I started Tom Wolfe's novel without knowing it was actual makeshift journalism but with the expressed understanding that it was the end all and be all of hippie acid lit. I suppose maybe it is. Find me a man who can write a better stream of consciousness and I'll read him with bells on. Wolfe was in top form in that respect and the book goes a long way (and I'll suspect did also to his straight contemporary audience) in explaining just what the fuck these long hairs were running around like lunatics for in the first place.
The book covers the adventures of Ken Kesey and his merry band of pranksters as they push the hallucinogenic gospel through raves they call "acid tests" to the who's who of California always pushing FURTHER. When the scene actually takes off in San Fransico his message evolves into going "beyond acid" and is consequently shut down by the team of Judas purveyors cleaning up catering to the heads digging the ambiance Kesey had spearheaded.
If this was journalism, then Wolfe had abandoned objectivity and played acolyte for the gospel according to Kesey. That's fine, his contemporary and detractor Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night played that same sort of game a few months earlier and they threw a Pulitzer at it. But whereas the pretenses, personages and especially the hero in the latter were challenged, critically analyzed and aired in public, Wolfe paints Ken Kesey as modern day Siddhartha, generally flawless even as he bolts ridiculous along the ditch beside the freeway trying to evade the feds..
Kesey and his bus on the east coast pay telling visits to his movement's most direct parents, namely Tim Leary and Jack Kerouac, neither or which seem to enjoy their company. The former, working in a prosaic estate and bent on reflection, meditation and all the rest of it have no real use for their loud and revolutionary guests, and the latter is bewildered and doesn't connect anything with them. Wolfe's answer for both cold receptions is simple; They don't get it. Hubris at is most pure and stupefying.
Both the kids on the bus and the chronicler himself were after the same thing; The pranksters wanted it without acid and Wolfe wanted it without dizzy spinning-discoball prose, transcendence. Both end up falling short. The line between yahoo drug addict and vanguard spiritual initiate is a lot thinner than four hundred and sixteen pages, but I'm far enough removed from the sixties to call it falling short with a measure of objectivity.
Masterpiece? No. Worth a Read? SSSSSUUUUURRRRREEEE. But no big rush.
Interesting... I didn't get that same hero-worshipping vibe from this book as you did. Granted, at the beginning, Kesey is painted as some sort of extraordinary visionary, but a lot of that is shown through the eyes of his most fervent disciples so that is understandable.
ReplyDeleteAs time goes on you start to see the cracks in the veneer... for example, the Beatles concert where Mountain Girl gets it but none of the others do. They show that Kesey and the rest are becoming just like Leary and Kerouac who they so disrespect - guys who once led the movement but don't understand the "kids these days."
Then there is the fact that they claim to be fully egalitarian and accepting, but as in most walks of life, the most attractive and charismatic pranksters become the centre of the movement while the others are pushed aside. This is illustrated most clearly by that one guy (can't think of the name) who just wanted to be accepted but ended up being ridiculed and finally abandoned.
In the end, Kesey comes off looking ridiculous and pathetic as he hides from the cops in a tripped out paranoid stupour. To me his message of moving "beyond acid" came off as nothing but a self serving act of hypocrisy designed to save his ass from serious time. Sure, he may have really meant it, but he never would have gone down that road at that time if it hadn't been for the pressure he was getting from The Man.