90s Acid Novelist To Reenact Merry Prankster's Road Journey

Posted on June 5, 1997

For novelist Todd Brendan Fahey, deja vu all over again is just another day at work. Author of Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel, the hotly controversial revisionist history of the CIA's MK-ULTRA LSD experiments and their influence on the Sixties' counterculture, Fahey says he has held his proverbial breath for seven years, awaiting reaction from his idol Ken Kesey, upon whose image the novel's protagonist Franklin Moore was fashioned.

"In Wisdom's Maw," says Fahey, "I plant this Kesey/Franklin Moore character deep in the pit of the CIA's LSD mind-control experiments. Franklin Moore is, for all intents and purposes, a willing stooge in the CIA's grandiose scheme to create a human superman via psychedelic drugs and behavior modification."

Ken Kesey, while a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1959-1961), offered himself as a human guinea pig in an MK-ULTRA subproject utilizing such psychedelics as LSD-25, psylocibin, and mescaline inside the walls of Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. It was via Ken Kesey, who disbursed smuggled quantities of then-legal LSD to his intellectual cohorts at Stanford's Perry Lane, that the psychedelic Sixties was born.

Todd Brendan Fahey seized on this esoteric aspect of American history in 1989 while a graduate student at USC's prestigious Professional Writing Program. During his seven-year struggle to see Wisdom's Maw in print, Fahey battled addictions to alcohol and LSD, was married and divorced, hired and fired three New York literary agents, and earned a Teaching Fellowship in University of Southwestern Louisiana's Ph.D program in English/Creative Writing.

Ironically, Fahey's first doctoral-level fiction workshop at USL had him studying under Ernest J. Gaines (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman), also a Stegner Fellow, and who attended Stanford's fiction workshops while Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Professor Gaines was shocked and amazed upon reading Fahey's unpublished manuscript in the Fall of 1993, for the verisimilitude of Fahey's rendering of Perry Lane and the Sixties' drug culture. Gaines, in penning a dust-jacket blurb for Fahey's long-suffering manuscript, delivers a closing line which brings Fahey's long, strange trip to a coalescence:

"You have written a very controversial book here; and if it is published and read, you may have to answer some questions to some pretty big boys. I hope you have the backbone for it."

High atop Fahey's list of worries was, of course, and always, Ken Kesey.

After 200 rejection slips, Fahey, in the spring of 1995, was contacted by Associated Press reporter Mitchell Landsberg, who, in the course of research for a national feature on Wisdom's Maw, gave Fahey the conclusive news: "Nearly every New York publishing house has read and enjoyed Wisdom's Maw; and each publisher's legal department finds the novel to be `potentially libelous.' They fear Kesey will sue [my] ass, and that the book will never make back court costs."

Fahey's only choice, then, was to self-publish.