Appreciation: Ken Kesey

Captain Flag of the good ship Furthur didn't just create great literature, he was great literature -- and a quintessentially American character.

By Sean Elder

Nov. 16, 2001 | Word of Ken Kesey's death came in under the radar last weekend, which is surprising considering the way the ebullient author rode into the American circus.

It's easy to imagine him playing his own best-known character, Randall P. McMurphy, the bull-goose loony in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," or see him as Hank Stamper in the 1971 film version of "Sometimes a Great Notion," just by squinting a little at Paul Newman. But when I think of Kesey, I think of him on top of that bus, the same old International Harvester he left to the weeds outside his Oregon farm instead of the Smithsonian Institute.

Here's one of the luminous snapshots captured in Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," the book that chronicled the 1964 cross-country trek of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters with the same love and attention to detail Stephen Ambrose employed to limn the voyage, toward a different frontier, of Lewis and Clark.

"Going through the steams of southern Alabama in late June and Kesey rises up from out of the comic books and becomes Captain Flag. He puts on a pink kilt, like a miniskirt, and pink socks and patent leather shoes and pink sunglasses and wraps an American flag around his head like a big turban and holds it in place with an arrow through the back of it and gets up on top of the bus roaring through Alabama and starts playing the flute at people passing by ..."

But Kesey wasn't headed west. The Oregon-born farm boy turned hepcat author was headed in the opposite direction, toward New York and the old America that had no idea what to make of him and his bus's stated destination: "Furthur." While "Cuckoo's Nest" had been published to mostly enthusiastic reviews just two years earlier, "Sometimes a Great Notion" met a much more mixed reception. It was too outsized and over-the-top, some critics complained, too lyrical and lusty -- all together too western. Besides, declaring Kesey's second book a failure meant that the East Coast Literary Establishment (as that posse was invariably referred to then) wouldn't have to create a new category for the writer after all. He could go down in literary history dismissed as one of those branded with, and broken by, literary promise.

Pity. For it is that very East-West split that fuels "Notion." The story centers on a rivalry between two half-brothers -- one college-educated and sophisticated, the other defined by native wit and instinct -- fighting over the same woman. As Kesey told an interviewer at the time, "The two Stamper brothers in the novel are each one of the ways I think I am." And for all its iconic status, "Cuckoo's Nest" looks a little stiff and one-dimensional these days: McMurphy's martyrdom is too obvious and symbolic, as is Big Nurse's smiling malice. "Notion," for all its baggy patches and unfinished jazz riffs, has the feel of real life -- the kind that sticks its thumb in your eye. In an age when organized labor was still largely revered in fiction, the Stamper family battled with the union; and just as tree-saving became a national passion, Kesey gave us loggers for heroes.

And pranksters. The Stampers are a family of jokers who salute the town they're battling with by tying their father's severed arm, middle finger erect, to the mast of a logging boat. McMurphy expressed much of his disrespect for authority in tricks and sight gags, like the World Series game the inmates "watch," sans picture. The Merry Pranksters themselves aspired to be sort of holy fools, as fellow Prankster and lifelong friend Ken Babbs reminded the assembled at a funeral service for Kesey in Eugene on Wednesday. "It's important to know what a prank is," the eulogist said, standing before the author's painted paisley coffin. "Kesey defined it as something that doesn't hurt anyone. It has to be illuminating and it has to be funny."

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