I got to the bottom of the Paris Review interview with Ken Kesey. (Spring issue, 1994.) Kesey, of course, has since died. No one lasts forever, except artists. Some artists don’t seem to make it, but, as anyone who’s played Massenet on the piano understands, once you’ve gotten into print, you’re practically unkillable. Ives might have carped (did carp), but that slender slice of “Thais” survives. Similarly, in my mind, so will “Memory” from “Cats.” A bazillion requests on scraps of paper from the elderly couple at table nine cannot even kill it. It’s my blog and I reserve the right to digress.

Back to Ken Kesey, the unkillable. The interviewer asks questions that keep Kesey humming along, sounding like he sounds in his books and in the glimpses offered by Tom Wolfe. His specialty is the one-liner that makes your head explode, makes you bark with laughter and quote him for the rest of your life. I know! That’s a lot of mileage for a one-liner. It’s happened to me regarding Kesey and that’s what got me searching his name again. The one-liner in question, if I remember it rightly: “You can’t expect to mess with it without getting some on you.” I’ll come back to that one. Its context is important to me. Others, the ones that crop up in this interview, are also telling. Kesey sums up the influence Neal Cassady had on him thusly: “most of what is important cannot be taught except by experience.” Right-o. I want that on a t-shirt, Ken. Kesey also has a stash of borrowed one liners, as most jesters do, that he calls up with telling effect. He uncorks one which he attributes to Hemmingway on the topic of having his novel turned into a movie: “I don’t like to see my bull turned into a bullion cube.” That is surely the G rated version of that one!

What strikes me again about Kesey is his paternalism. He’s a kind and benevolent father, but a father nevertheless. He tries to foist the paternalism off onto the driver of his psychedelic bus, Cassady, but the mud won’t stick. “Casady was a hero to us all, he moved us all.” Kesey had many classy, stylish acts in his circle, but not many heros. So to call Cassady a hero is significant. His heroism is bound up with his ferocity of spirit. He died with his boots on ‘in his t-shirt shroud, drowned in a dessert.’ (A paraphrase, not of Kesey, but of Harrison.) Who would not want a father to remain a hero? The charge won’t stick. Kesey knows this, of course. He reserves the paternal role for himself. He instigates, he motivates, he assigns chores. He enforces the mores of his tribe. He scolds gently, but he scolds. He dumps the heroic mode altogether at the end of the interview because the evolution of literary culture debunks it. He mentions the fiction of Zane Gray and the bad guy allowed back into the fold after a transformation (see my earlier on such transformations), but then Kesey reminds us that the heros are not so heroic these days: we’ve examined their dirty laundry and found it similar to the villains.

The last story in the interview gives us a glimpse (priceless) of Kesey the teacher. In this story, Kesey’s fathering of a group of young writers is made manifest. A student introduces the beliefs of a sect (Diamond Sutra, Rajneesh) into a text they were collectively working on. This is a no-no. Kesey counsels the other students to frost the offender out. In his summation at the end of the session, after a week of withholding feedback from the transgressor, Kesey scolds (not very gently, and publicly with all his force of personality), telling the students to reject any god that approaches and seduces. The ‘job of the fiction writer in our culture is to make the high the low. Take the mighty off their pillar and put them right beside you as toilers in the field.’ So. Away with your Buddhism. It does not belong in our anti-heroic morality play. 

The one-liner that prompted all of this Kesey searching was told somewhere in print. For the life of me, I can’t find it. The scoldee in this case was Tom Wolfe. In the Paris Review article Wolfe is also scolded with faint praise and a frost-out. Yet Wolfe was an effective chronicler and a publicist for the Pranksters. Kesey says that Wolfe took no notes. Elsewhere, I find this claim to be rebutted. I picture him aloof, with a notebook, taking notes. Kesey says he had a good memory and he got it 96 percent right. He also says that it was Wolfe’s memory and not his. These are not heros. These are merely men, excellent artists all, in print, and therefore immortal.

The story: Kesey was trying to move a big painted statue of the Buddah. (Again, trying to get the religion re-positioned.) He needed help and there was Wolfe, standing around doing nothing, all tricked out in his trademark white suit. (I can picture him taking notes. Otherwise, he has nothing to do with his hands in my scene.) So Kesey says, “Give me a hand, Tom.” (Paternal. Chores.) Tom obeys. The paint on the Buddah never quite dried, and Wolfe’s suit is ruined. Kesey looks him over and observes his distress. “You can’t expect to mess with it and not get some on you.” 

It ricochets around the canyon of my mind. It summarizes in a way that “observer and observed interact” cannot. If you want to watch the dance, you will soon be dancing. This will be the case, especially if a father figure like Kesey is choreographing. Even if he’s letting you come up with the material, he will be shaping and scolding. If you think you’ll get away with standing around taking notes (mental or otherwise), he will oblige you to pitch in. The only way to learn is to do. We could all do with such a father, and our resentment makes of them mortals. They will, nevertheless, live forever. They are in print.