Throwing Rocks at Kesey's Big, White Moon

Writing about Ken Kesey is like throwing a rock at the moon. He’s a much bigger rock, already in orbit.

I’m down here in Eugene, where the Kesey we know now is a statue next to the donut shop. This bronzed version sits upright, calm and fatherly as he reads to a flock of children. Crows peck at an empty pink donut box at his feet. Walking by with my two little boys, I wonder what they’ll make of Kesey. Will they discern the difference between the monument and the complicated human being who wrote Sometimes a Great Notion?

 

This winter, when the Willamette River began to swell, I picked up a used paperback of Sometimes a Great Notion from the Smith Family Bookstore. I had been avoiding the novel—Kesey’s 1964 follow-up to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—for years, ever since my mom told me that my biological father, now a stranger, had been inspired by the story. They met after he moved from suburban New Jersey to work as a logger in the Pacific Northwest. People try on identities. White dudes have been doing this forever. Kesey himself tried on many: Wrestler, logger, orderly, writer, and psychedelic prophet.

Reading the book for the first time, I found it both toxic and intoxicating. The sprawling novel follows the saga of the Stamper family, whose self-reliance strains the bonds of Wakonda, an imagined logging town on the Oregon Coast. Henry Stamper, the patriarch, installs his brood in a never-quite-finished house on the bank of the flood-prone Wakonda Auga river. Henry’s sons, Hank and Leland, dig in against the logging union formed by their neighbors, as much out of spite as for profit. Hank, a character drawn like the logger version of a comic book superhero, and Leland, an effete intellectual, duel for superiority, pitting Hank’s strength against Leland’s conniving. Nobody wins.

Squinting, I can see how my father would’ve misread the book, siding with the logger, Hank. Who wouldn’t admire a rugged, upcountry force of nature? In contrast to Hank’s malign masculinity, Leland moves through the world as an observer, plotting his course in ruminating, solipsistic letters. My father had also been to college and was deeply sensitive, like Leland. I imagine his desire to be Hank in tension with Leland’s brooding psyche—a notion of manhood that perpetuates conflict without resolution.

For a contemporary reader, much about Sometimes is off-putting. The language is so casually racist that it would make Mark Twain blush. The women are passive, objects of sexual revenge. The character of “Indian” Jenny, contrived without nuance, serves no role in the story other than to advance Kesey’s dim fantasy of a sexualized native woman. As for his prose, Kesey falls far short of Faulkner. Weaned on Ray Carver, I wanted the book milled like a log, trimmed down to the story that matters. On those rare occasions when Kesey sticks a sentence, it feels like the work of a broken clock, not the craft of a writer worth holding onto.

And yet, there’s something inside the damn book that keeps it on my shelf. It’s what the brothers don’t say to each other—that they love each other—that prevents me from selling it back to the Smith Family Bookstore. If one of my boys ever takes the book down from the shelf, I'll suggest that he read cautiously before he trusts the story or its teller.

 

Reading Sometimes a Great Notion, I was curious about the person who wrote it, so I drove out to see the Kesey family farm east of Eugene, behind Mount Pisgah. From the road, it looks like any other farm, though you can imagine, forty years ago, how the Merry Pranksters would have gathered between the house and the barn. Some of the farms in the area are still working while others serve as picturesque estates for aging boomers. The latter are the folks who came out okay on the other side of Kesey’s 1960s.

From the farm, I drove up through the lakeside town of Dexter to Springfield, exploring fifteen miles of backroads leading to Kesey’s old high school. He’d have passed through enclaves of logging families back when he made this trip. The same homes, seldom improved, now fly MAGA flags over broken-down cars. Like the Stampers, these folks seem uninterested in compromise.

Kesey eventually left the stumps of Springfield for the palm trees and sandstone of Stanford University. Wallace Stegner, then the head of Stanford’s writing program, found Kesey unfit for the school, even describing him as a “threat to civilization.” But for his erudition, Stegner might have said what he really thought: that Kesey was an ass.

When I picture Kesey among the intellectuals at Stanford who believed him unworthy of the project of literature, I find myself back in his corner. My pride of place kicks in. I don’t doubt that Kesey was an ass, but for Eugene, he was our ass. He was rough, yes, but he had something to say.  

Eugene can be like that, too. Downtown Eugene is still a cool place, but you have to squint a bit to see the charm of it. The farmer’s market that thrived in Kesey’s days got a fancy new building, and it bustles. So does the open-air fentanyl market across the street, where addicts are left to their own devices—not the set and setting that Kesey had contemplated.

The downtown drug users are a reminder of Oregon’s ongoing failure to serve people with complex health and behavioral health needs. I wondered whether One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is associated with the wave of deinstitutionalization that spread across the country in the decades after the book was published, might have anything to say about today’s challenges. I picked up a copy, this time from the Eugene Public Library, unsure if I wanted to own it.

The first chapters of One Flew Over are Kesey’s best stuff. We meet Randall and Nurse Ratched, unforgettable characters, in scenes expertly drawn from Kesey’s experience as an orderly in a psychiatric ward. Where Indian Jenny had been a poorly sketched caricature of a Native American, “Chief” Bromden, the narrator of One Flew Over, is a character with perceptiveness and depth. But then Kesey messes things up, dehumanizing the orderlies and staff with lazy tropes based on race and gender.

In Oregon now, we face a critical shortage of exactly these folks, the behavioral health workers whom Kesey vilified. We lack facilities to care for people with high levels of psychiatric need. I don’t blame Kesey for this shortage, but when he brought the sins of our institutions into sharp relief, he didn’t offer any ideas about how to fix them.

And then there’s the drugs. Of all the identities Kesey’s tried on, the one he’s best known for now is his role in the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. As the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey emerges after Sometimes is published as a sort of Messianic figure among the generation that experimented with LSD. He normalized the use of psychedelics for a generation of young people, serving as the fulcrum of the Merry Pranksters, a group that forged new ways of living both through open-mindedness and mind-opening drugs.

In Eugene today, people continue to open their doors of perception—with assistance, and now with the blessing of the government. “Grass,” as Kesey called it, is cheaper and easier to find around town than good coffee. Even the Merry Pranksters would have struggled to conjure a fantasy in which the government facilitates psilocybin services. Oregon was tested beginning in 2020, when voters approved a ballot measure decriminalizing possession and use of all drugs, including those with less literary cache than the class of psychedelics that Kesey helped popularize. Without adequate resources and planning, and coinciding with fentanyl’s emergence, the results were disastrous. And yet, at the heart of decriminalization was a worthy idea: to prioritize resources toward recovery, letting people find their own way.

In my identities both as father and son, I struggle with Oregon’s permissiveness towards substances. I want my children to achieve higher consciousness, to grasp the arbitrary nature of society’s constructs. I also want them to grow up capable of earning a living so that they have a fighting chance of affording housing. When my little one begs me for the “maple Blazer blunt” at the donut shop by Kesey’s statue, I feel tension with the attitudes that echo from Kesey’s generation.

Before the Pranksters set out on their bus, Furthur, Kesey implored them to take their own paths. “Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we’re going to wail with on this whole trip.”

Oregon’s trip is Kesey’s trip. We set aside norms and took our own path. It hasn’t always worked out, but maybe we’re learning something along the way.

 

I’m still growing up myself, even in middle age. I’m trying to figure out how to be a father in times when so many people struggle to find housing, recovery, and community. Reading Kesey, I find meaning in the messes that he made, both in his stories and in his life.

My two boys inadvertently got the same first names as the brothers of the patriarch in Sometimes a Great Notion. They’re only two generations removed from logging. My first favorite toy was a plastic chainsaw with metal beads that I would slam into the unsuspecting trees in our yard. With my life as their buffer, my boys build intricate structures out of magnetized tiles.

Still, there is something between my two boys—competition, fear, jealousy, and feral love—that’s no different from the Stampers. At their French immersion school, cocooned in privilege, they remain a heartbeat away from coming to blows over some perceived slight.

The world around us hasn’t changed as much as I wish it had, since Kesey’s days. “NEVER GIVE A INCH,” said the sign that Henry hung above his son Hank’s bed. “Never Give Up,” say the signs scattered around Eugene since the pandemic. Human beings, alone and together, endure by way of scattered mercies and also something more primal, less generous. Beatnik, boomer, or millennial, bigot or not, there’s some of that other thing in all of us, too.

My boys will inherit my books along with fragments of ideas about manhood, conflict, and self. As they experiment with the people they will become, I hope that they are free from violence, from addiction, from the troubling bonds of masculinity. I also hope they will find for themselves where there is meaning in the story, in the conflicts they inherit.

Tags

Family, Oregon, Place, Literature