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.
Ken Kesey is a central character of "Prime Green,"
and, in a sense, its failed hero, the symbol of all the era promised but did
not quite deliver. (The book gets its name from the stunning dawn light --
"primal, primary, primo" -- at Kesey's hideaway on Mexico's Pacific
coast.) There's plenty of peyote in the book as well, including an account of a
John Coltrane concert in San Francisco circa 1962 in which the music turned
suddenly visible on Stone, "scaring" him, he told me,
"----less." And, inevitably, there's Vietnam, where Stone parlayed
flimsy journalistic credentials (New York City tabloids, smut) into a stint
that made him something between "a tourist and a writer in
residence."
Stone's dedication to writing steadied him through the
disturbances, cosmic and political, of his day. "Prime Green" is,
among other things, an object lesson in how irony can extract and convey the
essence of an era.
IDEAS: Do you still trip?
STONE: It's been six or seven months since I even had a
beer.
IDEAS: How did all the peyote and LSD you took affect your
approach to literature?
STONE: I dropped out of Catholic high school, but read all
the time. My mother started me doing that. Though a bit mad, she was a
well-read person. I read the great moderns -- including Dos Passos, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald -- and set out to write realism. Then I began to see that behind the
appearance of things was something else, perhaps, and that between realism and
not realism there was no serious difference.
In a sense, drugs turned me back toward religion, from which
I had just liberated myself with great exhilaration -- back toward the
spiritual. And realism became a point of departure in my work for psychological
trips of different kinds. Drugs turned me in that direction, and in that way, I
think, were good for me.
IDEAS: Irony is the constant in your work. Does it have
anything to do with the drugs?
STONE: The irony of the drug experience is not unrelated to
the irony of Samuel Beckett saying, for example: "It's not enough to opt
for silence. You have to consider the kind of silence."
IDEAS: You write about the huge influence Hemingway had on
writers of your generation. But it seems that your version of Hemingway's edge
play -- the safari and lion hunt -- comes from consuming hallucinogens.
STONE: You're young, you do all sorts of things. Some of us
in that gang were rock climbers.
Look, there's no way around the role drugs played, the
driving force they were. Finally they became an utterly outsized element and
kind of destroyed everything. They created a mass youth culture, which was not
a good thing.
IDEAS: Why not?
STONE: For one thing, it made it really scary to bring up
children in the years after the '60s. And it gave our enemies a stick to beat
us with. Some people will say it was the Summer of Love, 1967, that screwed
things up.
IDEAS: Which is where my own generation comes into it. You
talk like an aristocrat of the stoned experience.
STONE: We were snobbish about it. We saw ourselves as
connecting with the Beats, as their inheritors. When I was in high school and
when, at 17, I joined the Navy, the Beats were the people I admired, and
eventually got to know. And we felt we were party to an arcane knowledge about
how things worked, behind the mask of conventional reality.
No doubt it's just some neurological synapse, but to this
day I can't deny that I had experiences on acid that I can't reject. They were
too overwhelming. Even in retrospect they seem a clue to something I don't
understand.
IDEAS: How does the Catholicism you grew up with play out in
your work?
STONE: Through the sense of a fallen world. It has to do,
for me, with how really hard it is to be decent, how hard, how special, it is
to behave well, and how things in a fallen world have a way of not working out.
IDEAS: You save Vietnam for the next-to-last chapter of
"Prime Green." Reading the book, I got the sense, for the first time,
that the catastrophe of Vietnam is becoming passe, pushed aside by the new
catastrophe.
STONE: Vietnam will never be passe for me. But in a way Iraq
is far worse, for the welfare of the country and the world. These people have
gone where Nixon never did, where Lyndon Johnson didn't want to go. It's the
rule of the worst. I'm a kind of patriot in my way. I put the United States
down all the time, the way I put myself down. But I don't like to see our
reputation completely destroyed.
IDEAS: You were very close to Ken Kesey, who you describe as
having failed to fulfill his vast potential as a writer. What stopped him?
STONE: Kesey didn't have the patience to endure the
loneliness, the depression, the daily grind -- not shooting lions but staying
awake in quiet rooms. He got used to things moving faster, and really thought
that he could change the world. He was driven to attempt the utterly impossible.
IDEAS: You were immune to utopianism, weren't you, but
totally devoted to writing.
STONE: Without writing I would have dried up and blown away.
That was my discipline, what I lived for, finally. I never had a lot of ego. It
got crushed when I was small. Writing was the one thing I had that was
beautiful, the only thing that justified me, the only way in which I could
provide something beyond my own gratification. Without it, I was just a guy who
drank too much, took too many drugs, and talked too much. Without it, I could
say to this day, I am virtually nothing.
Harvey Blume is a writer based in Cambridge. His interviews
appear regularly in Ideas. E-mail hblume@globe.com.
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