Skip to main contentBook event habitués have come to expect a dash of circus with their readings since Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's pack began transforming the typical book-plug tour into theater. Yet the clown-writer persona had an important literary antecedent: Ken Kesey. Kesey, who died last week, once said, "When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around"--which is exactly what Kesey's writing did.
Kesey was a modern-day jester, a literal reincarnation of the "merry prankster," who traveled the countryside in a motley-painted school bus (possibly the first art car) using mockery and magic to joust with middle-class standards. Kesey began performing as a boy when he'd accompany his father, a creamery manager, on his short bus tours of Oregon dairy farms. Kesey had taught himself magic, and his act entranced the farm kids who would come to see him in those pre-television days. He was the vaudeville in the milking shed, a strolling Oregon player.
Kesey studied theater at the University of Oregon; though he was eventually drawn to writing, there's a bit of Barnum and greasepaint in most of his work (the Wild West showiness and black-faced Oompa Band in Last Go Round, the town antics of Sailor Song), as there is of the holy fool, the Lord of Misrule (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's McMurphy, Demon Box's Deboree).
His fame as a modern-day jongleur was even appreciated by his detractors. The trial judge for his serious dope rap called him "a tarnished Galahad." Kesey adopted this name before escaping to Mexico to beat prison. Though in danger of arrest if he ever crossed the border, he made frequent horseback jaunts into the U.S. with a guitar slung on his back. If stopped, he told the border patrol he was Singing Jimmy Anglund, a Las Vegas troubadour. (He eventually served 90 days for marijuana possession.)
The last years of Kesey's life became even more theatrical, complete with a successful remounting of Cuckoo on Broadway. He wrote his first play, Twister (a performance-art crash into Oz with Kesey playing "the Wiz"); he launched a "mystery multi-media show" in Britain (ending with a trip in his clown bus to Cornwall on a "Search for Merlin" tour), and then staged the Pythonesque pageant The Knights of the Not So Round Table. He even dreamed up ways to turn Grateful Dead concerts into "a kind of Wagnerian drama."
But the Ken Kesey show really came into its own when Viking Press sent him on a tour to tout his children's books. In bringing his Northwest Indian tales to life, Kesey took over theaters and became a one-man potlatch ceremony with robes, masks and drums. For a reading of the same books with the New York Philharmonic, the old magician appeared in an ill-fitting Oliver Hardy bowler and full tails, a parody of the Philharmonic crowd.
Now the king of the jesters is dead...just when we need him the most.
Ken Kesey
Sept. 17, 1935-Nov. 10, 2001.
"People want to see drama; they want to have a story told to them."
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A memorial for Kesey will be held at noon Wednesday, Nov. 14, at the McDonald Theatre, 1010 Willamette St., Eugene, Ore.
WWeek 2015