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November 11, 2001
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
The Register-Guard
Recommend this story to others.
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.
Ken Kesey
1935-2001
"Kesey was a great personality and powerful presence. Quite charismatic.
Magnetic."
� GEORGE WICKES, retired UO English professor"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."
Ken Kesey walks beside the original "Furthur" in July. The bus made famous in
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" has gone back to nature on Kesey's farm.
Photo: BRIAN DAVIES / The Register-Guard"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:
Author Ken Kesey (above) gets into the moment at an event at the University
of Oregon in June 1976. A 1958 graduate of the school, Kesey taught creative
writing at his alma mater in 1987. Kesey, (below) in his bus named "Further,"
leaves Roseburg southbound on Interstate 5 in 1990 for a trip to the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The bus, a reincarnation of the
original driven by the Merry Pranksters, caused a minor ruckus when he tried
to donate it to the Smithsonian without quite informing them of its exact
heritage.
Kesey (above) appears at a function at the university in January 1989. Kesey
told the crowd that his family has always been the most important thing in
his life. Below, Kesey is surrounded by family and friends at his Pleasant
Hill farm in July. Fellow Merry Prankster Ken Babbs is at left.
Photos: The Register-Guard and The Associated Press"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.
Author Ken Kesey waits between sets at a rock concert in February 1999 in
Springfield.
Photo: THOMAS BOYD / The Register-GuardPeople 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.
Twisting and stopping and slowly untwisting in the gusting rain, eight or ten
feet above the flood's current, a human arm, tied at the wrist, (just the
arm; look) disappearing downward at the frayed shoulder where an invisible
dancer performs twisting pirouettes for an enthralled audience (just the arm,
turning there, above the water) ... for the dogs on the bank, for the
blinking rain, for the smoke, the house, the trees, and the crowd calling
angrily from across the river, "Stammmper! Hey, goddamn you anyhow, Hank
Stammmmmper!"
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"
=====
November 11, 2001
Ken Kesey time line
Recommend this story to others.
Author Ken Kesey died Saturday at age 66. Here's a look at his life and
accomplishments:
1935: Born in La Junta, Colo.
1943: Moved to Springfield
1956: Married Faye Haxby
1958: Graduated from the University of Oregon
1959-61: Attended Stanford University and studied with Wallace Stegner
1960-61: Volunteered for government drug experiments at a Veterans
Administration Hospital
1962: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" published
1964: "Sometimes a Great Notion" published
1964: Traveled cross-country in a bus with a group of friends who called
themselves the Merry Pranksters
1965-67: Marijuana possession arrest leads to a lengthy court battle. He
served 90 days in jail
1968: Moved to his Pleasant Hill farm. Tom Wolfe's book about the 1964 bus
trip, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," published
1973: "Garage Sale," a collection of essays, published
1974: He organized one of the state's first televised referendums on local
and statewide issues
1975: The film version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" won best picture,
director, actor and actress
1984: His son, Jed, died in a van wreck while traveling with the University
of Oregon wrestling team
1986: "Demon Box," a collection of essays, stories, poems and memories,
published
1987: Taught creative writing class at the UO
1989: Novel, "Caverns," co-written with UO writing students, published under
the name OU Levon; backward, it spells UO Novel
1990: Children's book, "Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the
Bear," published
1991: Children's book, "Sea Lion," published. Los Angeles Times honors him
with its Robert Kirsh Award
1992: Novel "Sailor Song" published. Kesey learned that he had diabetes
1994: "Last Go Round," a historical novel set in 1911 and based on the first
Pendleton Round-Up, is published
1997: Suffered a small stroke
Nov. 10, 2001: Kesey died at 4:30 a.m. at Sacred Heart Medical Center
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright � 2001 The Register-Guard
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