After years in the critical wilderness despite winning the National Book Award for his second book, Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone is now generally recognized as one of America’s finest novelists. So, naturally, it’s time for him to shift gears. The author of A Flag For Sunrise and Damascus Gate has written an autobiography of sorts, a ramble through his life from 1958 to 1971. During that time, Stone encountered the experiences that have routinely shown up in his work: hard living, the rough-and-tumble, hallucinatory landscapes of the counterculture, and the decay and violence of war.
In Prime Green, Stone recounts stories of that unruly decade in his usual clear, straightforward style, as if he were objectively recording actions in a film of someone else’s life. But just as happens in his novels, the unspoken turbulence roiling under the surface wins out in the end. The result is one of the very few accounts of the cultural and spiritual fractures of the ’60s that actually conveys the sprawling sense of possibility and hope so many felt then, even as everything seemed to be breaking apart around them.
Stone starts his account with a 1958 navy gig, gathering scientific information in the Antarctic, and finishes with a 1971 trip to Vietnam as a freelance journalist, during the time of South Vietnam’s doomed invasion of Laos. In between those dates, he put in a lifetime’s worth of struggle and searching.
For awhile he made a living as a writer for sleazy tabloids in New York in the early 1960s, making up outlandish, hilarious stories to draw in the grocery store clientele.
We see Stone start a family, get serious about his writing, and move to New Orleans, where he learns valuable lessons in survival through his day job as a census taker. Then it’s off to San Francisco where he falls for John Coltrane’s music and peyote’s re-visioning of the world. Soon he meets and becomes friends with Ken Kesey, fresh from the acclaim of his first novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At that point, Stone’s “hardcore ’60s” experience takes off, first with increasingly potent doses of LSD, followed by Kesey’s communal jaunt across the country with his Merry Pranksters to the 1964 New York World’s Fair (captured in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), then a post-acid-test move to the west coast of Mexico with Kesey & Co. for a cluster-mind-meld of cosmic proportions.
Stone is at his best when describing his days with Kesey and cohorts, capturing the odd mix of innocent euphoria, self-creation and delusion that marked much of the era’s counterculture.
Referring to the romanticized, hyper-creative life with Kesey’s band in Mexico, Stone writes, We had ourselves an opera. Or, as someone remarked, a Marvel comic. The concept of real life was elusive. All this naturally gave our own lives a quality of fatefulness and melodrama … I had partaken of the current notion that the world was changing. The scales of decadent convention were supposed to be falling away everywhere … working out a general liberation. The truth was supposedly emerging in some way, making people free.
The key phrase is “the concept of real life was elusive.” Anyone who was part of those upheavals, even on the margins, will know what Stone is talking about. They’ll probably also remember the wrenching disappointments that ensued when the world’s anticipated changes turned out to be smaller and less profound than expected. It’s surprising how few people have successfully conveyed in print the ups and downs of that era’s countercultural experience — which was, after all, a central event of the time, at least according to historians of both the left and right. Stone examines it intelligently and with the dispassion that comes with time.
In 1971, Stone traveled to Vietnam, a wooly, unfocused adventure that brought him face to face with the lies and terrors of people in a morally treacherous setting, a theme that appears again and again in his fiction.
He ends Prime Green with reflections on the ’60s, from the point of view of someone who witnessed much while taking part in the era’s “cultural resistance.”
Our expectations were too high, our demands excessive, things were harder than we expected … In some ways the world profited and will continue to profit by what we succeeded in doing. We were the chief victims of our own mistakes. Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing except our failure to prevail.
It’s a fascinating story, and, luckily, Stone is a great storyteller who brings places and characters to life. After finishing Prime Green, you may not like what happened during the overly romanticized and harshly criticized 1960s, but for once, you’ll have a good idea of what it was really like.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2007.
