Customer Reviews

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (P.S.)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The American 1960s were a decade distinctly different from any that came before or since; changes in music, fashion, and attitudes toward government were far more pronounced than any succeeding decade. The resulting memories, and memoirs, have sometimes been consequently overdramatic. This is not the case for _Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties_ (Ecco) by Robert Stone. Stone, who is better known for three decades of novels like _A Hall of Mirrors_ or _Dog Soldiers_, certainly has some classic memories to write about. He was in Vietnam, although he was only there for a few months as a freelance journalist. He dropped acid with Richard Alpert, who emerged as guru Baba Ram Dass. He smoked grass with Ken Kesey, and though he didn't take the famous cross-country bus journey with Kesey's Merry Pranksters, it was Stone's apartment in New York that was the bus's stop at the end of the trip. He was a little older than the members of the youth movement, and there is little here about the rock music that defined the times, but he soaked up all its neo-romanticism (and its mind-altering substances) and retained some artistic detachment: "In our time we were clamorous and vain. I speak not only for myself here, but for all those with whom I shared the era and what I think of as its attitudes. We wanted it all; sometimes we confused self-destructiveness with virtue and talent, obliteration with ecstasy, heedlessness with courage." From the distance of time, Stone can depict the enthusiasms of the era without such confusions.

Stone's book starts when he was a 21-year-old sailor, a journalist third class on the USS _Arneb_, a naval transport ship. When he was a sailor, he dreamed of being a professional writer, and "amassed a small collection of magazine rejection slips." One of them was his proudest possession. It came from _The New Yorker_, and was a standard rejection, except for a handwritten note: "Try us again." He eventually worked at the _Daily News_, where he lived from paycheck to paycheck, and looked for a job "with less morally demeaning publications." He didn't find them, and in fact wound up at a paper for which he only gives a pseudonym, "an imitation of the _National Enquirer_, lacking the delicacy and taste of the original." He had grown up as a reader of Hemingway and Joyce, and his aspiration to be a novelist was fulfilled in 1968 with _A Hall of Mirrors_, which won a National Book Award. He was obviously pleased, and even more so when Paul Newman called him to propose it be made into a movie. "In spite of all the grief I ought to have seen coming," he writes, "I was well pleased at the idea of a film of my novel." There began a strange spell when he went to Hollywood, and even had an office with a secretary who would pick up the phone and say, "Mr. Robert Stone's office." This was a grand joke for Stone's stoner friends: "Usually she would be replied to with a wall of stoned giggles and a hang up." Stone writes with embarrassment about the movie (which was re-titled _WUSA_), and actually apologizes for it, and frets that it still gets shown late at night and disappoints even more viewers.

There is enormous sweetness here, especially as Stone describes his marriage, which although it started too early and was shaky, has continued. He and his wife started in New Orleans, where he was taking menial jobs. He was tempted (and nearly succumbed) to abandon her for the bizarre lure of traveling with a Christian vaudeville troupe putting on mystery plays. He was convinced that he was just too young to be tied down, away from a world of adventures. A look at his wife made all the difference: "At that moment I knew that I was not going anywhere. I loved her and _that_ was fate... there was no hope, except in this woman." Any jubilation over this decision is handled with jocular ambivalence: "This rejoicing just shows my mediocrity. Just another Dagwood bourgeois jerk." They moved around, with their children, to important literary capitals like San Francisco, London, New York, and Paris, and had adventures with Kesey, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others. There will be many who read this book for new glimpses of that set, but it plays best as a memoir of a writer simply trying to make the words pay, as well as make them mean something.

to the history of that decade.
He was there and he reports it like he saw it and felt it. For an only child raised in NYC he has done pretty well. He has to be pleased with his journey.
I liked his first book HALL OF MIRRORS very much since I also lived in New Orleans in the 1960s. Hall of Mirrors did NOT win the National Book Award as stated in the other two reviews on here. It won a Houghton Mifflin Literary fellowship Award.Reading his book I was finding many experiences that he describes which we shared in common. My wife and I got our kittens at the same place he got his cat in the old French Market except it was in 1965 and he got his cat in 1960. I found we both rode the same freight train from Mississippi to Birmingham, Alabama. I have been a big fan of Robert Stone's books since 1967 when HALL OF MIRRORS first came out. At times I got the feel in this book I was going to the same places he went and often in the same places he was at the same time. New Orleans 1959/60. Jazz Workshop(not Gallery) in San Francisco in 1962 to hear John Coltrane. This one was really too much. Stone writes he was high on peyote. I was at the Jazz Workshop in S.F. in April of 1962 listening to John Coltrane and was high on dexedrine. I heard every note of MY FAVORITE THINGS And I didnt see any Lizard as Stone did. I did see drummer Elvin Jones sweating and wailing away on his drums.
Paris in the summer of 1964. I was staying on the Rue de Seine. Stone was a few streets over. We never met but we were in the same neighborhood.
I kept waiting for him to mention Buttercup Powell and The Hotel La Louisiane. It is still there on Rue de Seine by the way. The hotel that Bud Powell and Miles Davis and other American jazz greats stayed at in Paris. There was a killer they called "the slasher" in the Paris suburbs that summer of 1964. Bud Powell's little boy asked me if I was the slasher. I told him no. That kid's picture is on the Bud Powell Blue Note Album called THE SCENE CHANGES standing next to his father at the piano.
LA in the summer of 1969 when the scene was about to go bad because of Manson and his gang. I just recently found a website for Bobby Beausoleil who killed Gary Hinman and is still in jail as are all the Manson girls. I knew someone back in the day(1969)who said he knew Bobby Beausoleil in LA before all that went down in the summer of 1969. I was out there that summer in July and later in August and witnessed one OD in Hollywood. Misty I think her name was. One of my former college friends even ran a big money making head shop in the Valley that people like Roger Miller frequented.

I disagree with Stone about when the 1960s started. I do think the Jack Kennedy assassination was the kickoff point. Nov.22, 1963. Before that some lame folk music was what was happening.The only music worth listening to was modern jazz.
Feb.11,1964 The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and they lifted the sadness and the 1960's began.
Bob Dylan heard the Beatles on the car radio on a cross country tour(Dylan was still playing to college audiences of less than 100)in Feb.1964. The Beatles had 5 of the top ten songs on the chart and Dylan was certainly aware of that. Mardi Gras 1964 was the year of the folk singer. Every kid had a guitar he was carrying around. Dylan was there at that Mardi Gras in New Orleans on that trip in Feb. 1964.You can read Bob Dylan's account of his times at that Mardi Gras in 1964 on the back of his fourth album ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN(1965).I met him there and he wrote about it on the back of Another Side of Bob Dylan. No one in New Orleans knew who he was in Feb. 1964. He had just finished his third album THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'.(1964). One year later(1965) he was all cleaned up with mod suits and styled hair and was selling out The Royal Albert Hall in London all by himself. Check the wonderful film about Dylan in England in 1965 called DON'T LOOK BACK for a real close look at Dylan in those days.
Stone was there at the creation of the 1960's counterculture in California. There is a high interest in these stories told by people who were actually on the scene and witnessed all this first hand. The YOU ARE THERE kind of history. It is so much better to read this kind of book from someone who was really on the scene and can say "I was there. I saw it happen. I heard it happen".
In some ways this little memoir reminds me of the recent memior by Bob Dylan titled CHRONICLES. It has that feel of an insider. It was after all a counter culture.Too bad there is no such thing now. All we have now are zillions of strange subcultures.
Both Robert Stone and Bob Dylan married and raised children. Both wanted a real family and a family life. Thanks Robert Stone for a really nice trip down memory lane. I would bet we were in the Napoleon House in New Orleans at the same time. Or maybe La Casa de los Marinos at the same time or The Seven Seas(La Siete Mares) bar at the same time. I am sorry Stone didn't write more about the strippers on Bourbon Street. Those were some really interesting women and they all had good stories to tell.
And finally it was the war in Vietnam that really made the 1960's a nightmare. The draft and the war on TV every night. Right now we are in another unpopular war. If there were to be a military draft imposed I really believe the 1960s would start all over again. Let's all hope that doesn't happen. Robert Stone's book about the Vietnam War was called DOG SOLDIERS. It DID win the National Book Award in 1975.
It is always a delight to read Robert Stone. Now he gives us his memoir of his life and the 1960's. This is a book any young person should read who would like to know what the 1960's were really like. And then after finishing this memoir go on to read Robert Stone's first two books of fiction. Namely HALL OF MIRRORS and DOG SOLDIERS.
I did find one small factual error in PRIME GREEN. Stone mentions the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. and states that Vice President Richard Nixon lived in the house on the grounds now occupied by our Vice Presidents but Nixon never lived lived there. No Vice President lived in that house prior to 1974. Nixon and his family lived on Tilden St. in N.W. Washington, D.C. during his vice presidency.
I want to respond to some of the negative reviews on here. This is a book about Robert Stone. A memoir and history of his life. It is NOT a history of the 1960s. So dont expect it to be. The publisher added a subtitle to PRIME GREEN...remembering the 60s which mislead a lot of people into thinking this is going to be a historical review of that decade. It is not. That is the publisher's fault for misleading would be buyers. I guess it was done to try and sell more books. But it is clearly misleading.
However, for those of us who love Robert Stone's writing we knew what to expect and were not disappointed. I have been a fan of his since his first book HALL OF MIRRORS came out in 1967. Stone is a rare bird. A serious novelist. What you get here is his own PERSONAL take on the 60s. Not any kind of overall history of that decade. So dont be mislead by the subtitle Remembering the 60s.
I loved this book. But then I love Robert Stone's novels. Check them out. Stone is an acquired taste that is not for everyone. But I dig him to the utmost.

The title comes from the "green flash" which Stone, stoned, glimpsed from a Mexican beach. Much of the insight here resembles the recollectons one might expect from a friend of Ken Kesey, an acquaintance of Tim Leary, and one who hung out with the scions of the counterculture in New York City, New Orleans, California north and south, London, Mexico, and Vietnam. That is, pages at a time become illuminated with wisdom-- before sinking again into a miasma of mundane names, places, and events filtered muddily or waveringly through uninspired, if competent, prose. I have only read two novels by Stone, "A Flag for Sunrise," and the disappointing "Damascus Gate." Like the latter book, "Prime Green" stumbles when it could have soared on a promising premise.

The opening chapter rambles on about his stint in the Navy; polar-driven wind and the feel of being at the bridge gain evocative detail, but then the narrative wanders off into recollections of an Australian swimmer he fancied, a bit of action he glimpsed during the Suez crisis, and exchanging Playboys with a Soviet crew. All three anecdotes fizzle. They almost follow randomly, such is the nature of this compilation of memories. Perhaps this casual style conceals careful craft. But, from a writer of Stone's level, that is, of critical acclaim more than another hack bestselling scribe, the offhanded attitude towards such potentially valuable incidents became disappoining. They are treated so offhandedly you wonder why he troubled to bring them up. Much of this book follows suit. It reminds me of a few all-nighters, if you could tape them, with a great storyteller; the difference is, you tend to edit mentally what you were bored or confused by, and highlight the stories which enraptured you, to replay again in your memory. I'd return to this book in the same manner.

For instance, the Bowery and its sudden replacement of white old bums with tough young blacks released from prison circa 1960 sets up a treatise on this sociological phenomenon. But, suddenly, Stone in the next paragraph sidles off into how he wrote copy for a furniture firm. Admittedly, he excels at his harrowing yet hilarious description of writing for the right-wing populist NY Daily News, which like certain media today manages to arouse the contempt of the working class for the system that supposedly favors those less qualified, yet deflects any blame from capitalism or the rich themselves for this inequality and this cynical game of having the victims turn on one another.

His send-up of another bottom-feeding journalistic stint at what he calls the National Thunder, a sort of Weekly World News, is priceless. Anyone who could survive a paper that created headlines like "Armless Veteran Beaten for Not Saluting Flag" or a close runner-up, "Skydiver Devoured By Starving Birds," merits some acclaim for such anecdotes. His accounts of being under the knife for a burst vessel in his brain, of interviewing bitter draftees in Vietnam, of watching the moon on the night of the first landing in 1969 from the California hills, all ring true; his narrative leaps to fitful if brief elegance in these sections. On drugs, Stone glimpses time's wheel and struggles to convey his psychedelic revelation. I wonder if any bard from this time can do so?

The remainder of the book, once Stone leaves in search of the elusive authenticity that takes him, seemingly with little money and the kindness of many strangers become friends, to Stanford on a fellowship, to London, to Vietnam, and to Mexico in a tumultuous but-- for a while-- rather childlike time despite his wife and two children (who are barely mentioned) to support does create in this reader a sense of how much could be seen and heard and experienced by carefree Americans with not much cash, plenty of drugs, and a sense of adventure that in our day has narrowed and priced out all but the affluent or the heavily guarded! Comparing his coming of age with the later century, the combination of a strong dollar, cheap costs of living, and goodwill manage, nearly, to create a glimpse of utopia. On the other hand, his escape from menacing sailors on a Greyhound bus ride from hell that winds up with him barely getting away from the ironically if improbably named hamlet of Highspire, Pennsylvania marks a gothic tale where Poe meets Genet.

If you want a sense of the Sixties, disjointed and disconnected, with wisdom scattered along with a lot of langour, this does re-create a tone appropriate to these times. No history, or even tightly written account, nonetheless for all its faults, I learned from it. The conclusions are the expected sadness at the decade's waste of its promise, and the government infiltration and corporate co-opting of its ideals and its innocence. Not as many knockout punches as I expected, for the book needed editing and substantial tightening. It keeps reeling about, when it should have cut the flab and trimmed up under a drill sargeant of an editor, such as he used to work for in Manhattan in the early 60s.

The book bumps into the famous, nods, chats, and shuffles off again, In its slackness, casual air of street cred meets the dinner party, and Hollywood mingling with the Bowery, perhaps Stone, who managed to be in all of the proper places, dreadful or erotic, exotic or hilarious, remains the jester-cynic who sneers at the powers that be but knows if he had his chance on the throne (he gets a quick perch during his Hollywood visit), he'd settle down there comfortably enough. Stone, in a sloppy but occasionally memorable account, emerges rather blowsily, yet endearingly avuncular. He's slightly askew, a fitting if exasperatingly rambling witness and slyly calculating chronicler for a messy decade.

For anyone who missed the sixties Robert Stone's "Prime Green" is a good introduction. It seems he knew many of the most influential or well known counterculture figures of the time. The writing is smooth, though he does jump from one subject to another without any particular order, and the incidents he presents are typical of the sixties. They say if you remember the sixties then you weren't there, and in a way that may be true. My memories are not like Stones and I know many whose experiences where different from mine. But it was an interesting era, or maybe everyone believes the time that they came of age is more interesting than the ones that came before. It is always better when someone who knows how to write and write well gives their point of view and Stone's observations are as interesting as the best of the growing number of memoirs of the sixties.

After reading Wolfe's Electric Acid Test I was compelled to read further re-examinations of the temptuous 60s. Robert Stone's book was promised as another story of the 60s and it is his personal collection of where he was, how he lived the 60s, and an introspective look at what this era meant. But let me start by saying it is not fast and furious like Wolfe's book. Rather it is autobiographical where the reader can relive Stone's life.

Starting as a naval enlisted man in the late 50s, Stone returns to his single mother household in New York but quickly marries and lives a meager existence in New Orleans where he has his first child. Other than a telling description of the South in the early 60s the significance of this period is not revealed until he later writes a novel of these influences which is turned in to a movie starring Paul Newman and wife which allows Stone to move to Hollywood and experience that life just as the Sharon Tate murders ruin the free love and sex era generally credited with closing the "dream" of the 60s.

But prior to that Robert Stone, aka Forest Gump for the purposes of this book, stumbles into a Stanford fellowship for non college graduates at Stanford. This puts him into the Ken Kesey/Merry Pranksters set so eloquently portrayed in Tom Wolfe's book. Unfortunately, Wolfe's book enlivens the adventure but it is interesting to see Stone's experiences intersect the book. Intersections such as his initial drug use, Kesey's famous trip to New York on the bus staying with Stone and family, and finally Stone's trip to Mexico to cover for Esquire the adventure of the fugitive Kesey. For those who may not know the story I recommend Wolfe's book or a quick detour to Wikipedia will provide the background for what many consider the quisistential book of the 60s.

Stone later lives in Europe and brings a new perspective to Americans and how they are viewed during the Vietnam era. Later the book closes with a journalistic tour in Vietnam in 1971 and the decisions to return to America.

This book satisfies the desire to learn more of the era of which I participated but missed the hot spot of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Vietnam. Stone touched them all. I don't consider this book action oriented but rather an introspective review of this time in his life. While not of what I consider wide appeal, I do believe it is significant worth a read by others wanting to re-explore this fascinating time.

Robert Stone's writing career speaks for itself. His fiction and poetry are among the best for contempory literary writers. Now he offers us a memoir piece, and as one might expect, it is all Stone the poet, the rhythm of the words on the page capturing the reader's imagination and flying her off to the sixties. He connects the beat generation to the emerging hippy generation, he raises long-gone establishments from the ashes so that if you knew them you have an opportunity to see and feel them again - the Central Plaza on Second Avenue, the St. George in Brooklyn. All the time Stone is sharing his experience, his coming of age as a writer, his life with its choices and outcomes.

If you like Stone's work, you will enjoy his memoir. If you never heard of him but enjoy literary writing, you will enjoy Prime Green. If you want a look at the sixties, at the evolution of life and society, at the art and politics as seen through the eyes of a young artist as recalled by an older accomplished artist, Prime Green is delightful.

Robert Stone does a good job of objectively recounting his role as a writer and minor player in the countercultural revolution of the sixties. He doesn't fall into the trap of over-glamorizing the period as a mystical awakening or a brief utopia. Nor does he come down on the other side, writing it off as naïve fantasies of a drug addled and decadent youth. And that's the problem. A neutral stance does not often lead to engrossing reading.

This book is a dispassionate chronology of events in his life and it has some value just at that level. It's at its most interesting when big things are happening around him, like when he is hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. But I had a hard time convincing myself that I shouldn't just put the book down and read some Ken Kesey. He saves any critical analysis of the larger social movements of his generation for the epilogue and it's sadly too little too late.

He also beats up on himself a little bit for having only written one good book. And when he tells of the process of his novel being turned into a bad movie, it's just sad. He seems to still have a lot of unprocessed grief over the career that he almost had.

I've read some glowing reviews, so maybe it's a great book with a lot to say, and I somehow missed the point. I didn't even find it a terrible book, but- in parallel to his career as a novelist- a disappointing one that doesn't seem to live up to its potential.

Surely I'm not the only one who was disappointed with this book. It was a fine read, but I don't feel like I learned anything new about Stone or the 60s. It seemed like several chapters were forced in order to get enough pages for a real book. Although I am a big fan of Robert Stone's other works (especially Dog Soldiers), I cannot recommend this one even to his fans.

An enjoyable read. For someone old enough to have lived and experienced the era, it was a nostagiac ride through an innocent time. Unfortunately, the era for me ended with the Vietnam war and the devolving and violent morph of the drug scene. Since reading this book I have lend it to several friends who have also enjoyed it. It has made me eager to read Stone's other works.

In "Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties" we see how Robert Stone experiences life with quiet, observant feeling, appalled wonder, and deeply personal zeal. Beset with high intelligence and unpretentious origins, no one prepared him for a world unsuited for his gifts. He did not attend those universities where unwritten rules are passed on in secret societies of privilege. He was not "tapped" for Skull and Bones, where mysteries of power and governance are whispered in high-toned rituals of Freemasonry. Instead, he went to sea at twenty-one as a loner to learn truths, worked on assembly lines, sold encyclopedias, married early and had children in circumstances of poverty; did, in fact, what every writer of first rank must in one way or another do in order to learn about life. And in these circumstances he produced his first novel, "Hall of Mirrors," which won the National Book Award. One can achieve high office through Freemasonry, but not high art.

And this, in essence, is the heart of this eloquent book. The sixties stand for many things in the minds of Americans who remember images of change in that time. "You could catch glimpses of the fourth dimension, now and then see the world turning." This is not a sentence that would issue from the Johnson White House; or any White House since then. Stone and his tribe of dissident celebrants were looking at the sunrise, and by their uneven antics, making a profound observation: modern man could no longer look into the abyss and see himself. Behind these crazy psychedelic romps was a fundamental terror never directly acknowledged because Vietnam occluded the deeper dread. Willful regression into primitive dance and delusion was this post-war generation's acting out in frenzy against the very real possibility of human annihilation under the hand of political leaders of the cold war in possession of nuclear capability: when death is near, life is dear. Let's party!

And so Robert Stone, the American novelist we revere, is a game participant in foolery, but in this account of those times he takes us past the mania of his friends to wonder from our day, what was the meaning of it? And he gives us an answer.

This book is gift from a master of language and lyricism; but more, it is autobiography of spirit, a celebration of youth's aspiration and folly, and the fleeting joy and wonder each of us has before we belong to the ages. It is an account of a time of tumultuous change in America, where good was found to be false, and bad suddenly stood for truth. This is an astounding book of even-measured, droll, and sometimes hilarious observation, "Which," as Stone writes, "opens the question of what there is of history beyond what people believe after the fact and what they saw."