SOMETIMES A GREAT WRITER IS OVERSHADOWED BY NOTORIETY

Obituaries focusing on Ken Kesey's '60s antics missed the point -- his
literary legacy.

Oregon writer Ken Kesey was both a visionary who wrote from the sweet,
pulsing vein of American life and a genuinely outrageous character in a
landscape populated by super-sized caricatures, all vying with exaggerated
eccentricity for the 15 minutes of fame promised by pop art satirist Andy
Warhol.

When he died Saturday aged 66, mainstream obituaries tended to focus on
Kesey's anti-establishment adventures with the Merry Pranksters, a group of
counter-culture dissidents who set out to subvert the suffocating orthodoxy
of a post-war America.

It was a world suffused with rigid political correctness. Birth control was
technically illegal and beyond discussion in many places, including Canada.
A woman's place was in the kitchen. Blacks went to the back of the bus.
D.H. Lawrence was banned. Gays stayed in the closet.

The Merry Pranksters set out to deliver iconoclastic shock therapy to a
society strangling on its own conformity. They dispensed Kool Aid laced
with psychedelic drugs at rock concerts. They advocated liberated sex. They
preached a rambling Flower Power philosophy rooted in the religions of the
Far East. And they associated it all with the transfixing underground music
generated by bands such as Jerry Garcia's Grateful Dead. One California
newspaper described the Merry Pranksters as "a Day-Glo guerrilla squad for
the LSD revolution."

All this certainly contributed to the galvanizing of a Baby Boom generation
just coming of age.

Tom Wolfe, another young writer, was revolutionizing non-fiction with what
would later come to be known as the New Journalism, bringing to his
accounts of real events far from the mainstream a strong personal voice
speaking from an identifiable point of view. He looked for the internal
dramatic arc of his stories and applied to his writing the techniques of
characterization and descriptive detail used by fiction writers.

Wolfe's book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test recounted the Merry
Pranksters' bizarre travels through an America in tumult, riding an old
school bus painted in colours reminiscent of a hallucinatory dream. It
propelled Kesey to instant notoriety. But there was much more at work than
the mere pursuit of celebrity.

The driver of the Pranksters' bus, recruited by Kesey, was Neal Cassady, on
whom Jack Kerouac had modelled the central character for his classic novel
of the Beat Generation, On the Road.

Kesey was acknowledging the bridge between the Beat tradition of cool and
disillusion represented by writers such as Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bukowski and Gregory Corso and the emergence
of powerful new voices marked by passion and deliberate head-on political
engagement with their culture.

These writers vigorously advanced issues of race, language, gay rights,
feminism, environmentalism and human rights. More importantly, they
advocated a duty on the part of individuals to challenge both orthodoxy and
the tyranny of institutionalized thought.

From the political anthems of Bob Dylan to the sexual politics of Adrienne
Rich, from the austere, muscular verse of Kesey's fellow Oregon poet
William Stafford to the linguistic experimentation of Vancouver's bp
Nichol, from black writers challenging white repression to Polish and
Russian writers taking on a monolithic Communism, the great and varied
river of literature shifted course in the 1960s.

In part, this change of direction was signalled by Kesey's two great
novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962, and Sometimes A Great
Notion in 1964. Although his obituaries seemed more interested in the
successful Hollywood movies made from both novels, the books were the
seminal events.

The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won five Oscars in 1974 -- Best
Movie, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress. Kesey
rejected it and would later sue the producers for what he saw as a crass
betrayal of the book's central artistic vision.

Described by the New York Times as "a glittering parable" about the ancient
contests in the human spirit between good and evil, the novel One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest explores the inherent conflict between the individual and
the state.

The story parallels the gradual rediscovery of sanity by its narrator,
Chief Bromden -- a traumatized native Indian incarcerated in a mental
hospital -- and the fate of R.P. McMurphy, who has faked his insanity to
evade jail time for a petty offence.

Chief Bromden escapes while McMurphy is lobotomized for inciting the
inmates to a series of minor rebellions that challenge the repressive
authority personified by the cold and manipulative Big Nurse Ratched.

Sometimes A Great Notion, on the other hand, charts the tensions raging
through a West Coast logging family whose ethos of stubborn individualism
- -- its motto is "Never Give an Inch" -- collides fatally with the larger
community when it chooses to keep working in defiance of a forest industry
strike.

Although the plot is as grim as a Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, the moral
richness and complexity of the story, the depth, dimension and humanity of
the characters and the wonderful dexterity with which Kesey shifts the
point of view, both from character to character and from time to time,
combine to establish a new benchmark for the modern novel.

All this from a man who never intended to be a writer and who ridiculed
literary pretensions. Kesey went to the University of Oregon on a wrestling
scholarship and strayed into writing out of boredom. Only at Stanford
University, studying under Wallace Stegner and Malcolm Cowley with
classmates such as Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone and Wendell Berry, did he
begin his serious writing. Yet in two years he produced two of his
country's greatest novels -- and then didn't deign to publish another for
28 years.

The media accounts of Kesey's death implied a celebrity whose fame and zany
notoriety overshadowed his talent. It was not so. What his remarkable
novels tell us is that the media missed the real story, which is that as
Ken Kesey's celebrity flares and fades, his reputation advances into
immortality -- for his two great books will shine on as long as people read.