The life of a merry prankster
By Daily Bruin Staff
Nov. 12, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 The Associated Press Author Ken Kesey
holds an original playbill from the 1963 production, starring Kirk
Douglas, of the play based on Kesey’s novel, "One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest," in his Pleasant Hill, Ore., office in this April
23, 2001 photo. Kesey died Saturday following cancer surgery on his
liver, hospital officials said. He was 66.
By Ryan Joe
Daily Bruin Contributor
One can picture him sitting here, tripping on acid, peyote and
God knows what other pharmaceuticals, scrawling out the first few
pages of what would become an influential and allegorical
commentary on America.
With “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,”
novelist Ken Kesey hammered his LSD-laced linchpin into the frayed
fibers of the American culture and ideology.
Kesey died on Saturday at a hospital in Eugene, Ore., due to
complications following surgery for liver cancer. He was 66.
Kesey, who participated in Stanford University’s creative
writing program during the ’50s, soon found himself at the
center of a small group of idiosyncratic peers that burst and
bloomed into a nationwide movement of zany hallucinogenic and
antiestablishment values.
History has since stamped Kesey as the Father of the
Counterculture ““ a label he rejected.
In 1959, Kesey enlightened himself through his discovery of LSD
and, paralleling the Beatniks of the ’50s via
intercontinental exoduses across the American landscape, Kesey and
his ilk ushered in the hippies of the ’60s. With former Jack
Kerouac cohort Neal Cassady at the wheel, Kesey commandeered a
bombastic Day-Glo 1939 school bus, a psychedelic firecracker on
wheels dubbed Furthur, and danced, not to the jazz of the Beats,
but to the Grateful Dead of the hippies.
Even without his literary history, Kesey remained a
counterculture folk hero, a veritable Paul Bunyan on acid such that
journalist Tom Wolfe chronicled his hallucinogenic exploits in his
novel “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Kesey was the
central figure.
“Kesey bought the bus, Neal Cassady drove it, and the
’60s rolled on,” said writer and UCLA professor
Lawrence Grobel, who has interviewed Kesey contemporaries such as
Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg.
 “Like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs in the
’50s, Kesey, Wolfe and Timothy Leary were seminal figures for
the tune in, turn on, drop out ’60s. He won’t be
forgotten.”
1962 saw the publication of “One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest” with great critical trumpeting. Seen
through the eyes of the tacitly enigmatic Chief Bromden, the insane
asylum and the oppressive Nurse Ratched become, by extension, a
microcosm for American gubernatorial suppression.
For many, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
crystallized the inherent and subversive emotions that roiled
through the hearts of America’s disillusioned youth. From
this, the brain-dead “yes sir” acceptance that was the
American way about-faced into a steamy era of defiance, vibrating
with shouts of “Question authority!”
America throbbed under the critical literary jackhammers of
authors who, like Kesey, feverishly excavated the truth: Ginsberg,
Joseph Heller, Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Wolfe to name a few.
Even today, the influence of Kesey and his peers is still felt.
“(“˜Cuckoo’s Nest’) made me reevaluate
society as a whole,” said Jone Tran, fourth-year business
economics student. “(It taught me ) to look at
society’s structures and challenge those
structures.”
The success of its subsequent cinematic adaptation in 1975
helped to boost the popularity of Kesey’s novel as a
worldwide source of inspiration.
“Vladimir Posner, who was a Russian journalist who came to
the States, wrote that one of the most significant moments of his
life was going to the movies to see “˜One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest’ in Russia,” Grobel said.
“And when the Chief escapes, (Vladimir) felt there was
hope for him such that he could also break through the repression
of his country and he finally did. Jack Nicholson told me he
was in Russia once and said it was amazing the way people reacted
to him because of that movie. Probably of all movies around the
world, that’s the one that has the most significance to
people who come from cultures that are not as free as
ours.”
The way in which the film was handled, however, appalled Kesey;
he disagreed with the choice of Nicholson in the role of Randle
McMurphy as well as the elimination of Chief Bromden as the
narrator.
Despite the critical success and numerous accolades bestowed
upon the movie, including Academy Awards for best actor, actress,
director, and adapted screenplay, Kesey vowed never to see the
film.
Kesey was not the most prolific writer and his later works,
including his follow-up novel “Sometimes a Great
Notion,” have not held the same inexorable influence as
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
Still, despite the ever-present criticism of his later work,
Kesey remained conscious of the society that surrounded him, a
society that he did, in part, shape and sculpt, picking away with
razor-sharp words, into what it is today. Looking forward, Kesey
envisioned a new art form; an amalgam of the written word and the
motion picture.
“When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn’t writing for
stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move
around,” Kesey said in an interview in 1992 with Far Gone
Magazine.
“The new novel, the real new novel, hasn’t been
written yet. It will be written with a new type of pen. And
the most powerful tool of composition we’ve got now is that
camcorder,” Kesey added.
Kesey, however, realized the effect he had on today’s MTV
generation in terms of attitude, in terms of the arts, and in terms
of drugs.
“I really did have a sense that what we were doing was
important, historically important, in a way that still hasn’t
been understood or recognized,” Kesey said in the
interview.
“The ’60s aren’t over; they won’t be
over until the fat lady gets high.”
