A Few Thoughts on Ken Kesey and Wallace Stegner: the Constant Generational Change.
We at HardTimes have been thinking quite a bit about Ken Kesey. Mostly because the HT editorial board, creative team, and moonshine distillers were all forced to read Sometimes a Great Notion. Gathered around the bathtub - ladle in hand - we’ve all debated whether Kesey is just a lesser Beat, or something more substantial.
In this humble writer’s opinion, Kesey is something far larger than a Merry Prankster. Kesey, along with Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, Tillie Olsen, and Sandra Day O’Conner, was a student of the masterful Wallace Stegner. While One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest will be best remembered as the movie which gave Nicholson his first oscar, the Kesey’s novel proves a fine read. Some grand metaphor on the mainstream co-opting and exploiting counter cultural movements for their benefit; ie, Nurse Ratched steals McMurphy’s brain to regain control of the asylum.
But it is the relationship between Wallace Stegner and Kesey that truly interests this reader, and sheds light on his talent. Weary and skeptical of the shifts taking place in the 60’s, Stegner’s masterpiece Angle of Repose tells the tale of Lyman Ward - a historian researching his grandmother’s life. The elderly Ward hires a young, 60’s love child to help him with day to day living. After a few months, Shelly the Hippie informs Ward that she’ll be moving to a commune; she tells Ward, “It’s idealistic, it’s for love and gentleness, it’s close to nature, it hurts nobody, it’s voluntary. I can’t see anything wrong with any of that.”
Ward responds, “Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be in habited by and surrounded by members of the human race.”
Stegner was raised in the tradition of the “Rooseveltian man”: a hard working, patriotic model of the perfect human. Kesey, however, came into maturity as an individual and writer after WWII. In a time when the quiet of the 50’s gave way to the rebellious 60’s, it’s obvious to see why these two groups would clash. To Kesey, Stegner was stuck in the past. To Stegner, Kesey had no respect for his elders. One can almost imagine Kesey stoned and skeptical of Stegner’s lectures, slouched in the back of the class. In the front row, Wendell Berry scribbles his great professor’s every word.
In an interview for some documentary, Marion Stegner touches on Stegner’s reaction to Kesey and the 60’s:
Marion Stegner
The ‘60s were indeed a wild time and there was a lot of drug use and students were pretty much off the wall, and I believe he really disapproved of most of it. He had students with whom he had difficulty with, and the parties that we went to were always certainly full of marijuana and punch that was boiling up green and purple, and brownies that were well laced, and I don’t think he wanted anything to do with it. It was beyond his belief system that this could be going on.
Interviewer-John Howe
In that era he seemed to have some issues with some of his students like Ken Kesey and others. Talk about that just a little bit and the why behind that.
Marion Stegner
Well I think Ken Kesey said that the difference between them was that… I think the difference between Ken Kesey and Wally was that Ken liked marijuana and Wally liked bourbon. I think that’s what Ken said years ago, and that was their major split. And I think they knocked heads. They probably had a good deal of likenesses in some respects with their work, and they just locked horns, and that was never… I don’t think that was ever resolved in Ken’s life, though I think he came to respect him. I think there was a respect between them, but they didn’t like each other very much.
While One Flew remains Kesey’s most popular book, Sometimes a Great Notion reads more like a personal “horn lock” with Stegner. The old world of the west, east coast snobbery, and a minor pinch of flower power make the book an engagement of ideals. Expressed under the veil of “familial relations,” Sometimes a Great Notion uses the Stampers, an Oregon logging family, to speak to the constant generational change. Despite taking place in the late 60’s, the book ends up an incredible parallel to the generational shift taking place at this very moment.
I recommend anyone out there who pigeon holds Kesey as nothing more than a druggy Beat, to pick up Sometimes a Great Notion. It becomes apparent that despite Kesey’s continued drug use, he had his ear perked during class with Ol’ Stegner.
