‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ turns 50

EUGENE, Ore. – It was 50 years ago Wednesday that Ken Kesey’s wildly acclaimed novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” burst onto the published page, but his widow, Faye Kesey McMurtry, knows exactly how long the writing took.

“It took the same length of time that it took for my pregnancy with Zane,” one of Ken and Faye’s three children, said McMurtry, who last year married another acclaimed author and longtime family friend, Larry McMurtry of “Lonesome Dove” fame. “Ken was collating the pages (to send to the publisher) while I was in labor.”

At the time, the young couple had been married for six years and were living in Menlo Park, Calif., the next town north of Palo Alto, where Kesey was participating in a writing project taught by author Wallace Stegner at Stanford University.

While at Stanford, he had volunteered for “a drug experiment” at a nearby Veterans Administration hospital, McMurtry said, “but he also needed a job so he applied to become an orderly there. He worked mainly at night.”

That, of course, became the germ of the idea for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey’s unvarnished yet tender tale of the treatment – both medical and personal – of men in a ward at a mental hospital that he set in Oregon, where he had lived since he was 8 years old.

Kesey wrote a couple of other works while at Stanford, “Zoo” and “End of Autumn,” but he never intended for them to be published, McMurtry said.

Ken Babbs, a lifelong friend of Kesey, has a special recollection of Kesey from the time he began writing the novel.

“He was dynamite,” Babbs said. “He started writing it in 1961, after I’d left for the Marine Corps, but he was always sending me pieces of it.”

Like many who compare the book with the blockbuster film made 13 years later, Babbs criticizes the movie for abandoning the narrator – a gigantic Native American called Chief Bromden – whose personality and omnipresent observations provide the glue that keeps all the characters together from first page to last.

Not that Babbs has ever seen the movie, but he’s heard plenty about it, especially because it won five major Academy Awards.

“I never saw the movie because Ken (Kesey) refused to see it,” Babbs said. “So I said, ‘If you’re not going to, then I won’t either.’ ”

The back jacket of the “50th anniversary edition,” newly published by Viking’s Penguin Group, excerpts a half-dozen of the original 1962 reviews. “Kesey has made his book a roar of protest against middlebrow society’s Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them,” Time magazine trumpeted.

“An extremely impressive first novel,” Saturday Review agreed. “Kesey’s storytelling is so effective, his style so impetuous, his grasp of characters so certain that the reader is swept along …”

Kesey’s other major novel was 1964’s “Sometimes a Great Notion,” the story of the contentious Stamper family in a battle with the loggers that work for the family mill, also set in Oregon, along the Siuslaw River. It, too, became a well-received movie, released in 1971 with an all-star cast, but it received only two Academy Award nominations and won neither.

“I liked it better,” McMurtry said. “I thought it was more mature and complicated.”

Although he did produce other writings and edited a literary journal, Kesey only wrote three more novels in his later years, but two were collaborations with others, including 1994’s “Last Go Round” with Babbs. “Caverns,” published in 1989, was written by Kesey and a University of Oregon creative writing class he taught at the time under the pen name O.U. Levon (UO Novel backwards).

“I guess he got distracted,” McMurtry said of why Kesey didn’t write more after the extraordinary success of his first two.

Those distractions included the trips and travels of the Merry Pranksters, who traveled in the psychedelically decorated bus named Furthur back to New York City in 1964 to celebrate publication of “Sometimes A Great Notion” and visit the New York World’s Fair.

In fact, Kesey, who died in 2001 and also was an accomplished ventriloquist and magician, didn’t consider his literary works to be his greatest achievement, Babbs said.

“He told me the bus – Furthur – was his greatest work,” he said. “He said it was not an illusion like books and movies. It’s what was real.”