Bookplanet: novelist Robert Stone had a very sixties sixties

Stone’s Diaries
Review of PRIME GREEN: Remembering the Sixties by Robert Stone
By WALTER KIRN/NY Times

Time passes, and what it passes through is people — though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time. It’s a delusion, but it’s where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones. They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously. Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how, and alongside whom, one used his paddle.

In the novelist Robert Stone’s “Prime Green,” a personal memoir of the 1960s, the current of time feels swifter than usual and the fight against it fiercer, stranger. Stone was in his 20s then, and so was everyone else it must have seemed. It was the decade of the young, of course; the young who wanted to stay young, and thought they could. Maybe the drugs would help, or the new politics. Maybe unity, strength in numbers, would do the trick. Those were the dreams, at least, and Stone had all of them.

A year or two before the decade started, he wanted to be a writer but didn’t know how, because no one ever really knows how. He was in the Navy, on a ship, with a copy of “On the Road” inside his sea bag. What he remembers most about his shipmates was that they hailed from an America not yet culturally leveled by TV — “a place more varied,” he remembers, “than younger people today imagine.” The ship’s mission took it through the Antarctic region, and the voyage, as Stone recalls it, had a ghostly feel: a voyage to the bottom of the globe. In one hallucinatory passage the sailors stand on deck and watch a mass migration of penguins that, at first, in its dense totality, appears from a distance to be another great craft. “The vessel the captain thought he saw was low in the water and was certainly proceeding west. Whatever engine powered it was mysterious to me; it seemed to throb, a distinctly unstable mass.”

The penguins might have been Stone’s own generation sailing chaotically into view. What makes the metaphor prophetic, not merely visually apt, is the fact that he suspects the Navy ship’s first response to seeing the birds, whose gathered vitality seemed so huge and challenging, is hostility and suspicion. He fears it’s on the verge of training its guns on them. Stone doesn’t belabor the image, just puts it out there in his masterly, modest, impressionistic manner, but it shadows events to come.

And the biggest, best-known events do come, be assured: the assassinations, the war, the be-ins, the racial struggles, the lunar landing. Stone doesn’t stint on public history, but he approaches it, always, from an angle — that angle being his own hard, underdog trudge from unpublished writer with a wife and children to precocious prize-winning novelist ensconced in Hollywood as a movie is made of his first book. The movie disappoints, as it turns out (the lamely titled “WUSA,” a wan adaptation of Stone’s “Hall of Mirrors”), and so do the ’60s, in the end, but in neither case does that surprise us, because Stone as a memoirist never gives false hope but pressures his prose with retrospective pessimism. He’s in the here and now on every page, the here and now that is notably and brutally not the there and then, with its visions of peace and its psychedelic bus trips. He doesn’t cheat himself or us, that is, of ironies, regrets and second thoughts, although he delivers them tonally, not explicitly.

Stone, as suggested by his shipboard reading material, entered the ’60s with a gypsy itch. Having grown up in a cramped New York apartment with a hard-working, pinned-down single mother, he wanted to hit the highway, and hit it hard. The road brought him first to New Orleans, which he portrays as a hospitably slack and tolerant city whose race problems weren’t as vicious as they might have been. Stone spent his time there toiling in low-paid jobs that taught him, at factory-floor level, what it is to be human but not be treated as such. He was fired from a soul-killing assembly line for an “attitude” problem, whatever that is, and when he recovered by hawking encyclopedias, he fell afoul of locals’ fears that what he was really selling was Yankee liberalism. Dispirited, with a pregnant mate, and longing for grass-roots adventure and escape, he then sought a job with a touring religious play that “worked its way like a wheat-harvesting combine, rolling up from the Texas plains to the edge of the muskeg in northern Manitoba.” The group’s lead player, who styled himself “the Christus,” seems to prefigure later self-styled messiahs, of whom the decade had so many and by whose weird gospels it would finally be known, from Leary on to Manson.

His fellow novelist Ken Kesey fit this mold too, Stone writes, and represented what, to his peers, and if only for a short time, was literature’s Great White Hope. Stone’s Kesey is a prodigious, hopped-up ironman, imposing and charismatic. “In a way, he personally embodied the winning side in every historical struggle that had served to create the colossus that was 1960s America: an Anglo-Saxon Protestant Western American White Male, an Olympic-caliber athlete with an advanced academic degree, he had inherited the progressive empowerment of centuries. There was not an effective migration or social improvement of which he was not, in some near or remote sense, the beneficiary. That he had been born poor, to a family of sodbusters, only served to complete the legend.”

The tale of Kesey’s rise and fall — or not so much his fall as his protracted sideways skid — is one of the memoir’s most touching story lines. Going from rustic giant with pen to addled minstrel with a drug rap, Kesey never breaks his habit of personally embodying the zeitgeist. This starts to take a toll, distracting him from his work and driving him southward into a somewhat creepy Mexican exile marked by all-night walks on lonely beaches and dizzy bouts of druggy philosophizing. In time, Kesey’s hideout from the narcs up north becomes a Gilligan’s Island for shipwrecked beatniks, including Jack Kerouac ’s old sidekick, Neal Cassady, whose amped-up escapades Stone goes from reading about to getting to witness in the flesh, up close.

Drugs are a major presence in “Prime Green” (named for the light at early dawn as glimpsed above the ocean from Kesey’s lair), but drugs themselves, to Stone, are not the decade’s problem. The problem is what Uncle Sam decided to make of drugs: first a moral scourge and then a pretext for an inquisition. If the memoir makes just one outright policy statement, it’s in protest of neverending public burning not only of individuals but of the idea that consciousness is private, and not a domain for armed agents of the state.

As his long-haired wanderings play out, Stone takes a few harsh blows for his iconoclasm, even though he depicts himself as pretty small stuff, revolution-wise, and no great shakes as an agent of social progress. In rural Pennsylvania, on a long bus trip, he’s pummeled by a gang of thuggish truckers for looking like, well, a freak who needed a beating. Later, living in New York City, he beats himself up even more soundly when he takes a position as a staff writer at a lurid, ghoulish weekly tabloid that it’s his job to cram with made-up “news” like the confessions of a party girl who supposedly slept with Porfirio Rubirosa, a famed Latin playboy of the day, and who found the stud short on erotic stamina. “It had been an act of immolation,” Stone writes of the piece and of the paper generally. “I felt as though I had shoved my own pen down my throat.”

These lines give a hint of this memoir’s peculiar power, its singular mood of soulful sarcasm. Erudite but blunt, both tender and hard-boiled, the part-time tabloid hack turned novelist knows how to stick a sentence. He knows how to fly down the high road of ideas, then suddenly crank the steering wheel of style and take us for a tough ride along the ditches. He’s great on people — on joining their abstract insides to their outsides — and he’s even better on places, both when they’re populated, like New Orleans, and when they’re almost deserted, like stretches of the Pacific coast of Mexico.

One measure of how long ago the ’60s were now, and how deeply they differ from the present, is the extent to which their character is bound up with certain terrains, certain locales. One is the forests of Northern California, home to the artists’ cabins and hippie shacks where the youthful Stone spent countless hours drifting off into the mystic on pot and mushrooms.

Toward the close of the book he recounts a night spent camping in Big Sur State Park. Something happened that night — man reached the moon — but Stone remained below, still trapped in gravity, among a restless cohort still trapped in time. He recalls how it felt to lie there and look up into the newly “industrialized” heavens.

“Later in the night the half sphere showed a ring, reflecting the ocean damp, maybe signaling its violation. If you jammed your face deep into your sleeping bag, you could almost hear the clink and rattle of the astronauts deploying their krypton tripods and gravity-adjusted calipers. We kept our heads down; we were afraid of what we might see — the flash of a logo or, for just a moment, the Goodyear blimp.

“Good night, moon.”

And good night, all you dreamy children of Aquarius. Thanks to the wise recollections of Robert Stone, you’ve had your bedtime story now.

(Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His new novel, “The Unbinding,” will be published in February.)