[In the following interview by Reilly, Wolfe discusses the research and the work that went into creating his account of Ken Kesey's travels across America, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.]

Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was published the very same day as his The Pump House Gang. In one of it's more trenchent reviews, The New York Times said, “Two Books!!!!!!!! HeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeWACK! The Same Day!!!!! TOO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O Freaking Much!” Most recently, Wolfe's novel, Bonfire of the Vanities was made into a major motion picture.

Wolfe's chronicle of the hippie generation in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was an account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters who took a now legendary psychedelic bus trip from California to New York in 1964. To be “on the bus” meant you were part of that new generation, and later the term came to mean you were part of whatever movement was happening. If you're “off the bus,” you're not in the know, not with it. If you're “on the bus,” you're part of the group, going forward, one of the gang. “Are you on the bus or off the bus?—Are you with us or against us?”

[Reilly:] Could we talk about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? Could we, if I may, get “on the bus?”

[Wolfe:] By all means let's get on the bus.

It hadn't occurred to me to ask this, but it just popped into my mind. When you first heard the phrase “on the bus,” did it leap out at you as a signature-phrase, as an anthem for the Sixties?

Absolutely not. Keep in mind I did an enormous amount of research on that book—most of it in the form of interviews with Kesey and the other Pranksters. One of the pleasures of interviewing is that it is full of surprises. Sometimes, you will ask a question and you will know instantly that what you are listening to is enormously important—something you can use. But the sentence or phrase is over in a matter of seconds, and the interview itself goes on. You pursue an important development, of course, but the interview continues. Just as frequently, you will only recognize an event or a phrase's significance when you are editing or compiling. In either case, the dramatic value or narrative power of a scene or a phrase is really established when you are actually doing the writing.

What I still find fascinating about the enduring popularity of “on the bus” and so many other elements of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the fact that, as far as the Pranksters were concerned, they did not think of themselves as beginning an era: as far as they were concerned, their grand experiment was over. They genuinely believed their era, their Grand Prank, whatever they thought it was—was finished. And, ironically, all this was occurring in 1966. the era of being “on the bus” had hardly begun.

When you began The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, did you know from the very beginning that you were going to use a flashback technique? Or did that strategy just work itself into the writing?

That was not calculated—although I do feel it worked out all right. I first started on what became the book on assignment for the Sunday supplement to the World Journal Tribune—it later became New York magazine, of course. I wrote three installments, the first of which is pretty much like the first chapter of the book. But the next two were really dreadful and, when I realized that the only way to tell the full story was to work with a much longer piece, I just discarded them. To answer your question, I suppose I started the book off that way—that is, in the “present” with Kesey's release from jail—because it was easy. I had done it once, it worked. Now after I had gotten well into the book, I was tempted to remove the first chapter and work with a straight chronological approach.

But I realized that starting with myself—and “I” only appear at the beginning and the end of the book—was a pretty good device. It was sort of an “Everyman” device because, after all, here was a subject that would simply be weird to most readers; it had seemed absolutely weird to me when I happened upon it. And I decided I could serve as a pretty good stand-in for the reader as he encountered the Pranksters. If you'll recall I made a good deal of fun of myself in the beginning so the reader won't dismiss me as a hotshot who knows all about these arcane matters. What I was trying to do was be ingratiating and lead the reader into the entrails of a very strange beast.

I liked the way you permitted the reader to study Kesey's worries and fears. It wasn't until the end that Kesey became fully realized as a character, I thought.

Kesey's was a hard mind for me to get inside, which in turn suggests a serious problem in this type of writing. Kesey was a difficult person to interview for a book like this. Sometimes he was in a mood to sit still and tell you everything he could remember about a certain incident or period of time. But at other times, he just didn't feel like having his brain picked, or he might want to talk to me about something else. So at certain points it was easy for me to use Kesey, to be inside Kesey and to present the experiences through his eyes. But at other times, I couldn't because we had never talked about them, we had never gotten onto that subject. I worried for a while about whether I was presenting his mental processes adequately, although I guess there was a good deal of that sort of thing toward the end.

And Stark Naked. She began as a titillating character, but it seemed to me she became someone of almost tragic dimensions by the end. When she “completed her trip” by going mad and screaming the name of her divorced-off child, I was quite stirred. Did you, as an after-the-fact observer, find it difficult to recreate that character, that agony?

That episode came about in a curious way. I got the information itself from a number of points of view. Kesey had her on one of the tapes from the bus and I had a number of separate descriptions to draw upon. Kesey, of course, described what happened to her; Sandy Lehman-Haupt spoke about her in detail; and that girl Jane—I forgot her last name—went into some detail about her memories of the incident. Then I called up Larry McMurtry, whom I didn't know at the time, and found him to be a wonderful source. He is an excellent writer, of course, and he had the letters as well. It was McMurtry who told me about “the end of the trip,” when this stark-naked woman appeared on his front lawn. Now, when I began to work on that passage, I hadn't set out to make Stark Naked the key figure, but in the middle of the writing, it occurred to me she more or less symbolized a whole side of the experience that was unfolding before me. You know, that's one of the most exciting and gratifying moments in the writing process: when a new idea presents itself, and suddenly you see things falling into place.

That sounds almost casual. Yet I'm sure you are always in control of what you are doing.

It's hard to explain. For example, when I wrote that passage in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and this was the case in many other passages, I would actually go into what could be called a controlled trance. That is, I would close my eyes and try to imagine myself inside of the skin of the person I was writing about. I'd begin with a certain feeling, I can't really describe it, within my nervous system somewhere, and then I would start writing. In the scene we're talking about, as soon as I had hit upon Stark Naked, I found myself coming back to her while developing the episode, and I let the figure carry me right through to the end of the scene.

I've wondered about the extent to which the Pranksters made moral judgments about some of the tragedies they were talking about. When they told you about Stark Naked's disintegration, did they speak with remorse?

Some of them clearly weren't moved. Some of them seemed to dismiss it as one more crazy thing that had occurred. But I recall vividly when Kesey played the tape for me, he was quite affected. At certain points you could hear Stark Naked laughing and singing, and I remember Kesey shaking his head and saying: “Listen to that, I should have known right then.” Then, by the way, was back in California. “I should have known,” he went on, “she was done for.” So, yes, Kesey seemed ultimately to experience genuine remorse about what happened to her. But at the time when it happened, nobody seemed to be unduly bothered. Rather, they seemed determined to keep going, to stay on the bus, and so they just dropped her off at the front of the hospital and drove away.

Would it be fair to describe your Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night as literary fiction?

I wouldn't use the term “fiction” because there is nothing fictive in either that I'm aware of. They might be called novels, though.

What distinction are you making?

When you refer to fiction you're getting back to what was always a sore point with the critics when we “New Journalists” started appearing. In other words, we were always accused of making up our material. They didn't accuse Mailer, but they certainly did accuse Truman Capote in In Cold Blood or Gay Talese in Honor They Father or Jimmy Breslin in a lot of his work. People were calling it a bastard form or, as Dwight McDonald put it, a form that exploited both “the license of fiction and the claims of authenticity of journalism.” To me, fiction has the connotation of thing-made-up; of course, there are some novels that are called fiction even though they're only non-fiction with the names changed. So I wouldn't have called the “New Journalism” fiction. But if you go back to the origin of the word “novel,” which I gather has something to do with a new thing, even news, you can make a case for a non-fiction novel—if by that you mean non-fiction that uses what I call the four devices of fiction: scene by scene construction; recording the dialogue in full; the so-called third person point of view; and the recording of those everyday gestures symbolic of what I've called status-life.