the salon interview robert stone

BY DWIGHT GARNER | robert Stone claims that his hard-living days are behind him. But when he meets an interviewer in the lobby of New York's Soho Grand Hotel, where he's staying while in the city on a book tour, he is rubbing his bearded chin and grimacing. "An old friend of mine socked me in the jaw last night in Boston," Stone says. "It was a playful punch, and it was thrown by a woman, but it still hurts like hell." Stone may have been on the receiving end in Boston, but at age 59 the deeply tanned author still looks like a guy who can mix it up. The characters in his five novels -- "A Hall of Mirrors" (1967), "Dog Soldiers" (1973), "A Flag for Sunrise" (1977), "Children of Light" (1985) and "Outerbridge Reach" (1992) -- have often been strung-out loners, on the run from either the law or personal demons, and Stone himself looks like a man who has been there, done that. And to a degree he has. In the 1950s, he hung out with the Beats in New York. In the 1960s, he went west with Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey, and became a member of Kesey's Merry Pranksters. In the 1970s, he spent time as a journalist in Vietnam. Stone is currently on the road for his new book, a collection of short stories titled "Bear and His Daughter" (Houghton-Mifflin). The book marks Stone's first foray into short fiction, and the results are often breathtaking -- the collection's best stories are searing and often brutally direct portraits of men and women in various stages of withdrawal from alcohol, drugs and a lifetime's worth of bad vibes. They are characters who have lived, as he writes about one of them, "as if no bills would ever be charged to his account." Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn and suffered through an afflicted childhood, raised by a schizophrenic mother and spending the years between 5 and 8 in an orphanage. After returning from a stint in the Navy, he plunged into the Beat scene of the late '50s. His novel about Vietnam, the National Book Award-winning "Dog Soldiers" (which was later made into the movie "Who'll Stop the Rain?"), has become a classic. Stone and his wife, Janice, who have been married for 37 years, divide their time between Westport, Conn., and Key West, Fla. They have three grown children and five grandchildren. Stone spoke with Salon about his experiences with the Beats, about the recent death of Allen Ginsberg, and about one of the major themes of his new books -- the impact drugs and alcohol have had on a generation. What's it like to hear that Ken Kesey has called you -- as he has recently -- "a professional paranoid, someone who sees sinister forces behind every Oreo cookie"? Well, Kesey is a mythologizer and that's what he likes to say about me. He sort of reduces all his friends to characters in an ongoing serial, and that's my role -- as a total paranoid. I think it's because my tendency was to take a somewhat dimmer view of things in general than many of my contemporaries. He likes to paint me as the guy with the perpetual cloud over his head and constantly riddled with suspicion. I think I was one of the first people from New York that Kesey ever met. That may play a role in it. Allen Ginsberg died a few days ago. You knew him, and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about him. I was very moved to hear about it. I've known Allen off and on since back in the late '50s, although I didn't get to know him well until the early '60s. We weren't close friends, but we'd stop on the street and talk. Although Allen wasn't a Christian, in a way he really was the one true Christian of the last 70 years. He was absolutely fearless. I once saw him read a poem about the Hell's Angels right in front of a whole gang of them. He wasn't fazed for a moment. He had the qualities of a genuine shaman. He may not have been the greatest poet of his generation, but he was absolutely the real thing as a teacher and as a shaman. He didn't do anything for the publicity, or to advance himself. Many of the greatest things he did never made the newspapers. He believed in the holiness of things, and he stood against the American public's complacency at a time when we really needed it. Attacks are already being made on him, three days after his death. I find that disgusting. I miss him already.

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