It is the destiny of some writers to be linked forever with the era that gave them fame. F. Scott Fitzgerald inevitably evokes the 1920s heady mix of jazz and exuberant youth, dinner-jacketed elegance and corrupted dreams. The years just after World War II, when Americans in bustling cities and velvet-lawned suburbs found their new affluence somehow more disturbing than deserved, belong in the same way to John Cheever. So it is with Ken Kesey and the 1960s. Thanks not only to his own writings, but to the writings about him- accounts of chemically heightened days, mystical pronouncements, sudden disappearances and frequent arrests, in newspapers, magazines and especially in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- Kesey has become a symbol of those years when a generation believed they could alter their consciousness and the consciousness of a nation through drugs, sex, and noisy rebellion against society rules. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey’s first novel, published in 1962 when he was only
26, earned unusual critical and popular acclaim. Throughout the decade it was one of the books most likely to be found in college dorm rooms across the country, perhaps lodged on a cinder block and plywood bookshelf between Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.
In some ways Kesey may seem an odd candidate for the combination of court jester, pop messiah and serious novelist he eventually became, for on the surface, his boyhood had a Norman Rockwell, straightarrow wholesomeness to it. Born in La Junta, Colorado, in 1935, Kesey moved when still young with his family to Oregon, the setting for his two novels. His father, a dairyman, taught him the love of the outdoors that is manifest in Cuckoo’s Nest and in his second book, Sometimes a Great Notion. Voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in his class at Springfield High School, Kesey went on to attend the University of Oregon, where he was a star both on the wrestling team and in the Drama Department. Writing, however, was becoming his major interest. His initial efforts were short stories, but after graduation he attempted a novel, which remains unpublished. In 1959, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled him to enter the creative writing program at Stanford University.
At Stanford, Kesey studied under writers Wallace Stegner, Richard Scowcroft, and Malcolm Cowley, but his life outside the classroom influenced his writing as much as his studies. San Francisco, with its bohemian North Beach district and its reputation as a tolerant nesting-place for beat generation writers like Jack Kerouac, lay only forty miles to the north. Kesey and some kindred spirits formed their own satellite artists’ colony adjacent to Stanford, on Perry Lane in Menlo Park. There they wrote, and at the same time experimented with practices- notably drug use- that in a few years’ time would, for better or for worse, be disrupting lives across America. Kesey’s access to mind-altering substances was made easier when he volunteered for experiments being performed at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. There he was given psychedelic drugs, including the little-known LSD, while doctors noted the drugs’ effects on him. When the experiments ended, Kesey remained at the hospital, employed now as a psychiatric aide.
Both the drug experiments and the job had an enormous effect on Kesey’s writing. He abandoned the novel he had been working on and started a new one, set in a mental hospital- the book that was to become One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His experience as a psychiatric aide gave him insight into the workings of the hospital; many of the Acutes and Chronics described in the novel are thinly-fictionalized versions of patients he saw at the VA, and he even went so far as to arrange a sample electro-shock therapy for himself to see what the treatment was actually like. As for the drug experiments, it was his experience with hallucinogens that let him write so vividly from a schizophrenic’s point of view: Chief Bromden’s ominous dreams of fog and machinery have their roots in Kesey’s own LSD and peyote-induced visions.
Cuckoo’s Nest met with critical praise seldom lavished on first novels. “A great new American novelist,” said Jack Kerouac, the beat poet whose life and work had profoundly influenced Kesey. The distinguished critic Mark Schorer termed the book “a smashing achievement.” And it was a financial success sufficient to allow Kesey two years to research and write his next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. The story of a family of Oregon loggers as fiercely individualistic as Randall McMurphy, it is a more ambitious novel than Kesey’s first but perhaps less successful. It was made into a motion picture in 1971. After Notion’s publication in 1964, Kesey embarked on what was to be an extremely extended vacation, functioning less as a writer than as one of the public entertainers who helped to usher in the Aquarian Age. As recounted in Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey and his band of “Merry Pranksters” travelled the nation in a psychedelically painted bus, ingested large quantities of drugs, and in general made themselves an almost irresistible target to those groups, like the police, unwilling to tolerate such rambunctious attacks on social conventions. Kesey was arrested three times for possession of marijuana, fled to Mexico after faking a suicide note, and, on his return to California, served five months in jail.
Upon his release, he returned to Oregon to farm and to write, and there, except for sojourns to England and Egypt, he has remained. In 1973, he published a group of short pieces, Kesey’s Garage Sale. Subsequently he worked on a new novel, portions of which appeared in the magazine Esquire.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remained widely read and studied well after its publication. A play based on the novel enjoyed long runs off-Broadway and in many parts of the country; the movie made from it (over Kesey’s protests) in 1975 garnered all five major Academy Awards, the first film to achieve that feat in nearly 40 years. Clearly, something about the tale of McMurphy and Nurse Ratched fighting for the souls of the Chief and the other patients generates a powerful appeal. Perhaps some of that appeal lies in the book’s fast-paced, comicstrip humor, and in the comic-strip simplicity of its distinctions between good and evil. More seriously, the book’s message- that one must never be afraid to laugh, nor to rebel against a society that values efficiency and conformity above people-
has not staled: it may be more to the point now than it was in 1962. And, despite McMurphy’s defeat, this message, too, is a curiously satisfying, optimistic and American one, for it suggests that though the battle will be difficult and will claim some victims, there is a chance it can be won. We see that in Chief Bromden’s leap from the ward window out into a world where men can be free.