Edited by Ed McClanahan. with a Foreword by Gus Van Sant. (Penguin, 244 pp.; $15).
 
   Sometimes I wonder about all this business of keeping the Ken Kesey kettle cooking; if it hasn’t gone a bit too far?
   I mean I liked the guy and respected the fact that the Oregon author wrote two fine books about his home state-- “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and probably his masterpiece, “Sometimes a Great Notion”--as well as a number of other, less-successful works.  And that he liked little kids, was a good father and farmer, an inspiring teacher.  But the sixties bit, the ongoing “Merry Pranksters” hullaboo, gets a bit tiresome.

   Once, at a book convention in Las Vegas, I was present when Kesey, his buddy Ken Babbs and other, much older fellow travelers made an entrance on a replica of that famous wayward bus,
“Further” (or was it “Farther?”)  As they considered the creaky pranksters, who seemed to appear from a tie-dyed time warp, some members of the national press, young and old, shook their heads and looked on pityingly.
    “Does this guy do anything else?” one wondered.
     I often wondered about that too. As an onlooker, a book critic more concerned with Kesey’s work than his lifestyle; someone who had served four years in the Navy and spent the sixties married and working my way through college, I had little time for pranks--though there were times I envied those who dropped out.

   And during those times I encountered Kesey, at his home or at literary events, once sitting in on a
class at the University of Oregon, I considered his happiness. Was it real, or had he been so deified by legend and sycophants that behind his omnipresent smile there was clown crying for his lost son?  Whatever, we have made much of the man, who remains one of our most renown writers (a naive New York publicist once commented to me, “Oh, Kesey. Is he out there now?”), and this anthology is a paean to the author by his friends, admirers and those who simply knew and wrote about him. 
   “Spit in the Ocean #7: All About Kesey,” has been compiled by writer and longtime Kesey friend Ed McClanahan, who has resurrected the “Spit in the Ocean” title from the six literary magazines self-published by Kesey between 1974 and 1981, when the writer apparently lost interest in the project.

   Found within the book’s (magazine?) 244 pages are homages and eulogies from both usual and
unusual suspects, as well as just plain old folks like myself. Writings by Tom Wolfe, who put us into Kesey’s bus in his book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test;” Wendell Berry, who includes “Kentucky River Junction: A Letter and a Poem,” dedicated to Kesey and Babbs: “. . Free hearted men have the world for words. . .” and Portland’s own pranksterish, unofficial Poet Laureate Walt Curtis, who, in “The Way It Is,” writes: “ ‘If you seek out the spirit,/ the spirit will find you.’ It’s that simple. . .”
   And many others, including Paul Krassner and Douglas Brinkley; Kesey’s erratic friend, Hunter S. Thompson, with whom Kesey communicated daily via fax, and in “Walking with the King,” remembers the wild old Prankster days of the 60s: “It was quite a scene. People were bursting into flame everywhere you looked;” as well as novelist Robert Stone, with whom Kesey studied writing under the late, great Wallace Stegner at Stanford.

   Stone’s contribution is the measured and insightful “The Boy’s Octet,” in which he reflects: “I never knew anyone in my life, before or since, who was a dreamer on that scale, who really believed in Possibility, the great American bugbear Possibility, to the degree that Kesey did. I never knew anyone who had his ability to communicate that sense of possibility. He was not, I think, enough of an individualist by nature to want to become a novelist. I think he had preferred acting when he was starting out, and I think he disliked the loneliness and the isolation of the writer’s life, and he was determined to somehow make it all happen faster for everybody.” 
   Folk/blues artist and storyteller Rosalie Sorrels, a longtime friend of Kesey’s, recalls a party
celebrating his novel “Sailor Song,” and how afterwards, discussing “Last Go Round,” his and Babb’s recounting of the drama of the 1910 Pendleton Roundup--and one of Kesey’s best efforts--she confesses stealing a line from the book to finish a folk song by the same name.

   “. . And the rest of the verse reflects my vast admiration for one of the best western writers I ever read ... the rest of the song reflects my great affection for one of the best human beings I’ve had the good fortune to know.  
“What a party
        What a party
                What a party!!!”
   In “Elegy for Ken,” a poem by Vic Lovell, he laments, “The men I loved in my youth have begun to die..” Then, “. .Ken Kesey, I can still see the day/ forty-some years ago/ when you moved into the neighborhood/ and it was like the holidays when colored lights appear/ in trees and bushes and along the edges of roofs/ and over doorways, but it was still summer. . .”
   And, intermittently, we find Kesey’s words: “During the seventies Ken Babbs and I put out a little home-grown periodical called Spit in the Ocean. The idea was to have a different editor for each issue and let them call the deal, like in the poker game. Dr. Timothy Leary had agreed to deal our third issue of SPIT from his San Diego prison celle where he was being re-strained after being recaptured after his escape the year before.”

   The above from Kesey’s essay, “DEPARTURES:  Three Heavies Take Their Leave,” in which he eulogizes Jerry Garcia, of “Grateful Dead” -- “Hey, Jerry--what’s happening? I caught your funeral.   Weird. . ;” Leary-- “The famous Dr. Leary had always been more a distant phenomenon than a close friend,” Kesey acknowledges in a hilarious encapsulation of Leary’s escapades in a prison break; and long-time friend Allen Ginsberg, “Allen, the Friendly Legend: 
   “The first time I saw Allen Ginsberg, he was at a party, standing over by the fireplace, and nobody was talking to him. This was after ’Howl’ but before his big pinnacle. And this woman went over to him and said, ’I can’t talk to you; you’re a legend.’ And he said, ’Yeah, but I’m a friendly legend.. . .’”
   One could go on, but to do so would be to dilute the impact of all this Keseyiana (?), which, I must admit, brings a sense of melancholy; a sense of not having so very special not around anymore.  Grazing these pages of essays, poems, letters, interviews, photo essays and more, I feel validation; perhaps because of Kesey’s impact and influence on anyone he encountered. 

   I recall a dinner at his farm where there seemed to be a continual flow of hangers on, many of them very young and fewer who may have read any of his books, but all desirous of being in the presence of the man. He was infectious, I admit, and once sitting next to him I was amazed to see his wedding ring suspended in the air between us. I had heard he was a magician of the close-up kind, but how, I wondered, had he done this? I had seen Siegfried and Roy disappear an elephant, but this was more miraculous, yet somehow acceptable because it was Kesey, and he was magic.
   To borrow from Stone in conclusion: “He was a great artist, whose best work is going to last as some of the exemplary work of the twentieth century. . . .I think anybody who met him and had to do with has got to say, ’Thanks, thanks for that encounter.’”
   SPIT No. 7, is a merry little book recalling those encounters.

©2003 Paul Pintarich