Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

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.

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.

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."

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 hea

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 em