Acid Evangelist is written by Tim Appelo from the Seattle Weekly. He talks about one of my favorite authors... and how it's two years after Ken Kesey's death and the books are still coming. Are they evidence of genius, or a literary career wasted? Here's a bit:
When Kesey forsook literature in 1964 to become a man of letters – LSD – did he blow it? Or did he ignite a refining fire that still burns bright at the heart of every rave in America? Did drugs make him, or undo him? Was Cowley right to believe it would've been better had Kesey just said no to the Bus, shackled himself to his typewriter, batted out more books, and steered clear of public acts of shameless shaman magic?
Says David O. Weddle, who covered Kesey for Rolling Stone. "His life is a cautionary, perhaps even tragic, tale of the cost of celebrity and catastrophe of success for American artists. But in classic tragedy, the fall from grace throws into relief the magnificence of the hero's achievements."
Kesey had bad drug habits, but they were complicatedly and not entirely bad – in some ways inspiring his creativity, but ultimately stifling it. He began as about the most abstemious major American writer this side of Pearl S. Buck.
Eight peyote buttons gave Kesey the skeleton key to Cuckoo. The novel hadn't been jelling when written in the third person, but that fateful cacti encounter supplied him with the hallucinatory opening-scene reverie of the novel's half-mad first-person narrator. Cowley convinced Kesey to trim back the overwritten passages, helping to save him from the "first thought, best thought" folly that ruined Kerouac, whom Cowley thought "was corrupted by the notion that every word that fell from his lips was more or less sacred." Kesey was always more skeptical and self-critical than peers like Allen Ginsberg and the jaunty fraud and admanlike hack Tim Leary. At least Kesey never OD'd on ego.
He wrote his second masterpiece under the overwhelming influence of Faulkner and amphetamines. "Ken was taking speed for 30 hours a block when he wrote Notion," says Huffman. "He'd stay up for a day and a half just doing nothing but writing nonstop and then sleep for 12 hours and then do it again."
"It was a lifestyle thing. A novel is such a long, complicated thing that you can't smoke pot and keep it all sitting in your head." On speed, writing Notion, says Huffman, "When Kesey woke up 12 hours later he could remember the work that he'd done before, so he could carry on, where if you're writing on pot, you can't remember."
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