A Final Word From the Last Merry Prankster

The Willamette Valley was still blanketed in a misty predawn darkness when the horrendous news hit an Oregon dairy farmer named Ken Kesey, author of such enduring fictional classics as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion”: Suicidal terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 4,300 people. “Everything was so clear that day, so unencumbered by theories and opinions, by thought, even,” the 66-year-old novelist e-mailed friends 10 days after the tragedy. “It just was. All just newborn images, ripped fresh from that monstrous pair of thighs thrust smoking into the morning sunshine. All just amateur cameras allowing us to witness the developing drama in sweeping handheld seizures. All just muffled mikes recording murmured gasps.”

On that fateful day, Kesey--who died of liver cancer on Nov. 10 in Eugene, Ore.--was gripped by sadness but not by The Fear. For decades in his robust fiction, intrepid bus trips and renegade proclamations, he had warned of future disasters and the need to overcome them with bedrock courage and stoical perseverance, just like the 300,000 sturdy pioneers who struggled along the Oregon Trail in the 1840s. “Throughout the work of James Fenimore Cooper there is what I call the American Terror,” Kesey told The Paris Review in 1994. “It’s very important to our literature, and it’s important to who we are: the terror of the Hurons out there, the terror of the bear, the avalanche, the tornado--whatever may be over the next horizon.”

Readers first encountered Kesey’s vision of terror in his 1962 classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” in which a modern psychiatric ward became a chilling metaphor for oppressive American society. The roguish, Randle Patrick McMurphy, is rewarded with a frontal lobotomy by the book’s end. Defiance in the face of terror and unjust circumstances became a Kesey hallmark. His second novel, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” is about a stubborn Oregon logging family, the Stampers. Their maxim--which appears as a central theme throughout the sprawling narrative--is: “Never give a inch!” The entire book is a gritty Pacific Northwest adaptation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay “Self-Reliance.” Kesey understood that rugged individualism is the prize attribute in a society dominated by nuclear weapons, Orwellian Groupthink and Public Opinion Polls. Following the success of “Sometimes a Great Notion,” Kesey exploded on the consciousness of our culture when he threw an LSD party in San Francisco and saw half of America show up. Overnight he became an outlaw celebrity, “the last wagon master,” as Larry McMurtry called him, for painting a 1939 International Harvester bus named “Furthur” in Day-Glo colors and traveling from California to New York with his happy cohorts, known as the Merry Pranksters. Their goal was to unsettle America with their goofy LSD-inspired antics.

Lost in this semi-cartoonish portrayal--popularized by Tom Wolfe in his best-selling “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”--was the most important side of the real Kesey: the public moralist. Convinced that the military-industrial complex was menacing the survival of democracy, Kesey used his psychedelic bus to jar the mores of conventionality that blindly believed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that we were winning the Vietnam War or DuPont Chemical Co.’s assurances that it wasn’t polluting the Great Lakes. “What we hoped,” Kesey later noted with apocalyptic brooding, “was that we could stop the coming end of the world.”

Although Kesey abandoned novel writing for 28 years following “Sometimes a Great Notion,” he returned to the genre with the publication in 1992 of “Sailor Song,” a futuristic saga of human survival that takes place in a flyspeck Alaskan fishing village called Kuinak. The lead character, Ike Sallas, is an Earth First!-type eco-radical straight out of the pages of an Edward Abbey novel. But it’s really too late. Global warming (or The Effect) is slowly melting the polar caps and when Sallas is marooned in an inflatable motorboat during a storm’s ferocious peak, a direct result of The Effect, he lounges back in the boat’s bottom and lets it run into the strong wind. “Might as well try to get comfortable,” Sallas says. “You never know how long the End of the World is liable to take.”

Kesey’s exploration of global disaster was explored even further in his play “Twister: A Ritual Reality in Four Quarters,” premiered in 1993 following a Grateful Dead concert in Eugene. The play----in which Kesey played the main character--is structured around the characters from Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz,” all of whom are confronted with third millennium crises: The Hungry Wind, The Lonely Virus and The Restless Earth. Baum’s memorable characters are hammered with inconveniences such as tornadoes, plagues and earthquakes--all of which Kesey insisted were increasing in both frequency and velocity.

Given his penchant for contemplating the unexpected, Kesey’s e-mail reaction to the absurd terrorist attacks of September is worth considering. His first inclination was to conjure up a distant historical analogy. “Well, I can remember Pearl Harbor,” Kesey wrote. “I was only six but that memory is forever smashed into my memory like a bomb into a metal deck. Hate for the Japanese nation still smolders occasionally from the hole. This 9-11 nastiness is different. There is no nation to blame. There are no diving Zeros, no island grabbing armies, no seas filled with battleships and carriers. Just a couple dozen batty guys with box knives and absolute purpose. Dead now. Vaporized.”

But when it came to retaliating against the Taliban for the heinous crimes, Kesey turned pacifist. He had been staunchly against the Persian Gulf War and was in full dissent mode when it came to another U.S. war in the Middle East. His literary explorations in human nature had convinced him that an eye for an eye philosophy was bankrupt. “Of course we want their leaders,” Kesey wrote, “but I’ll be damned if I can see how we’re gonna get those leaders by deploying our aircraft carriers and launching our mighty air power so we can begin bombing the crippled orphans in the rocky, leafless, already bombed-out rubble of Afghanistan.” And while 90% of the American people--including me--thought President George W. Bush delivered a superb address to the joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, Kesey, watching from his living room in Pleasant Hill, Ore., shook his head in weary-eyed disgust. “Bush has just finished his big talk to Congress and the men in suits are telling us what the men in uniforms are going to do to the men in turbans if they don’t turn over the men in hiding,” he lamented. “The talk was planned to prepare us for war. It’s going to get messy, everybody ruefully concedes. Nothing will ever be the same, everybody eventually declares. Then why does it all sound so familiar? So cozy and comfortable? Was it the row after row of dark blue suits, broken only by grim clusters of high-ranking uniforms all drizzling ribbons and medals? If everything has changed (as we all knew that it had on that first day) why does it all wear the same old outfits and say the same old words?”

Such sentiments were considered unpatriotic heresy in the early days of the war on terrorism. It was a time to proclaim “United We Stand,” pin an American flag on your lapel and salute the commander in chief. Celebrity artists appeared on TV telethons to raise money for the victims of the attacks while liberals of every stripe swallowed hard and admitted that President Bush had exceeded their low expectations. But Kesey, like some stubborn old-growth redwood tree, refused to join their ranks. He was by trade and temperament a dissenter in time of war, always poised on the precipice of the abyss, thumbing his nose at authority and championing the individual: underdog over big government.

For Kesey--the iconoclastic artist--lived by a simple motto he clung to with the tenacity of a pit bull. The job of the writer, he said, is to kiss up to no one, “no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful.”