ideological criminal

Robert Stone’s lates book, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, is a memoir of his life in the sixties. Stone is a revered novelist, the author of A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, and others. His work has won him the National Book Award (for Dog Soldiers) and secured a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, among other decorations. As far as I know, Prime Green is his first book length work of non-fiction and although I’ve not read any of his novels, I’ve heard good things from good people.

The memoir begins in the late 1950’s with a twenty-year-old Stone working as a Naval petty officer on the USS Arneb, tracking sunspots on the south of the Indian Ocean. Stone is discharged in 1958. He grew up poor in Brooklyn and after his discharge, returned to New York and landed a job at the New York Daily News. While taking a narrative writing class at NYU, he met his future wife Janice. The two were soon married and in 1960 bought bus tickets to New Orleans, “being the most exotic but affordable destination the Greyhound Corporation afforded romantic newlyweds.” They arrived shortly before Mardi Gras and moved into the French Quarter. Stone worked on an assembly line and the two struggled with poverty. Janice worked collecting the census almost until the day she gave birth to their first daughter at the Huey Long’s Charity Hospital. Late in her pregnancy, Stone flirts with the idea of abandoning her for a life on the road with the International Gospel Theatre (sic), playing the role of Chief Temple Guard in the production of The Cup, which the IGT advertised as “North America’s most reverent and moving commemoration of Our Lord’s sacrafice.” Returning home from the audition and invitation to join the troupe, he confronts his young wife trying to muster enough to tell her he is leaving:

I looked over at Janice. And I thought, She’s done it to herself, committed to all this too young; she was just a kid. Committed to a louse like me, she’ll find out what a selfish creep I am. She can pass the baby to her parents; they could help her, and she could have a life. In turn I could have a life and cross those continents and oceans to where life was richer. To embrace fate, to live out the cruel rituals of life at the core of the flame, to do and to see everything. Oh, wow! To have the courage to be brutal and to reject convention and compromise. Chief Temple Guard was only the beginning.

I snuck another look at her, and ineed she looked beautiful. And being so young, she looked innocent and trusting. She looked as though she loved me.

So. At that moment I knew that I was not going anywhere. I loved her and that was fate. If I stood up to leave, my legs would fail, my frame wither, my step stumble forever. All my strength was subsumed by this rash, so unwise, too early love. There was no hope, except in this woman. She would give birth, and the new life would assert itself and take over our center and prepare to replace us. Instead of far continents it was boring parenthood; we would just roll down the old biology road like every other sucker. Trapped by nature’s illusion, like a bug by a predator’s coloration.

I felt infinitely relieved, happy for a moment as I would hardly ever be. I thought: This rejoicing shows my mediocrity. Just another daddy Dagwood bourgeois jerk. Because if I had been destiny’s man, I thought, I would have walked—strided away with my bus schedule and backpack, ready to ride from Chicksaw Lake to the Great Slave. But I was not, I could not, not any more than I could fly. I guess I also knew at about that moment that I would never leave her, not ever, that this thing was forever. Not Bob. Not your daddy, children. Leave your mother? No.

Shortly after his daughter is born, the three moved back to New York’s Lower East Side on St. Mark’s off of Bowery, but not before his time in New Orleans inspired what would become his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. They didn’t spend long in New York. Stone was soon awarded a writing fellowship at Stanford, which took the troika West for the first time. It was during his time at Stanford that Stone would become friends with Ken Kesey and other now famous beatniks like Neal Cassidy and Ken Babbs. He and his wife ate ungodly amounts of peyote at a Coltrane concert. He was introduced to acid by Richard Alpert, Ph.D. (aka Baba Ram Dass, Dr. LSD, Jr.), Timothy Leary’s research partner at Harvard, and Vic Lovell, the man who turned Kesey on to LSD (the dediction of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reads “For Vik Lovell, who told me that dragons don’t exist. The led me to their lairs.”) Stone used his time at Stanford to write his first novel, but returned to New York before finishing and shortly before the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens. The Fair would inspire Kesey and others to paint a school bus in all manners psychedelic with the word “FURTHUR” in place of a destination and set out across the country for Queens. Stone got on the bus, figuratively and literally, for the return trip to California. Stone later traveled to Mexico with Kesey who was on the run from the law for possession charges. His book was published and receives critical acclaim. He and his family moved to Hollywood while Paul Newman made it into a film (retitled WUSA), much to the later regret of Stone. He and Janice had a son and later expatriated to London for several years. Finally he traveled to Vietnam as a reporter in 1971. His experiences would inspire his second novel, Dog Soldiers.

Stone’s memoir is that of a bohemian life. It is full of reckless debauchery and hallucinogens. One memorable scene describes a famliy style, ie. kid friendly, nitrous party (the tank of gas itself was the legacy of a fellow graduate student who had taken to indulging in huffs in the hot tub, which subsequently lead to his fainting and demise by drowning):

And the kids so liked the balloons, and of course they liked the gas too. So to square it, even-steven it, we declared, we the adult authority, come on, kids, just one balloon’s worth to a kid. When, would you bevelieve, this one little tyke made this snarky face right at me and said ha ha or hee hee or some shit, “These aren’t balloons! They’re condoms!” And by the spirit of William James, they were condoms. We’d been getting loaded watching small innocent children sucking gas from condoms.

But the irony of this lifestyle coupled with the cause of social justice is not at all lost on Stone. He writes:

Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility. things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of use who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived. While we were playing shadow tag in the San Fancisco suburbs, other revolutions were counting their chips. Curved, finned, corporate Tomorrowland, as presented at the 1964 world’s fair, was over before it began, and we were borne along with it into a future that no one would have recognized, a world that no one could have wanted. Sex, drugs, and death were demystified. The LSD we took as a tonic of psychic liberation turned out to have been developed by CIA researchers as a weapon of the cold war. We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us.

The memoir has its moments, but I have higher hopes for his fiction. What I liked most was the early stuff—living in New Orleans, poverty, young love, life without a safety net and youthful decisions that would prove to have major implications for the rest of his life. What will ultimately become dear beyond all else, at one point, hung by the thread of a naive boy’s perspective and desire for “authenticity.” The passage about his decision to stay with his wife, I found deeply moving. Stone also has an unsparing relfective criticalness that is admirable and inspiring. He has a strong sense of social justice, much of it developed during the subject period of the book, but Stone’s fallibility plays a central theme in the memoir and he often reproves his own inaction. The book is at its worst in dealing with the Merry Prankster episodes. The cult of personality and over hyped cultural reverence of this gang of characters is unsettleing, and moreover, boring (in general, not just in Stone’s account). Much of the book seems needless, yet Stone has a gift for economy of the word; in four lines he can reveal a devastating insight, beautifully turned. The end result is that about ten pages sear the mind, while you wonder why the rest where ever written.