Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

The movie of "Hair": not good.  Saw it a year or so ago.

Tom Stoppard deals with the Prague Spring and lots of other great stuff in
his play "Rock'n'Roll," which I've seen twice in the last year.  Amazing.

I don't know how anyone could have made a movie from Chief Broom's POV.
  

    
I was thinking the same thing. 

"One Flew Under the Cuckoo's Nest," the film, is a very fine film.
Forman's direction is strong. The part of Kesey's story that we see in
the film is compelling. The novel is better than the film in some ways
but it's a different animal.

It'd be impossible to make a true-to-the-book version of "Moby Dick,"
too. 
  

    
"I don't know how anyone could have made a movie from Chief Broom's
POV."

I can picture it in my head.  It might be a bit like watching
waterfalls flow upstream, but if a director could pull it off, it would
be awesome.  I don't even think in the movie the Chief would have to
be a first person narrator, I just think something essential was lost
when this core character of the novel was not a core focal point in the
movie.  And, again, Cuckoo's Nest is still a very good movie, but not
transcendent or culture-changing like the novel.

Forman's best movie was "Amadeus," IMHO. 
  

    
Hey Scott, I spent the entire morning writing a lengthy, carefully
wrought answer to your question in post #80, and then, five minutes
ago, lost the fucking thing in cyber-space!  This system is as fragile
as ... as ... oh never mind!

Okay, here's a much shorter answer than the one I was planning:

Ken did a great deal of really fine writing after the first two books,
 despite the enormous distractions of the path(s) he had chosen to
follow in his life.  Some of the stories in Demon Box are just
splendid, I think--particularly "The Day After Superman Died" (about
Neal), "Now We Know How Many Holes It Takes to Fill the Albert Hall"
(about the Beatles), and "Abdul & Ebenezer" (about his farm).  

(For the record, I never really liked the title story, not because of
the writing, but because I'd personally observed Fritz Perls [Dr. Klaus
Woofner in the story] in action at one of his Gestalt Therapy sessions
at Essalen, and found him--and the experience--thoroughly repellent.)

Sailor Song was a monumental effort to write another Big Novel which
ultimately failed, I guess, but which incorporates some very fine
extended passages of descriptive writing.  "Tricker the Squirel," his
children's story, is terrific, and his performance readings of it
(although I admit I saw a few too many of 'em) were real show-stoppers.
 

Then too, there was ... the Bus!  "My best work," Ken insisted, and I
think in some ways he was right.  When I think of the bus I'm always
reminded of the Gulley Jimson character, the painter, in Joyce Cary's
masterpiece, The Horse's Mouth, and of Gulley's own masterpiece, the
immense mural of all those gigantic feet.

Here's a passing thought, something to chew on:  Suppose Ken had
published One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, then gone on to involve
himself in all these other projects, got famous via Wolfe's book, the
Cuckoo's Nest film, etc., etc., and THEN, along about, say, 1995 or so,
had published (gasp!) Sometimes a Great Notion!  It woulda stood the
literary world on its ear, and Ken would have lived out his  remaining
years collecting prizes and honors beyond number. It's all just a
matter of other people's expectations, really.  Or, as Ken himself
might've put it, "It's all EarthShoes, folks, it's all just
EarthShoes."

And now I'm going to go ahead and post this, before I lose the goddamn
thing again.  I'll (happily) move on to Scott's question about ME in
my next posting, cross m'heart.              



  
  

    
Imagining the reaction to Notion being published in 1995 hit me like a
Zen koan.  

The novel is both postmodern in its fragmentation, yet a cohesive
grand narrative at the same time.  I think your assessment of the
reaction it would have garnered in the '90s is not only absolutely
correct, but a brilliant way to recontextualize the importance of
Sometimes a Great Notion as a work of superb American literature. 
  

    
Thinking about it, the Kesey writing that may have affected me the
most, and that I still think about more often than any of this other
writing, is "Burying Jed Kesey," his essay that originally appeared in
CoEvolution Quarterly (or was it Whole Earth Review by that time? I
forget). It's stunning and deeply moving. 

Agree about "Adbul and Ebenezer" in "Demon Box." Mighty fine piece. 
  

    
You know, Ed, this is a fine old system, and it's not really that fragile.  
You just have to know how to use it, like a hacksaw or a car.

For one, try composing in another program, like Word.  (It's best if your 
"smart quotes" are turned off, but if you don't know what that is, never 
mind.)  Then copy and paste into the Well window.  Wah-lah -- no more 
words mysteriously disappearing into cyberspace.
  

    
LET'S HEAR IT FOR KEN KESEY'S LONG-AWAITED MASTERPIECE!  35 YEARS IN
THE MAKING! AVAILABLE AT LAST AT FINE BOOKSELLERS EVERYWHERE!

Now, moving right along, let's get back to Scott's question re my
teachers, influences, etc.  My first creative writing teacher,
Professor Walter Havighurst at Miami (Ohio) University, nursed me and
my tiny little dab of talent along for years.  (He was also, by
remarkable coincidence, Babbs's teacher.  I was there 1952-55, and
Babbs came a year or so later, so we didn't meet till California, ca.
1964, after Babbs had finished his hitch in the marines.)  At Stanford
in the fall of '55, Richard Scowcroft, that lovely man, was my teacher,
and in the winter quarter of '56, came the great Malcolm Cowley, who
would later play such an important role in Kesey's career.  After that
came Bob Hazel and Hollis Summers at UK, and then, after I'd actually
become a creative writing teacher myself at Oregon State, came a year
in the Stanford program with Mr. Stegner.  After that, I was on my own.

Influences?  Lemme see:  In addition to the ones I think I've already
mentioned (Erskine Caldwell and Faulkner and Twain and Flannery
O'Connor, that whole fast crowd), there were P.G. Wodehouse, whose
antic turns of phrase I fell in love with as a kid, and find myself
emulating to this very day; Salinger--no boy wannbe-writer of my
generation could've resisted that influence--; Henry Miller, whose
exuberant, celebratory sexuality was a wondrous revelation to me;
wind-in-the-hair lyrical prose writers like Dylan Thomas and Brendan
Behan; the really good novelists who were my immediate elders, like
Mailer and Vance Bourjailly and Calder Willingham and R.V. Cassill (my
character Harry Eastep, in Natural Man, took his given name from a
character in Cassill's novel Clem Anderson) and Kesey's Oregon teacher
J.B. Hall; and the ones who were my much-envied peers and were already
turning out great fiction like Barth's The End of The Road and Roth's
Goodbye, Columbus and Updike's The Centaur ... oh my, so many, so many.

A lot of writers don't like to show their work before it's a wrap, but
I ain't one of them.  I read my work aloud to my friends whenever I
can hold 'em down--to Gurney, to my dear California friend Kent
Crockett (who's heard me read, mostly on the phone, literally every
word I've written for the last twenty-five or thirty years), to my
friend and sharp-eyed cohort Tom Marksbury, who never misses ANYthing
...

A couple of years ago, when I was putting together O the Clear Moment,
I was teaching a little three-week seminar in the Gaines Humanities
program at UK, a sort of honors program for very, very sharp
undergrads.  I had a stack of stories I was considering for the book,
and this was during the heyday of that "Deal or No Deal" tv show; so I
read them the stories aloud, one in each meeting of the class, and
after each story, I said, "Okay, deal or no deal?"  

They turned down three of my babies!  And they were right!         
  

    
Sorry, Steve S., if you were here looking over my shoulder, maybe I
could get it, but I'm afraid it's too late for me.  At my time of life,
I'd rather sit here in cyber-darkness and curse Stewart Brand (an old
friend, actually; I speak in jest) than light a single candle.

Steve B, you're absolutely right about that piece about putting Jed to
rest; that's Kesey at his magnificent best.  Thanks for reminding me. 



 
  

    
It should be noted that "Burying Jed Kesey" was written by Ken as a
letter to his friends Ed McClanahan, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Bob
Stone, and Gurney Norman.  Here it is courtesy of a Google search and
the Summer 1984 CoEvolution Quarterly:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2002_Spring/ai_84866430/pg_1?ta
g=content;col1
  

    
Well, you know Ed, we could have that O'Round and beer and I could
show you a few Well tricks. <wink>

<slipped by Scott>
  

    
That letter about Jed is utterly heartbreaking, and Pranksterishly 
synchronistic, because the editor of a little magazine just asked me to 
write a piece about death, so I wrote about the death of my father five 
years ago in a hospital in Jersey City.  Ken's piece, of course, makes me 
a little ashamed of my own, but we do what we do.  Thanks for that 
pointer.
  

    
I remember reading that when it first was in the Quarterly. Made me
cry then and again now as I revisited. I buried my oldest daughter from
something similiar. God, it hurts to bury your children. Thank you for
sharing again.
  

    
Thank you for your post, <sundog>.  I'm in the midst of planning my
mom's memorial gathering to be held on the first day of Spring, so
Ken's eulogy letter was especially poignant for me, too. 
  

    
This is from my introduction to Spit 7:

"The expression 'Sparks fly upward' was a natural favorite of Kesey's,
suggesting as it does the soaring of the liberated spirit.  He used it
frequently both in private conversation and in addressing his larger
public audience; it's even engraved on his headstone.  But--as Ken
would certainly have known--the line comes from the Book of Job (not
ordinarily a source of sunny optimism), and it reads in its entirety,
'Man is born into trouble, as sparks fly upward.'

"For all his ebullient disposition, Kesey knew more about trouble than
most of us could bear--his and Faye's son Jed, twenty-one, was killed
in a particularly ugly vehicular accident in 1984--and that terrible
knowledge weighed heavily on him, and deepened him, I think,
immeasurably.  A few years ago, in a question-and-answer session,
someone asked him, rather disdainfully, whether he 'really believed'
that acid offered the only path to enlightenment.

"'Oh no,' he answered, 'grief will do it for you.  But if I had a
choice, I'd take acid every time.'

"Sparks fly upward."
  

    
Writing is, fundamentally, a lonely pursuit, yet, rather impressively,
you and your peers spread over four time zones have managed to sustain
a network of support and inspiration.  Despite our meanderings away
from your own stories, Ed, I'm very much enjoying this discovery of how
supportive your core community of fellow authors has been for one
another over the span of a half-century.   

Cuckoo's Nest is named one of the top 100 American novels of all time,
yet when Ken chooses to channel his profound grief over the tragic
loss of his son, he doesn't write in an omniscient voice to an abstract
public.  Rather, he directs the finest words he can muster to his
closest peers, to this group of writers who embraced the world of words
at the same time he did. You are a fortunate man, Ed, to have such an
impressive posse of fellow authors whom you've been able to count on as
both peers and friends.  Obviously, Ken felt the same way.  
  

    

Returning squarely, (or, we hope in not too square a fashion) to the
work at hand, clearly, Ed McClanahan's forté is comic literature.  It's
quite distinct from Kesey's or Gurney Norman's style, and more in the
vein of John Kennedy Toole's only novel, the posthumously published
Confederacy of Dunces, or Flannery O'Connors' Wise Blood, both
delightfully funny works of fine literature.

Ed, in your Creative Writing courses, I'm sure you've discussed the
notion of killing off your darlings, those characters or passages that
we writers grow deeply attached to, yet which our critical
readers/teachers suggest don't work quite as well as we think.

Getting down to the specifics of your prose, if I have one complaint
about O the Clear Moment, it's that you've omitted (but hopefully not
offed) one of your regulars.  As background for those reading this, I'm
talking about this character which you've variously described as:

Reverend P. Cosmo Rexcoat, Doctor of Natural Theosophy, Chiropractic
Science, and Colonic Irrigation, a sky-grifter of the old school 
setting up shop as Colonel Rexcoat and His Amazing Two-Nosed Child
Prodigy, Little Luther the Appalachian Frog Boy
in
"Juanita and the Frog Prince"

or

Professor Philander Cosmo Rexcoat, B.S., M.S., and Pee Aitch Dee,
direct from the Instituto del Experimento Scientifico of Nuevo Laredo,
Mexico, internationally acclaimed explorer, globe-trotter, author,
archaeologist, zoologist, ichthyologist, herpetologist, lepidopterist,
philatelist, cosmologist, natural theosophist, minister of the Gospel,
and licensed practitioner of colonic irrigation
in
"Congress of Wonders"

or

P. Cosmo Rexroat, Doctor of Natural Theosophy, Chiropractic Science,
and Colonic Irrigation, distinguished graduate of the Universidad del
Medico Diagnostic Clinic in the City of Limestone, diagnosing and
treating ailments of the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, spine,
joints, digestive system, nervous system, and feet, with female
complaints a specialty, not to say a calling,
in
"Finch's Song: A School Bus Tragedy"

and in
The Natural Man
there is a description of a framed certificate with impressive
gold-foil seal, attesting that "Philander C. Rexroat had completed with
distinction the course of study leading to the Doctorate in Sexual
Behavior at the Instituto de la Psicologia Humana of Nuevo Laredo,
Mexico

So whether Reverend/Doctor/Professor Philander Cosmo Rexroat/Rexcoat,
Sex. D. is temporarily gathering dust during this Clear Moment or,
heaven help us, he's a dead darling, it's clear to see that this
character is a recurring source of comic enjoyment for you as the
author.  (We can also see a recurring theme of expertise in colonic
irrigation, so please assure us that this is not an anal fixation on
your part).    

There is a fine line in humorous writing between cardboard caricature
and three-dimensional comic exaggerations.  Rexroat/Rexcoat––and don't
think we don't notice your authorial sleight of hand, Mr.
Clammerham––always plays a secondary character, and serves as artifice
around which your central story will pivot.  Yet, as stereotyped as
Rev.Dr.Prof.Rex is, you seem always to show your readers the odor of
flim-flam behind Oz's, err I mean Rex's curtain of wizardry.  Would you
say that this is the main technique you've employed to render him as
three dimensional?  

Perhaps as another way of looking at this, are you letting the reader
in on the secret of Rex's hardscrabble song & dance to heighten the
absurdity and madcap tension between him and your main characters that
serve as the proverbial carnival "marks" here?

Finally, is there something quintessentially Southern or naïve or
pre-TV that you are trying to capture with Rex?  And is there any other
inspiration/attachment you'd like to share with us about this
delightfully funny character?
 
  

    
>  "'Oh no,' he answered, 'grief will do it for you.  But if I had a
 choice, I'd take acid every time.'
 


Boy, do I ever hear that.
  

    

Wow.
  

    

BTW, my friends here in Portland say there's a stage play of "Notion"?
  

    

Yeah, opened up there last year. I don't know if it's been staged
anywhere else thus far.
  

    
Not to quibble, Scott, but unless I've overlooked a typo somewhere
(which is certainly a possibility), I don't believe I ever called him
"Rexcoat."  I intended the name to remind my reader, in a glancing sort
of way, of the Beats' favorite literary critic (and sometime poet)
Kenneth Rexroth, who was (at least on his weekly radio show on KPFA)
something of a windy old bird himself, with a lot of florid language at
his disposal.

In any case, old Rexroat is my favorite--and certainly my most
useful--character.  He turns up first, of course, in The Natural Man,
as the purveyor of the "sex education" film I called "Dads and
Mothers."  That whole episode in the novel is based on a real movie
called "Mom and Dad"--featuring an on-stage, in-person "lecture" by a
guy who called himself "Elliot Forbes, Noted Hygiene Commentator"--,
which played the old Lyric movie theater in Brooksville, Kentucky, my
boyhood hometown, in 1948.   My fictional description of the
show--right down to the "Registered Nurse" who "must be in attendance
at all times, due to the graphic nature of this presentation," etc.--
is really pretty accurate, as singularly goofy as it seems.

So, several years later, when I was first undertaking to write my
carnival sideshow story "The Congress of Wonders," I was stymied for a
while by the incontrovertible fact that I didn't know enough about the
private lives of carnies to feel comfortable writing about it; my only
experience with that world was as a mark, not as an insider.  

Then it hit me:  Rexroat!

"He run a tent show in a carnival," says Wanda Pearl Ratliff, the
"Registered  Nurse" in Natural Man, when young Harry Eastep asks her
how Rexroat got his start in the sexology business.  "Had him a
morphadike."  

Hey, I did "know" a carnie after all!

Immediately after I finished that story, I began working on "Juanita
and the Frog Prince," a story about a character named Luther "Two-Nose"
Jukes, who, for obvious reasons, takes up with a traveling freak show
for a time.  (And yes, in Brooksville in my boyhood there really was a
local personage with two noses, and he really did have just such a
career in show biz.)  Here, of course, was another role made to order
for the good doctor.  At first, he's a "sky grifter" (preacher) who
puts Luther on exhibit to draw the marks to his tent revivals; later,
ever the impresario, Rexroat joins a carnival, with "The Two-Nosed Frog
Boy" as his star attraction.

Both of these are long stories, and by this time I realized I had a
book in the works, to be completed by a novella, the longest of the
three, about a school bus driver named Finch Fronk, of which I had
written a draft during my Stegner Fellowship year, and which I'd been
rewriting sporadically ever since.  (Oh yeah, I'd once had a job
driving a school bus, too--worst job ever, with the possible exception
of teaching freshman comp.)  And Rexroat was already in it!  The bogus
physician, with his "electrosonic diagnosis machine" and his colonic
irrigation treatment and even his "Prayers for My Good Health" booklet
(another carryover from Natural Man), had made a very brief appearance
in Finch's story way back in that very first draft.  So all I had to do
was enlarge and highlight his bit-part ever so slightly
and--voila!--the old scallywag became (like Garcia's voice in "Grateful
Dead I Have Known") the stickum that held the whole works together. 
Behold, A Congress of Wonders!

What I love about Rexroat, above any other character in my fiction, is
just that he's full of wind, and language, and some sort of mad,
over-arching intelligence; he's a shaman, a magician, a sorcerer, he's
Fellini and Kesey and Cassady and the Wizard of Oz rolled up in one,
he's purely, utterly cynical, yet he has the kindly gravitas and wisdom
to advise a troubled boy that "You must never presume upon the cosmos,
my lad.  That wouldn't be ... good policy."    

I do apologize, folks, for going on at such interminable length here
(although I could say a great deal more if I thought anyone would sit
still for it).  Obviously, the old fraud is a great favorite of mine. 
I'll just add that in the sequel to Natural Man I've been working on
for years, I'm hoping I've just lately found a way for Rexroat to make
a surprise guest appearance.

In fact, I'm counting on it.
  

    
Excellent, Ed.

> the Beats' favorite literary critic (and sometime poet)
 Kenneth Rexroth

Well, a very beautiful poet, actually, though nearly forgotten now.  And
as a critic, he had a complicated relationship with the Beats.  When they
got to town, they converged at his salon at Page and Divisadero, just
blocks from where I'm writing this, and oh boy, I have imagined that salon
many dozens of times, and miraculously, the venerable shop beneath it,
Jack's Record Cellar, is still there, or was several months ago.  But
later, when the whole beatnik extravaganza took off, and poor Kerouac was
crowned King Daddy-O of the Beats and suddenly the Beats were the only
show in town, as if Rexroth hadn't been running his salon the whole time,
Rexroth turned against them, and started needling them in print.  Which
gave rise, in Dharma Bums, to Kerouac's most amusing character name:  
Reinhold Cacoethes (which means something like "bad habit" or "itch.")

In an interview I did with Philip Whalen in 1993, he told me this:

I met [Rexroth] for the first time at the Six Gallery reading I think. He
would have these Friday evenings at his house where you could, if you
called him up ahead of time and asked him could you come over, he would
say yes or not, depending if he was having a Friday evening or not.  That
was always every interesting, 'cause there were young poets there, and
older ones, and visiting luminaries from different professions, arts and
whatnot, so it was very interesting to be there.  People said it was
boring to go there, because Kenneth always talked all the time, but I
thought Kenneth was a marvelous talker and I enjoyed listening to him, so
I didn't mind whether anybody else famous was there or not, 'cause he was
very entertaining I thought.  Everybody thought he was a big bore, except
me.  I liked his style, a sort of Major Hoople style--great.
  

    
(And Ed, let me say, it has been such a pleasure to have your voice here, 
I am really going to miss you when this conversation is over.)
  

    
Thank you so much, Steve.  That's a lovely compliment, one I'll
treasure.

I love Whalen's Major Hoople analogy. The old Major used to interject
something like "hah-kopf!" into his puffed-up perorations, just like
Rexroth, belching and snorting and farting away as he did on KPFA.
Geez, you could almost hear his stomach growling!  But he was
wonderfully erudite; a brilliant man.  I still have a vinyl 12-inch of
him sonorously declaiming (at The Cellar, with some pretty questionable
"jazz" blowing behind it, and Ferlinghetti tripping delightfully along
on the other side) his "Dirge for Dylan Thomas": 

"You Killed him!  You killed him! 
In your god damned Brooks Brothers suit, 
You son of a bitch!"

I can't even play it anymore, but I wouldn't take anything for it.