Re-read a Favorite Classic: Sometimes a Great Notion

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

You study literature because you’re a scholar of what’s fair. It’s just a way of learning how to be what we want to be. We go to concerts to hear a piece by Bach not because we want to be intellectuals or scholars or students of Bach, but because the music is going to help us keep our moral compass needle clean. (Ken Kesey, Paris Review interview, 1992)

Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey

This is the second novel by the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, originally published in 1964. I read it for the first time in the mid-1970s at State, then again in the mid-1990s overseas. Like other great American novels such as Look Homeward Angel and All the King’s Men, it’s the kind of epic that pays re-reading.

Set on the Oregon coast, this family saga narrates the trials and tribulations of the Stamper clan. They own a small logging business. The Stampers live in a restrictive, hierarchical structure of an old-fashioned pioneer family, in which there are few emotional outlets and little intellectual stimulation. Though brother Hank is the head of the family, father Henry presents a rip-roaring presence, bringing to mind the half-mad father Gant in Look Homeward, Angel.

Logging is hard yakka, hazardous and exhausting. The family business has to hire family members to minimize trouble with the union whose members are on strike. Using gas-powered chainsaws, the Stampers can use technology to provide as many logs to lumber company Wakonda Pacific as a large number of union-organized workers. When it comes out that the family has signed contracts to provide logs to WP, their name becomes “leech” in town.

To add to the social and economic tension, an estranged brother, Lee Stamper, returns his to boyhood home to the densely populated house of his half-brother Hank and his sister-in-law, Viv. Lee is bent on revenge for his lost childhood which has made him slightly schizophrenic and highly anxious (both in a clinical sense).

Kesey skillfully mixes the pasts of the various Stampers and the streams of consciousness of different members of the town such as the native prostitute, union organizers, the family dog, and the bartender of local watering hole, to name only a few.  The narrative is like that of Moby Dick: comprehensive, full of details, a little awkward, and mercifully repetitive, which helps the reader keep her eye on the ball. There are frequent interesting changes of perspective within a paragraph and sometimes within a sentence. It can’t - and ought not to be - read quickly, as it is quite easy to slip into, “Huh? Who said that!” There are plenty of allusions to Beowulf, The Bard, Wolfe, Faulkner and doubtless others than I’m too ill-read to identify.

I didn’t grow up in a blue-collar family, but I did grow up in a blue-collar neighborhood in the Sixties. So the strutting, bantering code of masculinity I found very familiar and – heaven forgive me – nostalgic. It’s a rush to cut trees, clear land, make something and be able to say you made something without help from the outside. It’s a gas to hunt with your buds, drink beer, listen to music together. There is a code of behavior that must be followed or you will be picked on for deviant behavior. Sure, a lot of this machismo is toxic horseshit and just another way to manipulate and control people. And Kesey is not averse to exploring the dark sides of macho, from procrastinating medical attention to being unable to ever talk about shit that really matters. The heroine of this novel, for instance, finds that she has do something about letting herself down after she becomes not much more than a shuttlecock between the two half-brothers.

Kesey also wants to capture the basic unknowableness of reality – there is so much going on at the same time, right now, that we human beings have to filter it out or go bonkers. But the filtering has a cost – we focus on the essential as taught by our culture (money, agency, reputation, making a difference, being all we can be) and shrug away what doesn’t find its way through our narrow templates, never content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to those essential things. When we focus on what is beyond our control and don’t accept what we know is going to happen, we are not free. We miss a lot of magic, the miracle of creation, by being haunted by the past or anxious about the future without getting a bead on right the hell now. Like Hank and Lee’s cousin Joe Ben says, “See what there is you can get a gas out of. It’s all a matter of how you hold your head.”

In fact, Joe Ben, the wise fool, knows about the transformative power of acceptance, gratitude for being alive, and negative visualization.

I always say to him it is our lot to accept our lot and the best way to accept that lot is back off and see what a ball it is. I tell him, back off and see what a boot in the rear it is! Because it is, it is, if you just back off and look at it with your mouth held right. … Be gassed and happy and running around and loving every bit of it and even the bad stuff like this if you just hold your mouth right, Hankus. Now I don’t expect you to know the Redeemer liveth like I do, but you do know what’s coming up right here on earth, because I can always see in your eyes how you see already. So how come, when you see already what’s coming up ahead and know already what you’re gonna have to do about it, why don’t you save yourself all this fretting and cut across to what you see coming and do what you already know what has to be done …?

At about seven hundred pages that the eye had better not skim, this novel is not for the uncommitted. But it is a great American novel and deserves to be read. And re-read. I’m not letting another 20 years go by without reading this again.