{"id":4027,"date":"2012-05-13T17:48:21","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T01:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4027"},"modified":"2021-06-03T18:28:45","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T01:28:45","slug":"william-craddocks-be-not-content-now-out-as-ebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/13\/william-craddocks-be-not-content-now-out-as-ebook\/","title":{"rendered":"My Intro to William Craddock’s BE NOT CONTENT"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 13, 2012. <\/strong>I\u2019m proud to announce that my Transreal Books publishing company has scored the coup of bringing William J. Craddock\u2019s classic psychedelic novel back into availability. I reached an agreement with Craddock\u2019s widow, did a lot of computer work and now…<\/p>\n

Be Not Content <\/em> was available both as ebook and as a quality paperback, and used copies are still on sale. format.<\/p>\n

Sadly, as of June, 2020<\/strong>, my contract to publish the novel expired.\u00a0 Happily, as of December, 2020,<\/strong> the book is back in print<\/a> from Jay Shore of Backtrack Publishing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Note that used first edition paperback copies of Be Not Content<\/em> start at $90 and go rapidly upwards from there, with hardbacks in the $500 range. This book is one of the most important documents of the Sixties.\u00a0 And by now my out of print Transreal Books editions are getting pricey too.<\/p>\n

By way of explaining about the book, I\u2019ll print my full introduction to it below. See also my blog post \u201cWilliam Craddock and BE NOT CONTENT\u201d\u009d of April, 27, 2007, for more material (some overlapping with today\u2019s post), and for numerous comments by Craddock\u2019s friends.<\/p>\n


\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Be Not Content<\/em> is a coming-of-age novel set in San Jose, California, in the mid 1960s\u2014describing William Craddock\u2019s experiences as a young acidhead.<\/p>\n

This is a deep and well-written book, a unique chronicle of the earliest days of the great psychedelic upheaval. It\u2019s filled with warmth and empathy, tragic at times, and very funny in spots\u2014reminding me of William Burroughs\u2019s Yage Letters<\/em> and Philip K. Dick\u2019s A Scanner Darkly<\/em>, two other wastrel masterpieces where laughter plays counterpoint against the sad oboes of doom.<\/p>\n

Billy Craddock was born July 16, 1946, and grew up in Los Gatos, California, the son of William and Camille Craddock.\u00a0 The family was well-off, with William Sr. an executive.\u00a0 As a teenager, Billy said he expected to die at twenty-two, but that he wanted to be a Hells Angel and a published author by the time he was twenty-one.<\/p>\n

At nineteen he was in fact a prospect for the Hell\u2019s Angels, and he rode his chopper up to Oakland for a party in a bar.\u00a0 A vicious fight broke out, with knives and chains.\u00a0 Billy escaped out the bathroom window and decided not to be in the Angels after all.\u00a0 Instead he joined the equally outlaw Night Riders motorcycle club of San Jose for a few years.<\/p>\n

During his biker and acidhead times, Craddock was also an on-and-off student at San Jose State, an English major.\u00a0 Early on, he managed to sell an article about motorcycle gangs to the magazine Easyriders<\/em>\u2014under the pen-name William James. And he wrote some columns for a local paper, the Los Gatos Times Observer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But that was just a warm-up.\u00a0 Billy finished writing his classic psychedelic\u00a0 novel three months after turning twenty-one.\u00a0 Be Not Content<\/em> reads as if written by a mature professional. It\u2019s as if all those trips aged Craddock by dozens of years, and he mentions this possibility:<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0So much \u201clived-time\u201d\u009d used up in so little \u201cclock-time\u201d\u009d and the world still pretty much the same and us still pretty much the same except for having grown even farther away from the straight-world and its children, having grown hairier on the outside and older-younger on the inside because of the passage of so much lived-time\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cDecrepit, old, tired minds,\u201d\u009d said [the narrator\u2019s friend] Baxtor, \u201cbeing carried around in twenty-year-old bodies. A ludicrous spectacle. People have been conditioned to expect some sort of body-mind correlation. How will they react to the sight of a drooling, senile twenty-five-year-old being wheeled into the park by attendants? What excuse would you give? You couldn\u2019t say, \u201d\u02dcWell, there\u2019s nothing really wrong<\/em> with him. He\u2019s just old.\u2019\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

While we waited for senility we made treks back and forth, from San Jose to Sur, to San Francisco, to Berkeley, to L.A. and into Mexico\u2026 back to San Jose where we sometimes went to school or got jobs and then quit or got fired.<\/p>\n

We talked for whole nights far into the next day, about experiences and religion, Zen, Tibet and the Tao, prison and our friends in it, philosophy and the stars, insanity and music, new drugs and ancient drugs rediscovered, love and cops, bullshit and its universal appeal, poets and dictators, power and the cosmos, and it was all so real and new.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Be Not Content<\/em> appeared in a Doubleday Projections edition in 1970.\u00a0 What would Craddock write next?<\/p>\n

In a note written for Gale Contemporary Authors<\/em>, he reported, \u201cDoubleday tentatively accepted Be Not Content<\/em> in 1968. While waiting for the anticipated wild joy of actual publication I wrote a second and much longer novel (intended as a sequel and wrap-up of Be Not Content<\/em>) entitled Backtrack<\/em>, which followed the first book’s main characters through the disillusioning reentry years immediately after the winter of 1967 and the death of hippie-hope. This grand opus was rejected after due consideration.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

In 1972, Doubleday instead published Craddock\u2019s downbeat Twilight Candelabra<\/em>, a novel involving coke, Satanism and a murder. Craddock may have been trying to write a novel more in tune with what his editors imagined the commercial market to be.\u00a0\u00a0 His next novel was The Fall of Because,<\/em> \u201ca satire overlaying a serious allegorical treatment of \u201d\u02dcmodern magick.\u2019\u201d\u009d\u00a0\u00a0 This one was rejected by Doubleday.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Craddock finished the first draft of Be Not Content<\/em> in September, 1967, and two months later he married Carole Anne Bronzich for a year and a half.\u00a0 In 1975 he married for the second time, to Teresa Lynne Thorne, a native of San Jose.\u00a0 Thorne\u2019s father was a lawyer who\u2019d represented George Jackson, the Soledad brothers, and the Hell\u2019s Angels.\u00a0 Her parents took Billy\u2019s hippie\/biker looks in stride.<\/p>\n

Billy had dated Teresa for awhile, checking out if she\u2019d be someone he could live with.\u00a0 Teresa tells a story of Billy accompanying her to shopping mall.\u00a0 \u201cHe told me he wanted to wait in the parking lot,\u201d\u009d says Teresa.\u00a0 \u201cSo I left him there in the car with a glass of water and the window open and when I got back from my shopping, he told me he was on acid.\u00a0 You could never tell when Billy was high.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t show it.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Craddock found a novel way to get engaged.\u00a0 He gave Teresa a copy of Be Not Content<\/em>, and when she asked for an autograph, he wrote his marriage proposal on the fly-leaf.<\/p>\n

In 1975 the newlyweds spent some time as the caretakers of an empty mansion above Los Gatos.\u00a0 Billy wrote a somewhat autobiographical California novel, The Fading Grass<\/em>.\u00a0 For whatever reason it too was deemed unpublishable.\u00a0 Finally, in 1976, aged thirty, Billy wrote one more novel, A Passage of Shadows<\/em>, and that one also failed to sell.<\/p>\n

At this point he abandoned his career as a novelist.\u00a0 He drifted away from psychedelics. He made a little money writing for the Santa Cruz Good Times<\/em>, a column a week.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not the publishing that matters,\u201d\u009d Billy would gamely tell Teresa.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s the writing.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I got my first copy of Be Not Content<\/em> in 1972, shortly after taking a job as an assistant professor of mathematics at a small college in upstate New York.\u00a0 I think I may have found the novel in a hip bookshop at Dupont Circle, Washington, DC.\u00a0 I quickly began to idolize Craddock. I had my own memories of the psychedelic revolution, and when reading Be Not Content<\/em> I felt\u2014\u201cYes<\/em>.\u00a0 This is the way it was.\u00a0 This guy got it right.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I wrote Craddock a fan letter, enclosing what was at that time my sole publication, a technical math paper on higher infinities. \u00a0As if.\u00a0 Billy wrote a friendly note back, saying that he\u2019d only passed his high-school geometry class by cheating wildly off the girl in front of him, but that he was happy to know someone was reading him \u201cover on the other side of the island.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

The years went by.\u00a0 In 1986, my wife, three kids and I moved to Los Gatos, California.\u00a0 I had a job as a professor of math and computer science at San Jose State.\u00a0\u00a0 Soon after arriving I saw one of Craddock\u2019s columns in the Good Times<\/em> free weekly paper.<\/p>\n

I learned that Craddock had grown up in my new town, had attended the same high school where my children were going, that he\u2019d gone to the very same San Jose State college were I now worked, and that we\u2019d been born within a few months of each other. My mystic double! \u00a0I thought of seeking him out, but I wasn\u2019t sure how to start\u2014and I had the feeling that, as writers, we\u2019d inevitably meet without having to plan it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

More years went by.\u00a0 I\u2019d lent out my original copy of Be Not Content<\/em> without getting it back, and in 2003 I decided I couldn\u2019t live without it any longer.\u00a0 I bought a used copy online for the exorbitant price of $140.<\/p>\n

The fee hurt, but it was pure joy to reread this rewarding volume.\u00a0 I recognized numerous teachings that by now I\u2019d totally integrated into my worldview, and multiple headtricks that I\u2019d used in the transreal science-fiction novels I myself had published.<\/p>\n

And still I had some hope of meeting Billy Craddock.\u00a0 But then it was too late. Here\u2019s a note I made in my journals on September 25, 2005.<\/p>\n

\n

A fan who\u2019d bought Craddock\u2019s old motorcycle emailed that Billy had died over a year ago, on March 16, 2004.\u00a0 Today I went to the all-new San Jose State library to look up his obit.\u00a0 It\u2019s on microfilm, from the San Jose Mercury News<\/em>. It\u2019s eerie searching out the microfilm, in a graphically uncluttered basement room that vaguely resembles a mausoleum \u2014 I feel like a reporter in Citizen Kane<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I pull open a huge flat metal drawer with ranks and ranks of microfilm boxes, my hand reaches in, plucks out the box with Billy\u2019s obit.\u00a0 I go to the microfilm reader, the same big clunky kind of machine as ever, and grind forward past March 16, 2004. I\u2019m looking for a big article, but it\u2019s just a little tiny thing on March 20, with a picture of Billy looking tired and sad, his eyes hidden in dark sockets, the obit written by, I think, his widow Teresa.\u00a0 How little recognition my hero received.<\/p>\n

And how bum, how alien, how weird it would have been for Billy to see this microfilm room in a flash-forward vision while walking careless and high around this San Jose campus forty years ago\u2014what if he\u2019d suddenly seen, whoah, a hand pulling out this very box of microfilm with its image of his weary, suffering future-shocked face.<\/p>\n

I leave the library, and the bell on SJSU\u2019s Tower Hall is ringing to mark an hour, tolling deep and reverberant, the sounds overlapping and forming beats.<\/p>\n

We really die, nobody escapes, all of us on the one big trip.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

The fan who\u2019d bought Billy\u2019s bike gave me Teresa Craddock\u2019s phone number, and I talked to her about me trying to find a publisher for Be Not Content<\/em>.\u00a0 She encouraged me to try.\u00a0 Nothing came of it\u2014the publishers I talked to weren\u2019t interested in Sixties acid books, they seemed to think the story had already been told.\u00a0 I lost track of Teresa, posted some thoughts about Craddock and Be Not Content<\/em> on my blog, and early in 2012, a reader of my blog put me in touch with Teresa again.<\/p>\n

By this point, I\u2019d started up my own small publishing venture, Transreal Books. I went ahead and made an agreement with Teresa Craddock that I\u2019d republish Be Not Content<\/em> myself.\u00a0 I feel it\u2019s a very important book that needs to be remembered.\u00a0 Nobody ever wrote about the psychedelic revolution as well as William Craddock.<\/p>\n

A key point that he makes is that taking psychedelic trips was never, or at least not for very long, fun<\/em>, in the usual sense of the word.\u00a0 There were three problematic areas: freak-outs, seeing God, and coming down.<\/p>\n

In the harrowing final chapters of Be Not Content<\/em>, our hero Abel Egregore becomes obsessed with the seeing-God and the coming-down issues.\u00a0 He goes further and further on his peak trip experiences, and he does in fact talk to God, but it\u2019s not enough.\u00a0 Coming down becomes insufferable, and he begins going on nightmarish trips that last for days and days.<\/p>\n

Acid, Abel imagines, has changed the rules to the extent that he should be able to obtain complete enlightenment and a fundamental understanding of the nature of reality.\u00a0 But he\u2019s not getting there. In a turning-point scene, Abel\u2019s sage friend Baxtor describes his own end of the road.<\/p>\n

\n

We\u2019re going to grow old and die. That\u2019s all. That\u2019s all there is. The enlightenment-game is just that\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. another game. It\u2019s a variation manufactured to occupy the minds of those mortals foolish enough to overindulge in mental exercises directed toward seeing through the illusion. Beyond the illusion there\u2019s nothing.\u00a0 Now, I know that you maintain that the nothing behind the illusion is\u00a0 the \u201d\u02dcVoid\u2019 and a perfect state of wise Buddha-being; but Abel, that\u2019s only a more sophisticated variation on the old bullshit heaven concept. You\u2019ve simply eliminated all the things that you can\u2019t accept, can\u2019t believe in\u2014the harps and streets of gold and winged angels and benevolent old daddy God and all the rest\u2014after which you had nothing, which is uncomfortable, so you ripped off some validation from the Tibetans and called your nothing \u201d\u02dcThe Perfect, Empty Void.\u2019 But it\u2019s nothing, Abel. When you get right down to it, it\u2019s nothing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Yet our hero isn\u2019t willing to view the Void or the One or the Absolute as an empty<\/em> nothing.\u00a0 The ultimate nothing is, if you will, filled with light and with a hum. Craddock puts it thus:<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s the sound of the miraculous space between eternity\u2014between paradise. You only have to listen<\/em> to hear it.\u00a0 And beyond the music of the earth is the music of deep within you.\u00a0 It\u2019s the magic you once knew<\/em> existed.\u00a0 It does<\/em> exist.<\/p>\n

Everything is perfect\u2014OM\u2014endlessly\u2014OM\u2014infinity is ours\u2014peace, my friends.\u00a0 I love you.\u00a0 I am you.\u00a0 We are simply IT.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing else to know.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And, knowing this, ordinary life is enough. A classic mystic illumination.\u00a0 And all of this was written by a man of twenty-one.\u00a0 Incredible.<\/p>\n

Nobody I\u2019ve talked to seems able to locate Backtrack<\/em>\u2014Craddock\u2019s sequel to Be Not Content<\/em>.\u00a0 One hypothesis is that the single typed manuscript was lost in a fire that destroyed the house where Craddock was living with his first wife Carole around 1969.\u00a0 Or conceivably someone in Billy\u2019s circle still has possession of the manuscript. Or, who knows, Mindless Eddie ate it, just like in the final chapter of Be Not Content.<\/em><\/p>\n

In any case three other unpublished novels by Craddock survive\u2014The Fall of Because<\/em>, The Fading Grass<\/em>, and A Passage of Shadows<\/em>.\u00a0 These are still in the hands of his widow Teresa\u2014I\u2019ve seen one of them\u2014and they may yet appear in print someday, if not from Transreal Books, then from some other publisher.<\/p>\n

My guess is that Be Not Content<\/em> will remain Craddock\u2019s lucky strike, the outstanding early success that overshadows the rest of a writer\u2019s career.\u00a0 My friend Nick Herbert of Boulder Creek, an aging hippie writer himself, puts it like this:<\/p>\n

\n

Be Not Content<\/em> is a little-appreciated masterpiece.\u00a0Craddock truly captures the idealistic intensity of those days when we all\u00a0felt that enlightenment, wisdom, telepathy, alien contact and\/or\u00a0Childhood’s End was so close you could almost smell it. Where\u00a0anything seemed possible and every encounter felt like it could be\u00a0the door to another world. Where did all that wildness go?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ah, Nick, the wildness is still here, if only we look.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s close with my\u00a0 favorite teaching from the good book of Be Not Content<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cBut don\u2019t you feel like you\u2019re wasting time<\/em>?\u201d\u009d
\n\u201cHow can you waste time<\/em>? Man, that\u2019s ridiculous.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Relax and enjoy this wonderful work. Read it slowly. You have time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May 13, 2012. I\u2019m proud to announce that my Transreal Books publishing company has scored the coup of bringing William J. Craddock\u2019s classic psychedelic novel back into availability. I reached an agreement with Craddock\u2019s widow, did a lot of computer work and now… Be Not Content was available both as ebook and as a quality […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4027"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13267,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4027\/revisions\/13267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}