It’s all a Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey, by Rick Dodgson

Abstract

It's all Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey, by Rick Dodgson, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 256 pp. $26.95 US (cloth). There are some useful biographies of Sixties counter-cultural icons like Hunter Thompson or Timothy Leary, but an insightful account of life and times of Ken Kesey was lacking. Rick Dodgson had filled gap by offering first academic biography of best-selling author and inspirational figure amongst psychedelic enthusiasts. The young Kesey hit national fame with his novel One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest, which depicted life in an asylum in which one patient rose to challenge staff's authority. It was during his own part-time work in mental hospital ward that Kesey realized that he could better understand patients--his use of mind-altering drugs like LSD and mescaline helped create empathy toward them. Buoyed by his literary success, reaping financial benefits, and aware of life-changing potential of psychedelics, Kesey and his entourage (dubbed the Merry Pranksters) embarked on psychedelic cross-country journey, under influence of LSD. Returning to West coast, they organized famous Trips Festival and Acid Tests, where people were offered liberal doses of LSD during musical happenings. Pressed by legal matters in mid-Sixties, Kesey ultimately withdrew from public limelight. Dodgson met Kesey on his farm in Oregon in 1999 and was sufficiently awe-struck to make Kesey topic of his doctoral thesis. His narrative is based on Kesey papers University of Oregon, his early diaries, press coverage, or interviews of remaining Pranksters that shed unique light over his personality. The timeline is deliberately shortened to begin with his childhood to completion of his second novel, Sometimes Great Notion, and before his more famous psychedelic escapades chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Dodgson offers Kesey's early taste for performance and his graduate life in Palo Alto as explanations for his discovery of mind-altering drugs and subsequent unusual lifestyle. Dodgson deserves praise for critiquing Wolfe's cornerstone account of Kesey's flamboyant adventures and for recasting it as hyperbolic, rather than factual account. When we remember Kesey, it is Wolfe's version of Kesey that of us imagine: swashbuckling cultural rebel whose pharmaceutical proclivities, existential lifestyle, and acidified visions led Freak charge of 1960s (p. 6). Wolfe's text also contributed to spreading notion that Kesey and Pranksters scattered seeds of psychedelic counter-culture. But as Dodgson notes, Acid Tests only involved a few hundred most (p. 7). These Tests were important because of their artistic conception and because they signalled heyday of psychedelia, but to claim that they kick-started it overlooks much greater influence of underground LSD chemists like Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Kesey's influence deserves to be tempered because he was forced into exile in 1966, when San Francisco counterculture scene took off, due to drug-related trouble with law, leading to his public disavowal of LSD to avoid lengthy sentence. Kesey famously stated that he was young to be beatnik and too old to be hippie and ultimately stayed clear from those scenes, in part because he was man who had grown up at heart of close-knit extended family that had survived Great Depression and World War II, (p. …