The Hippie Narrative The Hippie Narrative A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture SCOTT MACFARLANE McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London Many thanks to the following professors for their superb suggestions as this book evolved: Kay Sands, Frank X. Gaspar, Steve Heller, and Amy Sage Webb. Thanks also to my friend Robert Touchstone for his close read of the final draft. LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA MacFarlane, Scott, ¡955– The hippie narrative : a literary perspective on the counterculture / Scott MacFarlane. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-¡3: 978-0-7864-29¡5-8 (softcover : 50# alkaline paper) ¡. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Counterculture in literature. 3. Bohemianism in literature. 4. Hippies in literature. 5. Postmodernism (Literature)—United States. 6. Nineteen sixties. 7. Nineteen seventies. I. Title. PS374.C68M33 2007 8¡3'.5409355—dc22 200603639¡ British Library cataloguing data are available ©2007 Scott MacFarlane. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Concertgoers at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair at Bethel, New York, ¡969 (Associated Press photograph) Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com For Mom, who took my sister and me to see Jimi and for Brenda, born in the summer of ¡967 Can they—the scholarly historians—reveal what truly happened? No, the writer is now convinced that he alone can snatch that essence from its wild background and isolate it from commotion and myth. And the writer is willing to spill everything. If you care to listen. —Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction Table of Contents Introduction 1 ACT I. NARRATIVE FOREPLAY 1. Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs: “The Vectoring Legacy of the Beats” 9 2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (¡962): Shock Therapy, Surreally 22 3. Sometimes a Great Notion (¡964): A Frontier Duality 37 4. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and The Crying of Lot 49 (¡966): A Chic Cabal 54 5. Trout Fishing in America (¡967): It’s All in the Presentation 65 ACT II. NARRATIVE INTERPLAY 6. Siddhartha (¡922): The Spiritual Quest 85 7. Stranger in a Strange Land (¡96¡): The Ecstasy of Grokking 92 8. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (¡968): Intersubjectivity 104 9. TheArmies of the Night (¡968): Meta-Journalism, Insta-History 129 10. Slaughterhouse-Five (¡969): So It Goes 143 ACT III. NARRATIVE AFTERPLAY 11. Divine Right’s Trip (¡97¡): The Last Whole Earth 161 12. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (¡97¡): Going “Gonzo” 176 13. The Fan Man (¡974): Missed Bliss of the Love Chorus 193 vii viii TABLEOFCONTENTS 14. Another Roadside Attraction (¡97¡) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (¡976): A Shifting Zeitgeist 202 15. An Essay on Slouching, Hippies, and Hitchhiking 217 DENOUEMENT 16. Postmodernism Reconstructed 231 Bibliography 241 Index 247 Introduction The Summer of Love was three years away when Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, drove up to the Texas home of Larry McMurtry in an old, wildly-painted school bus dubbed Furthur. McMurtry, the aspiring author who would write The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, Texasville, and several other novels, couldn’t shield from his suburban neighbors the hippieish antics of Kesey and fellow travelers, the Merry Pranksters. Kesey, not quite thirty-years-old, was riding the success of Cuckoo’s Nest and on his way to New York for the ¡964 World’s Fair and a publication party for his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Unlike McMurtry, who had yet to come into his own as an author, Kesey was already burned out on the novel as a form. Kesey felt “as though if I looked back on this period in 500 years I wouldn’t look at the literature to see what was going on. I’d listen to the rock and roll music, I’d go to the movies, I’d read the comic books” (Perry, Babbs, 59). In ¡959 Kesey had moved from Oregon to study creative writing at Stanford University with Wallace Stegner and fellow students McMurtry, Robert Stone, Wendell Berry, Gurney Norman and others. He lived some- what communally with many of the Pranksters in a row of rundown cot- tages near the Bay Area campus and discovered the mind-altering power of LSD while part of a CIA sponsored lab experiment at a nearby Veter- ans Administration hospital where he would also work and glean writ- ing material for Cuckoo’s Nest. In ¡965 and ’66, after their bus journey, Kesey and the Pranksters helped sponsor several public “acid tests” throughout California where the crowds tripped on the psychedelic drug. LSD and therefore the “tests,” were legal in California until October 6, ¡966, though busts for marijuana, which was not, were prevalent. When Tom Wolfe decided to write The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in ¡968, he said that the project was prompted in part by his idea that the protagonists, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, had all the psycho- logical traits of a new religious group in the making. 1