A Memoir of Ken Kesey at Naropa University 1994 by Keith Kumasen Abbott

To get a sense of the vibe of 1994, check out Seth Brigham’s photo rapportage.

Part One

Beats and Other Rebel Angels was the official title, but its underground name was “The Geezer-a-thon”. It was July of 1994 and the seven day tribute to Allen Ginsberg, one of the founders of Naropa, was touted as “a once-in-a-lifetime major literary and cultural event”. To some it felt like it would be the last gathering of the first generation of beat writers. Following these lines of thinking, national and international press easily took the bait and covered the event. But for the Naropa MFA writing students, footing some of the bill, the age of the esteemed and wheezy participants, their health problems and alternately relentless and/or wandering Sixties focus leant the event its subterranean title. 

A case in point for “The Geezer-a-thon” moniker was Gregory Corso’s reading. He was modestly entertaining but his health confirmed the students’ take on the event. Operating on a two-week supply of methadone negotiated with his maintenance minders in New York, Corso also suffered from bronchitis. White and subdued he gamely related the whys and wherefores of his works, the famous people, places and events feeding into his eminence as a rebel. However, from his present physical state, his outlaw rep only could be viewed as a retroactive legend. And this Retread Renaissance reached an inadvertent epitome on the event’s first night during Ken Kesey’s play Twister: A Ritual Reality. However, Kesey promoted this new Independence Day event as the Rebel’s Angels’ rejuvenated connection to the younger generation. This is what interested me – his unadvertised theme. 

As bad luck would have it, the newly purchased and updated edition of Ken Kesey’s fabled bus, Further II, loaded up with nineteen of his Nouveau Merry Pranksters, broke down while en route from Oregon to Colorado. And besides presenting the Prankster play, Kesey was to lead a prose workshop.

Student interest was high, his workshop over-enrolled. Word was that he left the bus and the theatrical troupe at a repair shop and was going it alone. With Kesey delayed, I was tapped to sub for him on Monday, July 4th, the first day of classes. 

The room was packed and there weren’t enough chairs. I was waiting for the students to settle down, when I saw through the hallway’s double doors a vintage Cadillac pull up, a brilliant white convertible with red leather seats. A Summer Writing Program staffer escorted Kesey directly to me. The staffer introduced me and said something about my memoir of Richard Brautigan Downstream from Trout Fishing in America. Kesey only nodded, remarked in passing that he knew my writing, and went straight to the head of the classroom. 

In ruddy good health and energetic, Kesey carried a large brightly colored cloth-covered brook trout. I don’t remember if the zipper was near the dorsal fin or on its side, but for a briefcase this was quite a striking fashion accessory. Its homemade look reminded me of the funky trout memorabilia that admirers showered on Brautigan.

Kesey took control of the classroom, talking fast and confidently. As he unpacked his trout briefcase, he gave a comic synopsis of the trip from Oregon, the bus breakdown, their tow truck driver and the obligatory consultation with the auto mechanics. Reaching into his trout bag, he rummaged around the vitamin bottles until he found a prescription vial and a banana. He announced, holding the items up, that the two medications had come about by chance. 

It was during a phone call to Ginsberg that Kesey described some recent physical annoyances. Allen diagnosed a diabetic condition, much like his own, and advised Kesey what to do — and here Kesey imitated Allen’s “advice voice” in a funny, but generous, way. Small meals throughout the day are mandatory and you must keep to a strict schedule. 

To prove that he was obedient to Allen’s instructions, Kesey peeled the banana and silently ate it in small precise bites. This bit of shtick got some laughs and jump started the workshop.

Then Kesey tapped a pill out of the vial into his hand and glanced around for water. Quick to sense his opening, the Naropa staffer supplied him with the regulation delivery of bottled water, along with the standard warning to all summer faculty and students about the Boulder high dry mountain air and danger of altitude sickness. The staffer’s reminder included the information that coffee, tea and booze were not correctives for a minimum daily intake of at least sixteen to twenty ounces of water; in fact they compounded any issues. Kesey listened attentively, politely thanked the staffer and washed down his medicine. 

I scanned his audience and noted that except for a few walk-ons, all had been my students. I grasped that there was some ambivalence, perhaps even wariness and boredom, in their postures and faces.  This was not acid our Rebel Angel was taking – these were Kaiser meds.

Kesey turned to the subject of writing, starting with his roots as a beginning writer. Kesey’s gratitude for the advantages of peer groups and lineage were blended in with some cogent and apt insights into the writing life. Most comments were contained in his Paris Review interview but were, I knew, undoubtedly fresh for these students. He claimed that from his Stanford days the writers in his workshop – listing Larry McMurty, Wendall Berry, Robert Stone, and included Judith Rascoe, a screenwriter who I didn’t recognize at first. They all still exchanged manuscripts and critiques. That camaraderie alone was reason enough for workshops to supply help and support. 

Kesey’s discourse included the mention of a collaborative novel, Caverns. In 1990 he and his twelve students at a University of Oregon workshop had written and published a novel under the name of O.U. Levon (which stood for Novel University of Oregon backwards). But the final manuscript encountered serious problems. With surprisingly adroit twists and turns of suspense this story spiraled around how foxy Kesey had thwarted a covert evangelical member from derailing the novel with last minute insertions of unedited religious messages. The benefits, though, of such workshop collaborations were touted as communal revelations via practicable ego-loss. Kesey hoped to duplicate this process at Naropa. His first assignment, therefore, asked the writers to get outside their own egos; to write a short autobiography, then shift into third person. 

Kesey’s enthusiastic and confident delivery produced the desired vocal assent for the experiment – but mostly from the new student walk-ons. Dubious grad students suspected this collaboration was not workable. Enrollment was over twenty, not the twelve student maximum of a MFA workshop. This project had only three days left, roughly nine hours classroom time. Kesey’s University of Oregon Caverns class covered a semester. Brainstorming, writing and editing had been conducted off-campus with Kesey. The Ginsberg Tribute week events were packed in ass to elbow – from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Students had little time for writing, let alone editorial meetings. No-one audibly protested; but skepticism was evident. 

Having proposed the collaboration for the workshop, Kesey shifted the focus to his own personal mission. In previous discussions with Ginsberg, both seniors had come to the conclusion that Kesey’s aspiring writers had lost their connection with the youth and it had been the youth of the day who had carried both Kesey and Ginsberg to fame. So, not only was Kesey going to teach writing and collaborate with students, this workshop was ground zero for Ginsberg and Kesey to resurrect the movement that had helped them at the beginning of their careers. This was the start of the “climb back out of the basement” – addressing their intent of not only reaching but enlisting the younger generation. 

Kesey then began to persuade Naropa students to sign on as Beat peers. “The job is to write for the MTV audience. Vision has to come from the writers. Theories mean nothing compared to the thing. Return to the campfire. Go get the little fuckers. Writing is about magic,” he announced.

His delivery had the tang of vintage Kesey raps, his brilliant shifts from the mundane to more metaphysical missions, which in the past had enchanted audiences. However, MTV started in 1981, when the Naropa students present at the workshop had been between the ages of six and ten years old.  An age when Sesame Street provided more televised background tracks to their lives than MTV.  Kesey’s core idea was that these perceived MTV souls were lost and, according to him, that was “their own fault”. 

It was now evident that the Beats and Other Rebel Angels week at Naropa had somehow been tagged (backstage) as a vehicle for the rejuvenation of the ashy guardians. Kesey set about enticing the students to join in the reclamation project because, “This is our job as writers.” And being no slouch at word slinging, his enthusiasm somewhat was catching.

By this point Kesey was preaching directly to the students as if they needed to convert themselves to The Vision. This seemed a curious tactic – if it was tactical – as it was a goal that was undermining previous enthusiasm for collaboration. The contradiction was not lost on most. These students didn’t see themselves as subjects or test cases for someone else’s recovery mission. As participants interested in artistic adventures, the response for the initial curriculum was definitely a yes and most were there for the writing workshop. But as that agenda had changed, unease could be sensed in the room.

Kesey continued to speak on writing. Every now and then hesitations crept into his raps. His head dipped down and he broke eye contact, as if editing himself. 

At first none of these verbal double takes created any gaffes. Such delays seemed like rusty synapses in Kesey’s performance skills or perhaps merely a search for the right word. After all, his non-stop driving from Oregon must have tired him. But when a student asked about the ways of setting a scene, Kesey slipped up. 

Otherwise sharp in a discussion about setting, Kesey somehow ended up analyzing a Hemingway technique for entering an emotionally charged scene. He said Hemingway described everything in a scene but one action, object or character which the reader knew was present, hence crucial. Kesey selected an example from a seduction scene where everything around this particular character – pine needles, trees and vistas – was included in the setting. “Everything….but,” Kesey said, a long pause followed, a sideways hitch of his head and an eye flicker double take passed over his face, “……everything but her bosoms.”

Before Kesey finished his sentence, the long pause had suggested that he was considering and rejecting other words. My first reaction was sympathetic. “Oh, he’s been down on his farm too long with no contact with younger people.” But then the workshop’s silence erased that thought. 

It had not been lost on the women present that Kesey had only mentioned one female writer, Judith Rascoe, when listing members of his Stanford workshop mates. Thereafter he did not mention other female writers in his discussion of writers to emulate. 

Bosoms? This was the precise moment when his workshop began to flounder.

Diving into the silence Kesey immediately segued into his duty to help his theatrical troupe get set up for Twister that night. He apologized for arriving late and leaving early. He ended with this sleight of hand, an act that served as an excellent stage exit, designed to leave the audience wanting more. But for some audience members this routine was an obvious distraction for his bosoms gaffe. And for others, the experience served as an affirmation that this workshop was going to be a duplicate of many other first weekend Ginsberg events: for passive audiences only. The overall mood wasn’t one of reassurance. 

Most grad students were already well aware of the inner circle of male camaraderie around Ginsberg. Students passed around the legend of Ginsberg’s poetry anthology from a past summer. In that collection Sappho was the first poet and the last woman. She didn’t put up much of a fight with her very short poems, published on a single page. 

A first-time observer of Naropa remarked to me how little the Beat artists noticed their diminishing circle of fans, hence the underground title for the Rebel Angels. “The Geezer-a-thon.”

Part Two