Life in a ‘bloody paradise’

New York — ON a warm afternoon in the summer of 1969, the novelist Robert Stone and two friends were hiking in the Big Sur wilderness, beginning a three-day trek to a Zen monastery 27 miles away. It was a transcendentally beautiful moment, with the ocean crashing below. Then a park ranger’s radio crackled to life: Two armed fugitives, one wearing a German army uniform, were loose in the area and considered highly dangerous.

Later that same night, U.S. astronauts began their historic moonwalk. As they gathered in the woods, some observers smoked marijuana and heckled the heavens; others got into fistfights. Stone pushed his face deep into his sleeping bag, convinced he could hear the astronauts clattering over the lunar surface, defiling its mystery once and for all. The threat from the two fugitives, meanwhile, had subsided.

“That day sums up the 1960s in California for me,” Stone said recently, recalling a vivid moment in his just-published memoir, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.” The Golden State, he decided, “was a bloody paradise, and at first it seemed that there were no snakes. But of course there were snakes out there. They were everywhere.”

During the last 40 years, Stone has established himself as one of America’s most respected and provocative novelists. In books such as “A Hall of Mirrors,” “Dog Soldiers,” “A Flag for Sunrise” and “Damascus Gate,” he has crafted tales that were either in tune with or one step ahead of the political zeitgeist. Laced with eerily prescient political turmoil and dark, cutting humor, his novels have explored the rise of right-wing talk radio, drugs and the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in Central America and the explosive collision of cultures and religions in the Middle East.

Stone, who won the National Book Award for “Dog Soldiers,” was described by Time magazine as “the canary in our cultural coal mine, discovering hot spots and danger zones early.” So why did he decide to look backward and write about the 1960s -- a decade that, to many, has become a psychological compost heap for aging boomers?

“There were stories I wanted to tell that I’ve been relating to others for many years,” he said, settling into an old, worn sofa in his Manhattan apartment. “And I had always wanted to write about my life as a writer. But I also wanted to avoid a lot of confessional stuff. The main thing for me was to entertain the reader.”

According to his editor, Daniel Halpern, Ecco’s publisher, Stone made a fairly easy transition from fiction to memoir. “Bob had written so much about the ‘60s as a novelist, he’d done Vietnam, drugs, Hollywood, Ken Kesey. He had all the gifts of a great fiction writer, but he was relating his own experiences.”

“Prime Green” is packed with stories charting Stone’s journey from the streets of New York to the decks of naval transport ships; he was discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1958. The book chronicles his early stint at the New York Daily News, and his later blossoming as a writing fellow at Stanford University. He rode with Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on their legendary 1964 bus tour across America, and celebrated with them the early years of LSD experimentation in Northern California.

Later in the decade, as his first novel “A Hall of Mirrors” was turned into the movie “WUSA,” which Paul Newman starred in and co-produced, Stone experienced the standard humiliations of a screenwriter in Hollywood. He also witnessed the paranoia gripping Los Angeles after the Charles Manson murders. The book ends with his stint as a contract journalist in Saigon, where he reported U.S. hypocrisy over the Vietnam War and the growing cultural rot that became the heart of “Dog Soldiers.”

Stone’s memoir also details his changing views of that era. To produce his first nonfiction book, the 69-year-old writer said he had to find a literary voice with which to tell real-life stories. And the narrator who finally emerged, Stone noted with a grin, “is a bit of a wise guy. The spirit of the voice preserves a little of the defiance I had when I was much younger. You might say it’s a provocative voice.”

It’s also dripping with irony. Stone still believes in the fundamental idealism of the decade; he has neither abandoned nor watered down his opposition to the Vietnam War, the push for civil rights and other revolutionary changes that dominated the 1960s.

But he also sees through the era’s pretensions -- the self-righteous crusades, the messianic beliefs in hallucinogenic drugs, the chest-beating certainties of militant youth. With his thinning hair and graying beard, he completes the image of a wiser man, a writer cursed with insight when others wallow in nostalgia.

“We were the chief victims of our own mistakes,” he writes in his memoir’s final lines. “Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing except our failure to prevail.”

In his personal life, Stone was hardly a poster boy for free love. At a time when many relationships were breaking up, Stone got married, and he has been with his wife, Janice, for 48 years; they have two children. If the open road was a good metaphor for the decade, as he wrote, he traveled with a steady companion.

More important, Stone said, the generation that assumed it would change the world sparked a conservative reaction that continues to this day. In a sense, the other guys had the last laugh.

“We thought we were busting things up in the world and making a lasting change,” he said. “But actually we were the generation that was being busted up by everything that happened later. It was the other way around.... A lot of the things that seemed like permanent insights at the time were fairly superficial ones.”

His generation’s hip dismissal of high style, luxury and fashion, for example, has not stood the test of time, the author said. Nor has its belief that institutions will change if only enough people march in the streets. Stone said he had stopped using drugs by the early 1970s, and conceded that political passions of the moment had often forced people to say and do foolish things.

“I certainly said some stupid things that haunt me in the middle of the night,” he confessed. Pressed for an example, the soft-spoken Stone shrank back on his sofa and laughed, saying: “Oh, God. Don’t ask me. I don’t want to go there.”

Pressed again, he told of a night he appeared on a New York public TV broadcast at the height of the Vietnam War and started “preaching” about the conflict that had bitterly divided the country. “That memory mortifies me. I had just published my first book, so I was sort of a youngish new artist, and I proceeded to say a lot of extremely self-righteous things. It was an inappropriate political lecture. I had no business making those comments.”

But for Stone, it was an aesthetic -- not a political -- mistake. During the ‘60s he typically shied away from joining political factions or large movements. The key lesson he took away from his youth, he said, is that insight trumps ideology.

“This is the most important thing in art and life, and for the individual,” he said. “The sense of striving for the truth -- for unresisted insight -- is what saves the world. And it’s encouraged me to keep on writing. Everything has followed from that.”

Toward the end of “Prime Green,” Stone recounts a 1969 party in California given by friends as his family prepared to move to England. There was a copious amount of nitrous oxide gas on hand, which guests began sucking out of balloons. There were also children at the party, and soon they too were inhaling the laughing gas. At one point, an eagle-eyed child made the startling announcement that the balloons, in fact, were inflated condoms.

Stone groaned at the memory, calling it “certainly a low point of civilization.” Nor did he try to make excuses by adding that adults quickly put a stop to the activity. “Today you would look back and say: ‘Surely this is the end, this is truly shocking,’ ” he confessed. “But in another sense, it was just another crazy party.”

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1969 Los Angeles

From “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties”:

Following Robert Stone’s 1969 trip to Big Sur, he returned to Hollywood and resumed work on the adaptation of his first novel, “A Hall of Mirrors,” into the 1970 movie “WUSA,” starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

“That summer of the moonwalk, the estrangement of Los Angeles from itself continued. Locals complained about all the kids. The boulevards were crowded with young panhandlers. There were hundreds of young hitchhikers. ‘Where are they going?’ was the jokey question. It was puzzling, because they did seem to disappear about where the action ended on the east-west streets.... No one asked, ‘What do they want here?’ Everyone in the world knew the answer to that. Young girls were coming to be ‘movie stars,’ in fact to be prostitutes. The question about their street destination was already an off-color joke. Boys were coming to be some kind of ‘cooler’ people, in significant numbers to be petty criminals, or to escape rap sheets in their hometowns. Like, wasn’t everything you did in Los Angeles like doing it in the movies, or being a character in a rock song? Then there was the lure of sex, surely the biggest illusion of all, since it had long ago been rationed, arbitraged and factored in L.A. as everything else would one day be.... The technicians, the teamsters and grips at the major studios arrived at work with horror stories about the kids who had appeared on Sunset. They were not like the beatniks down in Venice who knew their place.”