Ken Kesey and the Acid Tests

“Kesey had written two acclaimed novels by thirty. Then he stopped writing novels and started organizing events at which thousands of people took LSD. Stevens documents this as a tragedy of a particular American kind.”

Ken Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962 and Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964. Both were praised; the first became a cultural touchstone. He was thirty years old and had produced, by most measures, a body of work that justified a literary career of sustained attention to craft.

Instead, he organized the Acid Tests.

Kesey had encountered LSD in 1960 as a paid volunteer in a government-sponsored drug study at the Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, the same program, funded ultimately by MK-Ultra money, that was supposed to be testing substances for potential military use. What Kesey experienced was, in his account, the most important perceptual event of his life. He obtained LSD through the same channels and began distributing it to the people around him, initially the circle that became the Merry Pranksters.

The Acid Tests were multimedia events at which LSD was freely available and the goal was collective dissolution of ordinary consciousness boundaries. The largest, the Trips Festival of January 1966 in San Francisco, drew ten thousand people. Tom Wolfe documented the Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Jay Stevens, in Storming Heaven, documents them with less romance: as the moment when the clinical tradition that Osmond and Huxley had built over thirteen years was overwhelmed by the spectacle.

Stevens's assessment is not that Kesey was wrong about LSD's significance. It is that the Acid Tests were structurally incompatible with what LSD actually required: preparation, intention, experienced guidance, a supportive setting, a framework for integrating what happened. A sound stage with strobe lights and two thousand strangers was precisely the worst possible version of all these things.

Kesey continued writing, eventually. He moved to a farm in Oregon. He lived to 2001. He never explained, to Stevens's or anyone's complete satisfaction, why he stopped writing novels after two excellent ones and spent a decade on parties that helped destroy the clinical program that might have justified everything.

Sources

• Stevens, Storming Heaven (1987)
• Perry, Tom. On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey (1990)
• Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)