Book review:
Acid Christ,' by Mark Christensen
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-bk_acidchrist_1121gd.ART.State.Edition1.4b804c1.html
November 21, 2010
By TOM DODGE
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a popular novel when it came out
in 1962 but not entirely famous until the movie version in 1975 won
five Oscars. It's a simple Christian allegory, and professors keep it
in print, teaching its deeper meanings. What they may not teach is
that the government unknowingly financed the novel and provided the
drugs, mainly LSD, that its 27-year-old author, Kenneth Elton Kesey,
said were necessary to its success.
Ken Kesey's indirect association with the CIA began in 1959, when he
was a student in a Stanford University writing program (with fellow
student Larry McMurtry). For extra money, he volunteered for
experimental drug trials, later known to be the nefarious MKUltra
project, conducted at the nearby Veterans Affairs hospital at Menlo
Park. He was a Baptist with little drug experience, but through the
program made a love connection with LSD and mescaline.
The LSD, he said, gave him his literary vision, but this could have
been the drugs talking, as his writing instructor, none other than
literary kingmaker Malcolm Cowley, is said to have contributed most
to the book's success.
Mark Christensen's combination biography-memoir provides a portrait
of the artist and the era Kesey is said to have influenced. It is a
soft-focused picture of him and also of Christensen and his cadre of
West Coast surfboard dudes, retro-weirdo beatnik poets, doomed rock
'n' roll stars and Haight-Ashbury hippies.
Acid Christ itself is a kind of wild bus ride through an
often-bedeviling maze of mangled slang, strange figures of speech and
upside-down clichés. The author should get points though for
attempting such a hybrid literary form. A lot of readers will no
doubt enjoy the Christensen life story as it parallels Kesey's more
famous doings and may even surpass the Kesey contingent in drug intake.
Again, his literary contortions might send English teachers reeling
to their own drug cabinet. Typical example: "On the Road written in
1951 but published finally the year before in 1957 was flying out
bookstore doors and twenty-three year-old Ken Kesey had settled into
a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Stanford."
Bedeviling prose can happen to anybody. Kesey's second novel,
Sometimes a Great Notion, apparently made some reviewers want to jump
in the river and drown. After that experience, he gave up novel
writing, saying that it was too much trouble and was dead anyway. He
would live his art and redeem mankind into the bargain, and that's
when he fired up the psychedelic bus, old "Further," solicited as its
driver the notorious Neal Cassidy, he of On the Road fame, and lit
out with the Merry Pranksters on a mission to inflict peace and love
on the land. Judging by the current national fit of anger, his
aspirations toward messianic peace and good will fell flat as well.
Kesey's death in 2001 after surgery to remove a tumor from his liver
was a terrible blow to Faye, his wife of 45 years, their two
surviving sons and grandchildren, who saw him as the family magician
and hypnotist. One was heard to say, sadly, "Now who's going to teach
us to hypnotize the chickens?"
--
Author and radio commentator Tom Dodge (www.tomdodge books.com) spent
part of a day with Ken Kesey in September 1979 and found him to be a
congenial and truly thoughtful guest.
--
[email protected]
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Acid Christ
Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy
Mark Christensen
(Shaffner Press, $26.95)
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