KESEY'S JAIL JOURNAL 'FAR OUT'

PLEASANT HILL, Ore. - When Ken Kesey was kicked loose after spending the
1967 Summer of Love in jail for a marijuana bust, the guards asked the
famous author, psychedelic explorer and prankster if he was going to write
a book and include them in it.

''I think so,'' Kesey replied.

Two years after the author's death, Kesey's Jail Journal is out. The book
includes two dozen colour plates of collages Kesey made from ink drawings
entwined with his handwritten reflections.

They were all laid down in notebooks that were smuggled out by a buddy who
was busted with him.

Looking for something that went beyond the two novels he had already
written, Kesey melded words and drawings in a psychedelic 1960s version of
an illuminated manuscript that contains echoes of the battle between
freedom and authority he described in his most famous book, One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest.

''He was trying to make the whole page move, so it would convey something
beyond what the words themselves could say,'' says his widow, Faye, at the
Willamette Valley farm where the family moved after Kesey got out of jail.

Perhaps the best stuff never left jail, she says: his last two notebooks
were confiscated by guards just before his release.

''Ken had always hoped the other journals would show up,'' she says. ''It
would have made it so much more complete if they had. I have a feeling they
are still out there somewhere.''

In 1967, Kesey was a star of the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll freak show
going on around San Francisco. It was five years after publication of
Cuckoo's Nest, and three years after his psychedelic bus ride across
America, chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Kesey's six-month sentence to the San Mateo County Jail stemmed from a raid
on his rural home at La Honda in the Coast Range above Palo Alto, Calif.,
where he and his Merry Pranksters partied with Hells Angels, tried to make
sense of the movies they had taken on the bus trip and orchestrated the
acid tests that helped turn the world on to LSD.

Kesey was busted along with Page Browning, and together they did their
time. Described by Kesey as ''a big ex-Shore Patrol Navy man with arms like
hawsers and a face like a barnacle (who) made a very valuable backup in the
lockup,'' Browning kept the journals hidden from guards and smuggled them
out in adult magazines.

The duo started out in the lockup, but soon qualified for ''honour camp,''
an experimental program where jailbirds who could be trusted spent their
time clearing brush - in the redwoods not far from Kesey's home at La Honda
- - and talking about their problems in group therapy sessions.

Ed McClanahan, a writing pal of Kesey's from Stanford, visited him on
Sundays. McClanahan's wife gave Kesey the art supplies he used for the
drawings.

''He was a terrific graphic artist,'' says McClanahan, who wrote an
introduction for the book. ''I remember one time we were wandering around
downtown Eugene (Ore.) somewhere. We were both pretty thoroughly loaded.

"He had some artist friend. We wandered into his studio. Ken picks up a
scrap of paper. It was an odd shape. He wrote the word 'space' on that
paper. Then he filled the whole paper up with those letters. Everything he
touched turned to art.''