Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
You are so right, Ed.  In my transcription, I put a coat on the old
roat.  The laborious work I did was archaically non-computerized and
pure old school eyeballing rather than cut-and-paste. It was actually
closer to pure plagarism, except of course for the error which is not
even an embellishment considering the Rexrothian inspiration.  BTW,
thanks for expounding on that, Steve S.   

So, Ed, forgive my clumsy keyboard work and please send my apology to
the Maysville Order of the Sky Grifter Benevolence Society.

Another persona following you around like a shadow all these years has
been the real life Little Enis, the All-American Left-Handed
Upside-down Guitar Player.  He was the subject for your creative
non-fiction story, “Little Enis: An Ode on the Intimidations of
Mortality” from the collection, Famous People I Have Known. And,
although I haven't read it, I understand that you also wrote about him
in another Playboy magazine piece.

You have let it be known that Little Enis was also the inspiration for
Monk McHorning, the 15-year-old hero of your novel, The Natural Man. 
Of course, for anyone who has read this delightful novel, Monk is an
oversized, hormone-infested, adolescent with no propensity for guitar
picking.  However, the gamy, ever-so-subtle coarseness is intact. 
Newsweek called this book, “the funniest novel since A Confederacy of
Dunces,” which is high praise indeed.  

It is almost as though you latch onto certain characters that strike
you as fascinating, and then channel the personality as the basis for
your humor.  Author Tom Robbins told me that he hates to read anything
about his own works––such as Another Roadside Attraction or Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues––for fear of becoming self-conscious about his
own writing process.  For this same reason, perhaps it’s not safe to
ask you to analyze your own McCleverhanded wit .  (As an aside, even
though Robbins has lived his whole adult life in western Washington, he
grew up in Virginia.  Consequently, his wit also has a very Southern
flavoring).

However, since you've spent several years on a sequel for The Natural
Man, can you tell us a bit about how Monk will revisit us in the near
future?  Will he be full grown and repentant or eternally young,
despite the encroachments of adulthood?  I have a suspicion that Harry
will also return as our viewpoint character.  Also, for some reason, I
can envision Prof. Rexroth staging a pranksterish uprising in the local
nursing home!

Tell us more!   
  

    
The kind of humor I like best is the sort that turns in on itself and
incorporates its own internal irony, like in "Finch's Song," when
Finch's brother Claude  discovers that Finch has left his little
pittance of an estate to Mrs. Mooney:  "He left it all to that old
two-dollar flat-back, the little pansy!" Claude complains bitterly. 
"And never done jack-shit for his own goddamn loved ones!"

Then too, I'm awfully fond of the cleverly elegant crudities of the
Little Enis-Monk McHorning variety, such as Monk's favorite greeting,
"Take yer hat and jacket off!" or his favorite farewell, "If you see
Kay, tell her I love her!" or Enis's line, "I shoulda been a preacher. 
I like fried chicken and pussy as much as anybody!"

Harry Eastep, as a sexagenerian retired academic, is indeed the POV
character in The Return of the Son of Needmore, the sequel to Natural
Man that I've been working on, seemingly, forever; and Oodles Ockerman
has an appropriately meaty role in the story too.  Monk McHorning,
unfortunately, got himself killed off in Vietnam in Natural Man, but I
may resurrect him, briefly, via flashback.  Also, Monk and Oodles
produced a child--the boy who shows up in the final scene of NM--, who
has grown up to be a televangelist on local cable tv in Monroe,
Louisiana, preaching a doctrine he calls "Momentarianism" (its credo is
"The Business is Is-ness!") and who will have a touch of the old
Rexroatian loquacity.

(I owe the Momentarianism idea, by the way, to my friend Merce Levine,
who gave it to me free of charge.  Thanks a mil, Moice!)

And now I'm going out for a walk.  As Monk would say, "It's nice out. 
I think I'll leave it out."
  

    
ps:  You can listen to all of Enis's marvelous recorded songs (not
many, unfortunately), and see some wonderful photos of him too, by
going to this terrific website:  <www.garyscountry.com>

And while you're at it, take a gander at my website,
<www.edmcclanahan.com>  
  

    
"...and if a man goes out in his back yard and stands there with the
raindrops breaking cold against his face and the ozone rushing to his head
so fast it makes his teeth taste brassy and the storm rattling around him
like two skeletons humping on a tin roof using a soup can for a condom..."

        http://www.edmcclanahan.com/images/writings/02wrtingsmain.jpg
  

    
It delights me more than I can say, Steve, that you managed to unearth
that old lost chestnut!  I still remember laughing and laughing when I
wrote that in Missoula, thirty-five years ago.  
  

    
It's classic!
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Ed, out of curiosity, how were you able to have two of the most noted
illustrators of the counterculture, Ralph Steadman (Fear & Loathing in
Las Vegas) and R. Crumb (of underground Comix fame) to create covers
for
two of your books?  

Steadman, for those who haven’t seen it, designed the cover of O the
Clear Moment; Crumb did the “Dew Drop Inn” cover of Famous People I
Have
Known.
  

    
The Crumb cover was strictly my idea.  I'd loved his work from the
first time I'd seen his "Joe Blow" strip in the first (I think) issue
of Zap Comix, and it just seemed to me a natural marriage, Crumb's
style with all that '50s and '60s stuff, hippies and honkytonks, Yogurt
and Wheatgerm and Little Enis and the Tabletoppers and Kesey and the
Pranksters and Jimmy Sacca and the Hilltoppers and so forth.  

I didn't know Crumb at all, of course, but there'd been a piece about
him in Stewart Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly not long before the
question of a cover for Famous People came up, and, Stewart being an
old friend, I called him and asked for contact info.  Next thing I
knew, I was talking to Robert on the phone.  He asked me to send him
the book and to suggest a passage that might be good for a cover
illustration.  I did, and suggested a line about "all the Dew Drop Inns
in the Land of Doo-Wah-Diddie" in the story called "Drowning in the
Land of Sky-Blue Waters," and lo, he went for it, and produced the
perfect cover!

Jack Shoemaker, my publisher at Counterpoint, chose a wonderful
painting ("Hinky Dinky Parley Voo") by the great Paul Cadmus for my
next book, A Congress of Wonders. Then when we followed that up with My
Vita, I You Will, which features an old fictional story of mine that
takes its title, "The Little-Known Bird of the Inner Eye," from a
painting by the masterful Pacific Northwest painter Morris Graves, the
cover choice was pretty obvious.

Suddenly, without ever having thought about it or planned it, I had a
little tradition going:  great artists on every McClanacover!

I became friends with Ralph Steadman, the British illustrator whose
madcap genius illuminated so much of Hunter Thompson's writing over
many years, through my Lexington friend and neighbor Joe Petro III, a
printmaker who has worked with Ralph, Hunter, Kurt Vonnegut, and many
other writers and artists.  The day I found out that Counterpoint would
be publishing O the Clear Moment, I called Joe to tell him my good
news, and he said, "Well, that means you'll need a great artist to do
the cover."  That night he emailed Ralph in England, and the very next
morning, mirabile dictu, there on my computer screen was the cover
design for my new book!
         

    
  

    
<My Vita, I You Will, which features an old fictional story of mine
that takes its title, "The Little-Known Bird of the Inner Eye," from a
painting by the masterful Pacific Northwest painter Morris Graves>

Thanks, Ed.  The one collection of yours I didn't have is My Vita, If
You Will.  I just ordered it especially for the exegesis of the Dead's
"New Speedway Boogie."  

And now, considering that I reside in the magic Skagit Valley home of
those esteemed "Northwest School" artists––Richard Gilke, Guy Anderson,
and Morris Graves––I'm even more excited about getting the last piece
of the McClanacollection.  
  

    
My favorite moment from the Ed McClanahan Prankster Reunion and
Barbecue in Eugene three months ago was when you and Chuck said goodbye
to Geneva, who is Ken’s and Chuck’s 92-year-old mother. 

At the beginning of the party, when her granddaughter Sunshine
introduced her to me, I told Geneva what a pleasure it was to meet her,
and that I had just written a book about her son’s fine works of
literature.  She leaned into her cane and more-or-less whispered:
“Well, just don’t let those books lead you astray.”  

Then I watched as she hobbled over to the ample buffet featuring a
delectable BBQ brisque.  She turned to the Mackey’s, our wonderful
hosts, and told them: “Too bad you didn’t make enough food.”

A few hours later, when the Captain Kentucky party was winding down, I
heard Sunshine in the other room telling Mountain Girl that she needed
to take Grandma home.  Geneva walked up next to Chuck.  Warmly, Chuck
wrapped his fingers over the top of his mother’s hand as it rested on
her cane.  I pointed to Chuck and asked Geneva, “so, do you know this
fellow?”

She looked up at me with the same twinkling eyes she shared with
Chuck.  “Yep, I borned him.”  Keeping on task, she added:  “When they
were dedicating that nice statue for Ken downtown, a lady from my
church stopped and asked me what I had to do with these people.  I
pointed to the big bronze and told her: ‘that guy there.  Well, I
borned him’.”

It wasn’t hard to see how Geneva gave birth to two Pranksters. 

Then Ed came up and took Geneva’s free hand in his.  Here were two men
in their seventies bidding the warmest of farewells to this woman in
her nineties.  To me, it seemed that Ed was treating this moment as
though this might well be their last goodbye.  For Chuck there was the
radiance of a genuine, uncluttered love for his mom.  You could still
see the boy in both of them, the Prankster twinkle, but in their
goodbye, there was something of the sublime––the best of that Sixties
spirit, even.

Ed, as you, Chuck and Geneva were saying your goodbyes, there was no
mistaking either the genuine warmth, or the generations––Geneva was the
mother, you and Chuck were the boys, even though you two were both
born in the 1930s.  

Today there is not much talk of a generation gap, and of course, in
that moment, you were very much honoring Geneva, but have you ever
given much thought to how the youthful “merriness” of the Pranksters
became a model for the so-called youth generation that followed so
intrepidly, with its colorful modes of social rebellion?  

Do you think the “Prankster” approach affected how the subsequent
“boomer generation” engaged adulthood, or even tried to obliterate that
notion of coming of age, when there used to be such a clear cut
delineation between the adults and the kids?
     
Also, can you touch a bit on your relationship with Geneva?
  

    

Geneva and I have been friends for a very long time.    

In the early summer of 1964, my first wife, Kit, and I bought a house
in LaHonda, a couple of miles down the road from Ken and Faye's place. 
We weren't, at the time, thinking of ourselves as Keseyphiles at all
(certainly not as Pranksters; they hadn't even been invented yet).  
Rather, it was just that our friends the Keseys had bought a house in
this nice little community within striking distance of Stanford (where,
by then, I was teaching in the writing program), and our kids and
theirs were peers and play-pals; so we found a place we liked, bought
it cheap (19 grand, a house with an acre of redwoods!), and moved in.  

Later that summer came the bus trip, and the advent of the so-called
Merry Pranksters; by the fall of '64, the Kesey compound was swarming
with 'em.  But Prankster personnel kept making unauthorized long
distance phone calls, so after a while Ken took the phone out, leaving
Kit and me with the only working Prankster-friendly phone in the
neighborhood.

That fall (or perhaps in the winter of '65) Ken and the Pranksters
hosted a little party--a "Happening," as we called such occasions at
the time.  Kenneth Anger, the underground filmmaker turned up, and they
showed some of the  film footage from the bus trip, and, up in the
woods behind the house, ritually "sacrificed" a chicken ... and then
cooked it over an open fire, and ate it.   

It was, I would eventually see in hindsight, the very first Acid Test,
and there were many more to come.  My phone would soon be getting get
quite a workout.  

In April of '65, the San Mateo County cops raided Ken's place, and
busted him and about a dozen Pranksters.  The next morning, after
they'd bonded out of jail, I went up the road to ask whether there was
anything I could do to help.

"Yeah, there is," said Ken, in what was perhaps the only craven,
cowardly moment of his life, before or after.  "You could call my mom."

I was horrified!  Me? I squawked in dismay.  But ... but ... I don't
even know your mom!

"Well, no," he conceded, "but she knows you."

And then, at last, I got it:  I was on the Stanford faculty,
remember--albeit but a lowly lecturer--, and the rascal had  been
holding me up as one example to persuade his mom that he knew a few
respectable people!

Greater love hath no man than that he agree to call his friend's mom
to tell her that her son's been busted.  

Happily, it turned out that I didn't have to be the bearer of that
terrible news, because the story had already made the papers.  I only
needed to assure her that Ken was okay--to which she said something
like, "Oh, I know he's okay.  You couldn't hurt that nitwit if you hit
him with a stick."

But Mrs. Kesey, I protested lamely, Ken's a genius!  We can't expect
him to go by the ordinary rules! 

"Hunh!" she snorted.  "I know he's a genius, I just wish he was a
little smarter!"

Well, that's Geneva for you.  We became friends that very day, more
than forty years ago, and we've been friends ever since.  She's very,
very dear to me.

The Prankster generation are by and large children of the Depression
and World War II, and they learned the great lessons of those times
about family and community and mutual dependency at the feet of people
like Geneva.  By the time the Baby Boomers became teeny-boppers and
came west for the Summer of Love or whatever, they would find out all
too soon that groups like the Pranksters, the back-to-the-land folks,
the communalists, et al, were already fast becoming, paradoxically, the
avatars of those old values.    

And if that last paragraph surprises you, Scott, well, to tell the
truth I wasn't expecting it myself.  I think I found it under a rock,
down in Generation Gap.
  

    

Wonderful story, Ed. (And I could hear the two of you, as I was
cracking up!). 

 
  

    
What a story.  What a woman!
  

    <scribbled by stevebj Tue 17 Feb 09 03:19>
  

    
>>> The Prankster generation are by and large children of the
Depression and World War II, and they learned the great lessons of
those times about family and community and mutual dependency at the
feet of people like Geneva.  By the time the Baby Boomers became
teeny-boppers and came west for the Summer of Love or whatever, they
would find out all too soon that groups like the Pranksters, the
back-to-the-land folks, the communalists, et al, were already fast
becoming, paradoxically, the avatars of those old values. <<<

This is a very important point, Ed. Thank you for emphasizing it. A
divide between the Boomers and the generation born between the Boomers
and their parents -- those folks born in the late 1930s and early
1940s -- indeed existed. As young children, you knew real deprivation.
We often forget how much immediate post-war Britain and its poverty
shaped the lives and perceptions of the members of the Beatles, just as
the late Depression and early war years shaped the lives of Kesey, you
and others your age. For Boomers, however, the Depression and the war
were history. Like a lot of Boomers, I was raised by parents who knew
the Depression and war first-hand (both were born in the 1920s), and
one of their goals as parents was to do all they could to protect me
and my sister from living through what they had lived through. I've
never known true deprivation in my life (knock on wood). Ken's (and
John's and Ringo's, etc.) generation couldn't be protected because it
was all still going on when they were young. I think it had a ton to do
with who you all became
when you were adults -- Pranksters and Beatles, yes, but grounded in
meaningful ways in an earlier set of values that were sometimes
scorned, or at least misunderstood, by Boomers.  
  

    
<becoming, paradoxically, the avatars of those old values>

Ed is absolutely onto something here.  Most of is Kentucky stories, in
addition to their delightful comic caricatures, are rooted firmly in a
sense of the larger community, just after WWII.  

The chapter I wrote on Divine Right's Trip talks at length about how
Gurney Norman treated the return of Divine Right to his long-haired,
hillbilly uncle's little farm in Kentucky where, at the edge of a
hideous strip mine, he was going to raise rabbits and worms and slowly
rebuild the soil. I call Divine Right's trip an example of
radical-traditionalism, in its earthy, hippie example of
change-the-world hopefulness.  In rural Kentucky, it was the sense of
community that was the most palpable part of D.R. finding his righteous
path, his home.  He wasn't embracing "the establishment" but, a
Kentucky hill culture where all the marvels of "progress" had largely
passed them by.

Likewise, a key to understanding the first two works of Ken Kesey, is
to appreciate a similar streak of rugged individualism.  Cuckoo's Nest
is, of course, a story about finding our humanity in the face of a
looming, modern authoritarianism.  Sometimes a Great Notion, explores
our westward expansion at the furthest edge of the continent where the
notion of battling the wilderness has become more inward than external.
So, both profound books were very much about coping with shifting
values wrought by modernization.

Ken Kesey, was a large spirited man. Geneva, it should be mentioned,
is not much more than five feet tall, but without a doubt, every bit
the spirited match for her son. 
  

    
>"Hunh!" she snorted.  "I know he's a genius, I just wish he was a
>little smarter!"

I love that! And I love this lady just for her voice.

I've known more people than I could count on 1 hand that I could have
said the same thing about.

<slipped by Scott, with some wonderful insights> 

I've got to go back and re-read DRT, with my older (and hopefully,
more insightful eyes).
  

    
In one of your earlier stories you mention taking part in the beatnik
scene at your college in Ohio in the mid-’50s.  From an historical
viewpoint, one of the most valuable aspects of the Merry Pranksters
stems from how they can help us understand, culturally, the segue from
that earlier underground social movement of the Beats to the explosion
of the counterculture in the last half of the 1960’s.  

The disaffections and sense of post-WWII social malaise of the Beats
is said to have vectored forward through American culture.   Books such
as On the Road, Dharma Bums and the poem “Howl” created a
philosophical template upon which the young participants of the
flourishing counterculture could model a “bohemian” belief system.  In
connecting the dots, the Pranksters in the early-middle years of the
1960’s, with those new and powerful hallucinogens at their disposal,
have been referred to as proto-hippies.  Kesey certainly recognized
that he straddled worlds between the Beats and the hippies.  He has
also been called America’s first hippie.

Ed, you have had a fascinating (participant’s) vantage point on these
significant subcultural shifts.  “Another Great Moment in Sports” from
O the Clear Moment successfully rendered what a former creative writing
teacher of mine referred to as allowing the personal serve as the
universal.  Of all your stories in this collection, this is the one
that’s really sticking to my ribs, so to speak.  Mostly, I think that’s
because, during the anti-war protest, you’ve captured the chaos,
breadth and nuances of the counterculture, as well as some very funny
contradictions.   

What is your take on the preponderance of simplistic characterizations
of this era, and, as we wind down with this great discussion of you
and your body of work, what do you see as the most valuable things you
have taken with you from the Beat and hippie epochs? 

What, briefly, do you think is the best of that legacy, and the worst?
  

    
Not to derail the discussion, but I'd like to thank Ed and Scott for a
great conversation. While the virtual spotlight is turning to a new
discussion today, you are all welcome to stick around for as long as
you like. 
  

    
It's been terrific... that's a wonderful question in <144> Scott. Bot
the questions and responses have been great all around.  
  

    
Boy, talk about Pranksteresque serendipity!  I'm beginning this
posting at about 4pm on Tuesday, 2/17/09, and I've just walked in the
door from an inspiring protest march, and here, awaiting me, is a
question from Scott regarding my story "Another Great Moment in
Sports," which is about ... a protest march!  Old Man Synchronicity
strikes again!

This very day in Frankfort, Kentucky, the capital of this beautiful,
beloved, benighted state, several activist/environmentalist
organizations, spearheaded by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, joined
forces for the annual "I Love Mountains Day" march on the capitol
building.  About a thousand demonstrators, my doddering septuagenarian
self among them, marched up the hill (sometimes I wonder whether I love
mountains so goddamn much after all) and gathered on the grand
stairway before this grand old building, in which so much horrid,
unconscionable exploitation of our fellow Kentuckians has transpired
over so many years, to protest what might be the most horrid form of
exploitation yet, the hideous practice of mountaintop-removal coal
mining.

There were three splendid anti-MTR speeches this afternoon:  the first
by Louisville's rising young firebrand congressman John Yarmuth; the
second a real barn-burner by musician/schoolteacher Randy Wilson
(featuring a fine found-poem recitation of a catalog of the names of
lost Kentucky mountain streams); the third a gorgeously written,
gorgeously delivered speech by (be still my heart!) the oh-so-gorgeous
Ashley Judd!

(Ashley, a native of Eastern Kentucky, declared herself a "proud
hillbilly" and the mountain country her "spiritual home."  She was just
smashing in every respect, and she even got us some coverage, at long
last, in the local media; the Lexington Herald-Leader--which ignored
Wendell's magnificent speech at last year's rally--called Ashley's
speech "passionate" and "eloquent."  Maybe Wendell just ain't gorgeous
enough; he probably just needs to get himself a new hairdresser.)

And coming up in DC on March 2nd is a civil-disobedience protest at
the Capitol Power Plant, a coal-fired facility that is a heavy-duty
polluter in the District, and produces not electric power but steam to
warm the substantial asses of our complacent congress.  Wendell Berry
and Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams will be the point-persons
(Pointsters?) in this demonstration in DC; 10,00 people are expected to
be present.  Some of us will get arrested, and I fervently hope to be
among that happy number.

So what did I bring to the present from the Pranksters and the
counterculture and the 60s?  Or, as per David Ganz's earlier posting,
"Did it matter?  Does it now?"  Yeah, it did, and it still does--which
is why we're still bothering to do it.  Resistance to greed and
injustice is always relevant.


Meanwhile, feller WELLers, it has somehow become no longer yesterday
but today, Wednesday 2/17/09, and time for me to say adieu.  

This has been a lot of work--more than I bargained for, to tell the
truth--but absolutely worth every minute of it.  I love telling these
stories, and I've had a grand time telling them, as I'm sure you
must've noticed.  

My dad's definition of a good haircut was that it oughtn't to look
like you'd had a haircut at all, and that's the way it is with stories:
 one strives mightily to make the telling seem effortless, relaxed,
conversational, natural--itself all a big fat artifice.  "Effortless,"
in short, requires a lot of effort. 

Scott's fine, thoughtful  questions have kept me hoppin', although I
don't hop with great agility nowadays; but having a good audience is an
absolute essential, and you guys have been a dandy.  Those of you
who've participated have helped me immensely; just knowing you were out
there, listening to what I said and taking my measure as I said it,
was heartening and enlivening and inspiring, and I thank you for it. 
It's been a blast.  

xoxo, Ed
  

    

A blast and then some from this end, Ed! As an ardent fan of your
writing for damn near 40 (gulp!) years, I've been honored to have you
visit our weird li'l neighborhood. Hope you'll come back sometime.
  

    
Ed, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on Inkwell.vue.  The
care and consideration, not to mention the time and energy you devoted
to engaging those of us on The Well, has been greatly appreciated.

I am delighted that we were able to shine a light on your impressive
body of work, and to gain such great insights on your rather amazing
network of fellow writers and friends.  I'm sure I speak for everyone
who participated in thanking you for the opportunity to let us witness,
up close (and in such a personable fashion), your wonderful wit and
writing.

Let us know when your sequel--The Return of the Son of Needmore--hits
the shelves and we would be honored to have you back!

Best of luck in all your endeavors, Ed!  
  

    
What an interesting, enjoyable discussion this has been, Ed. Thank
you.