Ken Kesey, 1935-2001 / Oregon loses a legend
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Ken Kesey, 1935-2001 / Oregon loses a legend: The 'honest-to-God Western writer' surprised us even in the end By BOB KEEFER and SUSAN PALMER WE'VE LOST our Merry Prankster. Novelist Ken Kesey died early Saturday from complications following surgery to remove a tumor on his liver. He was 66 years old. Kesey was admitted to Sacred Heart Medical Center on Oct. 25 after a biopsy showed the growth was malignant, his nephew Kit Kesey said. Doctors had to remove a significant portion of the liver, but he seemed to be recovering from the surgery until late Monday.
"He began to lose liver function and that then dropped him back into intensive care," Kesey said. "He crashed pretty hard Monday night and we never really saw him come back out of that." "He slipped away" at 4:30 a.m. Saturday, he said. Ken Elton Kesey was born on Sept. 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colo., to dairy farmers Fred and Geneva Kesey. The family moved to Springfield in 1943. He attended the University of Oregon, where he was active in fraternities and college plays and won a scholarship as a wrestler. After graduating in 1958 with a journalism degree, he received a scholarship to attend the graduate writing program at Stanford University. While a student there, he became involved in drug experiments at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, Calif. Most people would be happy to write just one great American novel. Before he was 30 years old, Kesey had written two - "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion" - before settling into the more varied life of Merry Prankster, friend of the Grateful Dead and leading man in his own ongoing personal pageant. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," his brawling story of a rebellious inmate trapped within the clockwork order of a state mental hospital, perfectly captured the budding anti-authoritarian spirit of the nation when the book came out in 1962. "Powerful poetic realism," Life magazine said. "A great new American novelist," beat writer Jack Kerouac said. Later made into a movie, the book brought Kesey, then 26, a pile of instant celebrity. In the easy analysis of the flower-child 1960s, the mental hospital represented the United States of the orderly but often hypocritical '50s; Randle McMurphy, branded insane by the system, was the single sane hero, a disorderly stand-in for Kesey himself as he charmingly wrestled his way through life. He wrote "Cuckoo's Nest" at Stanford, where American literary critic Leslie Fiedler was on the committee that selected Kesey, a rawboned wrestling champion from Oregon, for a fellowship. "One day this rough-looking fellow turned up to talk to us," Fiedler said Saturday from his home in Buffalo, N.Y. "Everyone else on the committee hated him. `One person we don't want to give this fellowship to is the wrestler,' they said. I fought them to the death and finally won." Fiedler said that, ever since, he has felt like a "stepfather" to Kesey's two great books. "He is a great American writer, and an honest-to-God Western writer," the critic said. "Cuckoo's Nest," he said, touches America on many levels. "It's almost reached the status of a classic already," he said. "It exists for so many different kinds of audiences. He is available to the general reader, and - through the movie anyway - he has entered almost everyone's mind." "Cuckoo's Nest," Fiedler said, is organized as precisely as the facets of a jewel. "It's a beautiful piece of work. In terms of structure, construction and architecture, it seems to be first rate." "Sometimes a Great Notion," published in 1964, is a more massive, sprawling work of writing, more difficult to fathom and perhaps less certain of voice. It tells the epic story of the struggle of an Oregon logger named Hank Stamper and his roughneck family. Fiedler thinks it reads like a first novel compared to the cool precision of "Cuckoo's Nest."
"I don't think he really knew who he was anymore. `Sometimes a Great Notion' is one of those books where you feel the author is not in control of the book. But he thought big and wrote big. It takes a lot of chutzpah to write a book as big in intention as `Sometimes.' " Novelist Larry McMurtry, author of "Lonesome Dove" and "The Last Picture Show" among many other works, first met Kesey at Stanford in the "Cuckoo's Nest" days. McMurtry said he's always preferred the second novel - in part because he heard so much of "Cuckoo's Nest" read aloud as Kesey was writing it. Kesey put more of himself into "Sometimes a Great Notion," McMurtry said Saturday from his home in Texas. "I thought `Sometimes' had a lot more of Ken than `Cuckoo's Nest,' though that was a brilliant, youthful tour-de-force. Certainly his feeling about Oregon and place and work and many aspects of life are better fulfilled in `Sometimes a Great Notion.' " Kesey, who had married his high school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, in 1956, returned to Oregon in 1968. He settled down on a Pleasant Hill farm, raised a family of four children and immersed himself in the community, joining school boards, raising cattle and sheep, supporting several businesses. But he was rarely out of the public eye. George Wickes, a retired professor of English at the University of Oregon, called Kesey "a great showman," on both the national and local stage. "Kesey was a great personality and powerful presence," he said Saturday. "Quite charismatic. Magnetic. He always had people around him. He always attracted people that way." It was Kesey the showman - what McMurtry calls Kesey "the medicine man" - who would become the central figure in New York journalist Tom Wolfe's uproarious account of the 1960s' "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," published in 1968. A landmark work of New Journalism - a style of nonfiction writing incorporating techniques of fiction - Wolfe's book describes Kesey's adventures with a group of Merry Pranksters as they make their way through the '60s on a bus named Furthur, which Kesey bought with money he made from "Cuckoo's Nest." Renamed "Further" in later incarnations, the bus became as much a symbol in Kesey's life as a definite object, and Kesey caused a minor ruckus when he tried to donate a later version of the bus to the Smithsonian without quite informing them of its exact heritage. The original bus dawned on the national consciousness in this passage from Wolfe's book:
"I make out a school bus ... glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Leger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester school bus and told him to go to it." Led by Kesey, the Merry Pranksters toured the country and took LSD - then a legal drug - and partied with Hells Angels, becoming an icon of '60s excess and enthusiasm. Friend and fellow Prankster Ken Babbs, who lives outside Eugene, was too shaken up Saturday to talk about his friend's death. In a prepared statement, he called Kesey "a great husband, great father, great granddad, great friend. He's gone too soon and he will leave a big gap." The Merry Pranksters' house band was a then-little-known group called the Grateful Dead, and Kesey remained friends with the band and its late leader, Jerry Garcia, who often visited the Kesey farm on his way through Oregon. When a Dead concert in Eugene fell through one year in the mid-1990s because of Garcia's failing health, Kesey threw his farm open to hundreds of Deadheads, nomadic fans of the group, who had arrived in town for a show that never happened. It was a perfect example of his generosity and political acumen working together, for Kesey knew that the Dead could be hurt by the specter of hundreds of their frustrated fans wandering aimlessly around Eugene. Musician Mason Williams tells of another example of generosity he saw in Kesey, who performed several times in Williams' Christmas show with the Eugene Symphony and the Oregon Symphony in Portland. In Portland one year, Kesey arrived for the show dressed as a street Santa Claus - a down-and-out alcoholic bell ringer with a pint in his pocket. During the performance, he sent members of a school choir into the audience to collect money for the homeless. Later Williams helped hand out the cash - more than $6,000 - to derelicts on the street. The shocked symphony didn't want Kesey back the next night, but he behaved himself and did a lovely reading of the St. Matthew Christmas story. "He was kind of like a Buffalo Bill character," Williams said. "He liked to put on great show. He was truly larger than life." The literary world often lamented that Kesey stopped writing serious novels after "Sometimes a Great Notion." He made one attempt, with a comic story called "Sailor Song" in 1992, but it fell flat compared with previous work; and another with the 1994 historical novel, "Last Go Round," about the Pendleton Round-Up. Instead, Kesey preferred to give local performances, as in his work with Williams. He worked with Toni Pimble of the Eugene Ballet to set to dance a children's story he wrote, "Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear." With music by Art Maddox, it was performed in Eugene as well as at Lincoln Center in New York in 1989. Other more recent works include "Demon Box," a 1986 collection of essays, stories and poems, and a similar collection, "Garage Sale," in 1973. Most recently he was editing video collages of movies taken in the Prankster days. Williams, for one, is not judgmental about Kesey's switch from writing big novels. "You've got to just hole up to be a writer," he said. "It's spending a lot of time by yourself and getting this sentence right or getting that paragraph right. He was too much of a bigger-heart, bigger-vision person. He especially liked being surrounded by people." Explaining Kesey - his life, his literary and community influence - seemed too tall an order for at least one of his friends. "You can't encapsulate Kesey in a 30-second sound bite. It just won't happen," said Izzy Whetstine, a perennial mayoral candidate in Eugene.
People were drawn to Kesey because he gave them a sense of life's possibilities, Whetstine said. "I've talked to a lot of young people who moved to Oregon to be closer to Kesey," he said. "You watch him work a crowd, you get the feeling rainbows could appear at any time." Kesey's sudden turn for the worse after his surgery shocked family members and friends, who were used to seeing him prevail over trouble, almost as if by magic. Nowhere was that magic more evident than on Further adventures, Kit Kesey said. The gas gauge on the bus was fairly unreliable so Pranksters used an old broom handle stuck down into the gas tank as a measure. "However wet the broom handle is, is however far you go," Kit Kesey said. On a trip through England about three years ago, the bus ran out of gas a good mile from a gas station. His uncle grabbed a spray can of engine starter, popped the hood and perched there spraying the starter into the carburetor, as the bus jerked along the road. "I was driving and he was spraying pure ether into the carburetor. It was popping and sparking and puffing smoke, but we made it," he said. While the past week gave the family a chance to prepare for his death, they harbored the hope that somehow Kesey would pull through. "We were hoping there would be some rabbit pulled out of the hat like he always does," Kit Kesey said. Kesey is survived by his mother, Geneva Jolley; his wife, Faye; a son, Zane; two daughters, Shannon Smith and Sunshine Kesey; his brother, Chuck Kesey; and three grandchildren. His son Jed was killed in 1984 in an accident while returning from a wrestling match for the UO. Kesey will be buried in the family cemetery, next to Jed, at his Pleasant Hill property. A family graveside service as well as a public memorial service will be held sometime early this week, Kit Kesey said. A GREAT AMERICAN WRITER Kesey's two best-known works both received critical acclaim and were adapted for the screen.
And for anyone else who might care to look. - from the prologue to "Sometimes a Great Notion"
"Now; what was you asking about my record, Doc?" "Yes. I was wondering if you've any previous psychiatric history. Any analysis, any time spent in any other institutions?" "Well, counting state and county coolers -" "Mental institutions." "Ah. No, if that's the case. This is my first trip. But I am crazy, Doc, I swear I am." - from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
Related: Fond farewell to the Prankster: Admirers eulogize an irrepressible soul Bob Welch: Kesey, Oregon are inseparable Copyright © 2001 The Register-Guard |
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