Sometimes a Great Notion
Ken Kesey
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
From the original reviews of Sometimes a Great Notion
"As in Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey brings to life people you will never forget . . . Getting into this book is getting into a fascinating, crazy world of a fascinating, crazy family which has a throbbing reality and a desperate dedication to living . . . and then there is that great gift for comedy, for purely sensational writing. When Kesey describes the Canada honkers flying over the woods you can almost see them; when he describes the smells of the grass and the tastes of the strawberries you feel and you smell and you taste."--Ralph J. Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle
"Sometimes a Great Notion, a big book in every way, captures the tenor of post-Korea America as nothing I can remember reading . . . Beyond the PTA and the beer commercials, beyond the huge effluvium of the times, exist people who live by the ancient passions, and Mr. Kesey in the fullness of his material discovers them for us."
--Conrad Knickerbocker, The New York Times Book Review
"A tremendous achievement . . . Set against the damp and brutal background of an Oregon logging community, the book by turns gasps, pants, whoops, and shrieks . . . you cannot help but admire Kesey's vigor, his profligate command of the language. And you have to stand back in awe of the man's ability to create character."
--Don Robertson, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"In his first novel Kesey demonstrated that he was a forceful, inventive, and ambitious writer. All of these qualities are exhibited, in even higher degree, in Sometimes a Great Notion . . . Here he has told a fascinating story in a fascinating way . . . Many novelists have experimented with the rapid shifting point of view, and some have tried to blend past and present, but I can think of no one who has made such continuous use of these two methods as Kesey. And he has made them serve his purpose: that is, he has succeeded in suggesting the complexity of life and the absence of any absolute truth."--Granville Hicks, Saturday Review
"Full of vitality and color . . . There is no doubt that Kesey is a bold writer working out his own mode of expression . . . Anyone interested in the trends of the American novel should want to read it."
--Edmund Fuller, Chicago Tribune
"The reader should put on a muffler and a slicker before he reads: it's that wet and cold up in Oregon and Kesey is that realistic . . . He is both poet and peasant, as rich and voracious as the river and woods."
--Irving Scott, Los Angeles Times
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION
KEN KESEY was born in 1935 and grew up in Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon and later studied at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Scowcroft, and Frank O'Connor. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his first novel, was published in 1962. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. His other books include Kesey's Garage Sale, Demon Box, Caverns (with O. U. Levon), The Further Inquiry, Sailor Song, and Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs). His two children's books are Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear and The Sea Lion. Ken Kesey passed away on November 10, 2001.
CHARLES BOWDEN lives near the Mexican border. His most recent books are Inferno and A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior. He was born into a country that had a great notion, and he misses it.
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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1964
Published in a Viking Compass edition 1971
Published in Penguin Books 1988
This edition with an introduction by Charles Bowden published 2006
Copyright (c) Ken Kesey, 1963, 1964
Introduction copyright (c) Charles Bowden, 2006
All rights reserved A portion of this book first appeared, in somewhat different form, in Genesis West 5.
Acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to quote from song lyrics:
Adams, Vee & Abbott, Inc., for (p. 30) "Smoke on the Water" by Earl Nunn and Zeke Clements.
Copyright 1943 and 1951 Adams, Vee & Abbott, Inc., Chicago, Ill.
Hill and Range Songs, Inc., for (pp. 60, 62, 64, 217) "I'm Movin' On" by Hank Snow. Copyrights 1950
by Hill and Range Songs, Inc., New York, N.Y., and for (p. 385) "Candy Kisses" by George Morgan.
Copyright 1948 by Hill and Range Songs, Inc., New York, N.Y. Used by permission.
Hollis Music, Inc., for the two lines quoted on p. 21, suggested by the song "Going Down the Road" by
Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays. (c). Copyright 1960 Hollis Music, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Joy Music, Inc., for (pp. 571, 572, 573, 576) "The Doughnut Song." Words and music by Bob Merrill.
(c) 1950 by Joy Music, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Ludlow Music, Inc., for (4 lines on p. ix) "Good Night, Irene." Words and music by Huddie Ledbetter and
John Lomax. (c) Copyright 1936, Ludlow Music, Inc., (c) Copyright Renewed 1964 Ludlow Music, Inc.,
New York, N.Y.
Used by permission.
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establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To my mother and father--
Who told me songs were for the birds,
Then taught me all the tunes I know
And a good deal of the words.
Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in the town;
Sometimes I get a great notion
To jump into the river . . . an' drown.
--From the song "Good Night, Irene,"
by Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax
Introduction
I was trapped in the heart of a cold and gray Wisconsin winter when a campus radical loaned me what he described as "this great union novel by Ken Kesey." The name rang a few bells--he was the guy who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, dosed himself with LSD, went on the lam to Mexico after a drug
bust, and hosted the fabled Acid Tests with the Hell's Angels. I went home, sat in a corner chair, and read the first line, "Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they emerge into the Wakonda Auga River . . ."
That opening hit my head in the growing darkness around six p.m. When the sun came up the next morning, I was still in the chair and stayed there until sometime later that day when I finished the book. In between there was a lot of music, some cheap wine, then black coffee. After I devoured the final pages, a kind of silence descended because my friend was dead wrong--it wasn't a union novel. When I heard what other folks said about it--often bad--I just shook my head and stayed mute. The book was greeted with reviews that ranged from contempt to damn near hatred.
Sometimes a Great Notion is one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century. The plot is simple: a difficult family refuses to abide by a union strike against a lumber company and keeps cutting down trees. What happens after that decision tells us a lot about ourselves and our country and Ken Kesey's lust for freedom. The tale unfolds through the minds of successive characters. Some people find this confusing, though I'm not sure why since it is the basic reality of every whiskey bar, coffeehouse, and family. Life is a bunch of people seeing and talking and thinking, or life is nothing at all. In Sometimes a Great Notion (and what better description is there of the promise of American life than this title?) everything is damp, lush, and threatened. The ground is ancient, the people midgets compared to the natural forces swirling around them, and victory does not mean peace and contentment but resistance. Kesey was the hero of a tie-dye generation, and yet he put out a huge novel that was flannel shirts, sweat, brutal labor in the woods, and almost prehistoric in its angers and loves and beliefs.
The book demolishes all the ways we have of defining life so it will become tame. Collectivism comes across as living death, individualism as actual death, resources as something disappearing as the family gnaws through a last virgin stand. The human-centered world vanishes at times, as the book suddenly inhabits the mind of a dog pursuing a bear or the sensations of a fish leaping in the river in a desperate effort to flee the growth on its gills. And the entire book is literally in the hands of a woman as she flips through a family album in an effort to explain the love and defeat she has witnessed and shared.
After delivering this monster statement, Kesey stopped writing novels for more than twenty years. Decades later, he offered this bit of advice to writers:
One of these days you're going to have a visitation. You're going to be walking down the street and across the street you're going to see God standing over there on the corner motioning to you saying, "Come here, come to me." And you will know it's God, there will be no doubt in your mind--he has slitty little eyes like Buddha, and he's got a long nice beard and blood on his hands. He's got a big Charlton Heston jaw like Moses, he's stacked like Venus, and he has a great jeweled scimitar like Mohammed. And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out of your mouth like golden pennies. It's the job of the writer in America to say, "Fuck you, God, fuck you and the Old Testament you rode in on, fuck you." The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. Anytime anybody says come to me and says, "Write my advertisement, be my ad manager," tell him, "Fuck you." The job is always to be exposing God as the crook, as the sleaze ball.
He became famous for being famous. He was not taken seriously. He lived as a footnote to an era, the '60s, that much of American society wanted to forget ever happened. He failed at the literary game in which success is a shelf of books produced at regular intervals, that thing called a body of work. His best book, Sometimes a Great Notion, came very early on and now broods out of sight, a sunken ship in the dark water at the mouth of that safe harbor where our beliefs are securely moored, a navigational hazard that threatens to rip out the bottom of our unsinkable craft, a dreadnought we have named Culture. There is that famous bus ride of course, the one he undertook with a herd of Merry Pranksters that crossed the United States and delivered them in a fog to the launch party of this very novel in New York City. Later, that drug-fueled 1964 adventure kept him chained to the psychedelic machine through dozens of editions of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Then there was the bust for marijuana, the flight to Mexico, the months in jail--a fistful of untoward moments such as normally decorate the covers of supermarket tabloids.
From time to time, he lurched back into print with odd volumes--Kesey's Garage Sale, Demon Box, The Further Inquiry , and that slumgullion stew of a novel he whipped out with thirteen writing students at the University of Oregon (with the author listed--God have mercy!--as O. U. Levon) called Caverns . Ken Kesey himself became a ghostly reputation as a young, hot, once-upon-a-time writer who went a little nuts and then disappeared . . . up in Oregon somewhere? Right? Up there on some farm? They made some movies out of his stuff, didn't they? A curious fate for a man who wrote some of the most searing pages about the emptiness of this big country we all live in.
He was struck by the order, dullness, dumbness, suicidal tendencies, and pointlessness of midcentury America, the America of the empire, the America that was going to put its stamp on a century, the America with its arteries clogged with things, and its soul left at some pawn shop along the way in order to raise the cash for guns. Of course, many of us kind of like this prison and busy ourselves with checking the padlocks and adding more bars to the windows--so the burglars can't get in, honey. Kesey is the man trying to break out. All his work is about prisoners, some aware of the cage and rattling the bars, the rest resigned to doing their time. "We never claimed," he wrote years after Sometimes a Great Notion, "to know precisely when the birth of this New Consciousness would take place, or what assortment of potions might be required to initiate contractions, but as to the birthplace we had always taken it for granted that this shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of American labor."
His first book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, takes place in an asylum, and though the locations change from book to book, this sense of bondage is constant in Kesey's work. Kesey's world is a place with lots of space for love and sentiment. Nature is a big-ticket item in his books, but in Sometimes a Great Notion nature is not a soft, comforting mother: "For this land was permeated with dying; this bounteous land, where plants grew overnight, where Jonas had watched a mushroom push from the carcass of a drowned beaver and in a few gliding hours swell to the size of a hat . . ." And history hangs like dead weight over those who know it and those who do not: "You could never understand it all. You just want a reason, two or three reasons. When there are reasons going back two or three hundred years . . ."
And of course the '60s, that time that never seemed to have occurred and that can be barely remembered, is a wound he keeps licking. Kesey has become a symbol of the '60s despite the fact that he kept writing about its failings, its shortcoming, and its one solid virtue, a virtue summed up by the word further. Or at times Furthur, the name first painted on the front of that legendary bus.
Kesey has all the tricks we ask of writers: that ear for dialogue, that ability to create characters that live on the page, that simple conflict presented early on in the story that causes us to cheer for one side against another. He can write that pretty sentence, fill that blank page. There is a bounce to his prose and to the people in his books as they rampage around. He makes us laugh. None of this seemed to impress him much, and he popped off occasionally against serious writing in his time and suspected that comic books or popular music or maybe movies would be the stuff people would look back at, a century or two from now, when they wanted to understand our time.
In his own case, I think he was wrong. Because Kesey also had an obsession with something he called entropy at times; at other times he called it madnes
s; then again he'd say it was emptiness. And what he writes disturbs anyone who reads it. He is not the writer who sets out to capture and catalogue our culture's manners and morals, though that task occurs in his work. He is not the writer who seeks to focus on our interior hells and who chucks society while he pursues the demons of the individual, though such moments also occur in his books. He is that old-fashioned kind of writer, the moral critic, the prophet without a prophecy, a person who is cut from that moth-eaten old bolt of wool we'd forgotten about up in the attic, the stuff Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to name two, were cut from. He asks questions and can't give us answers. But he has these bothersome questions, the main one being: what are we going to do about this emptiness, this lack of dreams, ambitions, visions? We no longer have promises to keep, miles to go before we sleep, so do we just content ourselves with meeting the mortgage payments on this continental empire we seem to have inherited?
In Kesey's books people are afraid, afraid of this emptiness, and all the dope and merry pranks cannot disguise this fact. In Demon Box, he spells out the condition of our condition: "I allowed that it could be a possibility. 'But I don't think it's the people I'm fascinated by so much as the puzzle. Like what is crazy? What's making all these people go there? I mean, what an interesting notion this metaphor of yours is, if I've got it right--that modern civilization's angst is mechanical first and mental second?' 'Not angst,' he corrected. 'Fear. Of emptiness.
Since the Industrial Revolution, civilization is increasingly afraid of running empty.' "
There is an image in Sometimes a Great Notion of a buck deer swept out to sea, found by a fishing boat, and hauled aboard. The deer lies on the bottom of the small craft, almost catatonic with terror. When the boat nears shore, the deer jumps and swims back out to sea, still terrified, swims to . . . well, to certain death? A new future? Kesey can't tell us, he can just ask. In Sometimes a Great Notion, he asks what kind of future is possible when we have run out of country and are down to felling the last trees. The choice presented is between a brutal individualism that we all secretly love, but can no longer afford, and a dreary collectivism that stills our heart when we even think about it. What do we do when we know but cannot act, see but cannot move?
