On Christmas Eve 1955, former Seattle inventor and bootlegger Alfred Matthew Hubbard (1901-1982) turns novelist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) on to the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Their meeting takes place at Huxley’s home in the Hollywood Hills above Los Angeles. Seemingly from different universes, Hubbard and Huxley find a curious point of convergence via LSD, and their relationship sheds light on the transformative power of a single encounter and the ongoing exploration of consciousness in the twenty-first century.
Captain Trips
In HistoryLink's biography of Al Hubbard, author Brad Holden writes that Hubbard "made his first newspaper appearance in 1919 with the exciting announcement that he had created a perpetual-motion machine that harnessed energy from the Earth's atmosphere. He would soon publicly demonstrate this device by using it to power a boat on Seattle's Lake Union, though, at the time, heavy suspicions were cast about the legitimacy of his claims. From there, Hubbard would lead a storied life in which he assumed several roles: charlatan, bootlegger, radio pioneer, top-secret spy, uranium entrepreneur, and millionaire. In 1950, after discovering the transformative effects of a little-known hallucinogenic compound, Hubbard would become the 'Johnny Appleseed of LSD,' introducing the psychedelic to many of the era's important thinkers and transforming a generation" ("Hubbard, Al ...").
Hubbard and Huxley were seven years apart in age. The older Hubbard had a checkered past that included a conviction for smuggling booze from Mexico. He was as well-connected as anyone on the West Coast to dispense LSD. Huxley, the English intellectual, loomed taller than his psychedelic mentor by almost a full foot. Thomas Henry Huxley, his grandfather, was nicknamed "Darwin’s bulldog" because he was such a formidable promoter of evolutionary ideas during a time when they remained controversial.
Hubbard proclaimed himself "the Captain," aka "Captain Trips." He earned a Master of Sea Vessels certification in California after serving a prison term. By the time he met Huxley, Hubbard had relocated to Canada, likely to escape additional criminal charges in the United States. In his senior years, he showed up at gatherings clad in buzzcut, khaki fatigues, and a long-barreled pistol in holster. Hubbard was Huxley’s unlikely guide on his journey into the uncharted realm of psychedelia.
Humphry Osmond arranged their Christmas Eve 1955 meeting. Osmond, a Canadian psychiatrist, had become well known as a specialist in the altered states that LSD induces. Osmond coined the word psychedelic. In correspondence with Huxley, Osmond’s little ditty goes: "To fathom Hell or soar angelic / Just take a pinch of psychedelic," emphasizing the potential both for disturbing and pleasant experiences with psychedelic drugs.
Huxley was smitten by Hubbard’s LSD – so smitten, he had his wife inject him with it on his deathbed eight years after the two men met. Hubbard was the first LSD champion to emphasize the value of set and setting rather than sterile hospital beds for taking "trips." He profited from psychedelic centers he set up in California and Vancouver, B.C. In those centers he played recorded classical music and decorated walls with art to furnish focus for his subjects. Hubbard's role was that of the enthusiastic pioneer, a man who thrived on the fringes. After years spent duping the government as a smuggler, he was ironically hired as a Prohibition agent. He embraced LSD with a convert’s zeal, keen to share its transformative potential. But his interests were not entirely selfless. One Canadian businessman, after coming down from the acid session that Hubbard provided, told Hubbard he did not need “to worry about money again: He had seen the future, and Al Hubbard was its Acid Messiah" (Fahey, 40).
Hubbard bought LSD legally from Sandoz, the laboratory in Switzerland where it was manufactured. He supplied his clients with the purest substance and sold it to psychiatrists who enlightened a range of celebrities. They included "Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anaïs Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick" (Fahey). Hubbard’s second wife, Rita Scherer, tripped on LSD with Hubbard as well. The Hubbards owned 24-acre Dayman Island southeast of Vancouver, where they had an airplane, a hangar, and an enormous yacht.
"A Terrific Man of Action"
Huxley located to Los Angeles in 1937 to write screenplays. Under Hubbard’s lead on that decisive Christmas Eve in 1955, he approached LSD with the curiosity of an intellectual and the enthusiasm of an advocate. He referred in a letter to "a remarkable personage called Captain Hubbard – a millionaire businessman – physicist, scientific director of the Uranium Corporation, who took mescalin[e] last year, was completely bowled over by it and is now drumming up support among his influential friends" (Holden, 71). He admired Hubbard both as a therapist and as "a very nice man" (Pollan, 173). Huxley referred to Hubbard as "a terrific man of action, and results of his efforts may begin appearing quite soon" (Holden, 71).
How exactly Hubbard made his fortune is lost to the fogs of time. He smuggled armaments to Canada during World War II while the U.S. was still a neutral nation. He profited from promoting radium as an alternative energy and founded a company in Canada. He might have helped to the U.S. build atomic bombs. He enjoyed returns from the importation of LSD, while it was legal, when he treated patients. After LSD was outlawed, he lost his assets.
Like Hubbard, Huxley turned on first to mescaline and was so thunderstruck by that alkaloid of the peyote cactus that it became the subject of his book The Doors of Perception, which created a bond between the two men. Dubbed "the seminal psychedelic handbook" (Fahey), it records his initial chemical enlightenment in detail. Osmond guided Huxley through that voyage into psychedelia. He introduced Huxley to Hubbard at the writer’s request.
Huxley’s 1955 acid trip with Hubbard marked a turning point for Huxley. As Michael Pollan phrased it in How to Change Your Mind, "The experience put the author’s 1953 mescaline trip in the shade" (Pollan, 173). Hubbard unlocked a door in Huxley's perception that would remain open. Huxley's later acid trips informed his writing profoundly. His insights reached across the subjects of religion, geography, and art history. His books still provide a framework for others who champion psychedelic tripping as a form of therapy.
Hooked on Carbogen
Another bond between Hubbard and Huxley was carbogen – a gas compound that is 70 percent oxygen and 30 percent carbon dioxide. Hubbard often toted a tank along with him. He liked to huff the stuff and offer it to others. Huxley extolled carbogen in his 1956 book Heaven and Hell for its "marked enhancement of the ability to 'see things,' when the eyes are closed" (Holden, 143). Laura Huxley gave a frank account of Hubbard when he visited their Hollywood Hills home, several years after Hubbard’s and Huxley’s meeting. Laura wrote, "He showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to us ... but we said we didn't care for any, so he put it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the tank after lunch and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized, very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the Virgin Mary" (Fahey, 40).
In his correspondence, Huxley never mentions Hubbard’s lifelong Catholicism or his criminal past. Maybe he never knew that Hubbard, busted for smuggling alcohol, served 20 months at McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington, nor that Hubbard was a political conservative who worked as a government operative in a precursor organization to the CIA. Indeed, Huxley never named Hubbard in any of his books, only in his correspondence. Similarly, throughout The Doors of Perception, Huxley identified Osmond only as "the investigator" (The Doors ..., 19).
Huxley died less than eight years after he met Hubbard. In a lengthy and eloquent letter, Laura Huxley set down her husband’s final hours. Dated December 8, 1963, the letter addressed Julian Huxley and Juliette Huxley. Julian was the older brother of Aldous, Juliette his sister-in-law. LSD had become a family affair. Laura ingested it with Aldous, and she learned how to inject him with painkillers when he grew ill. In her letter, she expressed concern that history would come to regard her husband as an addict, even though LSD had yet to accumulate the stigma that was soon to get it banned in the U.S. and Canada. Her letter says she did inject him with it twice, the first time an intramuscular "shot of 100 microgrammes" (Usher). She confided that Aldous considered LSD to be his "moksha medicine in which he believed" (Usher). Moksha, from the Sanskrit to denote enlightenment or liberation, appears 22 times in Huxley’s Island, a utopian response to his dystopic Brave New World from 1932.
Hubbard's Influence
Hubbard, by turning Huxley on to LSD, not only influenced the books he would write – especially Heaven and Hell and Island – but also helped to free Huxley from the pain and anxiety that accompanied the larynx cancer that did him in. Laura’s words as his spouse and trip-sitter capture the quality of their final hours together and the palliation of the LSD itself: "Easy, easy, and you are doing this willingly and consciously and beautifully – going forward and up, light and free, forward and up toward the light, into the light, into complete love" (Usher).
The contrasting approaches of Hubbard and Huxley to LSD reflect the broader context of the counterculture movement. Hubbard embodied a rebellious spirit, an entrenched challenge to authority, and a search for covert and alternative ways to profit. Huxley represented an intellectual yearning to understand the human experience in its entirety. A key proposition in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell is that altered states historically have produced some of the finest visual arts and that psychedelics may replicate that artistry.
The chemical substance LSD became a tool for both men to advance their respective interests. For Hubbard it was a map to financial gain and a key to mental health; for Huxley it was a lens to explore the intricate complexities of consciousness. Their relationship may have been brief, but its significance transcends Osmond’s introduction of the two men. Hubbard, the unorthodox guide, provided the LSD. Huxley, the luminary and artist, embarked on a journey that left a lasting mark on philosophy, literature, and our understanding of the human mind.
