W hat do we expect from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test now, more than half a century after it was first published? Back in 1968 the story of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their attempts to spread the gospel of LSD was not exactly breaking news – it had not, as the saying goes, been torn from the screaming headlines of today – but Tom Wolfe’s book expanded the reach of the Kesey project to an audience who’d not enjoyed the mixed blessings of encountering the Pranksters or sampling their unusually potent wares. It’s possible that even some of those who could answer the question posed by Hendrix’s first album – “Are you experienced?” – in the affirmative weren’t aware of the backstory. Today we read the book partly because the broad outline of that story is now well known.
In the process it has changed somewhat, has become a story of meetings, tangled bequests and legacies. Allen Ginsberg put it succinctly in the Village Voice: “Neal Cassady drove Jack Kerouac to Mexico in a prophetic automobile to see the physical body of America, the same Denver Cassady that one decade later drove Ken Kesey’s Kosmos-patterned school bus on a Kafka-circus tour over the roads of the awakening nation.” This struck Wolfe as “a marvellous fact” – and it was, it is.
There are two strands of descent here: from Kerouac and the Beats to Kesey and the Pranksters, and from Kerouac to Wolfe. Kesey said that On the Road had “opened up the doors to us just the same way drugs did”. Kerouac’s initially warm response to the “unusually good” prose of Kesey’s first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) was upgraded to the ecstatic announcement that he was “A GREAT NEW AMERICAN NOVELIST!” In 1964 Kesey and the bus – with Cassady at the wheel – were headed to New York for the World’s Fair and the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey and Kerouac would meet for the first time; Cassady would be reunited with the friend who immortalised him in On the Road, one of the greatest novels ever devoted to the subject of friendship.
For his part, Wolfe, in interviews and in his introduction to The New Journalism anthology was constantly harking back to the great social novels of Balzac and Dickens, but the unrestrained energy and overloaded abandon of his prose is inconceivable without the immediate and liberating precedent of Kerouac. So everyone involved – both the participants and the writer chronicling its unfolding – has some kind of skin in the game.
Wolfe sets it up beautifully: “Here was Kerouac and here was Kesey and here was Cassady in between them, once the mercury for Kerouac and the whole Beat Generation and now the mercury for Kesey and the whole – what? – something wilder and weirder out on the road.” And then he records what turned into an event momentous only in its refusal to live up to the narrative expectations it had engendered. Kerouac hadn’t just used Cassady in On the Road; in the long wait for its publication and its aftermath, he’d used and boozed himself up too. While the bus’s famous destination plate read “Furthur”, Kerouac had taken a befuddled pledge to stay put, brooding within himself on a success so huge it assumed the quality of doom. Kerouac and Cassady would never meet again.
The Pranksters drove on, up to Millbrook, to another meeting of considerable genealogical significance, this time with acid guru Timothy Leary. It’s not just the Pranksters who had recovered their buoyancy as they approached Millbrook, Wolfe too is bubbling over with stylistic verve, expecting “the Learyites to come rolling out of the house like the survivors of the siege of Khartoum. Instead…” So, after another non-encounter, they move on again.
Kesey is the leader, holding together this psychedelic anabasis by a principled willingness to let things fall apart. The first thing he’d let slip was his ambition as a writer. He’d abandoned that in the name of something bigger, more far-reaching, but was unwilling to renounce a craving for celebrity and attention. That is the opinion of his old writer-friend from Stanford, Larry McMurtry, who viewed the acid-fuelled escapade as “a lot of foolishness”. McMurtry has a very minor part in Acid Test, hardly more than a cameo, but his recollections form a helpful complement to Wolfe’s account. When the Pranksters show up at his house in Texas it’s like “the breeze of the future” blowing into his quiet street.
This brings out something in Wolfe’s book that’s easy to take for granted. The acid aesthetic has been around for a long time now; tattered it may be, but with technological and musical modifications, the paradigm still holds good, at Burning Man and trance festivals the world over. Wolfe is insistent that almost every component of psychedelic style be traced back to its incubation with Kesey, the Pranksters, and their original Acid Tests.
It’s a reasonable claim, but what Wolfe does in addition is to enable us to see what has since become a familiar enacted style from the point of a view of a people, a culture, a society, who had never seen anything like it. This applies both to the participants and those who looked on askance, who were so thoroughly unprepared that they… let it happen. They had no choice, partly because LSD was so new and unknown a commodity it wasn’t illegal. Few things are more difficult to achieve in narrative history than to frame events in such a way that they seem to be happening without the benefit of hindsight, as the pages are being turned. And there is another convergence at work; this account of how the new phenomenon of LSD came into existence was being written by someone who “had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that [he] was doing things no one had ever done before in journalism”. We can actually tie this knot a little tighter. Aldous Huxley claimed that psychedelics enabled us to perceive things afresh, to see “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence”. In his introduction to The New Journalism, Wolfe quotes John Bayley’s “yearning for an age when writers had Pushkin’s sense of ‘looking at things afresh’, as if for the first time”. “In the mid-1960s,” Wolfe continues, “that was exactly the feeling I had.”
In short pieces – long, short pieces – Wolfe’s eyes and ears had proved highly receptive to the unfolding instant, but that attentiveness, he became convinced, had to be used as something other than training for the more demanding summit of a novel. No, the real ambition was to bring all the techniques and freedoms of the novel – “whole scenes, extended dialogue, point-of-view, and interior monologue” – to bear on the ostensibly inferior or apprentice work on the lower slopes of reportage. Having been assigned a story, the writer should throw the book at it! Acid Test was not Wolfe’s first book but it was his first opportunity to road test his abilities and approach over the extended length of a book. A key part of this endeavour was to put the reader “into the eye sockets, as it were, of the people in the story”, something that could be achieved only by sustained immersion in the lives of people one was writing about.
Now, there are different kinds of immersion. The book begins relatively late in the day, after Kesey had sneaked back into the US from Mexico in October 1966 and ended up in jail for possession of marijuana. Wolfe didn’t know much about him but arranged a prison visit. They meet and Wolfe starts “scribbling like mad, in shorthand, in the notebook”. The interview lasts just ten minutes and then we move seamlessly back to events from a time before Wolfe was on hand to witness them. So even when he stressed the importance of reporting, he had to go further, to develop the novelistic skill of imaginative immersion to vicariously re-create things he hadn’t been around to witness. Robert Stone, whose trajectory was in some ways the opposite of Kesey’s, from Prankster to career novelist, was there when the bus set out for New York; as Stone later wrote in his memoir, Prime Green, Wolfe “did not see the bus back then at all but is extremely accurate with the facts”.
Wolfe’s ability to re-create what happened does not depend on first-person proximity. He is an invisible presence, an absence visible by virtue of the high-dosage signature of his prose. This enabled him to achieve a kind of virtuosic reliability that was necessarily independent of fact-checking. William Gedney’s black and white photos of the summer of love show wasted teenagers in the squalid crash pads of Haight-Ashbury. They offer a documentary truth, verified by Wolfe’s description of the “lunger heads… slithering up and down the store fronts on Haight Street”. What Gedney was not able to show was what these wasted youths might be seeing once the visionary wonders of LSD took hold. Everyone on the bus, Wolfe writes, is “on to something here, or into something, but no one is going to put it into words for you”. But Wolfe does just that, plunging us into the inexpressible experience of a trip while simultaneously showing how the deranged tripper looks from the outside.
Crucially, Kesey and Cassady, even when decked out like a pair of Day-Glo weirdos, also appeared to have one foot in this outside world. More exactly, they had shoulders the straight world could respect. Kesey takes off his buckskin shirt – what could be more frontier-traditional? – to reveal “huge latissimi dorsi muscles making his upper back fan out like manta-ray wings”. (How easily simile-spiked empirical observation takes on the quality of hallucination!)
Kesey’s idea of breaking barriers was to ignore them: the barriers between keeping LSD as a serious aid to mind-expansion and delirious mass re-creation, between spiritual revolution and hedonistic silliness, between activism and solipsism. Just a few years before the Pranksters set off for New York in their bus, the Freedom Riders had undertaken perilous bus journeys with a definite political aim in mind. By the late-1960s the wild and boundary-free craziness of the Acid Tests had become chaotically and corrosively entwined with radical politics. It was no surprise, by the time a brittle Joan Didion took a look around San Francisco, that she viewed with scepticism the less-than-great notion that a five-year-old girl taking acid might be a leap forward in the project of human enlightenment. Across the Atlantic in London, meanwhile, a character in Tessa Hadley’s novel Free Love falls out of sympathy with “idiots” who think that “if all the governments dropped acid at the same time everything would be OK”.
Out of this chaotic mix of hazard, hope, and disillusion (bummer!), the promise (and fun) of LSD lived on. Adapting itself to new styles of music, it survived Manson and Altamont, thrived, and, uniquely in the world of illegal drugs, remained exempt from the ruthless imperatives of maximal profit. Wolfe’s book contains all of these shimmering potentialities. He revels in the ludicrousness of it, both the fall from the Huxleyan ideal and the wonder that lies in the wake of that fall. Satire and celebration are stitched into each other.
Kesey is the star of his own show but the reader is drawn back to Cassady. He is like the guy who picks up an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, without whom the movie would have flopped. Muscular like Kesey and no less committed to Prankster silliness, he remains strangely resistant to Wolfe’s rapt scrutiny. While Kesey was as enthralled by his “careening, corner-squealing commentary on the cosmos” as Kerouac had once been, McMurtry found “little about [Cassady] to like”. A man who had achieved nothing, “all he had was his vitality”. Well, those heroically pointless, amphetamine-fuelled feats of driving were achievements of a sort but they took a fearsome toll. Wolfe was struck by the way that “there are two Cassadys. One minute Cassady looks 58 and crazy – speed! – and the next, 28 and peaceful – acid”. Robert Stone extends the actuarial range still further, noting that by the time they get to New York in 1964 Cassady “looked about 70 years old” – an age he never got close to attaining.
Cassady is tragic hero – tragic, supporting hero – and fool. Kesey became a fugitive, fleeing from the swirl of a heady revolution he’d helped foment. He advocated going beyond acid, whatever that meant, but the net effect of his efforts was a massive shot in the arm for recreational drugs generally. A lot of the psychedelic evangelists ended up just getting high on whatever drugs came to hand but amphetamine was a drug with no serious claims to mind-expansion, and speed was Cassady’s drug. He died aged 41, a character in other people’s books, alone in Mexico.
It seems harsh to leave him like that so let’s go back to another meeting, when Cassady is among the Pranksters welcoming the Angels to Kesey’s lair in La Honda. That’s the physical meeting, but the literary convergence here is between Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson, and it’s a slightly lopsided one. Thompson was there, dropped acid, and re-created the scene in his 1967 book Hell’s Angels; Wolfe also wrote it up, based on taped notes taken by Thompson who is, throughout, an active spectator in many of the events he documents (ultimately getting stomped for his pains).
Barely featuring in his own book, Wolfe stylistically is, as they say, all over it. Thompson, too, is a ferociously innovative stylist but compared both with Wolfe and what is to come in his later work, his first book is in some ways a brilliantly dutiful piece of reporting. And then, right at the end, he opens up the throttle on a high-speed motorcycle run along the Pacific Coast Highway and takes the reader into a realm of sublime and terrifying transcendence: “the edge”, he calls it, a place that “is still Out there. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.” Thompson’s power will eventually curdle in the wake of the gonzo excesses of various iterations of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Wolfe’s ambitions, inevitably and ironically, will lead back to the hulking Dickensian and Balzacian novels he’d spent years claiming had been displaced by reporting.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the first sustained surge on that road, but an honest appraisal has to concede that the reader grows occasionally impatient and is tempted to skim. This is not inappropriate. LSD trips are inconveniently, and potentially frighteningly, long. Likewise the bus ride – who doesn’t want a bus journey to be over? When the Pranksters first pull up at McMurtry’s place, he finds them “extremely appealing. They were young, they were beautiful, they were fresh, and they were friendly.” Three years later, they “were still beautiful, but they… looked mushed, crushed, smushed, as bedraggled as World War One aviators who had just managed to get their Sopwith Camels safely on the ground.”
The exhausting nature of their travels has a knock-on effect on Wolfe’s exhaustive narrative account. Among all the claims he made in promulgating the aesthetic and work ethics of The New Journalism, he had no truck with the virtues of economy of expression. That’s why some pieces of The New Journalism seemed to Martin Amis to be “as long as Middlemarch”. Kesey may have quit writing but the bus’s long odyssey was underwritten by a sustaining artistic purpose. The money from his earlier literary success was sunk into making a film of the Pranskters’ exploits. Wolfe estimates that 45 hours of footage were shot, much of it “out of focus”, and though Kesey was defeated by the task of wrestling it all into shape, it was a great boon for posterity that this raw treasure survived. Except, even after it was edited down to less than two hours in 2011, it remained borderline unwatchable. I suppose you had, as they say, to be there. Nothing if not readable, Wolfe makes us feel like we were, like we are.
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, is published by Picador US
[See also: Jack Kerouac’s contested legacy]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?