Psycho-Alchemy

By R.Z. Sheppard

DEMON BOX

by Ken Kesey

Viking; 384 pages; $18.95

Before he became a character in American literature, Ken Kesey was a novelist. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) put him in the company of the young and the promising. He was a big man (a former wrestling champ at the University of Oregon) with a big talent. His family roots were in farming and logging; the rest is classic American tumbleweed. From Wallace Stegner's writing classes at Stanford, Kesey drifted to the San Francisco Bay Area, the playpen of countercultures. A bit young to be a founding beatnik and, ten years later, a little too bald to be a convincing hippie, he became "the Chief" to a tribe of hallucinating nomads. This stage of Kesey's life was described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's rollicking screed about a cross-country tour that Kesey and his overstimulated Merry Pranksters took in a vintage school bus with a psychedelic paint job.

Now immobile and rusting on Kesey's farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., the vehicle symbolizes the built-in obsolescence of 1960s enthusiasms. The same can be said for Demon Box, a collection of new and previously published magazine pieces about the good old days, departed friends, family, the pull of the soil and the lure of dope. Spruced up and polished, these writings impress and entertain but seem like an attempt to squeeze a few more miles out of a writer who has either run out of gas or has been stalled by too many chemical additives.

Names are changed to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. The result is a fictionalized autobiography in which Kesey is called Devlin Deboree, a once celebrated novelist who served a short jail sentence in California for marijuana possession. Tracking the cast requires some familiarity with Beat Generation hagiography. The names Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso are included in a straightforward litany. But Neal Cassady, the loquacious speed demon, is swathed in multiple fictions. He is called Houlihan by Kesey-Deboree, who complicates matters by saying that Houlihan, rather than the real Cassady, was the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, as well as the prototype for Hart Kennedy in John Clellon Holmes' novel Go.

Kesey, too, means to convey the imperative of motion. At the center of his loosely related narratives is the Oregon farm, which serves as both the setting for pastoral romances and a pit stop for the wrecked and restless. Old Pranksters pass through on their way from nowhere in particular. The proprietor can be as hospitable as a Bedouin, but not when he is accosted by footloose youths smelling of "sour unvented adrenaline."

In Cairo or covering an international marathon race in Peking, Kesey practices what has come to be known as gonzo journalism. The reporter, often intoxicated, fails to get the story but delivers instead a stylishly bizarre account that mocks conventional journalism. Kesey may have quit the literary major leagues but can still be an exciting writer, whether describing a rampaging billy goat or a fatal car wreck in Egypt: "It's two flimsy Fiat taxis just like ours, amalgamated head on, like two foil gum wrappers wadded together. No cops; no ambulances; no crowd of rubberneckers; just the first of those skinny street jackals sniffing the drippings."

The title Demon Box refers to Physicist James Clerk Maxwell's colorful explanation of perpetual motion. In the book Maxwell's model is used by a California therapy guru, fictionalized as Dr. Klaus Woofner, to explain human behavior. Kesey the globe trotter and spiritual joker seems entranced. But Kesey the planter of corn and milker of cows presents Woofner as another psycho-alchemist trying to turn a metaphor into a 14-karat gimmick. The point is made admiringly by one skilled fancifier to another. After all, the charlatan, like the artist, exploits illusion and a sense of mystery. Behind the plow or on the road, this has always been a risky business. The author's father once blamed his son's troubles on the need to "unscrew the unscrutable." He might have asked, How're you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen satori?