Digital Interviews: How did you develop an interest in writing?

Ken Kesey: I used to do magic shows. I really loved doing small tricks up on stage, in high school doing big tricks, and finally, my brother and I traveling around the state doing different kinds of shows. When I went to college, I continued to delve into performance art. I was writing the stuff that I was doing, and finally, I was just writing. Since then, I’ve come out of it. I’m getting back to doing as well as writing.

DI: Tell us about Perry Lane, where you lived while attending Stanford graduate school.

KK: It was the beginning of a complete, different movement for me. It changed my writing enormously. Up until then, I had been involved in writing what would be thought of as a conventional book. Being out on Perry Lane, trying all these various drugs, being with people that were, almost all of them, grad students, with the exception of a lot of teenagers who were around. Finally, I was using magic in my work.

DI: Were you familiar with the beat poets at that time?

KK: Before I ever left the University of Oregon, I had this record of [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti, [Kenneth] Rexroth and [Allen] Ginsberg reading beat poetry. We used to play it out of our loudspeaker system over at the Beta house. Lots of people were into it. It was so new that it was really involved. All of the class, even the people that were down on it, were listening to it and had a lot to say about it. I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn’t know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long -- and all of them made into crosses. He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.

DI: How did you get involved in the drug-testing experiments at Stanford?

KK: One of our neighbors at Perry Lane, Vic Lovell, asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said, “Sure.” I went in every Tuesday. I think I got paid twenty dollars a day. They ran me through all of the known drugs at that time -- eight or ten. I knew that some of them were going to be bad. I’d been told that. Man, you don’t want to give anybody a bad drug, no matter how much you want to know about it. If you’re interested in it, take it yourself. But to give somebody a bad drug, it’s a real mistake. When I could feel that it was going that direction, I would gag myself, and get out of me as much as I could.

DI: But LSD didn’t affect you badly?

KK: No. In fact, I never really had a bad trip until way after that. Nobody had a bad trip until way after that. It was just experimentation. You were trying to find out who was doing what, and what it was like. I was reading stuff from everybody who had written about it, about LSD and psilocybin -- and mescaline and peyote, which are two different drugs. Mescaline is the synthesized version, and peyote has a lot of other ingredients in it. It makes you sick, but being sick is important to it. Also, you don’t get near as high. You can eat a lot of peyote and not get near as high as you can on one capsule of mescaline.

DI: How were you able to get the LSD from the experimental setting to your friends and associates outside the hospital?

KK: I was connected to the VA hospital. Vic Lovell was working over there as a student of some kind, and when the drug experiment started, they set up a version of the VA hospital in Palo Alto. I went over and applied for a job, and a week or so later had a job. They put me on the same ward with the doctor that’d given me those early pills. He was not doing his experimentation anymore; he had quickly learned that this could be a real problem for the American government. One night, I came back in with my keys and went into his room, into his desk, and took out a lot of stuff. That was the source of most of our -- all of our drugs -- for a long time.

DI: That’s a nice desk. [laughs]

KK: Yeah, it was. I went right down to it, and there was this stuff all labeled. I already knew a bunch of it. I could see he wasn’t using it, and it was going to waste, getting old in there. So I liberated it. [laughs]

DI: It must have been nice to give it the new setting.

KK: The first time you take any of those drugs, especially if you’ve never been drunk even, you don’t think of it as “taking a drug.” You think, “This is an experiment that’s going on with the United States government.” We didn’t know about the CIA and the FBI’s connection with it until years later. Ginsberg always claimed so, but we didn’t know it until it had been closed up for 30 years. We were experimenting with it in a controlled system. It was only after we’d done it a while in the hospital -- all the people that I knew had gone in there and been part of these experiments -- it was important for us to take them outside, where you had more to react to.

DI: What was the layout of the hospital setting? Was there any experimentation with visuals or sound?

KK: No, this was a ward. All the other people in it were nuts. I went out and looked through the window, a little, tiny window, and the door there with a heavy, heavy screen between two panes of glass. There was no way to break out. You could barely see out through it. I’d look out there and see these people moving around, and I could understand them a whole lot better than I could understand the doctors and the nurses, or the interns -- and they knew this. They would come in and look at me in there, and I’d look at them through this little window. It was a regular ward, and there were about a hundred people on the ward.

DI: Would it be fair to say that this was all contributing to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

KK: Very much. When I went to work there, I started writing on it immediately.

DI: There’s a societal confrontation going on within the book's hospital.

KK: Right. There was that theme, naturally, but it went deeper than that. It was about people dealing with the forces that I had just thought were sort of fictional. When you run into these forces and these entities -- real things that influence you -- pretty soon you have to give them due. You have to go ahead and figure out which of these are good entities and which are bad entities. For a long time, I didn’t run into any bad entities. The bad entities were, sort of, good, not too strong forces, influenced by people who had problems, and they eventually loaded those drugs with problems. Nobody I ever knew had a bad trip until we moved back up here after Stanford. I was living over here by the river, and we gave a bunch of people some MP14. One girl began to have a bad time, and it was just contagious; the more we were around her, the more we were dealing with her, the more we were having her bad time. I think that’s what happened to a lot of people that were pretty sound. You can get through about anything if you’re sound, but if you’re really trying to empathize and deal with somebody who’s gone crazy on a drug, pretty soon you go crazy on the drug.

DI: In addition to the hospital society of Cuckoo’s Nest, you reveal some piercing messages regarding the society of the Oregon town in Sometimes a Great Notion.

KK: Oh, very much, and much more so than I realized at the time. I’ve gone back and re-read parts of Great Notion. A lot of it came from the fact that I was staying up 20 or 30 hours at a run. I’d write a piece, and I could see that, “If I change this back here, it’ll change this up there.” I began to do this scissor technique, having things happen to me in the present and things happen to me in the past or the future, and have them all there at the same time. When I finished it, I knew that I was finished with that form, but I went on to work on this same form in other ways. I’ve written a lot since then, but I’ve known when I started out on it, it was not going to be as good as Great Notion. There are times when you are able to do stuff that is just right for your years and your experience, and I’ve always known that that was the best I was going to be at writing.

DI: Tell us about the Acid Tests.

KK: It was a continuation of the same experiments that the doctors had started a long time ago. We were carrying them out, leaving the surroundings open to see what would happen. I remember this girl named Bubbles that we got to know. She’d take a lot of acid. We were in Palo Alto, the Palo Alto Acid Test, and she got out in the middle of the dance floor and discovered her shadow on the floor there. She began to dance to her shadow. This big, really good-looking black guy, also really high, got over on the drums, and he began to react to her reactions to the shadow. It went on for 30 or 40 minutes, and it was just exceptional. Everybody was standing there watching her reacting to the shadow, having good feelings about the shadow and bad feelings, and him reflecting this in his drumming, and the Dead and everybody else just stood around and watched this one thing happen. And it was exceptional.

DI: You’re thinking, “The doctors at the clinic would never understand this.” [laughs]

KK: There were times when I would run into the doctors again and talk to them about this, and they said, “No, no, that’s why we got out of it.” They realized that this was about a consciousness that they were not able to dig into and still be doctors.

DI: How did you meet Neal Cassady?

KK: I remember really clearly when he drove into the yard. We were over there in Perry Lane, and he came into that yard and he was out of that car. It was a Jeep, and he was out of that Jeep, and in and out, and taking the wheels off before I could get there, just talking like mad, and explaining what was going on, and explaining who he was. And I knew that he had been around and been coming by, and when we met there, he was already out taking the tires off to fix the brakes, because there were no brakes, and he had to fix these brakes. And he was wanting to know if I could go and get him some stuff. [laughs] Right away he was in charge. In all of our bus trips, he was in charge of driving the bus. Where the bus went, and what we did on the way there, was another person’s job, but he rode along and he never really tried to take it to a place that he had to go. He was with us and he was the best driver in the world.

DI: Even as a leader he was still following?

KK: Yeah, he was a driver. The driver doesn’t usually know for sure where he’s going. When you get to a crucial part in your drive, it’s sometimes a whole lot better to have somebody else tell you, “Turn here,” than it is to go ahead and try to look at the map and stuff.

DI: After the bus trips and the Acid Tests, you moved back to Oregon.

KK: When we came to Oregon, everybody that I knew who was really in on what was happening came with us. This was a place to go and lay back a while, and then take it easy and reflect on what we’d been doing, and continue. We were working as hard as we could with film and tape. We were trying to get the Prankster film out, but more than that, we were still involved in filming and taping what was going on -- and have never stopped.

DI: How did your view of LSD and the related culture differ from Timothy Leary’s view?

KK: I could see that the doctors in the profession would end up with this drug, and all these drugs, and keep it involved in their perspective fields. I didn’t really feel like that was just. I didn’t feel like it was just for the drug, and I didn’t feel like it was just for the people. As time went by, Leary and [Richard] Alpert and all those people at Millbrook have come around to the same thinking. This is too new to hold it to a small group of people, because that small group of people can bend it and turn it to their advantage, even if they’re not trying to. We started getting these drugs from other places than that doctor’s office. People started manufacturing them, and we were out trying these new chemicals, trying them in the streets and at concerts and in our work. We found that it increased our spiritual awareness, and it definitely increased our awareness of nature. I’ve never felt bad about either the drugs that I got out of the doctor’s desk or that stuff that we began to order, because most of the stuff we ordered for a long time was from Sandoz. We didn’t run into any homemade drugs for a long time. You know, you can trust Sandoz to give you the best. They’re not going to turn out some kind of rinky-dink, half-acid and half-something-else. Because you get down into dealing with LSD, which is just a pinprick in size, just the tiniest size of stuff, you realize that any deviation from that at all could really affect how you’re dealing with yourself and how you’re dealing with the experience.

DI: In the ‘70s and ‘80s, you wrote several short pieces about the deaths of John Lennon, Neal Cassady and your son Jed.

KK: It was what was happening. And there’s drugs involved in all of that, but the drugs aren’t the foremost thing that’s happening. It’s things that are going on between us as people, and the drugs are influencing it, but they’re not producing it like they were when we were first into it.

DI: Is it difficult to write about those things? Is that a release for you?

KK: I don’t ever think of it like that.

DI: It’s not a release?

KK: Nor is it really difficult. When you come across something that really affects you, and you sit down and write about it, it comes out because you’ve already gone through the agony. It comes out almost effortlessly. I think a lot of writers find this to be true. A lot of writers write about death, the death of somebody who’s close to them -- trying to work their way through it in their mind, and at the same time trying to change your mind about it. If anything, my mind is changed a good deal more since those things than it changed before those things. Oh, it’s easy to slip off into a natural sort of way of thinking, “Okay, that meant a lot, but we’re finished with that.” I don’t think that I’m finished with any of this stuff. We’re still working at it as hard as we can. Bringing out the films from 1964 is in terms of the present, even more than it is in terms of the past. We’re looking at something as we see it from the present. I did try to do it when we finished with a lot of the shooting, but it was just too hard. Also, I didn’t really know enough about what was going on to really legitimately get out there and try to explain it as though, “This is the end of it.” I can give examples of it, but to explain it, I’m not sure that I’m ready to do that even yet.

DI: In the ‘90s you wrote The Further Inquiry. Was that the start of the process publicly?

KK: Well, yeah. It was a hope to come up with a script that we could film down at the house, because a lot of people were still into that period of time. I knew that the people who were dead would have to have other things represent them. We were going to film it, and I didn’t think of it as a book for quite a while. The film didn’t happen, and so the book stands on its own. I’ve got six or eight pieces that are still important to what I’m doing. I want to finish those as best as possible, if I can just pry a little place open in what I’m doing now. It’s tricky to do, because what you’re doing becomes who you are, and I’m a little tired of being who I am. [laughs]

DI: You also published Sailor Song. Everyone said, “That’s the long awaited third novel.” Was it?

KK: No. I never have put it in the category of Cuckoo’s Nest and Great Notion. Yeah, I know better.

DI: Then you wrote Last Go Round with Ken Babbs. Tell us a little about that book.

KK: It’s about a rodeo that happens in Pendleton, Oregon, every September. It’s just removed from everything -- there’s no other town close -- and this rodeo’s been going on since 1911. I wrote a thing about the first rodeo, from the point of view of one of the guys who was the third runner-up of the three rodeo clowns, rodeo riders. His name’s Spain and he’s from the South. The two older guys are a black guy named George Fletcher and an Indian named Jackson Sundown. The three of them were tied at the end of the three-day rodeo, and they have a very famous last go-round. And the horse that won is in the Pendleton Museum there, mounted. I don’t mean he’s got somebody on him; I mean he’s dead and stuffed with stuff. [laughs] When you go back there, Pendleton is still appreciative of that scene. It’s remarkable to go back there. It’s almost the same. The photographs are better than they were back then, but these are still tribes of Indians coming in to dance, and cowboys coming in from everywhere to ride. That book got written because I’d written a screenplay, and people wanted to change the screenplay too much. I went ahead and worked it into a book, and Babbs wrote some scenes. We worked really hard on it together. It’s the best of my kind of work from a fictional point of view. It’s meant to be fictional, because I add people to it and I add scenes that can only be fiction. I make a point of that as I’m going through.

DI: You’ve recently gotten a new bus back out on the road. Where is the original bus now?

KK: The first bus is down in a swamp near our place. I always forget that when I talk about “the bus.” It’s like the Intrepid; that was a British man-of-war, and it was a World War I vessel, and then it was a World War II aircraft carrier. But it’s the same name, and people think of it as the same spaceship, even though it changes places and gets fixed up. Whole new spaceships come into being, and they’re all the Intrepid. This is the way I think of the bus -- it’s unique, it’s by itself, no matter how you construct it.

DI: Your latest project is releasing the first tapes of the original bus trip.

KK: We’ve done the first episode, and that gets us to New Orleans. We’re just about finished with episode two, the journey from New Orleans north to Manhattan. Episode three will be at Millbrook to meet Leary and Dick Alpert, and the whole scene there.

DI: You have a very unique “honor system” for your purchasers. They tell you what they want, you send it out, and then they pay you.

KK: Well, that was the way it used to be when we were kids. We would get a catalog from Montgomery Ward, and we’d go through it and order stuff. They would send us the stuff, and then we would send them the payment. You didn’t send it beforehand; you waited a number of weeks until you got it, and when you got it, if you didn’t like it, you sent it back. Almost all the stuff everybody kept. It was a marvelous system in which the weight of the proof was on the seller instead of on the buyer.

DI: Your packages are very handmade. You could easily have a company shoot these things out, but you’re doing everything -- from the labeling of the tapes to the painting of the boxes.

KK: We get letters from people -- just marvelous letters -- wanting to order, and they’re so excited about the fact that we’ve finally got some of this stuff done. Then, once it goes out there, we get tremendous letters back from them, having seen it, and they’re sending us the money right away, and that’s a whole lot more important than money. The connection between us and those people is really remarkable and wonderful.

DI: At the time you were filming, you didn’t have the technology to put everything together?

KK: There definitely was a mechanical thing. That helps a lot -- knowing that mechanical business. We tried a lot and weren’t successful at it. It just was too hard. Now we’ve got it down to video. We’re able to capture the visuals and the sound, and adjust the sound’s length, so it’ll put the words in the mouth of the person that’s speaking them. That’s a remarkable thing for us. Working with tapes and film, you play a tape and film and try to catch it. Pretty soon the words are off a bunch. Then you have to go back and re-adjust that tape, and then the words are off a bunch again. We’ve done a lot of stuff without the sound and lips working together, and it’s been effective for little pieces. But for a large piece, the more stuff that we can have coming out of the mouth of the person, it’s just so much better. You know, we’re coming near the end of our run. Maybe five, ten, 15 years is all we’ve got left, and we’ve got so much to do. So much stuff to go back through and make available.

DI: How much raw material do you have?

KK: Walls and walls of material. We filmed or taped everything. Most of it will never make it to an audience. To go through all of it and lip-synch it -- we don’t do that well until 1990, when we’re working with TV. Which is fine, because the stuff that we’re doing, it’s better on TV than it is on the big screen. It’s more personal, and the people who see it don’t see it as a movie. It works a whole lot better this way. So, we can turn out an hour, hour and a half tape regularly now and, hopefully, have ourselves a rendezvous with it as we’re checking out.

DI: Will we see future novels?

KK: I’ve got one book that was at Viking. It should have been published two years ago, but my editor got fired, so that book is down at the house. I withdrew it. I’ve got another long novel completed -- I haven’t gone back through it and reworked it. Then we’ve got a bunch of other stuff that I’ve written and needs to come out, because if it doesn’t come out, somebody will go back through and put it all out in a bowl, and I just want to put out little pieces of it in the bowl. [Ernest] Hemingway’s last book, The Garden of Eden -- it’s an embarrassment. Hemingway wrote it in 1939. It was about men and women, and they’re beginning to show cross-dressing. The woman is wearing pants and shorter hair, and the man is running around in his bathing suit and longer hair. That’s interesting in 1939, but now it’s something that would embarrass the hell out of Hemingway. I think it does, all the time. His spirit keeps saying, “No, no, don’t publish that! I haven’t fixed it. I’ve not gone through it.” I think a lot of the work ahead of me is going through and seeing what works and what doesn’t. I’m not interested in just turning everything over to somebody. It’s like saying, “Here’s a cake,” and just shove over all this flour and sugar and stuff. It’s not a cake. It’s not a cake until it’s been baked and ready to serve.

DI: Who are some of your favorite authors, past or present?

KK: Well, there’s [William] Burroughs, [Jack] Kerouac, [John] Steinbeck, Hemingway -- but, by far, it’s [William] Faulkner. Faulkner includes everything I’ve ever done, him being about as wiped out as I have been when I’ve written some stuff. You can go back to any piece of Faulkner and open it up and begin to read it, and it works. You don’t know where it comes about in his scheme of things; you’ll see one story done by him at one time, and then the same story done by him at another time, where he is looking from a different point of view, getting a different look at stuff. This is my favorite writer, by far.

DI: What advice would you give to a young author?

KK: Advice to a young author nowadays -- it’d be hard to make. I really don’t know what I would tell them, because I think the whole publishing world is in a real state of flux. It won’t be long before you’ll buy your book off the Internet. You’ll go through and read something by somebody and you’ll say, “That’s good. Send me that.” They’ll print it out to you. It’ll save us from having to ship all these big boxes of pulp back and forth. It’s one of the things that I’m, kind of, hanging back on. It’d be really easy to put a thing on that computer that would sell a book, and you’d be able to download the book in a night. You’d come in, and there would be a big pile of paper. It makes more sense. The whole notion of publishing houses and publishing companies, it’s an insult in a way. All writers have felt this. I’ve always been really happy with Viking, but I’m not part of the world that they want to publish.

DI: You’ve always been good at creating your own unique place in the world, though.

KK: Well, that’s important. And it’s hard to convince people that it is important. But, boy, it’s as important a thing as you can get now. People are sending pieces of novels. I think they ought to be read by somebody who can read them and say, “Hey, here’s something really good.” My editor, this was kind of where he was working, and he’s a real, real good editor. He’s willing to devote as much time and effort as you can possibly expect from a person. He was Burroughs editor, and he does the Ann Charters Kerouac books. He’s done important books, and he’s continuing to try to do important books, but there was something about him and Viking, who sold off to Penguin, who sold off to Putnam. It’s happening that way -- these big houses are getting bigger by buying more houses, but pretty soon they’re going to find they’ve got more houses than they’ve got readers. When somebody comes up with a really good book, you can put it up on the computer and sell it that way, and I think it’ll be healthy for the writing system.