Angus and Hetty MacLise papers, 1950s-2010

Angus MacLise was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1938, the son of a book dealer. MacLise's lifework included music, calligraphy, performance art, poetry (both the writing and publishing thereof), drawings, plays, and limited edition artists' books, all of which feature in the collection. He studied music and dance before moving to Paris as a young man in the late 1950s. In 1958 in Paris, he and his high school friend, avant-garde filmmaker Piero Heliczer, started the Dead Language Press. The press specialized in poetry and letterpress published early books and broadsides by Beat-adjacent poets such as Gregory Corso and Jack Smith. MacLise also published several of his own poems and manuscripts through the press, including Year, a shamanic calendar-poem that renamed all 365 days of the year––a convention that MacLise and many of his friends continued to use in dating correspondence or titling artworks.

MacLise and Heliczer moved back to the United States in the early 1960s, settling in New York City and bringing the press with them. In New York, MacLise continued his publishing efforts, while also pursuing music and becoming involved in avant-garde theatrics and performance art pieces. He was a regular participant in Fluxus and Theatre of the Ridiculous events in New York City and appeared in many experimental films being made by his friends in the downtown arts scene at the time, notably Heliczer and Ira Cohen. MacLise was an early member of the highly influential Theatre of Eternal Music, started and organized by composer LaMonte Young and featuring John Cale, Terry Riley, Billy Name, Tony Conrad, and Marian Zazeela, who experimented with durational forms and sustained tones, and often performed what they called their "Dream Music" for hours on end at lofts, galleries, and other Lower East Side spaces and happenings. Says Conrad, "[t]he music was formless, expostulatory, meandering; vaguely modal, arrhythmic, and very unusual; I found it exquisite." Most famously, MacLise was a founding member of the Velvet Underground—he was introduced to the band through his roommate John Cale and became the band''s first drummer. Though he helped to found the band, and may have even given it its name, his time with the Velvet Underground was brief owing––according to several sources including Lou Reed himself––to MacLise's rejection of creating art for profit or on a schedule dictated by anything other than his own inspiration. He quit left the band before they played their first paid show in late 1965, was replaced as the drummer by Maureen "Mo" Tucker, and does not appear on any of the band's official recordings. Still, his early percussive influence in terms of the hissing, buzzing, rhythmic, distorted, raga- or drone-like style that he brought can be heard on the band's first album onwards and beyond, including on tracks such as "European Son," "Venus in Furs," and "Black Angel Death Song." When Reed was hospitalised in 1966, MacLise rejoined the band for their series of Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows in Chicago, but his erratic timekeeping and behaviour ensured that this was only a temporary return.

Hetty MacLise was born Mary Catherine Scholten in either 1929 or 1931, and owing to a combination of her three marriages and her proclivity for self-reinvention, MacLise appears in the archive under a variety of names: Mary Scholten, Mary Burton, Mary McGee, Hetty McGee, Hettie MacLise and Hetty MacLise, to say nothing of the many fond pet- and nicknames given to her by various friends. In a sense this seems appropriate, capturing something of the fundamental multifariousness that characterised her personal and professional lives; MacLise was constantly refusing and dissolving boundaries: between different forms of art, between religions, between East and West, between bohemia and domesticity. A 2018 article in which she is mentioned quotes friends who remember her as "a wild woman who danced with ribbons and lace" but who also "brewed tea the prim English way, in a porcelain pot."

Her background sheds light on that apparent dichotomy. According to a diary found in the collection, Hetty was born to a wealthy family in Kensington, London. "We were rich," she writes, "but I was not spoiled." Her father was a stockbroker at a "well established firm" who also held a valuable collection of Chinese art that went to the Tate when he died. She describes a childhood of private dancing, singing, painting and tennis lessons that passed "in a glorious haze of golden security" (even if it did "little… equip [her] for the kind of life [she] was to lead later"), but one that was also marked by a particularly English upper-class form of childhood loneliness; she was primarily raised by a nanny, saw her mother for only one hour a day during pre-arranged appointments in the family's drawing room, and was sent off to boarding school at a young age. During and after finishing school, Hetty began, unbeknownst to her parents, secretly attending jazz clubs and drawing classes in London at which she met various musicians, poets, and artists, including Billy Kaye: "I became a radical cockney who violently repudiated her upper-class drawer from then on," as she puts it. In still another diary, she clarifies: "I did not dislike my home with my parents, it was the world they represented that I longed to flee from…" What she refers to as her "big breakaway" from said world culminated first in her attending art school in London, admission into which required that she lie about her age, and where she was proximate to the Bacon and Freud set, and then in her nomadic existence in the 1950s and 1960s. Scrapbooks, diaries and hundreds of photographs in the collection document Hetty's roving during this time on her version of the "hippie trail," from Andalusia to Antalya and featuring various Greek islands as well as Marrakech, Tangiers, and other locations in southern Europe and Central Asia, where she stayed with friends, made art and cared for her young son (with her second husband, from whom she was already estranged, Tom McGee), Jason. Her travels eventually led her to the San Francisco Bay Area where she lived with members of the Grateful Dead and worked as a staff illustrator for the vanguard alternative publication the San Francisco Oracle. There, she also joined the experimental street theatre troupe known as the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company; Angus MacLise had briefly moved to Berkeley in 1967 and met Hetty through his own involvement with this ensemble.

Shortly thereafter, Mary/Hetty McGee married Angus MacLise in Golden Gate Park, in a ceremony officiated by Timothy Leary. The couple initially moved (back, in Angus' case) to New York City, where they further fell in with Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, especially Gerard Malanga––Hetty claims they were present when Warhol was shot by Valeriea Solanas––especially Gerard Malanga, and also collaborated with Ira Cohen, respectively scoring and appearing in Cohen'swhose experimental film The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda Angus scored. Both were involved, too, with Cohen's Universal Mutant Repertory Company. Hetty continued her career as an illustrator with the East Village Other and other publications, and appeared in the Arlo Guthrie film Alice's Restaurant. They also travelled extensively in the North-eastern United States and beyond, living in rural Massachusetts, in Woodstock, NY, and in Aspen, Colorado, where editor Phyllis Johnson asked them to guest-edit the ninth instalment of Aspen magazine, the famous avant-garde periodical each of issue of which came in a customised box filled with assembled booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards, and other media. (The collection includes a rare complete edition of Aspen no. 9.)

In 1968, the MacLises, with singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, were arrested on drug charges following a traffic stop in Oklahoma City. Allegedly they were in possession of a matchbox-sized quantity of marijuana. While Wainwright was able to use his father's connections to secure both bail and less severe charges, Angus and Hetty spent a month in county jail and pleaded guilty. The couple were spared prison––partly because Hetty was almost six months pregnant with their son Ossian, after having had two miscarriages in the previous year––but incurred great legal expenses and were handed a three-year suspended sentence. This they served without incident, mostly from Woodstock, but the situation cast a long shadow and made enormously challenging the prospect of continuing to live and work in the U.S. for the non-citizen Hetty, who could no longer easily apply for a green card. Documents related to this incident and its fallout even decades later are included in the collection.

Upon completion of their sentence, Angus and Hetty began travelling internationally again, spending time in Canada, France, Greece, and the legendary ashram Auroville in Pondicherry, India, before eventually settling in the third location (along with downtown New York and the Bay Area) with which they have become most associated: Kathmandu, Nepal. There they became pillars of a countercultural expatriate scene of artists and fellow travellers that included Ira Cohen and which gathered around the Spirit Catcher Bookshop on so-called Freak Street, the hub of this small but growing Anglophone community. Angus MacLise and Cohen worked out of Spirit Catcher to develop Bardo Matrix, a dynamic imprint for publishing their own writing as well as that of their friends and colleagues. This resulted in a series of beautifully produced pamphlets, prints, books, and broadsides, printed in limited editions on local handmade craft paper, including Ting Pa, a literary journal edited by Angus and sometimes Hetty, and the Starstreams series, under which book-length works by Angus, Cohen, Diane di Prima, Paul Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Gregory Corso, and others all appeared between 1974 and 1979. These unusual publications on handmade paper tended also to be illustrated with woodcuts that scrambled together religious imagery and pop cultural symbolism, including comic books. During this time Angus was particularly interested in calligraphic art and works on paper. Much of his own work from his time in Nepal includes calligraphic illustrations in a made-up script. He also worked on establishing a handmade paper company, Himalayan Paper Inc. Cohen's term for their copious activities undertaken during this period, including their close collaborations with local craftsmen, was "the great rice paper adventure." In Nepal Hetty and Angus were also involved with spiritual communities, with Dzogchens and other religious leaders at communes and monasteries, one of which, the Swayambu Buddhist Monastery, pronounced the now seven-year-old Ossian to be a Tulku (a reincarnation of a high Tibetan lama), which briefly attracted a burst of Western tabloid interest.

Angus died in Kathmandu, aged only forty-one, on June 21st 1979, the summer solstice. Indeed, this did mark a transition or the closing of a chapter for that scene. As Cohen remarks, "the cycle seemed to be over. The great rice paper adventure drew to a close as most of us left Nepal and moved on." After Angus' death, Hetty did remainremained in Nepal for the better part of a decade, despite having lost enthusiasm for it and the lights having long been turned up on the hippie expatriate party, primarily to stay nearby to Ossian and his spiritual duties (or "destiny") at the monastery. In the late 1980s she returned to Woodstock and ultimately London, where she continued to write and make art until her own death in 2011.

As individual artists and as a couple, the MacLises straddled the ostensible late 1960s opposition of the seedy New York underground––with its iconographies of sadomasochism, hard drugs, avant-garde drone music, dark sunglasses and shiny boots of leather––and the tie-dye, psychedelia-tinged, turn-on-tune-in-drop-out euphoria of San Francisco's corresponding and equally mythologized hippie scene, with all of its imagined and actual attachments to Eastern spirituality and religion. And in neither of these were Angus and Hetty mere hangers-on, far from it; rather they were active, central, formative participants who helped shape those aesthetic sensibilities from the ground up. Equally so in the expatriate scene that they joined in Nepal, where their DIY ethos, openness, and resourcefulness inspired countless people who crossed into their orbit. They were driven by true vanguard impulses––always to innovate, to collaborate, to fundamentally change the syntax and grammar of established forms, never to be hemmed in by convention custom or fashion. Their restless, unceasingly creative and unconventional lives and work might finally best be captured by a line from one of Angus' untitled poems: "You are not limited to one room, there are many rooms."