In “The Secret Lives of Poets,” April Yu ’30 investigates the absurd habits, wacky relationships, and creative practices that past and modern writers use to stay grounded or take flight.
“I took LSD and he stayed with Jack Daniels,” writer Ken Kesey once said. “The line between us was drawn.”
The year was 1958, and at the heart of Stanford’s Cecil H. Green Library, in one of the most coveted classrooms of the decade, a battle was brewing. On one side, Wallace Stegner: the dean of Western writers, literary traditionalist, the man Edward Abbey deemed “the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel.” On the other, Ken Kesey: spiritualist technophile, the father of the Merry Pranksters (a 60s counterculture group), the classmate Larry McMurtry called the instant “alpha male.”
The conflict: the future of Western literature.
To most English majors today, opponent one is a household name. Stegner founded the Stanford Creative Writing program 80 years ago and created the Stegner Fellowship, which has brought more than 600 emerging writers to campus to create art and gives lectures. As a professor, his roster of students was world-class: Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday Ph.D. ’63, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor ’50 LL.B. ’52 and Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Haas M.A. ’65 Ph.D. ’71. The live culture of theory instruction, literary immersion and pure talent Stegner cultivated in the Jones Room of the Bing Wing thrived.
What most students do not know, however, is that from 1958 to 1961, Stegner taught a college writer who became his in-class rival: Ken Kesey. In writing content, the two men were similar. They were both interested in the contours of the American West, in Nebraska and New Mexico. In every other way, they were completely different.
Stegner was straight-laced and strictly coralled. He imagined the American West as a beautiful space that needed preserving, and his “Wilderness Letter” was used to establish the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. He taught sustained work, constant revision and carefully honed perspective in prose.
Meanwhile, Kesey was subversive and prophetic, using drugs as emotional flights through Western geography in his works. He allowed manuscripts to flow from his typewriter unedited, shifting between time and perspective in his novel “Sometimes a Great Notion.” Bob Stone, a writing fellow at Stanford, told Stegner’s first biographer, Jackson Benson, that “Stegner saw Kesey and what he represented as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety.”
So, who was right? Should art undergo scrutiny and endless revision, or is it best experienced at its rawest and newest? Was Stegner correct in his fear of the anti-intellectual next generation?
At today’s Stanford, which benefits from the writing both Stegner and Kesey produced, art has entered a complicated conversation about creativity in an age of unprecedented technological growth. Artificial intelligence has the power to shape both the raw material Kesey preferred and the revision process Stegner valued. It has the power to convert the most intelligent learner into a consumer that can only process synthesized, digestible summaries. It has the power to algorithmically predict what the future of Western literature could be and spew that, word by word, onto a student’s screen.
In the modern climate, both men’s opinions contribute to an ethos of creation that resists shortcuts. Stegner’s push for revision is arguably a push for human inefficiency: the friction of reading every line in a piece of writing to make it more concise, accurate and authentic. Kesey’s drug-induced emotional journeys also supported the idea that bewildering and overpowering emotion is at the center of a piece, that the urgency of the human can never be replaced.
Stegner and Kesey’s feud may have been buried with time and publications, but their debate grows ever more relevant. In an interview with The Paris Review, he made amends by celebrating that the program that Stegner arranged “ruled literature in California and, in some ways, the rest of the nation for a long time.”
Kesey still embodies LSD, and Stegner lives on as the Jack Daniels, but we can realize that both arguments centered on an obsession with craft: an ideological war over how to make writing touching, intimate, incisive. The two men fought for two concepts of art that will always surpass one shortcut to the final product.