[In the following essay, Bredahl evaluates the differences between Tom Wolfe and the Merry Pranksters he wrote about in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, noting that the Pranksters's rejection of the physical world as a hindrance to the development of perception, rather than a tool to aid in reaching a higher level of perception, was their downfall.]

Tom Wolfe's writing is the most vivid instance of the role of the journalist in American literature, a role that has played a major part in the development of twentieth-century prose fiction. Unfortunately, even Wolfe himself, in his introduction to The New Journalism (1973), seems content to distinguish his work from that of novelists and to look for influences in "examples of non-fiction written by reporters." He does not but should recognize that the novel is a dynamic form, that in the hands of such journalists as Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway the novel has developed in this century just as it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the novel the imagination has always been concerned with particulars of a real world, a concern that has only been intensified in the twentieth century. The journalist, once depicted in literature as a mere observer and thus only a second-rate artist, has begun to emerge as an individual especially well trained to work with particulars. Certainly, all journalists are not suddenly novelists, but in several significant ways New Journalism is actually in the mainstream of the developing American novel. In Green Hills of Africa Hemingway speaks of pushing the art of writing prose fiction much further than it has ever gone before, and Wolfe, like Hemingway, is a writer who, instead of reporting facts for the consumption of a mass intelligence, is consuming the physical world as a part of his own nutriment. Like Hemingway eating the kudu's liver, this new journalist is thriving on the materials available to him: Ken Kesey and the Pranksters.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) is a story of individuals keenly sensitive to the fact that they live in a new world and delighted by the prospect of exploring it. Tom Wolfe's story describes individuals anxious to say "Shazam" and draw new energies into themselves. Ultimately, however, they fail to become Captain Marvel:

"We blew it!"

" . . . just when you're beginning to think, 'I'm
going to score' . . ."

"We blew it!"1

Henry Adams dreamed of the child of power, but the twentieth-century child has discovered that power is not enough; the excitement of Eugene Gant must be combined with the cool skills of Hemingway. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test reflects Gant's exuberance in its free use of the medium, the language and syntax; but it is at the same time a carefully structured work. Neither an uncontrolled celebration of drugs nor an ordered documentary on Ken Kesey and the Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is an expression of a narrative imagination that sees the possibilities of the twentieth century embodied in the Pranksters. That imagination has discovered the need and ability to integrate both the exuberance and the structure if it is to function in a world characterized by electric energies.

Wolfe's values are evident in the book's opening sequence:

That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze. Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four days' beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat. Out of the back of the truck the city of San Francisco is bouncing down the hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and streaming down the hill. One after another, electric signs with neon martini glasses lit up on them, the San Francisco symbol of "bar"—thousands of neon-magenta martini glasses bouncing and streaming down the hill, and beneath them hundreds, thousands of people wheeling around to look at this freaking crazed truck we're in, their white faces erupting from their lapels like marshmallows. . . . Kneeling in the truck, facing us, also in plain view, is a half-Ottawa Indian girl named Lois Jennings, with her head thrown back and a radiant look on her face. Also a blazing silver disk in the middle of her forehead alternately exploding with light when the sun hits it or sending off rainbows from the defraction lines on it. (1-2)

As one of several reporters covering Kesey's story, Wolfe comes to San Francisco with a pre-arranged idea of what his story will be—"Real-life Fugitive"—and interviews Kesey with all the usual questions. In spite of these limitations, Wolfe is moving, fascinated with the Pranksters, and able to focus on the details of the physical world. That world is one of objects that expode with an energy all their own. Nothing is static in the opening scene—faces erupt, lights explode, and the city bounces out of the back of the heaving, billowing truck. The description is, of course, that of the narrator Wolfe in contrast to the reporter Wolfe; but even as a reporter, Tom Wolfe is himself moving West, attracted to Kesey and the Pranksters.

"Stolid" and two years out of date as a result of being from the East, Wolfe enters a world that stimulates his senses rather than his mind. He has only a limited amount of information about Kesey, and his rational questions of what, when, and why are distinctly out of place in the world of day-glo paint and marshmallow faces—but he sees a great deal: Kesey

has thick wrists and big forearms, and the way he has them folded makes them look gigantic. He looks taller than he really is, maybe because of his neck. He has a big neck with a pair of sternocleidomastoid muscles that rise up out of the prison workshirt like a couple of dock ropes. His jaw and chin are massive. (6)

His first encounter with Kesey takes place in a jail, a sterile, rigid, and confined environment that contrasts sharply with the physically healthy individual who responds immediately to Wolfe's interest. That same contrast is also evident in the "conversation" between Wolfe and Kesey. Tom Wolfe, like the television reporter who later interviews Kesey but does not get the answers he is looking for, does not hear what Kesey is saying: "The ten minutes were up and I was out of there. I had gotten nothing, except my first brush with a strange phenomenon, that strange up-country charisma, the Kesey presence" (8). The early relationship between Wolfe and Kesey is imaged in the telephone they use to speak to each other:

Then I pick up my telephone and he picks up his—and this is truly Modern Times. We are all of twenty-four inches apart, but there is a piece of plate glass as thick as a telephone directory between us. We might as well be in different continents, talking over Videophone. The telephones are very crackly and lo-fi, especially considering that they have a world of two feet to span. (7)

Physically they are close, but imaginatively they are miles apart. Wolfe is a note taker and instigator of talk, and Kesey's responses about moving and creativity lose Wolfe: "I didn't know what in the hell it was all about" (7). Little is answered, but Tom Wolfe has been "brushed" by Kesey's energy.

After leaving Kesey, Wolfe continues his journalistic efforts and investigates the environment of the Merry Pranksters: "Somehow my strongest memories of San Francisco are of me in a terrific rented sedan roaring up hills or down hills, sliding on and off the cable-car tracks. Slipping and sliding down to North Beach" (8, italics added). Moving enthusiastically but not with much control, Wolfe discovers that an old world is vanishing: "But it was not just North Beach that was dying. The whole old-style hip life—jazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam—it was all suddenly dying" (9). Wolfe's "blue silk blazer and . . . big tie with clowns on it" reflect that hip world, a world that Wolfe understands and enjoys. Now he stands on the edge of a new world and is "starting to get the trend of all this heaving and convulsing" (9); he is, however, one of the few. The straight world of the cops and the courts thinks in terms of keeping Kesey trapped and forcing him to preach their cause or be denounced by his friends—and the "heads" are unable to understand Kesey's talk about "beyond acid."

While these two groups want to "Stop Kesey," their efforts in essence directed at stopping movement, we get an insight into Kesey's values in the actions of his lawyers who are able to pull off the miracle of his release. They make things happen, in contrast to those who try to stop activity. In the best Ben Franklin sense of the word, Kesey "uses" people. The cops and heads are using Kesey as a tool to keep a structured environment rigid, but Kesey—like Ben—sees a world of continuous possibility in which individuals (and drugs and machines) can be of use to each other in realizing that possibility. The opening situation of the book, Kesey coming out of jail, thus embodies two major impulses in die narrative: the explosive activity of Kesey to make things happen and the efforts of those who fear change and wish to lock him up.

Tom Wolfe is responsive to his new world: "Well, for a start, I begin to see that people like Lois and Stewart and Black Maria are the restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters" (11). Wolfe is beginning to see actions and a world that glows; he also hears—"From out of the black hole of the garage comes the sound of a record by Bob Dylan and his raunchy harmonica and Ernest Tubb" (11)—and knows what he is hearing. Wolfe has possibilities of doing more than just recording data since he is both responsive and knowledgeable, but he is still unsure as to what is happening: "that was what Kesey had been talking to me about, I guess" (9).

"For two or three days it went like that for me in the garage with the Merry Pranksters waiting for Kesey" (15). Kesey is the unifying and stimulating ingredient; without him the Pranksters do not function. As Wolfe gets further into their life, he sees them as a gathering of individuals who, without Kesey, live amid a piled up "heap of electronic equipment" (21) and talk, however eloquently, about abstractions. Above all else, they wait.

Through the sheet of sunlight at the doorway and down the incline into the crazy gloom comes a panel truck and in the front seat is Kesey. . . . Instead of saying anything, however, he cocks his head to one side and walks across the garage to the mass of wires, speakers, and microphones over there and makes some minute adjustment. . . . As if now everything is under control and the fine tuning begins. (22)

Kesey enters the gloom of the garage through a doorway of light, and with his fine tuning, Wolfe himself feels the electricity: "despite the skepticism I brought here, I am suddenly experiencing their feeling" (25).

"Don't say stop plunging into the forest," Kesey says. "Don't stop being a pioneer and come back here and help these people through the door. If Leary wants to do that, that's good, it's a good thing and somebody should do it. But somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for the others to follow." (27)

Kesey's drive is to keep moving, to explore new energies. He has no question about whether possibility exists or whether it is demonic; the energy is there, and Kesey wants to use it, go with its characteristics rather than impose his requirements on it. These qualities also characterize Wolfe's art, a skillful exploration of the possibilities of prose fiction. Together, the book and Kesey tremble with energy that can either transform Billy Batson into Captain Marvel or blow a fuse.

With Chapter Four Wolfe begins a flashback which carries through much of the book. We should remain aware, however, that though the focus is on Kesey, we are really seeing Wolfe "evaluate," take the strength from, Kesey and the Pranksters. The flashback is, then, a continuation of the narrative fascination with Kesey, a fascination that leads to Wolfe's own growth. Both Kesey and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test focus on physical objects that sparkle with life:

That was the big high-school drive-in, with the huge streamlined sculpted pastel display sign with streaming streamlined superslick A-22 italic script, floodlights, clamp-on trays, car-hop girls in floppy blue slacks, hamburgers in some kind of tissuey wax paper steaming with onions pressed down and fried on the grill and mustard and catsup to squirt all over it from out plastic squirt cylinders. (34)

No corresponding attention is paid to the talk about life. The Perry Lane sophisticates turn "back to first principles" (31) of Greece, but Kesey is into the modern western hero who is capable of transformation into a being of superhuman energies: "A very Neon Renaissance—And the myths that actually touched you at that time—not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas—but Superman, Plastic Man, The Flash" (35). The power of the verbal "Shazam," like the new drug LSD, sparks an electrical power surge which makes an individual begin "traveling and thinking at the speed of light" (35). Attuned to this new power, Kesey is able to see detail and movement:

The ceiling is moving—not in a crazed swirl but along its own planes of light and shadow and surface not nearly so nice and smooth as plasterer Super Plaster Man intended with infallible carpenter level bubble sliding in dim honey Karo syrup tube not so foolproof as you thought, but, little lumps and ridges up there, bub, and lines, lines like spines on crests of waves of white desert movie sand each one with MGM shadow longshot of the ominous A-rab coming over the next crest for only the sinister Saracen can see the road and you didn't know how many subplots you left up there, Plaster man, trying to smooth it all out, all of it, with your bubble in a honey tube carpenter's level, to make us all down here look up and see nothing but ceiling, because we all know ceiling, because it has a name, ceiling, therefore it is nothing but a ceiling—no room for A-rabs up there in Level Land, eh, Plaster man. (36-37)

He can also see the muscles in the doctor's face or his pulse as an accurate measure of his life or Chief Broom as the key to his new novel. As his perception is altered, Kesey becomes aware of a potentially frightening world where few people want to go but which is also a place where a moving line can suddenly become a nose, "the very miracle of creation itself (40).

Kesey's early activities after taking LSD are burstings forth of "vital energy" (41). The move to La Honda, the appearance of the intrepid traveller, and the bus trip are all forms of this eruption. The bus trip "Further," like the flashback technique Wolfe uses in his narrative, is a movement back in preparation for new directions. The bus heads East toward the old intellectual world of the Learyites and Europe. The trip carries the Merry Pranksters down through the pressure-cooker heat of the South, something like the first stages of a sauna bath where the body is flushed of internal poisons. The trip back culminates in "the Crypt Trip" where the pressure is of a different kind. The Pranksters expect to be received joyously, but all along the road they encounter a variety of threatening responses. When they visit the Learyites, they discover that the "Pranksters' Ancestral Mansion" (94) is not a home; rather its "sepulchral" atmosphere and "Tibetan Book of the Dead" (95) emphasize that the Pranksters have broken off from the intellectual Eastern world:

. . . the trouble with Leary and his group is that they have turned back. But of course! They have turned back into that old ancient New York intellectual thing, ducked back into the Romantic past, copped out of the American trip. New York intellectuals have always looked for . . . another country, a fatherland of the mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and purer, gadget-free, and simpler and pedigreed. (100)

The Pranksters are a new group, living in a new world. They have no roots and must seek their life in constant discovery. When they emerge from the Crypt, they turn westward, but the bus now takes the cooler, Northern route. The trip ultimately integrates and unifies the Pranksters; they become a special group rather than a collection of idiosyncratic individuals.

Kesey's interest in energy and art have also been developed while on this "risk-all balls-out plunge into the unknown" (78). Simply becoming aware, sensitive to power is not enough:

Kesey said he wanted them all to do their thing and be Pranksters, but he wanted them to be deadly competent, too. . . . They should always be alert, always alive to the moment, always deep in the whole group thing, and be deadly competent. (88)

Being alive to the moment is integrally related to Kesey's particular understanding of art. For him art is a way of getting totally into the now, a world where one experiences an event at exactly the same time it is occurring: "The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself—Now—and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve" (52). While Kesey wants to be the artist who can organize such an experience, he also wants an art form that does not determine the experience. Being trapped in the rules of syntax and the referential properties of language, while it allowed him to break through the "all-American crap" earlier, would destroy his present commitment to the now. In pointing to the bus and in creating the miracle in seven days and the acid tests, Kesey imagines an artist who can artifically create conditions but not the experience of the work. Each individual must do that—get on the bus—for himself.

"It could be scary out there in Freedom land. The Pranksters were friendly, but they glowed in the dark" (107). The frightening power of the new electricity is epitomized in the Hell's Angels:

The Angels brought a lot of things into synch. Outlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off of dead center and were out in some kind of Edge City. The beauty of it was, the Angels had done it like the Pranksters, by choice. They had become outlaws first—to explore, muvva—and then got busted for it. The Angels' trip was the motorcycle and the Pranksters' was LSD, but both were in an incredible entry into orgasmic moment, now. (152)

As the Angels' motorcycles roar into La Honda, the energy that has been discovered and explored thus far surges forth. It is not just a test of the Pranksters; it is an event which embodies just how far the Pranksters have gone in their exploration of power. No group in America could seem more demonic than the Angels, but their tremendous energies are now being taken into the Pranksters and used by a group of highly skilled individuals. What could have been a "time bomb" (159) becomes instead a vibrating two-day party.

With all the energies of the Angels in their movie, the Pranksters are now able to achieve a "miracle in seven days." This chapter is at the center of the book and culminates the efforts of Kesey to get in tune with his environment, discover the Power that is available, and use that Power through his own art to bring others to see what it it like out on Edge City. What the conference allows Kesey to do is demonstrate that he is able to make his current fantasy work. When it is all over, "it's like all the Pranksters' theories and professed beliefs have been put to a test in the outside world, away from La Honda, and they're working now, and they have . . . Control" (170).

So that creative impulse to burst forth from the all-American crap, an impulse that is the driving force during the first part of the book, culminates in an artistic production that is non-verbal and unprogrammed. The actors and audience become one movie—but something is wrong:

Kesey also had his court appearances to contend with and more lying, finking, framing, politicking by the constables than a body could believe—he looked like he had aged ten years in three months. He was now some indeterminate age between thirty and forty. He was taking a lot of speed and smoking a lot of grass. He looked haggard, and when he looked haggard, his face seemed lopsided. (172-73)

The final word of the chapter is "Control," and the last few pages stress "Power," but the lives of the Merry Pranksters are soon to become like a nuclear reactor that has gone beyond critical mass. The image of energy bursting forth, impulsing outward, which dominates the first half of the book, is the same image which dominates the second, but that energy is rapidly getting out of control.

Kesey's efforts have been to discover and release energy; he is beginning to find, however, that that energy may not be easily handled. Two chapters demonstrate what is happening: the one which closes the first part of the book, "The Hell's Angels," and the one which opens the second, "Cloud." In the Hell's Angels chapter the Pranksters welcome tremendous outlaw energies into their movie—"The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Hell's Angels." The situation is the same in "Cloud"—"The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles"—but what had worked in the earlier chapter becomes ugly and dangerous in the second. The Beatles fantasy is an effort to continue moving, but now the vibrations are bad because the value that Kesey has been striving for—Control—is absent:

It is like the whole thing has snapped, and the whole front section of the arena becomes a writhing, seething mass of little girls waving their arms in the air . . . and they have utter control over them—but they don't know what in the hell to do with it. (182)

Instead of energy working, the Pranksters find themselves in a pen in which "mindless amok energy" (185) threatens to become a cancer, uncontrolled and self-consuming.

The implications of that cancer are developed in the chapters after "Cloud," but one would be mistaken to suggest that the first part of the book does one thing and the second part something different. Rather, the factors that result in the blown fuse are present during the early successful activities of the Pranksters; they have just gone unrecognized by Kesey (but not by Wolfe—since they are part of his narrative). They are integral aspects of some of Kesey's major assumptions. The problem is evident in the opening of "Cloud," the chapter in which the energy becomes cancerous.

They lie there on the mattresses, with Kesey rapping on and on and Mountain Girl trying to absorb it. Ever since Asilomar, Kesey has been deep in to the religion thing . . . on and on he talks to Mountain Girl out in the backhouse and very deep and far-out stuff it is, too. Mountain Girl tries to concentrate, but the words swim like great waves of. . . . Her mind keeps rolling and spinning over another set of data, always the same, Life—the eternal desperate calculation. In short, Mountain Girl is pregnant. (177)

Kesey has gotten so completely into his current fantasy that he has lost touch with the physical environment he is seeking to touch. Mountain Girl is pregnant, but Kesey is unaware. She is about to bring forth life, but Kesey is sensitive only to ideas.

Evidence of the difficulty appeared in Chapter Eleven when the Merry Pranksters returned from their trip East having discovered a new unity: "What they all saw in . . . a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me" (114). Kesey began with the urge to create from within himself and to involve himself in his world, drives which suggest a need to experience fully what it means to be human. But in Chapter Eleven the implication is that being human has become a "predicament" that needs to be altered. At the same time, however, the movie is demanding some very human skills if it is not to become its own uncontrolled cancer:

But the Movie was a monster . . . the sheer labor and tedium in editing forty-five hours of film was unbelievable. And besides . . . much of the film was out of focus. . . . But who needs that old Hollywood thing of long shot, medium shot, closeup, and the careful cuts and wipes and pans and dolly in and dolly out, the old bullshit. Still, plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you. (122)

The cutting needed in the jungle or in the editing of the movie requires a human response that is not just a submersion of the individual into the physical, a submersion that is implied in the statement, "Suddenly!—All-inone!—flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to" (114). These words have Emersonian overtones, where the individual is in danger of losing his individuality—or where he can lose his ability to see the particular because he has become intellectual.

Chapter Eleven explores the human "predicament" as Kesey understands it, talking of Cassady:

A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. . . . He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives. . . . That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough . . . nobody can be creative without overcoming all those lags first. (129)

Kesey's statement that no one can be creative—that the creative impulse cannot burst forth and fully express itself—without overcoming this lag, this humanity, invites a potentially destructive conflict between his beliefs and the physical properties of his environment. Once the lag is ended, the individual will be completely in tune with the pattern: "one could see the larger pattern and move with it—Go with the flow!—and accept it and rise above one's immediate environment and even alter it by accepting the larger pattern and grooving with it" (129). However, they are left with "the great morass of a movie, with miles and miles of spiraling spliced-over film and hot splices billowing around them like so many intertwined, synched, but still chaotic and struggling human lives" (131). Such a life is Mountain Girl's and in all the theory and talk, Kesey has missed that individual. The loneliness and pregnancy of Mountain Girl, an individual who is so thoroughly a Prankster, calls attention to the dependency upon Kesey that most, if not all, the Pranksters have developed. "Kesey was essential to Mountain Girl's whole life with the Pranksters" (149) just as he was essential to the success of the party with the Hell's Angels. Kesey's initial urge had been personal, and he sought to extend his own perception while also stimulating others to begin perceiving for themselves. The Pranksters—as well as those drawn into their movie—should be developing that individuality, but their dependency on Kesey's energy has apparently limited their ability to concentrate and explore their own. What was to have stimulated the individual to discover himself has become a social enterprise where the group is dependent on a leader. If such a problem is developing, the removal of that leader ought to bring movement to a halt and perhaps to cause that tightly welded unit to disintegrate. These problems develop in the second part of the book, the section that begins with power out of control at the Beatles' concert and with the power surge in New York that blows all the city's fuses and transformers (190).

Events in the book, then, have begun to anticipate the breakup of the Merry Pranksters. In "Departures" Kesey prepares to head for Mexico, for the first time responding to the actions of others—the police—rather than initiating action himself, and Mountain Girl goes to New York to try to get herself back together. Sandy also leaves for New York, again the victim of what for him will apparently always be "the demon Speed." As if to emphasize the social thrust of their recent activities, the two chapters preceding Kesey's trip focus on the skills of the Pranksters "to extend the message to all people," with Kesey very prominently at the controls. No longer is each individual Prankster striving to become deadly competent, a functioning individual alive to the moment. Rather each is concentrating entirely on the collective enterprise of conveying their "message"—with all the verbal and social connotations of that word—to a group. Instead of the effort of the individual to go "further," the Pranksters create an authorized, organized Now.

The Mexican chapters parallel in many ways the earlier bus trip, but where the pressure cooker had then been restricted to the heat of the sun, now Kesey and those with him are subjected to disease, filth, and death. What had been an intellectual crypt trip now becomes almost too real. Wolfe's handling of the opening scene in Mexico is both a vivid description of the paranoid state into which Kesey has fallen and a major indicator of the developing difference between Kesey and Wolfe. Earlier, Wolfe had been stimulated by Kesey's skill, but now Wolfe himself is demonstrating that skill. Kesey's helpless mental state is presented with an incredibly sharp eye for detail:

Kesey sits in this little rickety upper room with his elbow on a table and his forearm standing up perpendicular and in the palm of his hand a little mirror, so that his forearm and the mirror are like a big rear-view mirror stanchion on the side of a truck and thus he can look out the window and see them but they can't see him. . . . Kesey has Cornel Wilde Running Jacket ready hanging on the wall, a jungle-jim corduroy jacket stashed with fishing line, a knife, money, DDT, tablet, ball-points, flashlight, and grass. (200)

Kesey is seeing very little—his mind is alive largely to the details of his latest fantasy—but Wolfe is able both to focus on the reality of Kesey's world and to convey the quality of Kesey's paranoid experience, each second of which lasts no more than a minute and is agonizingly detailed and examined in the best Prankster day-glo color. Wolfe is in control, and in his hands the verbal medium comes alive.

Kesey's energies are also alive but trapped within himself—not the artificial rules of syntax. His tremendous energies are still there, and they continue to pull people back to him: Black Maria and Mountain Girl, now back with the Pranksters and eight months pregnant—as well as some Pranksters left at La Honda—begin to regroup in Mexico. What they find there is the ugly world in which Kesey has been living: "All the vibrations outside were bad. Corpses, chiefly. Scrub cactus, brown dung dust and bloated corpses, dogs, coyotes, armadillos, a cow, all gas-bellied and dead, swollen and dead. . . . This was the flow, and it was a sickening horrible flow" (275). The intensity of the Mexican experience is epitomized in "The Red Tide," "a poison as powerful as aconitine" which is produced by the plankton in the ocean waters and which is death to the fish. That death mirrors the death on the land where the Pranksters are "stranded like flies in this 110-degree mucus of Manzanillo" (280-81). The red tide and the Mexican disaster are less efforts at journalistic accuracy than metaphors for the Prankster experience at a time when death and stagnation are as much a part of their lives as they are in the filthy pressure-cooker world of the environment. The drugs which were opening doors earlier are now only a means to escape the heat.

Under these same conditions, however, Mountain Girl has her baby, her dyed hair gradually returns to its natural state, and Kesey begins to see what is happening to them: "They have made the trip now, closed the circle, all of them, and they either emerge as Superheros, closing the door behind them and soaring through the hole in the sapling sky, or just lollygag in the loop-the-loop of the lag . . . either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon" (290). The "current fantasy" has become just that, a fantasy; they have lost contact with reality. "Mommy, this movie is no fun any more, it's too real, Mommy" (299). That reality—in the form of the Mexican police—reaches out to capture Kesey but succeeds only in spurring him into activity: "It was time to get the Movie going on all projectors. And the bus" (301).

Kesey's return to California is a curious mixture of continuing to live in fantasy and yet wanting to get back in touch with the environment, separate values that mirror Kesey's own state of mind—"Kesey veering wildly from paranoia and hyper-security to extraordinary disregard for his own safety, one state giving way to the other in no fixed order" (312). His commitment is once again to movement, this time beyond acid and beyond the stagnant condition of the tests which have quickly become the in-thing, the sport of college students and New York intellectuals. Kesey is once again probing the "westernmost edge of experience" (323), and that scares those who are content to remain where they are. It is the Hell's Angels side of the Kesey adventure that panics the hip world because the Angels are "too freaking real. Outlaws . . . the heads of Haight-Asbury could never stretch their fantasy as far out as the Hell's Angels" (326).

Kesey is also having to work his imagination; at the moment he is theorizing and playing a game of cops-androbbers with the California authorities:

It will be a masked ball, this Test. Nobody will know which freak is who. At the midnight hour, Kesey, masked and disguised in a Super-hero costume, on the order of Captain America of the Marvel Comics pantheon, will come up on stage and deliver his vision of the future, of the way "beyond acid." Who is this apocalyptic—Then he will rip off his mask—Why—it's Ken Kee-zee!—and as the law rushes for him, he will leap up on a rope hanging down from the roof at center stage and climb, hand over hand, without even using his legs, with his cape flying, straight up, up, up, up through a trap door in the roof, to where Babbs will be waiting with a helicopter, Captain Midnight of the U. S. Marines, and they will ascend into the California ozone. (328)

This seems less movement than fantasizing, less Captain Mavel than a child who is exercising his power to defy authority. Once again Kesey finds that "the current fantasy . . . this movie is too real, Mommy" (329). Appropriately, Kesey's capture is put in terms of a little boy with torn pants.

The last chapter of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test details the anticlimax of Kesey's efforts to go beyond acid; they blow it. In the final scene, the Pranksters who are striving to move are sitting on the floor of the Warehouse surrounded by too much noise and too many TV cameras. Whatever Kesey has been driving for is imaged as a much publicized stagnation: "It's like a wake" (366). Wolfe has later said that during the abstract expressionist movement of the 1950's,

The artists themselves didn't seem to have the faintest notion of how primary Theory was becoming. I wonder if the theorists themselves did. All of them, artist and theorists, were talking as if their conscious aim was to create a totally immediate art, lucid, stripped of all the dreadful baggage of history, an art fully revealed, honest, as honest as the flat-out integral picture plane.²

To a Prankster as well as an abstract expressionist this passage might appear an irritatingly inaccurate evaluation of their activities, but it indicates much about Wolfe's own artistic values and does indeed point to the crucial weakness in the Prankster way of life. The emphasis in the passage is on the Word in its most sterile form: and it is this that would annoy the Pranksters because their whole effort is dedicated to going beyond an abstract verbalization which is the epitome of the distance between the event and the experiencing of it.

The desire to open oneself up to the world, not unique with the Pranksters, allows us to see them in the mainstream of American thought and literature reaching back through Hemingway, Whitehead, Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson to Franklin and the Puritans. Whitehead's emphasis on creativity and novelty illustrates the potential vitality of the Pranksters:

"Creativity" is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the "many" which it unifies. Thus "creativity" introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The "creative advance" is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which originates.³

The world is continually being "renewed"; there is no stasis, no biblical Garden of Eden. Kesey's concern with "beyond acid" is absolutely right, for it indicates continuing novelty; however, when he says that we are "doomed" to watch our lives and that without overcoming lag "nobody can be creative" (219), his stress is not on movement but on goal, one that is disturbingly Edenic. At such a theoretical point, the world might be moving but the individual would be carried along with it.

Kesey points to Cassady as someone "going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that" (129). Cassady, however, is an individual who burns himself out, and Kesey's praise of Cassady should warn us of dangers implicit in Kesey's drives. When Kesey starts to talk about overcoming rather than opening, his drives become self-destructive rather than liberating. In addition, the existence of Wolfe's art indicates that, far from limiting creativity, lag is what makes creativity possible. Kesey urges the Pranksters to "go with the flow," but the danger, as any defensive tackle will verify, is always that such movement can result in being swept along. Kesey's interest is in the ability to perceive and evaluate flow so as to develop not dissolve individuality. Such perception necessitates lag. The discovery and assertion of personal skills—"The most powerful drive in the ascent of man," says Jacob Bronowski, "is the pleasure in his own skill"—is not a goal but a process that demands vision and objectivity. Kesey has all the right impulses, but when he begins to talk about overcoming lag, he is in danger either of becoming self-destructive or of being swept along by the flow.

While Kesey sees goals and ideas, Wolfe sees objects:

But my mind is wandering. I am having a hard time listening because I am fascinated by a little plastic case with a toothbrush and toothpaste in it that Hassler has tucked under one thumb. . . . Here Hassler outlines a pyramid in the air with his hands and I watch, fascinated, as the plastic toothbrush case shiny shiny slides up one incline of the pyramid. (18)

Ultimately, the difference between Wolfe and the Pranksters is evidenced in Wolfe's ability to keep his narrative eye focused on the physical world of the Pranksters and to unify The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in contrast to the talk and endless feet of film and electrical wires that the Pranksters can never manage to bring together. Kesey worries that his experience cannot be verbalized: "But these are words, man! And you couldn't put it into words. The white Smocks liked to put it into words, like hallucination and dissociative phenomena" (40). Wolfe, however, goes for the vitality rather than the intellectual abstraction, a quality that distinguishes him from the reporters who come to cover the story of redeveloping Perry Lane:

The papers turned up to write about the last night on Perry Lane, noble old Perry Lane, and had the old cliche at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements about this machine civilization devouring its own past.

Instead, there were some kind of nuts out there. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as coons. . . . but they managed to go back with the story they came with, End of an Era, the cliche intact. (48)

These men see with their clean, structured minds; thus the cliches. But Tom Wolfe is able to open his eyes and see the vitality of the Prankster world. His willingness to look rather than to theorize allows him to perceive "shape and pattern" in his verbal exploration of the Pranksters. The result is a functioning narrative voice in an exciting new world: "That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze. Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four days' beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat" (1). Good thinking and movement and concrete objects—these are Tom Wolfe's values.

Kesey and Wolfe share many of the same values, but Wolfe succeeds where Kesey and the Pranksters blow it because Wolfe is able to look at physical laws as something to be used to one's advantage—evaluated—rather than as frustrations to be overcome. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is thus a book about art, about the individual's effort to get it all together. Telling one's story and getting one's skills finely tuned are finally the same thing. Kesey has the skills to tune a piece of machinery, but he is also interested in fine tuning himself. Ultimately, he and the Pranksters fail to look at themselves or at each other as individuals (the Who Cares girl) just as they prefer to look at the physical world as metaphor rather than object. Games, roles, metaphors, and abstractions become Prankster values in spite of their talk about opening doors and going further. Tom Wolfe's uniqueness is his recognition that perception and skill must be developed together, that one can only discover his strengths by evaluating his environment.

¹ Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 368. Subsequent references are to this edition.

² Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 63.

³ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p. 26.