Acid Christ

Nonfiction review:
'Acid Christ' by Mark Christensen

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/10/nonfiction_review_acid_christ.html

October 09, 2010
by Jeff Baker

It's been almost nine years since Ken Kesey died of complications
from liver cancer at age 66. There have been a few posthumous
publications, notably "Kesey's Jail Journal" (2003) and a
40th-anniversary edition of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (2002)
that included sketches Kesey made while working as an orderly at a
California hospital. There haven't been any books of previously
unpublished or uncollected material, the way there usually are for an
author of Kesey's stature, because there apparently isn't enough
quality writing to complete a book. Kesey wrote throughout his life,
but after "Sometimes a Great Notion" in 1964 he turned his prodigious
energies in different directions.

There also hasn't been a biography, a surprise considering Kesey was
such a colorful and influential figure. Robert Stone's memoir "Prime
Green: Remembering the Sixties" contains an insightful, affectionate
portrait of Kesey, and there are plenty of other mentions in
histories of the counterculture, but until now no one has tried to
make sense of who Kesey was and what his life meant.

Mark Christensen, who grew up in Raleigh Hills and went on to edit
Oregon magazine and write several books, has made an ambitious
attempt with "Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of
Ecstasy." Christensen knew Kesey and believes "it's likely everything
people think they know about Ken Kesey is wrong." In particular,
Christensen thinks Kesey's "decision to ditch literature was (or at
least could have been) as brilliant and misunderstood as the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, and he never burned out -- at least not in
the sense that he lost his talent."

Before considering the evidence that might back up Christensen's
claim, it's necessary to briefly examine a few of the myths that have
grown around Kesey and obscured a true understanding of his
significance. Christensen is right that "the collective portrait of
Kesey amounts to pastel idolatry. Though he dedicated a good part of
his life to drugs, romanticized their use with terrible
effectiveness, and ultimately died because of them, in most popular
portraits of Kesey he appears as a gentle giant, and at worst the
high priest of a failed religion." The lovely statue in downtown
Eugene of Kesey sitting on a bench reading to his grandchildren makes
no mention of his leading role as a proselytizer for LSD and other drugs.

Kesey was exposed to psychoactive drugs while he was in graduate
school at Stanford University. A graduate of Springfield High School
and the University of Oregon, Kesey was in the creative-writing
program at Stanford when he volunteered for a CIA-sponsored study in
which, for $20 per session, he was given what Christensen calls "a
kaleidoscopic array of mind-blowing drugs. For six months." He was
later hired as a night shift nurse's aide at a hospital, where he
sketched and took notes and stole more drugs from a doctor who was
involved in the study. "Cuckoo's Nest," a novel Kesey later called "a
simple Christ allegory taking place in a nuthouse," was published in
1962 and was an immediate success. After "Sometimes a Great Notion"
came out two years later and Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drove a
brightly painted bus across the country, LSD replaced writing as his
primary means of expression.

One common misconception about Kesey was that the Merry Pranksters
were somehow a democracy. Larry McMurtry, Kesey's Stanford classmate,
and many others have noted Kesey's need and desire to play to an
audience. He was approachable and charismatic, a natural leader, and
one who loved to be the boss. Christensen says the famous saying
"You're either on the bus or off the bus" can easily be read as "my
way or the highway." At the time of the bus trip chronicled in Tom
Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," Kesey was 28 -- too young
for the beat generation and too old for the hippies, as he put it --
but ready and eager to use his celebrity to espouse the mind-opening
possibilities of acid.

Kesey was the life-of-the-party host to legendary gatherings in the
woods of Northern California, "Acid Tests" attended by hippies and
Hell's Angels, with music by the Warlocks (soon to be known as the
Grateful Dead) and LSD for all. The Pranksters took the show on the
road, including at least one visit to Portland, and in San Francisco
came to the attention of music promoter Bill Graham, who wrote about
Kesey in his memoir.

"I had not seen the acid thing in full force," Graham wrote. "That
night, I did. It shocked me. They might as well have been offering
hand grenades to people. When LSD exploded inside the body, how did
they know how much damage the shrapnel could cause? They had ices
spiked with acid, available to all, children as well. There were big
tubs on the balcony and downstairs for anyone to consume. From the
outset, that has always been my one ongoing argument with Ken Kesey.
There has to be a warning. If people don't know, how can you assume
their body can take what yours can? How can you know that?'

In Kesey's case, not many could take what he could. Owsley Stanley,
the infamous LSD maker, was quoted in Rolling Stone as saying that
for most people 150-200 micrograms is a proper dose. "When you get to
400, you just totally lose it," Stanley said. "I don't care who you
are. Kesey liked 400. He wanted to lose it." Wolfe reported that
Kesey sometimes took as much as 1,500 micrograms. "But what may have
braked (Kesey's) literary output and ascent was the cumulative
sledgehammer effect of 400 to 1,500 mg. doses," Christensen writes.

The notion that Kesey fried his brain makes some sense but is
incomplete. Throughout his life, he offered all sorts of explanations
for why he quit writing novels for almost 30 years. A popular one was
that his life became his art and that, as he said in 1965, "to
continue writing would mean that I couldn't continue my work."
Christensen is at his sharpest when he points out how much time and
effort Kesey put into filming his life, an enterprise that
anticipated reality TV by decades. Kesey spent $100,000, most of the
profits from "Cuckoo's Nest," and shot countless hours of footage, on
the bus and everywhere else. There were problems with sound and film
speed that were never solved, and bigger problems. As Christensen put it:

"a) Just because you are a genius of the very words you are
abandoning, doesn't mean you'll be a genius at film -- no more than
Babe Ruth could have been a great quarterback in the NFL.

"b) As Kesey was about to discover: Making a great movie about the
wonders of acid while on acid is tough."

Bobby Miller, Arthur Miller's son and a friend of Kesey's, told
Christensen that "Kesey felt that writing no longer spoke to the
audience he wanted to reach. He'd be writing for the old folks and
they already had enough writers ... He was trying to speak to his
followers, and writing wasn't going to do it."

Writing was boring. It was hard. It wasn't in the moment. It's
difficult for most writers to match their early success. Kesey said
as much many times. That doesn't mean he didn't write. "Last Go
Round," a novel written with Ken Babbs and set at the 1911 Pendleton
Round-Up, is overlooked by many, including Christensen, who has a
long chapter on its origins as a screenplay and nothing much on the
novel. "Sailor Song" is an ambitious failure of a novel. "The Sea
Lion" and "Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear" are
two delightful children's books. There were essays and journalism for
Esquire and Rolling Stone, including a brilliant meditation after the
Kip Kinkel school shooting in Springfield. None of it is "Sometimes a
Great Notion," not even close, but it's not nothing.

After Kesey settled into a quieter life in Pleasant Hill, he involved
himself in the community and led a respectable life built around his
family and friends. He also drank heavily, something that isn't
widely known. Jeff Forrester, who took Kesey's creative writing class
at the University of Oregon, told Christensen, "Ken drank himself to
death. Even after he found out he had hepatitis C, he kept drinking.
He had diabetes. But he kept drinking, and he just wasn't gonna stop."

"Acid Christ" is an admirable book in many ways. Christensen did tons
of research, knows what he's talking about and writes with an edgy
energy that often produces surprising revelations. He also, for some
reason, thought it was a good idea to write a "participatory
biography," which he defines as "how a major modern cultural figure,
in this case Ken Kesey, affected the life of the author personally
and subjectively." What this means is Christensen included long,
tedious chapters on his own coming of age and drug history that have
nothing to do with Kesey. He also writes at length about
journalist/provocateur Paul Krassner and Portland poets Walt Curtis
and Marty Christensen, interesting characters who are not (with the
possible exception of Krassner) key figures in Kesey's life.
Christensen believes participatory biography is "about the best new
format idea ever." Based on his book, it is not.

Kesey was a loquacious man who gave hundreds of interviews. The
question of why he stopped writing novels and started taking massive
amounts of drugs when he was on his way to becoming the greatest
novelist the Pacific Northwest has ever known will never be answered.
He tried, and in a 1989 talk at the Yachats Community Presbyterian
Church he sounded like he had second thoughts.

"If I were to redo my life, I would try to develop a really steady
writing everyday thing," Kesey said. "I would."
--

Reading: Christensen discusses "Acid Christ" at 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov.
13, at the Multnomah County Central Library, 801 S.W. 10th Ave., and
at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 15, at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

ACID CHRIST
Mark Christensen
Schaffner Press
$26.95, 440 pages

.