PARTISAN REVIEW
537
Sunshine and all the Pranksters in a tight circle with Kesey. They
all hold hands and close their eyes. Silence. Then the scream again
ARCHETYPICAL! MIND POWER!
Then a voice from one of the clumps of people by the wall, some
girl, with a spondee voice like a Ouija medium:
"The - child - is - cry-ing - Do - some-thing - for -
the - child - first - "
Kesey says nothing. His eyes are shut tight. The high keening
sound rises from the circle with the kid's scream weaving through
it.
Fantastic mind power crackle
-
Goldhill registers the energy
THEY'RE ALMOST
But the girl on the side doesn't let up: "See - about - the - child
- A - child - is - cry-ing - That's - all - that's - hap–
pening - A - child - is - cry-ing - and - no - one - is -
do-ing - any-thing - a-bout - it - "
ALMOST HAVE IT-PRESQUE VU!
" - Why - is - the - child - cry-ing - Doesn't - an-y-bo-dy
- care? -"
FEEL IT! THE VIBRATION LEVEL!
Kesey looks up. The spot hits
him
in the face. The Pranksters re–
lease hands. The music starts up. The Anonymous Artists of America
play a low rock 'n' roll version of Pomp and Circumstance with
drum flourishes . . .
THE ACID TEST GRADUATION
In trying to see what Wolfe wants this elaborately rendered moment
to mean, one may first
try
out simple indignation. We don't like to see
small children up too late, especially when they're being bewildered
and scared silly by what even some adults found a lurid and grotesque
spectacle. There's Dad, dressed up like Captain Marvel in his cape and
leotards, doing incomprehensible things and
not even noticing them
and
their terror in the night! This reaction, which I suppose few can
entirely resist, then feeds into a general dislike and fear of what Kesey
was up to, or a dismissal of it all as a simpleminded and gauche excess
- like the judge who called him "a childish ass, an egotist who never
grew up" and then let
him
out on bail.
But while WoUe's vignette lets one get even with Kesey for being
such an outrageous freak, it also makes room for an adversary view of
"a child is crying." The girl's spondee enunciation seems mechanistic
and lifeless (one is invited to wonder what
she
was on), her concern
the impersonating of a reflex moralism, her assumption that childish
fear overrides any other consideration highly dubious. What
if
Kesey
had been finishing the Sistine Ceiling, saving the world from collision
with Saturn, graduating from Yale? - should he then have stopped
because his child was crying? What he was doing was important,
to
him
and some others at least, the most important thing he (or maybe any-
