An Interview with Ken Kesey by Matthew Rick and Mary Jane Fenex

Ken Kesey Interview

by Mary Jane Fenex and Matthew Rick

Ken Kesey’s sitting at a table with a stack of books beside him, and a bag of markers, pens, and rubber stamps to assist him in the project of autographing copies of Sailor Song and The Sea Lion, his two most recent works. To his side is a blonde haired boy named Lutien who is helping Kesey on the project. The stamp in his hand is done in the style of Northwest Indian art.

“It’s like this frog is appearing out of the fog…” Kesey is telling the child. “This is a fog frog.” Introductions are made and then he resumes decorating copies of his books. “Go ahead. I’m ready.”

Matthew Rick: Of the pieces you’ve done, do you have a particular favorite?

Ken Kesey: “Tricker the Squirrel” I think is the best piece I ever wrote. It’s intricate and well wrought. The best long piece is Sometimes A Great Notion. I’ll never come up with a better book.

Mary Jane Fenex: Why?

KK: I don’t know, but Alberto Salazaar ain’t gonna win the New York Marathon. There’s a thing you have when you’re young. Me and, oh, Norman Mailer have talked about this. About how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.

MJF: Do you think it’s the influence of American culture that we can only go so far?

KK: I saw Jerzy Korzinski just before he died — before he committed suicide — and talked to him about this. He said in Europe you make one good book, one good movie, and you’re set. In America you’re expected to best yourself every year and that in itself is crippling.

With Sometimes A Great Notion I was able to work 20 or 30 hours at a whack and I had all this stuff in my mind. I’ve been to too many Dead concerts. There’ve been smokin’ holes where my memory used to be.

MR: The things you did with style, with narrative, with splicing stuff…

KK: It was exciting. Gurney Norman, a good writer friend of mine (Divine Right’s Trip) said he really envied me that book because there’s something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy. And when I was really sailing along on that I knew that I was doing stuff that had never been done, and nothing I’ve done since has been anything like that.

After publishing Sometimes A Great Notion in 1964, his second successful novel in as many years (the first being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) Ken Kesey and a band of friends who called themselves The Merry Pranksters boarded a 1939 International Harvester school bus, perhaps the first such bus to have a psychedelic paint job, and took off on a cross country road trip. Their destination? FURTHUR. The events which grew out of this rollercoaster ride into America’s heartland were chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and in the songs of a Prankster band called the Grateful Dead.

“The bus came by and I got on.

That’s when it all began.

There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to Never Never Land.”

With Beat legend Neal Cassady (the notorious Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) behind the wheel, the bus trip bridged the gap between the Beat Generation ’50′s and the emerging psychedelic scene that became California in the 1960′s. Kesey had proven to the literary establishment that he was a master writer with Cuckoo’s Nestÿand then proved that he could “best” himself with Great Notion. His next challenge? To prove “nothing.”

In the eyes of the literary establishment, Ken Kesey proved he could “do nothing” for close to thirty years. Though he wrote a number of other works (Kesey’s Garage Sale, Demon Box, which includes “Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear”, The Further Inquiry, and Caverns, a collaboration with his class at the University of Oregon) Kesey attracted attention primarily as a counter-cultural folk hero.

“My best work is this kind of stuff” Kesey says pulling coins out of his pocket and doing a quick slight of hand trick. “That has to do with art at its best. It leaves you with that little crack in your mind. The bus trip… 60,000 books every season and there’s only one of those. And that communicates something that can’t be bottled and sold so people don’t think of it as valuable.”

He taps a marker with the palm of his hand. Two coins fall out. Lutien is staring in awe.

Lutien: How’d you put that in?

KK: I was doing magic acts around Oregon, my brother and I, when I was in high school. And my brother and I would travel around with my dad — he was manager of a creamery, and we’d do these shows for these kids — farm kids –before television, hardly any radio. We’d do these shows and the look that would come on these people’s faces –it was wonderful. And I remember one time driving the bus through Boise. We were playing ball on top. The cops’d told us to get out of town and we were just about out of town and there were these two kids and we were playing ball on the top of the bus, making all of this noise. We saw these kids, and we threw a ball at them. One kid caught one. The other kid caught one and the bus went on. And I always thought about what do they tell their folks? ‘Where did you get the ball?’ And that to me is art at its peak. There’s a feeling for it in this country again. Of magic. You can feel it.

MJF: How do you define magic?

KK: Magic is seeing something that extends beyond the visible.

For Kesey, the magic hasn’t ended. Far from being tired and disillusioned, he is still very much a participant in the psychedelic passion play.

KK: I’m just hoping to do a thing that I’ve been talking about a long time which is what we were doing with the Dead 25 years ago. Bill Graham kind of took it over and we haven’t gotten back to it. I call it ritual reality.

In 1966, just prior being arrested as a fugitive, Ken Kesey was saying “It’s time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. I don’t know what this means in any way that I could just spell out, but I know we’ve reached a certain point but we’re not moving any more and that’s why we’ve got to move on to the next step.”

Is this “ritual reality” the next step?

MR: Could you tell me more about ritual reality?

KK: Matthew, the virtual reality — it’s that word virtual that goes back to the word virtue. Goodness. Goodness is something that is about to happen. It hasn’t really happened. It is by virtue of its nature it will happen. But it won’t happen without some kind of observance of it. Ritual is necessary for us to know anything. You’ve got to get out and pray to the sky to appreciate the sunshine otherwise you’re just a lizard standing there with the sun shining on you. We need the rituals or else we have to contrive our own because all of our rituals have been coopted and corrupted and taken from us and used by Coca-Cola and Nike.

A ritual has to be a little dangerous. It doesn’t come cheap or free. The rituals we are trying to put together, we don’t know what they are, but we feel the hunger for them. Everywhere I go, I feel the hunger for people wanting to be a

part of a ritual. Not to be there and have somebody present something to them. It’s almost being taken away from us by disco, by MTV, by bottled performances. That’s why I like to see this whole punk group. The statement that they’re making with their stuff… This is ritual.

MR: What do you see as the role of the 21st century shaman / mystic?

KK: Everything’s still basically the same as it used to be. Fire hurts you when it burns you. If you fall in water, you drown, rocks bruise you, wolves bite you, you go through a certain bunch of things that are the same. The job of the shaman / mystic I think is to pull things away from the Freudian mind. Let’s quit examining ourselves and trying to make ourselves psychologically perfect. We aren’t and never will be.

I have a friend that teaches psychotherapy and they go through death experience and I said, ‘Hey you can roll around on the ground and agonize as much as you want, but it’s not like it really is when you really have somebody you care for die.’ That confronting reality, we’ve been turned away from it. We don’t want to think of the bad stuff that’s going to happen to us, but it’s life and we need to be able to reach our arms around it and say, ‘Hey, it’s awful, and it’s beautiful and I love it.’ People like Ginsberg, he teaches you to do that. That’s why Kerouac was such a great writer. He tries to say ‘Hey look at these people — these pops, these jazz players.’ Y’know you can’t think of anybody in Kerouac’s books that he puts down — except for Lou Little, the football coach at Columbia and he is hard on his case.

Kesey went from being humorous to being very heart felt and sincere numerous times. The death of his son Jed in a bus wreck in 1984 still weighs heavily on his mind.

KK: I was driving around one time after Jed died. He’d been dead about two weeks and I was driving to a wrestling match and I was weeping and talking to him and I said, “Oh Jed, we really loved you” and I thought “That doesn’t sound right. Loved.” You can’t use it in the past tense. We still love him. Death does not stop that love at all.

When we were at the hospital these couples began to come around who’d lost kids, so for years after that, I still do, I wrote to people who lost kids. Because you don’t think you need that. It’s important shit.

When Pirsig’s kid died, he wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, [he] wrote me a letter and we knew that this had happened to us, but it was larger than that. I had poetry to it and if you don’t have that… if you don’t have that dab of poetry and beauty and stuff, it’s just too

hard. You can’t stand it. If love isn’t stronger than death, then fuck it. I can’t bear it.

So I wrote the Kennedys after the one kid od’d, [and] I got a great letter back from Teddy Kennedy. That changes how you feel about somebody like that. When I was back in DC he came over and shook my hand and thanked me for the letter. That wave length is above and beyond all this other political stuff.

Also check out my Ken Kesey MFA Thesis. Thanks!