When Kerouac Met Kesey

If the 1950s and ’60s belonged to Jack Kerouac, then the ’60s and ’70s belonged to Ken Kesey. Both of them were my clients, and I liked and admired each of them. Although they differed in age, personality, and writing styles, they overlapped as writers of their times, and there was room for both. Each man was an iconoclastic thinker whose writing and philosophy inspired passionate devotion in his readers.
Before I ever met Kesey, Tom Guinzburg, president of Viking Press, called me one day in 1961 to ask whether Kerouac would write a blurb for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey’s first novel. Tom had bought the book, but Viking had not yet published it. Publishers are always looking for well-known writers to offer positive comments for the book jacket or a press release. A blurb can be particularly helpful if readers feel there is a creative relationship between the two writers. I had no idea whether Kerouac would help, because I couldn’t remember his having blurbed before, but I didn’t think he would be offended if I asked. I thought he might even be flattered. So I told Tom to send me the manuscript. I read it before passing it on to Jack, and I knew right then that I wanted to work with Kesey. His novel was a bold, creative story of what happens in a mental institution—a very daring subject for his time. In the end, Jack did not write a blurb; he felt uncomfortable doing it, perhaps not wanting to get into that arena and all that went with it, and I respected that.
I called Guinzburg to tell him I’d like to represent Kesey, who didn’t have an agent, and then got in touch with Ken. He was delighted, and we started working together. In 1963, Ken sent me his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, and soon came to New York for the Broadway opening of the play based on Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Kirk Douglas as McMurphy and Joan Tetzel as Nurse Ratched.
When I met him then, Ken shook my hand with a firm grip. He was 28 and had the piercing blue eyes and warm smile of Paul Newman—but with not as much hair. (Newman would play the lead in the film adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion.) He was five feet 10 and trim, and he had bushy sideburns that were his signature and wore a woolen bill cap. He seemed to be enjoying everything he did.
Kesey had brought his family and friends with him to Manhattan, and I soon realized that despite his many interests and his peripatetic life, family was a major part of who he was. The night before the play opened, we were sitting around in my apartment on Central Park West, which had a great view of the skyline looking south toward the Empire State Building. But the Kesey contingent, after a day visiting the Museum of Natural History and the site of the upcoming World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows in Queens, ignored the view. They were totally absorbed with one another.
I had just finished reading the manuscript of Sometimes a Great Notion and was impressed and moved. I had never been to Oregon, but Kesey’s writing gave me a vivid picture of that part of the country.
“Ken,” I said, “I think you’ve written a novel that will become an American classic!”
“Thanks very much,” he said immediately, “but I don’t think you’re right. The story is too complicated.”
He turned out to be more right than I was. When I read it again, I realized that although the story bears all the markings of an epic American tragedy, the rotating first-person narrative (often blurring one character’s perspective with that of the next) detracted from the premise of the Great American Novel: no single character or situation serves as emblematic of the novel’s period, and there is no clear hero or villain. But the distinctions it explores between the East Coast and the West Coast, nature and civilization, rugged individualism and communitarianism, all seem very much in keeping with the spirit of the times...

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Sterling Lord @'The American Scholar'