obituary: ken kesey
Fuelled by psychedelic drugs and dressed in a jester’s outfit, Ken Kesey, who has died aged 66 of liver cancer, embodied an ancient tradition of the Merry Prankster and became the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s ground-breaking book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but the work that will last is his darkly humorous and critically acclaimed first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Published in 1962, the book was based on Kesey’s experiences at a war veterans’ mental hospital in California where, in 1959, he became a paid volunteer in experiments with mind- altering drugs, chief among which was LSD, or acid. The late film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Kesey’s book: “It preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture. Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic and … has entered the consciousness of many perhaps most Americans.” She could have added the English-speaking world, as well.
The film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson, swept the 1976 Oscars and although Kesey disliked it for omitting a central character, a Native American, the evil martinet matron, Nurse Ratched, has become an iconic figure. She represented the authority that Kesey symbolically rebelled against in his historic 1960s Merry Prankster trips across the United States in a school bus painted in lurid colours and labelled “Weird Load”. Most of its occupants, including Kesey, the Chief Prankster, were high on drugs and their humour and antics were meant to upset conservatives as much as to amuse others. They were immortalised in Wolfe’s 1968 book, which established Kesey, in particular, as a counterculture hero.
Kesey wrote other works and novels after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but they never won the same praise. Some critics attacked them as weakened by the writer’s continued drug habit. Kesey himself acknowledged in an interview in 1990 that he may have overindulged. “If I could go back in time and trade in certain experiences I’ve had for the brain cells presumably burned up,” he remarked, “it would be a tough decision.”
Kesey leaves his wife of many years, Faye, a son, Zane, and daughters Shannon and Sunshine.
Christopher Reed