Sometimes a Great Notion (2 page)

 

He became famous for being famous. He was not taken seriously. He lived as a footnote to an era, the ’60s, that much of American society wanted to forget ever happened. He failed at the literary game in which success is a shelf of books produced at regular intervals, that thing called a body of work. His best book,
Sometimes a Great Notion
, came very early on and now broods out of sight, a sunken ship in the dark water at the mouth of that safe harbor where our beliefs are securely moored, a navigational hazard that threatens to rip out the bottom of our unsinkable craft, a dreadnought we have named Culture. There is that famous bus ride of course, the one he undertook with a herd of Merry Pranksters that crossed the United States and delivered them in a fog to the launch party of this very novel in New York City. Later, that drug-fueled 1964 adventure kept him chained to the psychedelic machine through dozens of editions of Tom Wolfe’s
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. Then there was the bust for marijuana, the flight to Mexico, the months in jail—a fistful of untoward moments such as normally decorate the covers of supermarket tabloids.

From time to time, he lurched back into print with odd volumes—
Kesey’s Garage Sale
,
Demon Box
,
The Further Inquiry
, and that slumgullion stew of a novel he whipped out with thirteen writing students at the University of Oregon (with the author listed—God have mercy!—as O. U. Levon) called
Caverns
. Ken Kesey himself became a ghostly reputation as a young, hot, once-upon-a-time writer who went a little nuts and then disappeared . . . up in Oregon somewhere? Right? Up there on some farm? They made some movies out of his stuff, didn’t they? A curious fate for a man who wrote some of the most searing pages about the emptiness of this big country we all live in.

He was struck by the order, dullness, dumbness, suicidal tendencies, and pointlessness of midcentury America, the America of the empire, the America that was going to put its stamp on a century, the America with its arteries clogged with things, and its soul left at some pawn shop along the way in order to raise the cash for guns. Of course, many of us kind of like this prison and busy ourselves with checking the padlocks and adding more bars to the windows—so the burglars can’t get in, honey. Kesey is the man trying to break out. All his work is about prisoners, some aware of the cage and rattling the bars, the rest resigned to doing their time. “We never claimed,” he wrote years after
Sometimes a Great Notion
, “to know precisely when the birth of this New Consciousness would take place, or what assortment of potions might be required to initiate contractions, but as to the birthplace we had always taken it for granted that this shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of American labor.”

His first book,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, takes place in an asylum, and though the locations change from book to book, this sense of bondage is constant in Kesey’s work. Kesey’s world is a place with lots of space for love and sentiment. Nature is a big-ticket item in his books, but in
Sometimes a Great Notion
nature is not a soft, comforting mother: “For this land was permeated with dying; this bounteous land, where plants grew overnight, where Jonas had watched a mushroom push from the carcass of a drowned beaver and in a few gliding hours swell to the size of a hat . . .” And history hangs like dead weight over those who know it and those who do not: “You could never understand it all. You just want a reason, two or three reasons. When there are reasons going back two or three hundred years . . .”

And of course the ’60s, that time that never seemed to have occurred and that can be barely remembered, is a wound he keeps licking. Kesey has become a symbol of the ’60s despite the fact that he kept writing about its failings, its shortcoming, and its one solid virtue, a virtue summed up by the word
further
. Or at times Furthur, the name first painted on the front of that legendary bus.

Kesey has all the tricks we ask of writers: that ear for dialogue, that ability to create characters that live on the page, that simple conflict presented early on in the story that causes us to cheer for one side against another. He can write that pretty sentence, fill that blank page. There is a bounce to his prose and to the people in his books as they rampage around. He makes us laugh. None of this seemed to impress him much, and he popped off occasionally against serious writing in his time and suspected that comic books or popular music or maybe movies would be the stuff people would look back at, a century or two from now, when they wanted to understand our time.

In his own case, I think he was wrong. Because Kesey also had an obsession with something he called entropy at times; at other times he called it madness; then again he’d say it was emptiness. And what he writes disturbs anyone who reads it. He is not the writer who sets out to capture and catalogue our culture’s manners and morals, though that task occurs in his work. He is not the writer who seeks to focus on our interior hells and who chucks society while he pursues the demons of the individual, though such moments also occur in his books. He is that old-fashioned kind of writer, the moral critic, the prophet without a prophecy, a person who is cut from that moth-eaten old bolt of wool we’d forgotten about up in the attic, the stuff Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to name two, were cut from. He asks questions and can’t give us answers. But he has these bothersome questions, the main one being: what are we going to do about this emptiness, this lack of dreams, ambitions, visions? We no longer have promises to keep, miles to go before we sleep, so do we just content ourselves with meeting the mortgage payments on this continental empire we seem to have inherited?

In Kesey’s books people are afraid, afraid of this emptiness, and all the dope and merry pranks cannot disguise this fact. In
Demon Box
, he spells out the condition of our condition: “I allowed that it could be a possibility. ‘But I don’t think it’s the people I’m fascinated by so much as the puzzle. Like what
is
crazy? What’s making all these people go there? I mean, what an interesting notion this metaphor of yours is, if I’ve got it right—that modern civilization’s
angst
is mechanical first and mental second?’ ‘Not
angst,
’ he corrected. ‘Fear. Of emptiness.

Since the Industrial Revolution, civilization is increasingly afraid of running empty.’ ”

There is an image in
Sometimes a Great Notion
of a buck deer swept out to sea, found by a fishing boat, and hauled aboard. The deer lies on the bottom of the small craft, almost catatonic with terror. When the boat nears shore, the deer jumps and swims back out to sea, still terrified, swims to . . . well, to certain death? A new future? Kesey can’t tell us, he can just ask. In
Sometimes a Great Notion,
he asks what kind of future is possible when we have run out of country and are down to felling the last trees. The choice presented is between a brutal individualism that we all secretly love, but can no longer afford, and a dreary collectivism that stills our heart when we even think about it. What do we do when we know but cannot act, see but cannot move?

Jesus, sometimes this feeling gets so bad we need a little war just to perk ourselves up. In
Sometimes a Great Notion
the head of the hell-for-leather Stamper clan is old Henry, an eighty-year-old man who refuses to give in. He is the best part of ourselves and the worst part of ourselves. He is our war against the land, our mindless pursuit of the work at hand so that we do not have to wonder why we are doing this work.

Henry Stamper says:

Well, Henry, we did like you said. Now what?

There’s a guy who was a lot like Kesey. He also was a hellion when young, wrote two famous novels, and then refused to write another one for decades while he pursued other matters. He was a Russian count named Leo Tolstoy. When he was a boy, his older brother told him that there was a green stick buried in the woods of the family estate and, if he could find that stick, he’d learn the secret of life. When Tolstoy finally died as very old man, he asked to be buried near the rumored site of that green stick.

Kesey, after his legendary bus ride in Furthur, kept the old machine in the woods on his farm, where it has slowly rusted and been devoured by moss. The Smithsonian kept asking him for it as a doodad for its collection. He refused. Now Kesey is dead, the bus still rusts under the Oregon sky, and we’re left with this fat novel called
Sometimes a Great Notion
. Nobody seems to know what to do with it, any more than they could figure out what to do with Ken Kesey. This book just doesn’t seem to fit our notions of what a proper novel should be or of what America should be. I think this is our green stick buried in our ancestral woods. Get a shovel. You’re likely to break a sweat, but you’ll get to a better place, your own country.

I suppose I should mention Indian Jenny, but you’ll meet her along the way. Listen to her. She knows the gospel truth.

You’ll see.

 

East, back up the highway still in the mountain pass where the branches and creeks still crash and roar, the union president, Jonathan Bailey Draeger, drives from Eugene toward the coast. He is in a strange mood—owing, largely, he knows, to a fever picked up with his touch of influenza—and feels at once oddly deranged and still quite clear-headed. Also, he looks forward to the day both with pleasure and dismay—pleasure because he will soon be leaving this waterlogged mud wallow, dismay because he has promised to have Thanksgiving dinner in Wakonda with the local representative, Floyd Evenwrite. Draeger does not anticipate a very enjoyable afternoon at the Evenwrite household—the few times he had occasion to meet with Evenwrite at his home during this Stamper business, those times were certainly no joy—but he is in a good humor nevertheless: this will be the last of the Stamper business, the last of this whole Northwest business for a good long time, knock wood. After today he can get back down south and let some of that good old California Vitamin D dry up this blasted skin rash. Always get skin rash up here. And athlete’s foot all the way to the ankle. The moisture. It’s certainly no wonder that this area has two or three natives a month take that one-way dip—it’s either drown your blasted self or rot.