Book Review : Charting a Pilgrim’s Progress in the ‘60s

Godspeed: Hitchhiking Home by Laurel Lee (Harper & Row: $15.95, 251 pages)

Sometimes Ann and I try to tell our 12-year-old son, Adam, what it was like in the ‘60s. We talk about our generation’s restless but earnest striving for good values and good works--but we are circumspect about the sex and the drugs. Now I can safely hand him a copy of Laurel Lee’s “Godspeed”--an antiseptic account of the life and times of a searcher after beauty and truth in Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, Venice, Mexico, the Pacific Northwest and Alaska during those tumultuous years.

Lee reminds us of the silliness, the vanity and the sometimes dangerous promiscuity--moral, spiritual and intellectual--of the ‘60s. She is generous in opening herself and her foibles to our scrutiny, a gesture that is childlike both in its innocence and its self-absorption. And she is successful at capturing some of the absurdities of the hippie ethos.

“Why do I need to remind you of our agreement?” asks her companion, a bad poet and a rather fainthearted student of enlightenment, as they seek out a forest retreat where they will fast and meditate. “Look, Laurel, it’s no drugs or food, and we stay here until we blast through all these things that our flesh is always demanding.”

“I want you to know that I am dying and all the significant meals of my life are now passing before my eyes,” replies Lee, who depicts herself as funnier, more alert and vastly more articulate than the mythic “hippie chick.”

A Reverence for Language

Indeed, we are continually reminded that Lee is not a hippie chick at all. For one thing, she carries a joint in “the natural pocket in my bra between my breasts”--an article of clothing that one did not often find in the Haight in 1967. More important, she has a reverence for language--and especially the language of spiritual revelation--that prefigures the work she will do as a writer. (She is the author of several well-regarded inspirational books about her own struggles against disease and despair: “Walking Through the Fire,” “Signs of Spring” and “Mourning Into Dancing.”) Even as a young woman on the road, she is given to bursts of overwrought metaphor and overheated simile that reveal her powerful literary ambitions.

“Getting a restaurant job is a lot like hitchhiking,” she tells Richard Lee, the man she will eventually marry, after they embark on a plan to make money for a pilgrimmage to Alaska. “I just step into the slow-moving vehicle of a cafe and make words like an extended thumb asking for employment.”

“Godspeed” is assembled from the diaries that young Lee kept during her odyssey. Her prose is ornate, lyrical, sometimes overwritten; her focus is firmly fixed on herself, her husband and their spiritual progress. We are given, too, an assortment of her rather too whimsical line drawings and a scrapbook of grainy black-and-white snapshots that confirm our impression of Laurel and Richard as happy wanderers of the hippie era who happen across God.

Indeed, we are not terribly surprised when Lee idly picks up a Bible--her customary reading, a book of Zen aphorisms, is fortuitously out of reach--and, after glancing at a few passages from the Sermon on the Mount, she is moved to a moment of spiritual revelation.

“I feel the garment of Christ being pulled over our shoulders,” she says of her husband and herself at that moment. “I am new, and what we are together can be a new configuration of a couple too.”

‘May I Make the Angels Smile’

Her calling does not dampen her sense of whimsy, her rhetorical excesses, or her preoccupation with herself: “I’m your daughter, at duty,” she prays. “Put a dove on my shoulder. May I make the angels smile.” Indeed, we hear very little more about her beliefs, or the impact of her faith on her lfe, as she and Richard persist in wandering up and down the Pacific Coast.

In a sense, all of “Godspeed” is a latter-day pilgrim’s progress, although I never really understood what Lee and her husband were seeking. Alaska is their destination and their cherished goal--they imagine that they will homestead in the frozen wilderness--but, along the way, the Lees encounter drug dealers and “Jesus freaks,” Salvation Army missions and hippie encampments, and their own illusions.

“We are both candidates for never-never land,” she reflects. “I remember it’s the second star to the right, and Peter Pan took the boys there who never wanted to grow up.”

“Godspeed” is, of course, only one tiny fragment of the collective generational crisis that we call the ‘60s--and a rather odd fragment at that. Lee largely neglects the other variations on her theme of self-discovery and self-expression in the ‘60s--radical politics, for example, are wholly absent from “Godspeed,” and so is any encounter with the sexual and chemical excesses of that era. Even her treatment of self-revelation through faith is somehow unsatisfying. To Adam, and to any reader of Lee’s book, I would say, yes, “Godspeed” is part of the story of what it was like in the ‘60s, but it is not the whole story.