Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  funds. The high-tech plants were spreading down the valley to the south end of the bay, displacing the fruit orchards and their spring blossom storms, the peaches of Santa Clara, the pears of Mountain View. Eisenhower’s interstates, built in part to serve the interests of Big Oil, were funded as Defense spending. This smoke-free indus- trial revolution was displacing Steinbeck’s California, even Kerouac’s. It turned out that the lovely liberating drugs came out of the Stanford Research Institute too, funded by the CIA. So the connec- tions I had been feeling, which I had ascribed to mere propinquity, were substantial after all. In 1943, in Zurich, a Swiss chemist named Hofmann was experi- menting with ergot, a parasitic fungus that affects wheat. His pur- poses were those of scientific husbandry. After work, Professor Doktor Hofmann, pedaling his bicycle over the cobblestones of the ancient city, began to feel peculiar. The ergot had permeated his bare fingertips, and he was suffering from an attack of ergotism, a not unheard-of condition among populations subsisting on transported, sometimes contaminated flour. The effects were known in the Mid- dle Ages as St. Anthony’s fire, or the Dancing Mania. The results of ergotism on cognition had been described as “temporary schizophre- nia.” Some discovered that this replicated madness was not always so temporary, at least not for everyone. Dr. Hofmann was employed by the Sandoz Corporation. After his report was published, Sandoz was approached by the American Of- fice of Strategic Services, the proto-CIA of the World War II era. U.S. intelligence was interested in obtaining an incapacitating non- lethal compound or perhaps an interrogation tool, a truth serum. Rumors about this kind of stuff filtered into the scenarios of nine- teen forties movies and radio thrillers. One of the places Sandoz and the CIA bestowed their grant 82 robert stone

  money was the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto. The SRI was already working on Defense contracts of all descriptions, and that may have entered into the decision to take the project there. Perhaps the friendly presence of the Hoover Institute played a role. In the early sixties one might see Alexander Kerensky on his way to his office in the Hoover Tower, most spookily resembling his por- trayal in Ten Days That Shook the World. If he was in the mood for a movie, Dr. Kerensky could have watched his own rise and fall several times a semester on the Poli Sci Department walls. During my twenties, I understood that I had shared a universal modern experience: the world I had anticipated as a child, day- dreamed about and planned adventures in, simply disappeared be- fore I could get to it. At Stanford, between one thing and another, the first novel I had been working on changed its nature under my hands. Conceived as a realistic political narrative, A Hall of Mirrors wandered out of the strictly “realist” mode. I decided, I believe, that between “realism” and formalistic experiment there was no substan- tial difference. Originality was always welcome; experiments worked or they didn’t. Language was language and life was life, one tracking, undermining, enlightening the other. Did I need to spend all those nice Sundays experiencing Owsley-quality death and trans- figuration to learn that? Maybe. I had started out under the influence of the first generation of lit- erary moderns. Hemingway bestrode the world then, inescapable. Instead of learning algebra and long division, I had spent my high school years reading and goofing, in the manner of bookish under- achievers then as now. I read the books then read, Hardy, Conrad, Waugh, Dos Passos, Wolfe, Fitzgerald. Young people read many or most of the same books now. Earlier it had been Jack London, Ernest Thompson Seton, William Saroyan, the hagiographies of Louis de prime green: remembering the sixties 83

  Wohl. Does anyone remember, speaking of odd Catholic novels, Mr. Blue? Early Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren. A predictable list for anyone my age. A year or so older than I, Ken Kesey had finished two novels be- fore the sixties were well under way. Altered states certainly influ- enced his literary imagination in those books, though not to the degree the feds registered in his FBI file. “Subject has finished two books [there followed ludicrous mangling of his first two titles] one about marijuana and one about LSD.” That was how it looked from the seat of government. One thing being around and being the right age in the sixties gave us was the primary sensation of time’s wheel. You could catch glimpses of the fourth dimension, now and then see the world turn- ing. People who lived after the First World War had something like that experience; at least that’s the story we can piece together from the narratives they’ve left us. I don’t think every modern era is the same in that regard. Maybe we were a case of the delayed-action “postwar.” The fifties were full of nervous assurances that things would go back to being the way they had been, although after the confusions of the forties, no one was sure what that had been. Among many there was a sense that the way they had been was not acceptable. Yet times were dangerous, the elders said; they said not to rock the boat. I can remember where I was when I heard that Kennedy was shot: in a house on a country road by a creek in Santa Clara County, changing the diaper of our second child, my son, Ian. Deidre, our daughter, born in New Orleans, had been a freebie courtesy of Huey Long and his Charity Hospital. Ian was a virtual freebie as well, but at the far more state-of-the-art Stanford University Hospital. So 84 robert stone

  we’d had both of our kiddies on the cheap—at opposite ends of the economic scale. Later on the day of Kennedy’s death my friend Vic Lovell and I drove around the Stanford area, through the suburban paradises and the clusters of bungalows, and the ghetto of East Palo Alto, the town that later decided not to call itself Nairobi. We were checking out popular reaction. It was California, of course, and popular reaction was difficult to locate on the sparsely peopled streets. At Kepler’s famous bookstore we found out that the shooter was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. A clerk laughed at our dismay. On the street in Menlo Park, people were crying. When we drove over to the student center, the radical element displayed knowing smiles to the unhappy undergraduates. What the radical fringe thought it knew that Thanksgiving weekend I can’t imagine. People of a certain age maintained over many years an illusion that the world somehow darkened after November 22, 1963. As though things had been getting better and suddenly they began to spin out of control. It was sheer illusion of course, even if one be- lieves in some spirit or pattern of history. Which opens the question of what there is of history beyond what people believe after the fact and think they saw. These were the kind of questions the LSD experience led us to raise. You could dismiss the whole experience as funny light patterns and snapping synapses. But there were times when the drugs seemed to take you down as far and as deep as you extended, to the very bot- tom of things themselves. How deep that really was, who knows? So we inherited, in California in the early sixties, some of the headiest plantings in the American grain. The changes (the word “changes” was often heard in those days) in politics and popular cul- prime green: remembering the sixties 85

  ture may have seemed more profound than they were. They were at- tended by moralizing and vulgarity of all sorts, and they were very unsettling to many. We won a little and lost a lot, depending. By 1970, there may have been more in the way of threat than promise around. There was a sense in which everybody lost, or at least paid his or her way. The middle Americans, shocked at seeing hysterical rage visited by half-educated youth on their flag, the rad- ical folkies in flat woolly caps appalled to hear Bob Dylan zap out those electric chords at Newport—all were seeing the future of their dreams go down. The struggle between the CIA and the bohemians over Dr. Hof- mann’s Promethean fire contains as many ironies as the era affords, I think. Vic Lovell, the intern at Palo Alto Veterans Hospital and Ken Kesey’s initiator in psychedelics, was an activist in the Stanford area for many years. The FBI paid the ultimate compliment by calling him to demand information on the abducted Patty Hearst. “You’ve gotta be kidding,” Vic said. But they weren’t. The CIA and its researchers called their experiments with LSD MK-Ultra. That part of the CIA’s history is quite fascinating and frightening and appears in a number of well-researched books: Acid Dreams, by Martin A. Lee
and Bruce Shlain, is one of the most thor- ough. It should be remembered that many of the people who did re- search on lysergic acid as a therapeutic tool were working quite legitimately and in good faith. (Interestingly, just as the drug made its way out of Defense research circles to therapy studies in North America, it did the same in Communist-controlled central Europe. The work of Dr. Stanislas Grof in what was then Czechoslovakia is part of the literature.) Their results were not negligible. Many peo- ple saw therapeutic uses for LSD-25, and some still do. Experimen- tal grants stand approved by the governments of several countries 86 robert stone

  today, including the United States, for work with Ecstasy and re- lated compounds. Where these elixirs of the psyche will lead us in the era of chimeras and clones is daunting to speculate. More than forty years have passed since Joshua Lederberg told the writing students that humanity was relative. After the experiments, when Ken Kesey had written One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he dedicated the novel to the man who turned him on. “For Vik Lovell,” the dedication reads, “who told me that dragons did not exist Then led me to their lairs.” prime green: remembering the sixties 87

  EIGHT Ken Kesey worked in a cabin so deep in the redwoods above San Francisco that the indifferently painted interior walls seemed to grow seaweed instead of mold. Even with glass doors, it held the winter light for little more than a midday hour, so the place had the cast of an old-fashioned ale bottle. It smelled of ale too, or at least beer, and dope. These were the days of seeded marijuana; castaway seeds sprouted in the spongy rot of whatever had been the carpet, and plants thrived in the lamplight and bottle green air. Witchy fingers of morn-

  ing glory vine wound in every shelf and corner of that cabin like il- luminations in some hoary manuscript. Across the highway, on the far bank of La Honda Creek, were more morning glory vines. They were there because Kesey had taken his shotgun and filled the magazines with all the mystically named varieties of that flower’s seeds and fired them into the neighboring hillside. The morning glory, as few then understood, is a near rela- tive of the magical ololiuhqui vine, used by Chibcha shamans in necromancy and augury and finding small items that have been mis- placed. The commercial distributors of the seeds, on record as all un- aware, gave the varieties names like Heavenly Blue and Pearly Gates. Once ingested, the poisonous-tasting seeds would produce hours of startling visions and insights. (A warning: Don’t try this at home! Morning glory seeds as presently sold are advertised as being toxic to the point of deadliness.) La Honda was a strange place, a wide spot on the road that de- scended the western slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains toward the artichoke fields along the coast. Mainly in the redwood forest, it had the quality of a raw northwestern logging town transported to sur- burban San Francisco. In spirit it was a world away from the woodsy gentility of the peninsula towns nearby. Its winters were like Seat- tle’s and its summers pretty much the same. Kesey and his wife, Faye, had moved there in 1963, after their house on Perry Lane, in Menlo Park, was torn down by developers. Perry Lane was one of the small leafy streets that meandered around the Stanford campus then, lined with inexpensive bungalows and in- habited by junior faculty and graduate students. (The Keseys had lived there while Ken did his graduate work at the university and af- terward.) The area had a bohemian tradition going back to the time 90 robert stone

  of the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who lived there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kesey, as master of the revels sixty years later, did a great deal to advance that tradition. There were stoned poetry readings, also lion hunts on the midnight dark golf course where chanting lion hunters danced to bogus veldt rhythms pounded out on their kitchenware. Drugs played a part, including the then legal LSD and other substances in experimental use at the VA hospital in Menlo Park, where Ken had worked. The night before the houses on the lane were to be demolished, the residents threw a demented block party at which they trashed one another’s houses with sledgeham- mers and axes in weird psychedelic light. Terrified townies watched from the shadows. I first met Kesey at one of his world-historical tableaux, a reenact- ment of the battle of Lake Peipus with broom lances and saucepan helmets. (The Keseys’ kitchenware often took a beating in those days, though I can’t say I remember eating much on Perry Lane.) I attended in the person of a Teutonic knight. Ken, formerly a student at the writing workshop, represented Alexander Nevsky. When the Keseys moved to La Honda, it became necessary to drive about fifteen miles up the hill to see them. Somehow the sun- starved, fern- and moss-covered quality of their new place affected the mood of the partying. There was the main house, where Ken and Faye lived with their three children, Shannon, Zane, and Jed, and several outbuildings, including the studio cabin where Kesey worked. There were also several acres of dark redwood, which Kesey and his friends transformed little by little, placing sculptures and stringing batteries of colored lights. Speakers broadcast Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Ravi Shankar, and the late Beethoven quartets. The prime green: remembering the sixties 91

  Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

  house in the redwoods increasingly became a kind of auxiliary resi- dence and clubhouse cookout—a semipermanent encampment of people passing through, sleeping off the previous night’s party, hop- ing for more of whatever there had been or might be. It was a halfway house on the edge of possibility, or so it appeared at the time. Between novels, Ken had forged a cadre in search of itself, the core of which—in addition to Ken Babbs, who had just returned from Vietnam, where he had flown a helicopter as one of the few thousand uniformed Americans there—consisted at first of people who had lived on or near Perry Lane. Many of them had some con- nection with Stanford. Others were friends from Ken’s youth in Ore- gon. Old beatniks, such as Neal Cassady, the model for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in On the Road, came around. Some of the locals, less used to deconstructed living than the academic sophisti- cates in the valley below, saw and heard things that troubled them. This would cause many problems later on. As Wordsworth wrote, it was good to be alive and to be young was even better. More than the inhabitants of any other decade be- fore us, we believed ourselves in a time of our own making. The dim winter day in 1963 when I first drove up to the La Honda house, truant from my attempts at writing a novel, I knew that the future lay before us and I was certain that we owned it. When Kesey came out, we sat on the little bridge over the creek in the last of the light and smoked what was left of the day’s clean weed. Ken said some- thing runic about books never being finished and tales remaining for- ever untold, a Keseyesque ramble for fiddle and banjo, and I realized that he was trying to tell me that he had now finished Sometimes a Great Notion. Christ, I thought, there is no competing with this guy. In 1962, he had published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a liber- tarian fable to suit the changing times. It had been a best-seller on 92 robert stone

  publication, and has never been out of print. The book had also been adapted for a Broadway stage production starring Kirk Doug- las, who then proposed to do it as a movie. Ken and Faye had gone to the opening night, in that era of formal first nights, in black tie and gown. Now, a few months later, he had another thicket of epic novel clutched in his mitt, and for all I knew there’d be another one after that. He really seemed capable of making anything happen. It was be- yond writing—although to me writing was just about all there was. We sat and smoked, and Possibility came down on us. Kesey was, more than anyone I knew, in the grip of all that the sixties seemed to promise. Born in 1935 in a town called La Junta, Colorado, on the road west from the dust bowl, he had grown up in Oregon, where his father became a successful dairyman. At school, Kesey was a wrestling champion, and champion was still the word for him; it was impossible for his friends to imagine him losing, at wrestling or anything else. Leaving the dairy business to his brother Chuck, Kesey had become an academic champion as well, a Woodrow Wilson graduate fellow at Stanford. Ken’s endorsement, at the age of twenty-six, by Malcolm Cowley, who oversaw his publication at Viking Press,
seemed to connect him to a line of “heavyweight” novelists, the hitters, as Norman Mailer put it, of “long balls,” the wearers of mantles that by then seemed ready to be passed along to the next heroic generation. If American literature ever had a favorite son, distilled from the native grain, it was Kesey. In a way, he personally embodied the winning side in every historical struggle that had served to create the colossus that was nineteen sixties America: An Anglo-Saxon Protestant Western American White Male, an Olympic-caliber athlete with an ad- vanced academic degree, he had inherited the progressive empower- prime green: remembering the sixties 93

  ment of centuries. There was not an effective migration or social im- provement of which he was not, in some near or remote sense, the beneficiary. That he had been born poor, to a family of sodbusters, served only to complete the legend. It gave him the extra advantage of not being bound to privilege. Some years before Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken had written an upublished Nathanael West–like Hollywood story based on Kesey’s unsuccess- ful attempt to break into the picture business as an actor. All his life, Ken had a certain fascination with Hollywood, as any American fab- ulist might. He saw it in semimythological terms—as almost an au- tonomous natural phenomenon rather than as a billion-dollar industry. (This touch of naive fascination embittered his later con- flicts over the adaptation of his novels into films.) However, it was as a rising novelist and not an actor or screenwriter that he faced the spring of 1963. There was no question of his limitless energy. But in the long run, some people thought, the practice of novel writing would prove to be too sedentary an occupation for so quick an athlete—lonely, and incorporating long silent periods between strokes. Most writers who were not Hemingway spent more time staying awake in quiet rooms than shooting lions in Arusha. Kesey was listening for some inner voice to tell him more pre- cisely what role history and fortune were offering him. Like his old teacher Wallace Stegner, like his friend Larry McMurtry, he had the western artist’s respect for legend. He felt his own power and he knew that others did, too. Certainly his work cast its spell. But, be- yond the world of words, he possessed the thing itself, in its ancient mysterious sense. “His charisma was transactional,” Vic Lovell, the psychologist to whom Kesey dedicated Cuckoo’s Nest, said to me when we spoke after Ken’s death. He meant that Kesey’s extraordi- nary energy did not exist in isolation—it acted on and changed 94 robert stone