Some years ago, when I was book review editor for a major Northwest newspaper, I happened to mention to a young woman, a publicist for a New York publisher,  that I was soon to visit Ken Kesey and discuss his then latest novel, the unfortunate “Sailor Song.”

To my surprise, the woman responded naively, “Ken Kesey. . . Oh, is he out there now?”

Oh yes, I affirmed, explaining once again to another parochial New Yorker that we could claim Kesey as one of our own, and that literature and its practitioners did manage to thrive in the rude, unlettered expanses west of the Hudson River.  Now, however, after the death of the popular Oregon author and 60s cult figure, I have reconsidered the young publicist’s comment, and allow that identifying Kesey has never been easy. In all the years of our acquaintance, reading his work and following his life’s good and bad weather, I’m not sure I ever gained a firm handle on the man.

Part of the problem, it seems, is that despite two indisputable masterpieces, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s Nest” (1962), and “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1964), both set in Oregon, he is acknowledged less as a writer of  literature than as leader of the itinerant, LSD-fueled “Merry Pranksters,” a now rather tiresome manifestation of the “hippie generations” chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

In an interview not long before his own death in automobile accident, author Wallace Stegner, Kesey’s mentor and teacher in Stanford University’s renowned graduate writing program (where Kesey attended on a scholarship after being graduated from the University of Oregon in 1957), Stegner said he was “disappointed” in Kesey, who, he said, “had frittered away such a promising future.”
 
Kesey, however, seemed to be aware of his dilemma, once telling an interviewer that writers never seemed to get better than their first work, and admitting, “this bothers me a lot. You look back and their last work is no improvement on their first. I feel I have an obligation to improve, and I worry about that.”

   Many native Oregonians like myself were somewhat surprised to learn that Kesey’s future began not here but in La Junta, Colo., where he was born on Sept. 17, 1935, the son of dairy farmer Fred Kesey and his wife Geneva. His family moved here when he was quite young, however, settling near Springfield where he grew into a brawny young man who learned to hunt, fish and love the forested-rainy outdoors, as many of us did in those quiet years before the “Northwest experience” became a catch phrase among Starbuck’s-sipping yuppies from elsewhere.

Kesey catches the true Northwest ambiance in “Sometimes a Great Notion,” a fictional chronical of the Stampers, a rough-hewn family of loggers living on the sodden Oregon Coast, and the dichotomous
relationship between two of its brothers who Kesey draws as personifications of the conflict between the Westerner’s rugged individualism and effete Eastern intellectualism. The book epitomizes Kesey’s skill, and apt tribute was paid by a colleague of mine, Steve Erickson, a fine writer and Northwesterner who died decades before his time. Steve kept a battered copy of “Notion” in his desk drawer, reading it continuously from cover to cover, and expressing his amazement after each reading.

Serious Kesey fans will dispute the merits of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion,” taking sides as to which is the finer work. “Cuckoo’s Nest,” inspired by Kesey’s work as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, and written with the assistance of hallucinogens, is a dark, though often hysterically funny, satire of a battle of wills between psychiatric patients and the tyrannical “Big Nurse,” Miss Rached.
Written in stream-of-consciousness style, the controversial novel depicted Kesey’s interpretation of an repressive American culture, “The Combine,” represented by Big Nurse, who ultimately defeats and lobotomizes the rebellious patient, Randle Patrick McMurphy.
 
Kesey’s subsequent work was far from being distinguished, often no more than substantial and occasionally disappointing. Of his two final novels, “Sailor Song” (1992) and “Last Go Round: A Dime Western” (1994), the latter written with fellow prankster and long-time friend Ken Babbs, “Last Go Round,” a fictional account of a bronco-riding contest between three cowboys--white, African-American and Native American--at Oregon's venerable Pendleton Round-up,  proved the most promising.   “Sailor Song,” an uncontrolled leviathan of  a novel set in Alaska, is largely a waste of paper that Kesey had lost interest in long before it publication. 

On a visit to his family’s farm in Pleasant Hill, east of Springfield, where Kesey farmed and was involved in community affairs, we sat in his study where the manuscript sat fat and neglected on a shelf above his desk. Around us the floor was littered with curled fax missives from his friend, the infamous Hunter S. Thompson, and when I asked Kesey about the manuscript, he dismissed it with a curt, “Oh, that thing. .”

Later, after it was published, I asked what he thought, and he grinned and said, “I like the cover,” which was richly garish, like a romance novel. “I always wanted a book of mine to have raised letters like this.”

In the decades after his prankster adventures, Kesey stayed mostly at home with his wife Faye (his high school sweetheart, he married Norma Faye Haxby in 1956), and claimed he had always been a family man with strong ties to the community.  The keseys had four children, daughters Shannon and Sunshine, and two sons, Jed and Zane, and many think it was Jed’s death in 1984 that took the wind out of Kesey’s sails, sobered him to life and turning him away from writing.

Jed, a high school wrestler as was his father -- Kesey was a star wrestler and football player in high school, as well as being voted “most likely to succeed” -- was killed in a car accident in 1984 while on the way to a wrestling match.  Kesey had Jed buried on the property, and each evening he would visit the grave and say goodnight to his son, a moving rite I experienced on one visit, noting that nearby was the original Prankster’s bus, “Further,” the once infamous 1939 International-Harvester rig rusting amid a tangle of blackberry vines.

Among his other work you can list “Kesey’s Garage Sale” (1973, essays by himself and others; “Demon Box” (1986), essays and stories; “The Further Inquiry” (1990), personal recollections of the 1960s Prankster bus trip, and two quite charming children’s books, “Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear” (1990), which he delighted audiences by performing to music, and a poignant tale of coastal Native Americans, “The Sea Lion: A Story of the Sea Cliff People” (1991). 

In his later years, along with raising cattle, sheep and blueberries, Kesey served on several school boards, ran a web site, edited a magazine, “Spit in the Ocean,” founded in 1974, coached wrestling and taught a graduate writing seminar at his alma mater, the University of Oregon.  Kesey was a keen teacher who, I witnessed firsthand, was adept not only in conveying writing skills, but in holding his students spellbound. I sat in a session of his seminar, a group of 13 students with whom Kesey was a writing the collaborative novel, “Caverns,” a mystery published in 1990 under the name “O.U. Levon.”  Though the book proved wretched, it was an effective hands-on experience in the process of conception to publication, which many of the students would find later, undoubtedly, to be quite frustrating.

Many people are unaware that Kesey was also a skilled magician, able to pull rabbits from hats as well as doing difficult close magic. I once watched wondering as he suspended a wedding ring in midair, and still haven’t a clue how he did it.

Though I may be wrong, Kesey’s later years were prevaded with a kind of sadness, that despite his age and better judgement he was almost required to return to his Prankster image to sustain a reputation among a younger generation of fans. When he was on tour publicizing “The Further Inquiry,” he seemed a kind of carnival act sustained with the structure of cotton candy. While covering the American Booksellers Convention in Las Vegas, I was sitting with members of the national press when Kesey, funny hats and all, made an entrance into the Mirage hotel on a newer representation of “Further.”  Rather than being amused, the reporters for the most part looked embarrassed, and one, knowing that I knew Kesey, asked somewhat plaintively, “Doesn’t this guy do anything else.”

I reminded them of “Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Notion,” but to little avail, and remembered a visit of my own a few years before when I had arrived at Kesey’s home for an interview and an invitation to dinner.  Before long the large kitchen-dining room with its huge round table was filled with sycophants, youngsters, for the most part, wanting to be in the proximity of Kesey, perhaps to catch more than a whiff of the grass we were smoking; perhaps to vicariously catch a whiff of something that wasn’t cute and funny anymore.

I watched Faye, cooking and working and cleaning up after all these people, and she didn’t seem to be having fun. Nor did Kesey, who seemed tired and wanted to the din to end. It reminded me of an interview I had once had with the widow of Neal Cassady, the aging beatnik who drove further and later died a dismal death in Mexico.  Referring to those beatnik
days of the 1950s, when Cassady, Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs and et all were “On the Road,” she said, “Ask the wives how much fun it was. You’ll
get a much different story.”

Thirteen years younger than Jack Kerouac, Kesey was a little too late for the beatnik scene, and his pranksters were less a link than a transition. Nevertheless, I think Kesey admired and respected the beatniks (it was Ginsburg, after all, who recommended he be examined for diabetes, which he had, along with hepatitis) and he once told me, “Unlike the hippies, the beats did their homework.”

Now with him being gone, I reflect that Kesey was someone I could never know. Though nearly the same age, while he was off prankstering and creating a legend, I was nose-to-the-grindstone working and married and doing all the stuff Big Nurse might admire. Maybe I missed out on something, but maybe he did too. At least the books remain, the two
masterpiece novels, and if I return to them again I might begin to understand.