To Jump Into The River An' Drown

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on my personal Substack. For those of you who are not aware, I’ve had recent work published in the Metropolitan Review, including my first ever published short story (frequently compared to the works of Flannery O’Connor) and a review of Alexander Sorondo’s Cubafruit. Check those out if you’re so inclined. Now, for my thoughts on a great novel, one that is criminally underdiscussed: Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion

Imagine the stream of consciousness and narratological innovations of Faulkner and Woolf further developed, widened, folded in on itself, but the end result is not some inscrutable late modernist tome but something more accessible, more akin to the great 19th century realist novel, without its narratological presumptions; that is, with prose satisfying both to romantically inclined maximalist as well as to the desires of the “craft” evangelists for the narrator to get out of the way, if less capitulating to their desire for concision.1 Prose that, for all its extravagance, doesn’t draw attention to itself so much as the world wrapped it encapsulates, a world I was happy to spend the better part of a month inhabiting. Allow me to make my case for the old novel everyone on Substack should be reading.2

I’ll admit my biases here. He’s one of those figures I feel a similar spirit to. Maybe it’s the west coast individualism, the psychedelics, the proximity to major countercultural movements without fully being part of either3, or the Faulkner obsession, but both his writing and his mythology do more for me than Kerouac or Burroughs ever did. Without ruining this notion by digging too deeply into his biography, he’s the dead writer I can most see myself having been pals with if I was born just a few decades earlier.

For a novel over 600 pages, and over 700 in the first edition, the plot is fairly minimal. I won’t spoil it here past the basic premise. The Stampers are a gyppo logging clan with a house at the end of a long expanding river going on several generations. The mostly now sidelined patriarch, Henry Stamper, started the whole operation as a boy to support his mother and siblings after his father had settled them in Oregon and years later, took off. Through indomitable will, the family motto, “Never give an inch,” Henry managed to tame the land around him to create a family logging business, one that is often at odds with the rest of the logging town they live in, Wakonda Auga. Through his first marriage, Henry bore the golden child, Hank Stamper, the strong, rugged, charismatic golden child whom I couldn’t visualize as anyone other than Paul Newman even before finding out there was a 1970 film adaptation starring and directed by Paul Newman. Henry’s second marriage was to a much younger woman named Myra, whom he had coaxed out of New York City with his burly charm, the romantic ideal of a pastoral life in an idyllic Northwest. Henry and Myra have a son named Leland, a scrawny bookish lad who never quite fits in with his more virile logging family, and finds himself wanting to escape. He gets this wish in a roundabout way when Myra has an affair with a teenaged Hank, and shortly after he leaves for the military, takes Leland back to the East Coast.

In the present day, a strike is raging in the town against Wakonda Pacific Lumber. The only thing standing in the way of the workers winning that strike are the Stamper clan, with a historic tendency of scabbing, who stand to make a lot of money on a Wakonda Pacific contract. Henry Stamper, getting too old for the rough life of logging with a bad arm and bad leg primarily leaves his operation to be run by Hank Stamper and his good natured nephew, Joe Ben. Needing some more help, and wanting to keep it in the family, they send a letter to Leland, currently a student at Yale. His mother Myra had committed suicide recently, which has amplified his resentment towards Hank. A certain line in the letter sets him off: “You should be big enough now.” This sets off Leland on a quest of hazily conceived revenge, which takes a more concrete form when he meets Hank’s beautiful and dissatisfied wife, Vivian.

When we meet Leland in the present day, he is something of a beatnik archetype; a student of the romantic poets (he quotes William Carlos Williams frequently), and neurotic to the core. Against his more romantic yearnings, his psychiatrist tells him he does not believe he will ever go “mad,” that he might be miserable for the rest of his life, but like many in his generation, is too self aware and hip to the motions of insanity for it to ever “truly catch him unawares.” Through a prolonged phone call with his best friend, when he reveals the letter he had gotten from his family, he promises not only some kind of settling of the past so he could “go about his present business” but makes a more implicit threat to the reader: to be the most annoying character in the book.

Because all my beautiful fortifications, built so cunningly and carefully on Maynard’s couch, had been designed in accord with information indicating that the only dangers lay in front, ahead of me–and were fortifications, alas, quite powerless against even the meagerest offensive from the rear. Dig? So that postcard sneaking up as it had from behind, had caught me more unawares than my aborted suicide; the explosion, though certainly a bit of a shocker, was nevertheless immediately comprehensible, you see? A here-and-now holocaust. But this postcard was a kidney kick out of the past, coming by the most devious route. It had jumped all customary postal tracks, of course, to travel through the dark time zones of an oscilloscope and other science-fiction movie background music…speeding through nimbus shadows and along the undulating crystal hand appearing at my mail slot. . .

He stops talking like this as soon as he leaves New York. After he goes home and re-integrates himself into the logging world through the grueling work of chokesetting, much of his neurosis starts to dissipate. After all that daily physical exertion, he even has a difficult time holding onto his grudge against his older brother, the main reason he went there in the first place. It’s as if the more natural way of living starts crushing all that postmodern anxiety and resentment, but never all the way.

Heavily influenced by the Yoknapatawpha stories of William Faulkner, with perhaps the strongest resemblance to As I Lay Dying and Light in August, even more so than Cormac McCarthy’s novels of this time period, Sometimes A Great Notion features a polyphony of different narrators and focalizations. Within a single page, the viewpoint might switch from Hank Stamper in the third person, to Hank Stamper in the first person, to a single line about something happening to someone across town, to a single line about someone else across town, back to Hank Stamper in the first person, and then Leland in the first person, all without anything so much as a page break to indicate the transition. This makes things sort of confusing for the first hundred pages or so, but eventually these characters’ voices become so familiar that there is never a question as to who is speaking. This is because through all of what many a modern editor would consider “bloat”—the pages and pages of gorgeously rendered description of the wet gloomy but vibrant Oregon country, the long scenes describing the minutiae of the Stampers workday felling trees and setting chokers and swapping stories, the power struggle between union officials in the local tavern and their less than brilliant machinations against the Stampers—immerses you to such an extent in the fictional town of Wakonda that you feel like you’re living in it. Hank’s voice is distinctly Hank’s and Leland’s is Leland’s. This synchronicity of these narrations proves itself throughout to be not some avant-garde flourish but a crucial function telling the story of two brothers who on an elementary level cannot understand each other and cannot communicate.

In one particularly memorable scene Hank takes Lee to the local bar, despite both of them knowing the townspeople don’t want them there, and being there will only cause problems for everyone. Hank, determined not to let the townspeople run him out, goes there regardless to make a point to Lee. Though the exact point he’s making is misunderstood to his neurotic and guilt-laden younger brother. They arrive knowing the town bully, Big Newton, is going to come looking for Hank, who made it known to everyone that he was going to be at that bar at that time, and Big Newton was looking to fight him. As Big Newton enters the building, we jump back and forth between Hank and Lee’s inner monologuing without so much as a paragraph break, as none are needed:

Pretty soon ol’ Big he ambles his way over to us. . . . (And even after he had walked over to us and made his challenge, Hank pretended to be surprised by his presence.) “Hey, by gosh! Biggy Newton! What ya say, Big, babes? I didn’t see you come in. . . .” Hell, I even seen every dirty inch of his ninety-board-foot body . . . and we talk it over a little like a couple high school kids. (They greeted each other with sweet smiles and salutations, as friendly as rabies wolves.) “Haven’t seen you in some time, Big; how’s it hanging down Reedsport way?” I wonder . . . does the kid see? (Then, just before the eruption of the actual fight, I noticed Hank glance in my direction.) “Ah, not too bad, Big, how about you? How’s your daddy?” Does he see, I wonder, how Big outweighs me a good thirty or forty pounds? (Hank had just the barest suggestions of a smile on his face, and a look in his green eyes that asked again the question: You want to see how the woods folks deal with their hassles?)

“Yeah, you’re lookin’ right in the pink, Biggy.”

(And it then became quite obvious to me: Hank wanted me to witness first-hand the wrath to come should I continue my advances toward his wife. SEE? I TOLD YOU. RUN WHILE THERE IS TIME! My paranoia was exonerated).

And as Hank continues his conversation with Big…

“You know how ol’ Floyd likes to blow things up; I ain’t keeping you out of work. As a matter of fact I hear they’re jumping up and down for men out at the WP. I hear that there was a bunch of fellows walked out on a strike or something like that, y’know?” Look here, Lee; you think I’m gonna let him run me, I don’t how the fuck big he is? Even he’s my best buddy, you think I care I break his grubby neck? Aint’ he looking to break mine? “So you could get mill work if you was a mind to, Big.” But ain’t they all Look here, Lee looking to break mine? “Course if you’re partial to swinging a pick . . .” So you think I care I scuff a few noses Look here, Lee he can whip me but he can’t run me! while I’m defending my own? Even my best buddy? “You don’t say so, Big. My, but that’s a shame. . . .” I have to keep telling myself And if he don’t run me he don’t ever really whip me, do you see?

Like a classic song that comes on the jukebox eight rounds in, it takes a lot of restraint to not just recite the whole scene in its entirety.

You can’t really write about this book without addressing the politics. Though never publicly adhering to any specific ideology, Ken Kesey has always been symbolic of a certain strain of Californian quasi-libertarianism. It would be hard to imagine such a thing as Burning Man to ever exist without the Merry Pranksters, and no doubt, if the cultural impact of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest didn’t aid the Reagan administration in shuttering psychiatric wards and letting the mentally ill to roam in the streets, it didn’t much hinder it either (though I leave it to others to determine whether life on Skid Row outmatches the cruelty of Nurse Ratchet). The novel doesn’t do as much to either complicate or deepen this legacy as much some would like; it’s not some Randian tale of a capitalist superman prevailing over the tyranny of the proletarian masses, and its deconstruction of the rugged individualist only goes so far. Hank Stamper, for all his golden boy virality, is very often brutish, prejudiced, overbearing, and selfish. He’s purer of heart than Leland, who is predominantly driven by fear, insecurity, and resentment, but also alienating in his machismo. More time could have been spent on the disintegration of his marriage with Vivian, and perhaps more time on Vivian in general, but the core of their silent dysfunction is that she has perfected her place in his world while her world has become all but invisible to him. On second thought, maybe we didn’t need more time spent on that. Though less page space is spent on union officials, they are allowed the same complexity given the Stampers. Floyd Evenwrite’s bumbling scheming, though often played for comedy, comes from a place of genuine worker solidarity and a desire to continue the legacy of his grandfather who was murdered by the National Guard in one the nation’s many massacres on striking workers. In trying to convince Hank to break his contract with Wakonda Pacific, he brings up Hank’s time in Korea. Surely Hank understands the idea of sacrifice to a greater collective, if he can fight for his country, why can't he fight for his hometown? Hank remarks that the town didn’t care about him when he was on the ground bleeding in the tavern a few weeks before. All that is to say the novel is only as anti-populist as is necessary for any kind of capital L-literary novel: from Ulysses to Faust to Crime and Punishment to Jane Eyre, the novel’s emphasis on somewhat alienated outsiders of the prevalent culture carries its own latent anti-populism.

To whom are we morally obliged? Who knows and what does it matter. Ken Kesey avoids the sort of didacticism necessary for a straight answer, be it how we should organize as a community or simply how a man should be, the latter of which this novel is more concerned with than the former. You could be Leland, sensitive, intellectual, attuned, but all that physical weakness turns to resentment that will eventually swallow and subsume every relationship he manages to develop. Better, you could be Hank, hard headed but with a deep love of your family, willing to go toe to toe against nature at its least forgiving just to preserve the tiny piece of the dynasty your father managed to sliver, and when it finally leaves you broken, takes the lives of the very people you love, you will be alone anyways and all those years of fighting the river, the town, the knifing branches of felled timber, yourself, will all be for nought. The rain pours down for half the year, the river expands and takes it cut, and of houses, of families, of civic life, of love, the foundations rot until all bonds are severed making farce of the notions underlying civilization and the tenuous psyches that inhabit it. In either the old world or the new, there is no kind of man built for a happy life.

With the social novel’s scope, the family saga’s sentiment, and the modernist novel’s subjectivity married into one epic, this is about as much an opus as any writer could hope to produce. It’s no wonder then that Kesey moved on from literature to acid tests; he had done all he could in his era’s attempt to alter mass consciousness with the former, returning to it with Sailor Song only after ceding the failure of the latter. Only in Sometimes A Great Notion was his vision most clear: There will be no revolution, there will be no return to tradition, there will be no individual left standing. Only a masterwork could acknowledge this and yet end on a note so shockingly but believably inspiriting.