Demon Box
Kesey, Ken
Is the name of Ken Kesey still one to conjure with among American readers? There was indeed a time when it seemed as if much of our country's future literattue would bear the impress of his...
...Banging speed [injecting amphetamines] is the only thing even close...
...a capable worker, no better or worse than he who writes press releases for Drano or Pampers...
...And so Kesey turned to the easier road, that of Timothy Leary: he painted an old school bus, gathered a crew of impressionable young people, and traveled far and wide, dispensing powerful drugs to all and sundry among the under-30s...
...His portrait of the fictional Chief, a mentally disturbed American Indian, in Cuckoo's Nest had more Ufe than his eulogistic sketch of his close friend Cassady...
...But today, at least, he is a talented writer only, and no more...
...indeed, a number of the essays in this book center on his difficult attempts to divest himself of psychotic hippie burnouts who have gathered unto him in the wake of his sixties exploits...
...rather it is that once upon a time Kesey ceased being a writer and became, instead, an ideologue of the anti-America subculture, celebrating a drugged oblivion...
...the movie version threatens to become a contemporary cinema classic Tbm Wolffs essay about him, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid list, became a fundamental text of 1960s millenarianism...
...Another piece, on the death of the erstwhile driver of his drug-bus, Neal Cassady, is incomprehensible for one who does not know the history of Kesey and Cassady...
...But as this latest collection shows, the myths have become shopworn...
...Cuckoo's Nest, although having as its subject such quintessential sixties themes as madness, the romanticized underclass, and Western regional sentiment, didn't blow any minds, to use the quaint locution...
...Nobody can deny that Kesey was a Stephen Schwartz is senior editor at the Institute for Contemporary Studies in San Francisco talented writer...
...One of the essays, "Oleo: Demon Briefs and Dopey Ditties," consists of some musings on his child's failures in school followed by some stoned and predictably idiotic song lyrics...
...The main effect of these dozen meandering pieces is to prove once and for all that excessive drug consumption leads the writer not to greater imagination or insight but to a wallowing in the inconsequential...
...In a memorial to John Lennon, "Now We Know How Many Holes It Tkkes to Fill the Albert Hall," Kesey describes the experience of fame after the pubUcation of Tom Wolfe's essay, beginning, in his jejune manner: Stand in this spotlight, feel this eye pass over you...
...In the end, he is a salesman of myths...
...Self-consciousness and irresolution melt in this beam's blast...
...To those who did, the book is a cause for discomfort if not a certain shame...
...To those who did not themselves go through the sixties it will be, without doubt, obscure and baffling...
...But one seldom hears him mentioned today, even among the intellectually vagrant young...
...Cuckoo's Nest remains interesting because its characters are brilliantly derived from the real-life subculture of the Pacific Northwest...
...Their intention is imvarying—they present a series of nostalgic homages to the spirit of the 1960s, the decade in which Kesey rose to prominence as an author and as an aspirant to the title of hippie messiah, a notable rival of Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and John Lennon...
...Everybody along Kesey's path is described with a certain tone of contempt...
...Kesey— the outcast and the friend of the prisoner, the advocate of reform in the mental health industry—finds the modest inquisitiveness of real patients unnerving and distasteful...
...At any cost, Kesey wants to avoid being seen as a loser...
...Every character, with the possible exceptions of Big Niu^e and McMurphy, is a recognizable human type, of interest because truthfully drawn...
...The real Kesey doesn't cotton to mental patients—they have what he calls here "the loser's profile...
...But that Kesey himself is a loser is proved by this terrible book...
...In most cases, any conclusion is lost in the void...
...Demon Box is important only as testimony to the enormous capacity for self-waste to which so many gifted Americans succumbed in the 1960s...
...Tbday all that is left is the heartlessness...
...I would even say that in the beginning he was a fine writer...
...Even those sketches that might have turned into short stories, rather than bursts of literary swamp gas, find the author mired in the banal once it is informed with chemical meaning...
...But unlike Ginsberg, the bad poet, and Lennon, the popular songwriter, Kesey, as a novelist origmally of some seriousness, could not easily convey his message of revelation through his creative work...
...Have intimacy and grief dulled his pen...
...if it is rescued, it proves to be trivial...
...His particular sell involves himself, his dreams about the sixties, and flashes of sophomoric philosophizing about prisons, or hitchhiking, or mental hospitals...
...There has always been a heartlessness to Kesey, but Kesey the comic writer—as opposed to Kesey the silly writer, his most recent incarnation— could make his attitude work as literature...
...There are no human types here...
...You never forget it...
...bu are suddenly changed, lifted, singled out, elevated, and alone...
...Grace and power surge in to take their place...
...a peculiar transmutation of the Buddhist priest role so many of the literary rebels of the 1950s coveted...
...There was indeed a time when it seemed as if much of our country's future literattue would bear the impress of his peculiarly contradictory imagination...
...But the Kesey of Cuckoo's Nest is absent from Demon Box...
...His first novel...
...The connection between the lyrics and the problems of his child is not made but perhaps is obvious, embarrassingly obvious...
...I think not...
...One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, has become an undying bestseller...
...The title essay describes his fear of having people need anything from him, particularly the patients in the mental hospital where the film of Cuckoo's Nest is to be made...
...This collection of pieces short and long may perhaps provide enough of an explanation for the fading of Kesey's star...
...A sample: Blackberry vines and barelegged wimmin/ They led me astray, they took me in swimmin/ I reached for a cherry but I got me a lemon/Midst blackberry vines and barelegged wimmin...
Vol. 19 • November 1986 • No. 11
