It’s All a Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey

by Rick Dodgson

Counterculture icon and best-selling author of the anti-authoritarian novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion , Ken Kesey said he was “too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie.” It’s All a Kind of Magic is the first biography of Kesey. It reveals a youthful life of brilliance and eccentricity that encompassed wrestling, writing, farming, magic and ventriloquism, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory drugs, and a notable cast of characters that would come to include Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson.

            Based on meticulous research and many interviews with friends and family, Rick Dodgson’s biography documents Kesey’s early life, from his time growing up in Oregon through his college years, his first drug experiences, and the writing of his most famous books. While a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kesey worked the night shift at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital, where he earned extra money taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs for medical studies. Soon he and his bohemian crowd of friends were using the same substances to conduct their own experiments, exploring the frontiers of their minds and testing the boundaries of their society.

            With the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , Kesey moved to La Honda, California, in the foothills of San Mateo County, creating a scene that Hunter S. Thompson remembered as the “world capital of madness.” There, Kesey and his growing band of Merry Prankster friends began hosting psychedelic parties and living a “hippie” lifestyle before anyone knew what that meant. Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test mythologized Kesey’s adventures in the 1960s.

            Illustrated with rarely seen photographs, It’s All a Kind of Magic depicts a precocious young man brimming with self-confidence and ambition who—through talent, instinct, and fearless spectacle—made his life into a performance, a wild magic act that electrified American and world culture.

“Rick Dodgson has pored over Kesey’s published and unpublished writings, interviews, and historical records to write a colorful biography of this charismatic American character. The resulting portrayal challenges assumptions about Kesey’s place in the counterculture.”— Journal of American History
 
“Dodgson’s painstaking research unearths hidden gems of Kesey’s life that marked him as a fascinating figure.”— H-Net


 


 


 

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's All A Kind Of Magic by Rick Dodgson was born out of his doctoral dissertation on the life of Ken Kesey.

This biography documents the first part of Ken Kesey's life in great detail - from his childhood, growing up on farms in Oregon, to his later years at university and beyond becoming the famous author of " One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and his second book "Sometimes A Great Notion".

It is interesting to know that the title for his first book, was derived from a poem his Grandma Smith taught him as a young boy:
“William, William Trimble toes, he’s a good fisherman,
catch his hands put ’em in the pans,
some lay eggs, some not,
wire, briar, limber lock, three geese in the flock,
one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest; "

This book was reprinted 100 times in the fifty years after its first edition hit the markets.

The title for his second book was derived from the song, “Goodnight, Irene”, popularized by Lead Belly.
Sometimes I lives in the country
Sometimes I lives in town
Sometimes I haves a great notion
To jump into the river an’ drown
This book would turn out to be a breathtaking accomplishment, a genuine classic of twentieth-century American literature.

Kesey was a prankster, a jokester, a frat-boy, a jock, an author, a natural entertainer,a party animal and a dreamer. In one person lived a rebellious soul who found wholesomeness and happiness in laughter. He loved people. They loved him. He questioned everything and sought out his own personal truths away from the mainstream of the 1950's and 60's in America when the country was involved in the Vietnam War and new social trends were being born on all levels of society. The world was not ready for his approach to life. He was breaking through a well-guarded mold and was not welcomed or appreciated.

Kesey became on of the 'lab rats' for testing different drugs, including LSD, which was sponsored by the CIA. A fact that led Senator Ted Kennedy to accuse the CIA of having engaged in activities that “involved the perversion and the corruption of many of our outstanding research centers in this country.”

The VA trials were legal and officially sanctioned, and the substances they were testing seemed harmless yet fantastic. It was typical of Kesey and his friends that they wanted others to share their good fortune with others. Initially at least, this is how the psychedelic revolution got its start, rippling out from the first few initiates to their circle of friends, and then out to their circles of friends, and so on.

Ken Kesey needed the money. At the time of participating in the drug tests, he was a speech and communications major at the University of Oregon (U of O). He never realized what a profound effect the drugs would have on him and all the people he introduced to it. He never was a drinker but managed to remain popular in his fraternity where alcohol binge-drinking sort of guaranteed anyone's acceptance into the fold. Non-drinkers, normally, were ignored.

Tom Wolfe’s book "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968) describes this part of Kesey's life in detail. The book was a huge best seller and firmly established Wolfe’s career. Ken Casey was regarded by some as the “father of the counterculture”, although he never felt comfortable with the idea.

However, there was a reason for regarding Ken Kesey as such. He and his friends decided to buy a bus, which they named 'Further', travel the west coast and spread the word on the mind-altering drugs that could benefit the entire country. They were a group of intellectuals, writers, artists, musicians and best friends. The idea was born when Kesey and two friends crossed the country from New York back to the west coast by car. During the trip Pres. Kennedy was murdered. They listened to the shocking events over the radio.

According to Kesey, "the bus trip “spun off this feeling of seeing the landscape of the American people in this new way. I think the whole hippie movement, this love-everybody feeling for each other was born of that feeling. It was born of the death [of Kennedy]. . . . When God wants to really wake up a nation, he has to use somebody that counts.”

They were just trying to take what was in front of them and change it around to get another way of looking at it, to see what it was about.

This traveling road show of the Merry Pranksters, as they became known, would set off the hippie movement in its wake.

The Pranksters’ 1964 bus trip, for example, is remembered as an acidfueled odyssey, but in addition to the LSD-laced orange juice in the fridge behind the driver’s seat, the Pranksters also took along a jar containing five hundred Benzedrine pills (as well as a shoebox full of joints rolled specially for the occasion by Prankster Steve “Zonker” Lambrecht).

Ken Kesey was regarded as " a swashbuckling cultural rebel whose pharmaceutical proclivities, existential lifestyle, and acidified visions led the “Freak” charge of the 1960s. Similarly, when we think of the Merry Pranksters, it is Wolfe’s account that has fixed in our minds their image as a group of young psychedelic warriors, careening around the West Coast in Further, dispensing LSD and rebellion in equal measures, somehow seeding the whole hippie revolution that came in their wake."

"This strange conglomeration of historical actors and forces—powerful drugs developed by a profit-driven pharmaceutical industry, well-funded and well-intentioned research scientists and doctors, and the anything-goes mentality of the Cold War intelligence agencies—did succeed in unintentionally spawning a cultural revolution that would,it is not an exaggeration to say, transform the United States and the world in its wake.

He was probably unaware of the ripple effect their actions would have on the world, when Casey and his friends chose to do more research on drugs and venture off on the path they chose for themselves. He was optimistic and believed it was for the greater good, and legitimate after all. The American government could not stop what they have begun however hard they tried.

This movement is essentially a rear guard action attempting to recover lost ground with few prospects of success. While Nixon’s “Silent Majority” turned out to have a pretty loud, powerful voice in the public arena, in the private sphere—in everyday life—it has largely fallen on deaf, young ears. If truth be told, the culture war is over and the hippies won. In twenty-first-century America, there is a yoga studio on every Main Street, rock music is the new classical, and the medical and recreational use of marijuana is more widespread than ever. More important, the progressive values and ideals of the counterculture—love, peace, compassion, understanding, environmentalism, the embrace of diversity, nonviolence, and more open-minded attitudes about religion and drugs, sex and sexuality, race, and gender—have become absorbed and accepted into mainstream American society, fundamentally changing its morals, its manners, and its ethics. Traditional ways of thinking survive and thrive in some places more than others, but their grip on our imagination has been significantly loosened, their view of the world significantly undermined, and their claims to truth significantly weakened. Important battles are still being fought—gay marriage, the War on Drugs—but one can never imagine American society going back to what it was before the 1960s.

Kesey was well aware of the absurdity of being held up as an icon of some sort of anti-American counterculture when he actually saw himself as a defender of the American way. “I’ve always been far more conservative than Barry Goldwater can imagine,” he told an interviewer on the CBS Sunday Morning Show in 1990. “I still believe in all that stuff . . . I haven’t ever developed any kind of cynicism about the American Dream.”

He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.

MY COMMENTS: The book is published by the University of Wisconsin Press and is clearly not a sensationalized account of Ken Kesey's life. It is almost a quiet tribute to an extraordinary individual's life, honoring a human being who played a great role in changing the course of history without too much fanfare and bongo drum rolls. Although he was, like all young men, ambitious, he was also teaching his people a new approach to life, without becoming a caricature or a clown, although his parties were beyond wild and bohemian. He always remained a fraternity boy in everything he did. His charm, for me, lies in his approachable personality; his boy-next-door-and-best-friend character. He loved to party and have fun, but he also knew how to work hard. He was highly intelligent, a visionary, who understood the psyche of the American people much more than most people around him and saw a social revolution coming, long before it happened. I personally suspect that he could have been someone much more important if he was born in a different social class. His background counted against him in many ways. The fact that he was short-changed in selling the movie- as well as theatere rights to his first book, illustrates how naive and inexperienced he was in the world of big business. He did not have the right kind of people on his side to protect his interests. He was seriously taken advantage of.

Ken Kesey started and ended in Oregon. Full circle. He experienced it all: from a modest little boy building his own toys and being best friends with his brother on the farm, entertaining friends, family and audiences in his hometown as ventriloquist, actor and magician, to becoming a famous writer being wined and dined by the big wigs cashing in on his talent. In the end he chose to get away from it all. The memories of a lifetime was packed away in a dusty back yard building until the author of this biography changed its destiny. It was a very very good thing. I feel honored to have met Ken Kesey.

The book is slow moving, detailed, tedious. But for the reader who is interested in Ken Casey's life and times it is an excellent read and well worth the time it takes to finish the book. The details of his boyhood on the farm, as a student, and as natural charismatic leader are well presented. Excellently researched.

Despite getting impatient with it at times, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Visit my blog Something Wordy and read the review with added pictures and information

[Andy Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion are two of my all time favorite novels. Thomas Wolfe's "Electric Cool Acid Test," which was about Ken Kesey and is wild trip to the New York World's fair and aftermath left me a bit cold, but still intrigued about Kesey's life. And of course there are the stories about Kesey, his falling out with Wallace Stegner, his friendship with Larry McMurtrey, his connection with the Grateful Dead, the Hell's Angels and his life in Eugene after the success with his novels and after the fights with the law and after the LSD. I have long pined for a biography of Kesey and was so excited to find this. And there are great parts to "It's all a Kind of Magic." Growing up blue collar, mainly conservative, a wrestling star and then going to a college campus in the 50s where he was a stereotypical BMOC , frat guy, and successful college athlete and then evolving into a counterculture icon-this is well told and the book reminds us that whatever permutation Kesey was in, there was always charisma, always fun, always women, even after his marriage.
There is good analysis. Many Kesey followers, including myself, were disappointed by the anti-union portions of Sometimes a Great Notion, contemporary readings of Cuckoo's Nest show misogyny and racism that while apparent when first written are increasingly disturbing now. This biography shows that the anti-union themes were consistent with much of Kesey's politics, the misogyny was consistent with his sexual infidelities and how he viewed most women. But the book also explains the nuance in Kesey's beliefs in individuals vs collective and that he regretted some of his characterization of Nurse Ratchet, even apologizing to the real life nurse that inspired the fictional Ratchet.
The author also reveals perhaps the best explanation of why Kesey's great writing stopped after Sometimes a Great Notion. His successful novels took a lot of work, hard work that Kesey complained about the time, pages scattered and constantly being rewritten, different storylines posted throughout his home, the solitary hours at the typewriter when Kesey's passion was being the life of every party he attended.
A couple of disappointments. The book ends too early, at the conclusion of writing Sometimes a Great Notion and before his bus trip and before his legal troubles. The author, Rick Dodgson, also seems to pull punches. That may be explained in his introduction, of how he met Kesey while he was in a state of worship of Kesey and how he worked on convincing him to cooperate with a PHD thesis that Dodgson was writing about Kesey. And how Dodgson was touched by slowly being let partway into Kesey's inner circle and given access to so many of Kesey's treasures, as well as gaining cooperation from Kesey's family and friends. Dodgson's loyalty to the memory of Kesey and to the living family and friends seems to have prevented a truly honest biography. And if anyone deserves an honest biography, it is Ken Kesey

[John Tipper · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good and fascinating biography of Ken Kesey up until the year 1964. He grew up in a working class environment in rural Oregon. An athletically gifted youth, Kesey was also good in the classroom. He excelled at wrestling and football. Was in school theater. He and his brother enjoyed hunting. Ken attended the University of Oregon, where he pursued his interests in sports and then later writing. After trying his hand at acting in LA, he settled into writing. Kesey won a scholarship to Stanford and studied under Wallace Stegner. He took part in a VA Hospital study of psychedelic drugs, and started in on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a novel that established him as a talent. A charismatic, roughhewed man, he led a group of bohemian writers on Perry Lane. After the success of Cuckoo's Nest, Ken began the composition of Sometimes a Great Notion. I would've liked more on how Kesey wrote his books, specifically Notion. The work stops just as Kesey starts to take a bus trip across America, which was covered admirably by Tom Wolfe. Worth delving into.

[Dave McLeod · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book ends exactly where it should, with the start of the much more documented Prankster Kesey. This is more the 'PNW woodsman finds creative writing classes' phase. Cool stories from the crucible of the Program Era.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ken Kesey is perhaps best known for his iconic book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and as a member of the Merry Pranksters and their drug-fuelled trip across America in the 60s. A leading figure in the counter-culture, Kesey was friends with other famous names of that era, such as Tom Wolfe, Larry McMurtry, Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead, all of whom make an appearance here. In this meticulously researched biography author Rick Dodgson fills in the detail from the first 30 years of Kesey’s life, from his birth in Colorado to his time at the University of Oregon, then his participation in the famed Stanford University writing programme with Wallace Stegner, to his job at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital which inspired the famous book, and on to his move to La Honda, California. Dodgson chronicles Kesey’s and his friends’ experimentation with drugs, in particular the recently discovered LSD, and their wild parties.
Dodgson was lucky enough to meet Kesey and was given access to his archive of personal papers and photographs, but Kesey refused permission for his words to be quoted in this biography, so we never hear Kesey’s voice unmediated. However, this is a wonderful portrait of the ambitious, rebellious and gregarious young Kesey and an evocative and fascinating picture of the era.
Unfortunately, the narrative stops abruptly before the infamous road trip of the Merry Pranksters, although Dodgson refers to it on many occasions, leaving the reader somewhat unsatisfied. I can only assume a second volume is on the cards, as this one comes to a very sudden and jarring finish. On the whole I found this a very interesting and compelling biography although perhaps at times it was a little too detailed, which tended to slow the narrative down and detracted from the general verve of the writing. However, this is a very thorough and well-researched biography of a key figure in American alternative life, and is well worth reading.

[Joyce Reynolds-Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

A kind of okay biography of Kesey. The man did his research on Kesey the person but got a few details about the Eugene-Springfield area wrong--understandable since he was not a native and all, but enough for someone from the area and the time to raise a brow. While the part I found best were the years at Stanford, I still had to wonder about accuracy there because of the few mistakes about Eugene. Granted, those were very nit-picky details, but still...

[Kathryn Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smiles, I want a second volume.

What ended up enthralling me was Dodgson's way of interpreting the mindset of the era. The fear of the Cold War. The very innocence of psycholedic drugs. Examining the world in which Kesey moved.

What please me most was Kesey's dedication to those two novels.

[Doc Macabre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intimate and enthralling portrait of the author's development. After reading it you feel as if you knew Kesey personally, much as Pr. Dodson did.