Originally appeared in The Boston Globe
Q&A with Robert Stone
By Harvey Blume
ROBERT STONE, THE novelist and short-story writer, was not
with Ken Kesey and the other Merry Pranksters when their bus steamed out of
California in 1964 on its psychedelic journey east. But as Stone explains in
his taut new memoir, "Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties," the
saying that you were "either on the bus or off the bus" was never
meant literally. The real question was whether -- metaphorically and cosmically
-- the bus was coming for you. In every sense the bus headed straight for
Stone, making its first Manhattan stop outside his apartment, which shortly filled
up, he recalls, with "people painted all colors."
More than four decades later, Stone, almost 70 now, resides
on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which is where we sipped tea and discussed his
work. Stone has revisited the '60s often in his fiction. "Dog Soldiers,"
for example, his bracing 1974 novel, focused on the mayhem caused by heroin
smuggled from Vietnam. But "Prime Green" adds autobiographical detail
-- about the sea, for example, which is often the setting for Stone's work.
Born in Brooklyn, Stone, the grandson of a tugboat captain, joined the Navy in
his teens. But he longed for New York City, and was pulled, when he returned in
the late '50s, into the coffeehouse scene growing up around Allen Ginsberg and
the other Beats.
