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Ken (Elton) Kesey (1935-2001) |
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American writer, who gained world fame with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, filmed 1975). In the 1960s, Ken Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper on the Seeker's New Path, who changed the beat generation into the hippie movement. I think McMurphy knew better than we did that our tough looks were all show, because he still wasn't able to get a real laugh out of anybody. Maybe he couldn't understand why we weren't able to laugh yet, but he knew you can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard of pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn't able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach. Maybe the guys weren't able to see it either, just feel the pressures of the different beams and frequencies coming from all directions, working to push and bend you one way or another, feel the Combine at work—but I was able to see it. (from One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, New York: Signet, 1963, p. 203) Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, the son of Fred A.
Kesey and Geneva Jolley. When he was still a child, he moved with
his family to Eugene, Oregon. Kesey's father worked in the creamery
business, in which he was eventually successful after founding the
Eugene Farmers Cooperative. His early years Kesey spent hunting, fishing, swimming; he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player. Moreovewr, at the University of Oregon, where he studied, he acted in college plays. On graduating Kesey won a scholarship to Stanford University, but he soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. In 1956 he married his school sweetheart, Faye Haxby. According to Kesey, she did not use drugs. "As for my children, I consider myself a devoted father. I've give my kids acid several times, so now they know what it is, they know where it's at, and they don't even want to take it now," he said. (Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy by Mark Christensen, Tucson, AZ: Schaffner Press, 2010, p. 160) Kesey attended a course led by the novelist Wallace Stegner at the Stanford Creative Writing Program. Malcolm Cowley was a guest lecturer. "Neither Wally nor I thought he had a particularly important talent," said Richard Scowcroft, who taught at Stanford. "Wally said to me once he was sort of a fairly talented illiterate." (Wallace Stegner and the American West by Philip L. Fradkin, 2009, p. 131) Kesey though that Stegner had put together a good writing team, exept for the Irish writer Frank O'Connor, whose writing formula was too fixed for Kesey. His first work was an unpublished novel, Zoo, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco. Stegner's other students included Tillie Olsen, Larry McMurtry, and Peter Beagle. Cowley remembered Kesey as looking "stolid and self-assured", he had the build of a football halfback and "a neck like the stump of a Douglas fir." (Ibid., p. 132) Tom Wolfe has described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they travelled the country and used all kinds of hallucinogens. Wolfe compared somewhat mockingly Kesey to the figures of the world's great religions; Neal Cassady was an avatar, a deity in human form. Their bus, called Further - actually written "Furthur" on the vehicle - was painted in Day-Glo colors. In California Kesey's friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of their parties. At a Veterans' Administration hospital in Menlo Park,
California, Kesey was paid as a volunteer experimental subject, taking
mind-altering drugs on Tuesdays and reporting their effects. The
supersecret project, called MK-ULTRA, was organized by CIA. Kesey got
$20 a week. "I had a tape recorder with me, free access to most of the
place, and plenty of time to lie on my back watching whatever was
moving around on the ceiling or the other guys who were watching their
scenes." (Conversations with Ken Kesey, edited by Scott F. Parker, 2014, p. 20) Some of the drugs, which included magic mushroom capsules,
mescaline, amphetamines, and LSD, he took to his home. These
experiences - and a vision of an Indian
sweeping there the floor - formed the
background for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, set in a mental
hospital, and and less distinctively in Sometimes
a Great Notion (1964), a novel about a logging family. While writing One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and at the same time continuing in the footsteps of such writers as Thomas De Quincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821), Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception, 1954), and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959), Kesey took peyote and his favorite, LSD. With his new, increased perception, Kesey felt being "dimensional", explaining in his words, "I saw everything that you see from this position, if you're also able to see it from over here, you've got two views of it." (Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy, p. 84) The story is narrated by Chief Bromden, a paranoid schizophrenic, who is six feet, eight inches tall, a half-American Indian. He lets people think he is a deaf mute. Into his world enters the petty criminal and prankster Randall Patrick McMurphy with his efforts to change the bureaucratic system of the institution, ruled by Big Nurse Ratched, a female Big Brother. McMurphy is an involuntary and anarchic patient - the others are there more or less voluntarily. The conflict between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy becomes a battle of totalitarianism and anarchistic freedom. McMurphy plans to escape but after a wild party he is given a frontal lobotomy. Bromden smothers his zombie-like friend with a pillow and escapes towards Canada. The book suggests that the really dangerous mental cases are those in positions of authority. The film adaptation of the book gained a huge success. Kirk
Douglas had bought the right to Kesey's novel; he played the role of
McMurphy on Broadway in an adaptation by Dale Wasserman. It ran for 82
performances at the Cort Theater during the 1963-64 season. When he
failed to interest a studio in the project, he finally turned the
package over to his son Michael. Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman refused
to take the role of Murphy. The film was made in one wing of the Oregon
State Hospital. Several actual patients of the hospital played extras.
The major change was that while the novel was narrated by Chief
Bromden, the film was shot more objectively -
Bromden is also the only patient who escapes the hospital. "But Forman does his best to minimize Kesey's misogynist undertones. By making all the characters more fully rounded, he reduces the polarization of good and evil that leaves the novel open to these charges, avoiding the novel's tendency to turn McMurphy into a hero or Christ figure. Nicholson's award-winning performance gives equal weight to McMurphy's sly, trickster side and his developing compassion for his fellow patients." (from The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, foreword by Robert Wise, New York: Checkmark Books, second edition, 2005, p. 33) When the film won five Academy Awards, Kesey was barely mentioned during the award ceremonies, and he made known his unhappiness with the film. He did not like Jack Nicholson, or the script, and sued the producers. "This guy's a scamp who knows he's irresistible to women and, in reality,he expects Nurse Ratched to be seduced by him. This is his tragic flaw. This is why he ultimately fails. I discussed this with Louise [Fletcher]. I discussed it only with her. That's what I felt was actually happening with that character—it was one long, unsuccessful seduction which the guy was so pathologically sure of." (Jack Nicholson about McMurphy, in Jack Nicholson, the Unauthorised Biography by Barbara Siegel and Scott Siegel, New York: Avon Books, 1991, p. 83) Kesey's next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, came out two years later and was also made into a film, this time directed by Paul Newman. The story was set in a logging community and centered on two brothers and their bitter rivalry in the family. Hank Stamper is a raw and aggressive man of nature, and his opponent is Draeger, a union official attempting to force local loggers into conformity. Hank's half-brother, the introspective Lee, chooses to retreat into intellectualism instead of action. After the work, Kesey gave up publishing novels. He formed a band of "Merrie Pranksters," set up a commune in La Honda, California, bought an old school bus, and toured America and Mexico with his friends, among them Neal Cassady, Kerouac's travel companion. Dressed in a jester's outfit, Kesey was the chief prankster. In
1965 Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana. He
fled to Mexico, where he faked an unconvincing suicide. The FBI opened
a file on him. There was several reports of Kesey sightings. The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article headlined 'LSD Fugitive's Strange Story'. (Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, edited by JPat Brown, B. C. D. Lipton, Michael Morisy; foreword by Cory Doctorow; afterword by Trevor Timm, 2018, p. 237)
When Kesey returned to the United States, he was caught by the FBI
agents from the San Francisco Field Office. Kesey then served a
six-month prison sentence at an expermental work camp. After this
tumultuous period he bought farm
in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, settled down with his wife to raise their
four children, and taught a graduate writing seminar at the University
of Oregon. In the early 1970s Kesey returned to writing and published Kesey's Garage Sale (1973). His later works include the children's book Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (1990) and Sailor Song (1992), a futuristic tale about an Alaskan fishing village and Hollywood film crew. Last Go Around (1994), Kesey's final book, was an account of a famous Oregon rodeo written in the form of pulp fiction. Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992 and in 1997 he had a stroke. Kesey died of complications after surgery for liver cancer on November 10, 2001 in Eugene, Oregon. For further reading: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968); "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest": The Text and Criticism, edited by C.J. Pratt (1977); Kesey, edited by M. Strelow (1977); Ken Kesey by Barry H. Leeds (1981); The Art of Grit by M. Gilbert Porter (1982); Ken Kesey by Stephen L. Tanner (1983); One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Gilbert Porter (1989); On the Bus by Ken Babbs (1989); Ken Kesey by Stephen L. Tanner (1990); St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, edited by Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (1999); Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy by Mark Christensen (2011); It's All a Kind of Magic: the Young Ken Kesey by Rick Dodgson (2013); Conversations with Ken Kesey, edited by Scott F. Parker (2014); Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll: the Rise of America's 1960s Counterculture by Robert C. Cottrell (2015); The Power of Silence: Exploration of Muteness in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Hasine Şen (2918); 'Ken Kesey,' in Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, edited by JPat Brown, B. C. D. Lipton, Michael Morisy; foreword by Cory Doctorow; afterword by Trevor Timm (2018); On the Avenue of the Mystery: The Postwar Counterculture in Novels and Film by Gary Hentzi (2023) Selected works:
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