Ken Kesey’s Magic Trip

In 1964, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set off on an epic road trip across America with his ‘Merry Band of Pranksters’. They shot footage of the journey, intending to turn the material into a film, but failed to do much with it (partly due to technological ineptitude, partly to being massively high on acid most of the way).

Now acclaimed documentary-makers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have lovingly pieced together the material to make a fascinating documentary about Kesey, his trip, and America at a time when the country was on the brink of huge changes. ‘As a film maker it was really interesting that there was all this footage they’d shot of the bus trip, because then you can dig into it’, says Gibney when I meet up with him to discuss the making of the film. ‘Kesey and the Pranksters had been trying to make a movie out of it for years, and never really succeeding. They had versions of it which were, to the outsider, almost unwatchable. You had to ingest massive amounts of hallucinogenic drugs and be, you know, tripping in order to be able to get it.’

The film opens with images of neat picket fences and Mad Men-esque housewives, and quickly plunges into sex, drugs (Kesey initially discovered LSD through an experimental programme financed by the CIA), and rock ‘n’ roll. Kesey and the Pranksters, says Gibney, ‘struck a blow for personal freedom at a time when you were expected to be a kind of cog in a bigger social machine’. There are clear echoes here of the themes Kesey had already explored in his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is set in a mental hospital and tells the story of one inmate’s rebellion against institutional authority and repression. In both the book and in his own life, Kesey was interested in the tension between the individual and society, and the concept of personal freedom versus convention and tradition.

The book that looms largest over the film, however, is Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel On the Road (1957). As Gibney explains, ‘Kesey decides they’re going to take this journey across the country, and I think in part because he’d read On the Road, he understood those myths, and he was going to take that journey on the open road … he understood the poetry of it all, and he was the one along the way who was trying to make the reality fit the poetry, or to find a poetry in the reality.’ Fiction and real life become even more blurred when Neal Cassady – the basis for the character of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, ‘the holy con-man with the shining mind’ – decides to accompany Kesey on the trip.

Cassady is exactly as Kerouac describes him in the book:  you see him driving hair-raisingly fast, delivering non-stop quasi-philosophical monologues, infuriating and entrancing people in equal measure. It’s as if a character from fiction has suddenly stepped off the page and into the real world. Yet sometimes you have the impression the real Cassady is constantly trying to live up to the semi-mythical role he’d been written into. ‘You can see why he must have been attractive to Kerouac and Ginsberg as this kind of mythic action figure,’ says Gibney, ‘but also he becomes trapped in the fiction that they made for him, and so he starts inhabiting this role that now he has to keep writing, and playing, over and over and over again. The words are always new, but it seems like he keeps ploughing the same ground. All he can do is keep moving forward, keep driving the bus, over and over and over again.’

 

Kerouac himself also has a cameo in the film – he’s seen sulking in a chair at a party, thoroughly unamused by the japes of Pranksters. It’s a gripping moment: the author who at least partly inspired the Pranksters’ trip is so clearly uncomfortable with the legacy he himself had created. ‘He was a completely bitter guy. I mean he dissolved into alcoholism, and I don’t think he really ever reckoned with his own fame,’ says Gibney. ‘There were other books he wrote after On the Road and some of them were good, but he didn’t really know what to do with that fame. He got lost.’

Magic Trip, then, is essential viewing for anyone interested in the Beats, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the era in general. What could have been an incoherent account of a rambling road trip, turns out to be an altogether more interesting (and often very funny) depiction of an innocent, experimental period in American history and a group of people who saw themselves as ‘explorers’ within a great American tradition. And, in the manner of all road trips worth their salt, the Pranksters ultimately discover that the ride itself is more important than their final goal of reaching New York’s World Fair. As Gibney puts it, ‘It was the trip that was the destination. It was not the place, it was the journey’.

Jessica Harrison, Classics Editor
   
Magic Trip is showing in cinemas from 18th November and will be available on DVD and Blu-ray from 28th November.

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Understanding Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is one of the most significant graphic novels in existence; a fact signalled most obviously by its status as the only graphic novel to have won the Pulitzer Prize (in 1992, by special commendation). As if to underline this unprecedented, and as yet unrepeated, endorsement from the American literary establishment, the collected volumes of Maus grace every “Graphic Novels you Must Read” list that is worth its salt as well as several lists which do not restrict themselves purely to graphic novels as a medium.

What lifts Maus above other graphic novels isn’t purely its subject matter, depicting the Holocaust with the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats, but the complexity which Spiegelman instils into the text (far above and beyond my simple summing up of the animal analogy). The irony of the animal imagery is that Maus is also very effective at reminding the reader that what is being depicted is a true and human story, with real people and real lives behind the words and images.

[For me this is one of the most powerful moments in Maus, it portrays both the horrendous nature of the Holocaust, but also its effects on those of subsequent generations who did not live through it, but who are tasked with continuing its memory – Spiegelman is tired, depressed, stressed, but he’s also become trapped amongst the horrors which he has written about: the pile of discarded corpses, but also (and not often noticed) the watchtower and wire fence of the concentration camp outside his window, not to mention the at first ominous exclamation by an unseen seeming gunman off panel.]

The publication of MetaMaus further emphasises the human element of the book, sometimes unbearably so. It’s a hefty volume packed out with photos, preliminary sketches, interviews, and the original script to the comic, seeking to answer the three most common questions which have followed Spiegelman since Maus’s first publication: “Why the Holocaust?”, “Why Mice?” and “Why Comics?”. Some of this material is familiar, although it has never been so beautifully presented, or been placed in the company of so many other wonderful insights. The gem in the crown of the book is the interactive DVD which is included; on the disc is a digital version of the complete Maus, with audio commentary and sketches available for almost every page and panel at the click of a button. The content of the MetaMaus book is expanded tenfold, with extra pictures and material which would not have been possible to squeeze between the bindings of the text. Finally, and most haunting to my mind, are the audio clips of Spiegelman interviewing Vladek. To hear Vladek relaying the now familiar story of his life first hand in that thick Jewish-American accent sends genuine chills down my spine.

There is always the danger in supplementary material that it can lessen the impact of the original text, that it will strip away any mystique. However, rather than diminish the magic and power of Maus, MetaMaus complements it perfectly, offering insight at a historical, artistic, and that crucial human level. We come to understand a little of Spiegelman’s motivations, his way of viewing the world, and in doing so we come to appreciate and understand Maus that little bit more. It’s also a boon to those interested in the art and craft of comics, with step-by-step drawings leading up to the finished product showing the evolution not just of the art but the idea behind each panel, if you ever doubted the work that goes into something like Maus then MetaMaus will set you straight.

 

Glyn Morgan
Waterstone's bookseller and comix expert

 

Glyn Morgan is a Ph.D research student at the University of Liverpool. His research is concerned with non-mimetic narratives of the Second World War. This allows him to spend most of his time reading and thinking about texts which have always interested him: alternate histories, science fiction, and comic books. More about his research and academic life can be found at his blog.

 

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Doing Dickens – Part 4

'I'll beat you with an iron rod, I'll scratch you with a rusty nail, I'll pinch your eyes!'

I love the thought of someone's eyes being pinched. How is this even possible? And I love Quilp, the leering, deformed, lustful, sadistic villain of The Old Curiosity Shop, not only because he insults people in inventive ways such as this, but because his demonic energy brings the novel to life: appearing from the shadows like an evil Rumpelstiltskin, threatening to bite people, pinching the arm of his inexplicably pretty and 'well-trained' wife, trying to seduce poor little Nell, and even starting a fight with a dog, just for the hell of it.

The Old Curiosity Shop is the fourth in our Dickens readathon (see Parts 1, 2 and 3 here), which means we are officially a quarter of the way through – cue small whoop – and it is by far the strangest of the books I've read so far. Despite desperately wanting to prove Oscar Wilde's famous maxim wrong, I did find Little Nell intensely annoying: an angel in human form, little more than a cypher. It's the badness that really works in this freakish, carnivalesque, episodic, sexually troubling and morbid novel: the torturing of the starving servant 'the Marchioness'; Nell's grandfather terrifyingly transformed by his gambling habit; the random acts of cruelty. Here's what our other indefatigable readers thought:

"I worried at first that we'd been spoiled forever by the brilliance of David Copperfield (how can simpering, perfect little Nell compete with David's flaws, courage and good humour) but after a slow start, I did end up enjoying this one. It's so clearly written in serial form – the opening narrator falls away in chapter 3 and characters introduced as simpletons or drunken clowns become strong moral heroes by the end of the book – but Quilp the dwarf makes everything OK again. He's a wonderful, horrific little demon, popping up at windows, appearing in every shadow, eating eggs and prawns with the shells on and gulping boiling rum from the pan, and his strength and vitality and amazing language puts everyone else in the shade. The whole book is really strange and nightmarish, full of religious references and weird sideshow freaks living as functioning members of Dickens's society, with weird occurences and apparent non-sequiturs adding to the sense of dream-like oddness. Marvellous. Ignoring Nell's Cordelia act, I'd give this book a hearty 6.75/10." Sam Binnie

"Dickens hadn't thought through his plot when he published the first few bits of The Old Curiosity Shop, and some of the characters change personality half way, so it's strange as a novel, but understandable as a soap opera, and stands up to close scrutiny about as well as Hollyoaks. I'm reading the complete works of Dickens on my Kindle because I have weak arms, and the free version I downloaded is full of spelling errors. I don't want to sound too Penguiny here, but I enjoyed this odd, dreamlike story a lot more once I'd upgraded to the Penguin Classics e-book, with its introduction, notes, and habit of putting the right letters in the right order. My attention wandered a lot in the chapters starring angelic, tragic Little Nell, who is a mechanism designed to tug at the heart strings of your more sentimental Victorian soap opera fan. But Quilp, the sado-masochistic, perverse, antagonistic, evil plotter is the most vital, disgustingly enjoyable villain I have ever come across. He and Whisker the unreliable horse, who has far greater psychological depth than little Nell, make it all worthwhile." Becky Stocks

Next time: Nicholas Nickleby, and after that we'll be squeezing in a quick read of A Christmas Carol before the festive season.

What’s Eating Gordon Grice?

Here’s a question: what do Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, Edward “Teddy-Bear” Grylls and the ill-fated Taiwanese zoo-keeper Mr Chang Po-yu all have in common?

Answer: parts of them appear on the cover of Gordon Grice’s The Book of Deadly Animals.

In the cases of Ms. Gilbert and Mr. Grylls, it’s the standard, exclamatory, gushing praise, alongside that of David Sedaris and Michael Pollan, presented between the customary inverted commas. In the case of poor Mr Po-yu, it’s his severed hand that features – between the jaws of 31-stone, 18-foot crocodile.

As the Daily Mail gaily reported in their article ‘The man who lent a hand to a crocodile’, the hand in question was eventually returned and reattached. In the world of animal savagings this was a good-news story, accompanied by a photo of Mr Po-yu waving merrily (with his other hand) from his hospital bed.

But the fascination with limb-severances, eviscerations and, for want of a better word, face-lifts at the paws and jaws of our co-habitants on this planet is as much a concern of the broadsheets as the tabloids and extends into a far more ghoulish realm. Since the polar bear attack that killed schoolboy Horatio Chapple in August of this year, no fewer than seven animal attacks (not to mention countless follow-up articles and videos), have graced the main news section of The Times and Guardian – wired in with, some might say, unseemly haste from the Seychelles, Yellowstone Park, South Africa and Australia.

Type ‘animal attacks’ into Google and I guarantee you will need to lie down for a few minutes to restore blood to your brain. But type ‘shark attack’ into the venerable BBC News website and 206 stories appear, 50 of them from within the last year. Is this really news?

Even if it isn’t, the desire to witness these appalling, meaningless, spectacular deaths may not necessarily be as prurient as we have been shamed into thinking. As Eric G. Wilson, Professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, argues in his superb forthcoming book, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the desire to slow down and turn one’s head when passing that fresh pile-up on the motorway is a healthy, necessary means of coming to terms with our mortality.

In the case of animal attacks, though, I think there’s something else involved: revenge. I loved Steve Irwin as much as anyone. He was so full of gung-ho, and his shorts were so remarkably tight, you couldn’t help but fall for him. I was genuinely shocked and upset when the barb of a bull ray stabbed him through the heart, killing him.

But then there’s Roy Horn, he of the somewhat freakish Siegfried and Roy stage show, who suffered the loss of a beating heart (twice), a stroke and a quarter of his skull when one of the tigers in their act ‘attempted to protect him when he fell’ – by biting him. Really? ‘Protect him’?

For those who suffer such attacks, we all have speechless sympathy. But animals are not our playthings. And as Grice argues, we humans are animals, too. We may be the most deadly of them all, but we’re as much a part of the food chain as any other. Man bites dog. Why should we be surprised when dog bites man? Or ferret scratches child? Or kangaroo punches walker? Or elephant destroys oil-tanker? (Grice has uncovered some truly bizarre encounters, and the book surely has one of the highest kill-counts of any non-war-related book in existence.)

Not all dogs are called Marley, care for the blind and rehabilitate traumatized war veterans; not all cats are called Dewey and have healing powers. Some seabass are ill-tempered, mutated and have laser beams attached to their heads. And if, like one mother, you smear your child’s hand in honey in order to have his picture taken with the big black bear (as Bill Bryson reports in A Walk in the Woods), is it any wonder what happens next…?

I think that, as well as shocking us into a heightened awareness of our mortality, these humbling reports remind us of our true place in the grand scheme of things. As Tony Fitzjohn, conservationist on the Adamson ranch, author of Born Wild, one-time victim of a lion-mauling and full-time rogue writes, also in praise of Grice’s book: ‘After all we’ve done to them, it’s great to see the animals getting their own back. When are we going to leave them alone?’ We are not the masters of our universe. At least, not all the time. In Grice’s book, it’s clear that we are rarely even masters of our own back yards.

 

Will Hammond, Editor

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