Shameless Shaman

One night in the 1950s, Malcolm Cowley, the Stanford writing teacher who made William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey famous, declined his student Kesey's offer of a cup of green hallucinogenic Kool-Aid from a punch bowl billowing sinister clouds of dry-ice smoke. "It looks like the sort of punch that Satan would serve," observed Cowley, who drank Kesey's grandma's Arkansas bootleg whiskey instead. In Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers, the character based on Kesey is "Doctor Dope," a self-sacrificing guru whose followers think he is God.

So what was Kesey, devil or deity? Conservatives decry his flabbergastingly irresponsible acid evangelism; when he died two years ago, eulogists stressed his saintly side. Now that his celebrated bus, Further, has long since literally conveyed him to the grave, it's a better time to put Kesey to the moral acid test: He belongs to the ages, not his mourners, and this winter marks his literary last stand.

Two new books are almost certainly the final volumes to whip up the patchouli twister of his prose: Kesey's Jail Journal, composed during his six-month 1967 pot-bust hitch in San Mateo County Jail, and Spit in the Ocean: All About Kesey, distinguished writer and old Kesey chum Ed McClanahan's collection of the Prankster Pope's own witty encyclicals, touching letters to friends, and rare interviews and essays from 1968 to 2001, plus reminiscences from Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Gus Van Sant, Bill Walton, Paul Krassner, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurtry.

When Kesey forsook literature in 1964 to become a man of lettersLSDdid 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?

THE HUMILIATION OF CREATION

"Being shackled to anything, even a typewriter, just wasn't in Ken's nature," McClanahan opines. "The stage and magic, on the other hand, were very much in his nature."

The Jail Journal proves McClanahan's point. Even in actual shackles, Kesey defiantly kept conducting symphonies of trouble with his magic wand. Originally titled Cut the Motherfuckers Loose, the book portrays one cut-loose motherfucker. The psychedelectable Day-Glo pen drawings of convicts and fantasias, idylls and race riots, showcase his little-known visual imagination, a style that recalls by turns Peter Max, William Blake, Fillmore rock posters' unruly wraparound lettering, the transgressive collages of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton, and Steve Ditko's Dr. Strange.

Kesey attempted the ultimate fusion of art and action. (Duke Downey / Keseys jail journal)

The Jail Journal may not be strictly factual, but it's an authentically exuberant, sardonic slice of the Summer of Love behind bars; Spit in the Ocean is more poignant and retrospective, a fond, funerary Festschrift of Stony Age scholarship. Both show that Kesey wasn't about partying in the modern, mindless sense. He believed his kind of questing partying might save the world, one soul at a timeor hey! Maybe everyone at once, if he could only get his magic act together. Like the Acid Test, the Journal is an attempt to fuse all sensations and artistic means into one ecstatic new form of expression in which (as the Kesey character says in Dog Soldiers) "there was absolutely no difference between thought and action."

In the Spit book, Robert Stone (who is penning his own memoir about "Doctor Dope") says that Kesey was out to transcend the whole business of making books: "I think he believed that he could somehow invent a spiritual technology, somewhere between Silva mind control and the transistor, that would spare all the humiliating labor that went into the creating of art."

CANNIBALIZED BY THE MERRY PRANKSTER

Like virtually every literary experiment, Kesey's was largely a failure. The Journal succeeds in seizing a moment or three, but it's utterly inferior to his first forbidden text, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, done during his 1950s stint working at the VA hospital near Stanford. As he notes in the Journal, the jail scene was very like the VA hospital; he composed under similar circumstances, sketching patients on his employer's time, "jumping every time I heard a lock rattle and stuffing the pages out of sight in the wastepaper basket."