In 1964, a promising novel was published based upon a young writers’ family tribulations in the Pacific Northwest; this is only important because it was his second published work and writers will usually use their early lives for their first novel. Overshadowing the reception of this novel was the journey the young writer took on his way across the country to New York. It could be considered post-Kerouac, taking that journey from west to east in as much the same way Kerouac described himself and Neal Cassady rolling down two-lane highways on an all-night benzedrine bender. However, in 1964, this entire experience would most likely be considered post-modern-Kerouac: not only did the young writer make the journey in a dolled-up school bus; not only did the young writer have the actual Neal Cassady at the wheel; but the young writer’s journey was also turned into a novel – sadly much better received than his own second novel, sadly because someone else wrote it.
It would not be the first nor last time celebrity overshadowed art. Ken Kesey was already famous when his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, arrived. Less a publicity stunt, perhaps, than a defense mechanism against facing the Great New York Literati, Kesey – with a busload of emotional support and performance art – became the subject of yet another hallmark of 1960s counterculture literature: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. But before all of that, in 1964, Ken Kesey was well-known for his debut novel – a once-in-a-lifetime achievement that makes you believe you are actually there, only because Kesey had already been there – and had the great notion to put his observations down on paper.
The circumstances under which the actual writing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest occurred is rife with nostalgic hipster mythology. All sources agree that Kesey was working at the same mental hospital he had earlier reported to for his volunteer drug research (doubtful the pay was as good); all agree his after-hours position was a prime boxseat in which to watch the drama of asylum life unfold; but some sources wonder if Kesey took the job precisely because he had access to more psychotropic drugs and ultimately wrote OFOTCN while under its influence. It's definitely Martin Torgoff's opinion: In Can't Find My Way Home - America in the Great Stoned Age, he imagines Kesey's position: "Being on the ward under the effects of LSD and mescaline had the effect of a veil being pulled back to reveal a darkness in the American Soul." It certainly does not diminish the impact of the novel to take into account the writer's state of mind - Kesey follows a long line of authors who have successfully mixed altered states with literature.
Unlike the baby boomers, Kesey grew up as part of the first postwar generation. They did not use their affluence to rebel as much as saw their affluence as a reward to conform. It all comes down to whether Kesey and his contemporaries actually thought themselves as hip or breaking out of some established mode of literature prevalent up to 1962, when OFOTCN was written. Norman Mailer had already come up with the eclectic hipster definition as someone possessing an "intense awareness" when he was a big part of the fledgling Village Voice. Growing up amid the Cold War and its dark twin, McCarthyism, would certainly be a spark to re-examine one's society - just as the generation before Kesey's did and just as the generation after Kesey's did. A fiery, instant annihilation via nuclear bomb may have been a novelty during Kesey's young adulthood, but writers throughout history have been keenly aware of how the end times are always right around the corner.
What literature from the 1950s would have appealed to or ignited Kesey? J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye may have seem too conservative, although Kesey must have appreciated that singular narrative voice. To be trapped in the mind and smell the smells of a jaded teenager must have made being trapped in the mind and smelling the smells of an overmedicated mental patient a distinct challenge. William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer are other examples of books Kesey had been exposed to that featured strong, psychologically-challenged narrators. If the literary world was taken aback with the sudden appearance of OFOTCN, it was because the subject matter was not usual for a young man's first novel. The accepted rite of passage in the 20th century was the thinly veiled memoir, because a young writer can only write what he knows and has seen in his life. (Kesey did write this novel, Zoo, but it has yet to be published.)
Postwar New York City was the undisputed capital of every slice of the culture pie except for film. The literary establishment oozed from all corners - universities, re-patriated Parisians, writers who were eaten up and spit out by the Hollywood studio system and who were begging to write for the theatre again. In New York in the 50's, Dan Wakefield makes it clear: "In New York the word was most honored, most powerful, most brilliantly imagined...gathered on one single island." Alcohol was the East Coast Literary Establishment's main vice, along with a haughty ability at self-serving debate. While movies in the 1950s were mostly selling fantasy, the giants of literature Kesey was exposed to were disavowing fantasy and embracing a startling blend of ultrarealism and psychoanalysis. (Theatre continued to vacillate between the eye candy of musicals and the taut electric current that can only be achieved by live theatre - the grittier the better.) Not only was writing a good outlet for anyone dissatisfied with their world (Kesey was also something of a sketch artist), writers had a certain leniency in society all artists shared. Creatives were allowed to be eccentric, where a mainstream citizen might easily, in the Post War era, be seen as a candidate for psychoanalysis, or worse, exile into a mental health facility.
In contrast to the East Coast, the California literary scene was newer, looser and decidedly anti-intellectual, easily adapting the latest Eastern philosophies into their art just as they would adapt the new Psychology. San Francisco's literary era was officially entered when Allen Ginsberg unveiled his syncopated performance of Howl in 1955, plunging poetry from something transcendent to an unrelenting indictment of society by bullet-pointing its lower depths. Ginsberg was wisely moving beyond the beat moniker to something closer to Zen prophet, leaving the movement he helped foster (literally playing nursemaid to many of the classics of his generation due to his patience, naivety and skill at working a room) to turn into stereotype. Kesey would not want to be associated with any long-in-the-tooth former torch, even if it did launch a certain zeitgeist, but he could have at least commended Ginsberg for going through the obscenity trial so later writers would not have to. Kesey would remain in synchronous orbit with the remains of the Beats up past the publication of OFOTCN when, one source claims, Neal Cassady – Jack Kerouac's sweaty muse – arrived fresh from prison on Kesey's doorstep. He had read Kesey's book, realized that somehow Kesey was writing about him when writing about Randall McMurphy, and ended up driving Kesey's bus (until he passed out in Mexico and died).
The beat generation gets a bad rap because few remember what flowered in their wake: the Village Voice, The Evergreen Reader and works published by Grove Press went a long way in helping new and raw voices like Kesey get a wide readership. The beats did not dwell much on the psychological in their work, they were concerned with the moment of experience. Writers who used the blank page as a form of self-analysis risked being put in the same suspicious light as psychiatrists themselves. In New York in the 50's, Dan Wakefield sets the stage for Kesey's later arena: "One of the most prevalent criticisms of psychiatry in the fifties was that it somehow led to conformity, that its goal was to "shrink" the patient to fit the mold of middle-class society." He goes on to point out that artists feared having their creativity drained away by modern psychiatry as much as homosexuals had to worry about being cured of their preferences.
Meanwhile Timothy Leary was at Harvard as a research psychologist specifically targeting his drug of choice, the hallucinogen psilocybin, to his most attentive guinea pigs, the artist. Leary cut a wide swath throughout most of the literary East Coast, converting many of the creatives (with the exception of Jack Kerouac, an especially mean drunk, even when tripping on Leary's mushrooms). Psychological began being traded for the psychedelic. While the government was using Kesey to further its own experiments in mind-control, Kesey was quick to realize these same drugs, in enlightened hands, could, as Ken Goffman defines in Counter Culture Through the Ages, "[fuel] the countercultural drive by illuminating utopian visions, inspiring artistic departures, and exposing consensus reality as a buffoon emperor with clay feet and minimal clothing." Leary himself would later describe LSD trips as analogous to the Tibetan Book of the Dead in its mystical properties.
If Kesey and his West Coast friends were looking for the mystical, it did not surface in his observations while working as a nurse's aide. Perhaps taking a (half) Native American as his storyteller says more about Kesey's quest for shamanic experiences with peyote and its natural properties – LSD was manufactured in a sterile lab. Kesey was raised in Oregon, where OFOTCN is set, and much of his youth was spent in the same wilderness Chief Bromden fondly recalls. Peyote, and its synthetic counterpart, mescaline, could have been brought to Kesey and his friends' attention in 1954 when Aldus Huxley's The Doors of Perception appeared. The connection between watching his friends blissed out on peyote and watching mental patients in a Demerol haze would not have been lost on him. He also experienced the double standard of living in a country whose government will simultaneously use drugs for their own devices while condemning and persecuting those who self medicate for recreational purposes.
A lot of mid-20th century American literature's purpose was to expose society's ills. Films were just coming to that same conclusion, American theatre had broken a lot of ground, but in 1962 a serious young writer knew the longform novel was the greatest weapon he could wield. Ken Kesey belongs to this cadre, often unrecognized because they do their best work alone, instead of capturing media attention by igniting protest or entering politics. Live entertainers like Lenny Bruce fired their vitriol directly at their audience - the delivery mattered as much as the material; Filmmakers and playwrights accepted that what they brought to the table visually or through the power of speech were the important channels in which to funnel their message; writers, however broad their pallet, have to make the visuals, the sounds, the speech, all work in their readers' heads. Therefore, add the novel to the list of potentially dangerous mind-altering experiences.
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Works Cited
Boon, Marcus. The road of excess: a history of writers on drugs. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.
Faggen, Robert. Introduction. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. by Ken Kesey. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Print.
Goffman, Ken. Counterculture through the ages: from Abraham to acid house. New York: Villard, 2004. Print.
Hughes, Jim. Altered states: creativity under the influence. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1999. Print.
Kaplan, Fred M. 1959: the year everything changed. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley & Sons, 2009. Print.
Plant, Sadie. Writing on drugs . New York: Farrar, Straus, And Giroux, 2000. Print.
Torgoff, Martin. Can't find my way home: America in the great stoned age, 1945-2000. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2004. Print.
Von Bergen, Julie. "Ken Kesey." Ken Kesey (2005): 1. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Feb. 2011.
Wakefield, Dan. New York in the fifties. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992. Print.
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