“Divine Right’s Trip”
The novel of the Whole Earth Catalog (from The Nation)
Bantam Books makes a point on its cover of letting the reader know that its paperback edition of Gurney Norman’s novel appeared originally in the pages of The Last Whole Earth Catalog. If that imprimatur is not enough, on the back is a quote from Ed McClanahan’s review of the catalog that appeared in Rolling Stone and reads in part: “Gurney Norman wasn’t merely being droll when he subtitled Divine Right’s Trip ‘Our Story Thus Far.” . . . Divine Right Davenport is our hero, our Odysseus, our Jason, our Beowulf, our Boone; and his quest for identity, his Wholeness, is our quest, his struggle our struggle, his triumph ours, too.” And the novel is just that. Divine Right’s ontogeny, in the classic sense of the “folk tale” Norman insists that it is, recapitulates the phylogeny of the counter-culture.
The hero of the folk tale is D. R. Davenport. In one way “D. R.” stands for Divine Right in an echo of Stewart Brand’s proclamation in the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it”; but in another way, in the disintegrating manner of the schizo, “D. R.” stands for David Ray, the murky half of our hero’s bifurcated mind. D. R. is a 21-year-old dope dealer from the West Coast whose mind is fragmenting Humpty-Dumpty fashion when he first appears in the novel behind the wheel of his gaily painted VW bus (shades of Ken Kesey and the Pranksters) with his girlfriend Estelle. “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,” says the Bible in the opening quote for the book.
While all the other parties in the novel are heading west like lemmings to the California earthquake, while the whole movement of the counter-culture is on a western glissando from Woodstock to Altamont, D. R. rides east in an upside down version of the Turner thesis on the shock waves of a disintegrating mind and a disintegrating counter-culture — the eastward and destructive pattern of Easy Rider and Alice’s Restaurant.
One of the first characters he meets, and D. R. seems to attract them like a drowning man at a lifeguard convention, is The Lone Outdoorsman. This rugged offspring of Indian fight stock is in his own way an epic hero as funny as Natty Bumppo. He has a trail bike to ferry him from his campsite to the restroom, an AR-15 rifle and .357 magnum pistols to complement his ever vigilant preparedness for “Trouble,” and a complete GMC camper to provide the 20th–century version of self-reliance. When he spies Estelle and D. R. making love on top of a rock, he suppresses his desire to riddle their bodies with bullets for the more humane idea of inviting them to dinner and winning their hearts and minds. After all, hasn’t he fought the war to win the peace? After a hilarious dinner with D. R. and Estelle, at which the Lone Outdoorsman wears his cowboy clothing and watches the television program, Westward, Westward, Norman reveals in his tricky way the Outdoorsman’s name: William F. Dixon (Richard M. Duckley?).
Further east, D. R. and Estelle pick up the hitchhiking Greek whose theosophical lore and penchant for nonstop monologues make him sound like Neal Cassady with a case of Buddhistic rabies. What the Greek pours into D.R.’s now acid-shattered cranium is “the mucous conspiracy” which is being perpetrated by the Food and Drug Administration. The Greek is on his way to the library of the University of Oklahoma in Norman to destroy his autobiography, the last vestige of his ego, which has been secreted Brautigan-fashion (The Abortion) amongst all the M.A. thesis. The Greek, like D. R., suffers from a fragmenting mind and desires the final immolation of his problem in Nirvana. As he leaves, he shouts to D. R. and Estelle that he wants the California earthquake: “Because once I went down with it I wouldn’t have to think about how scattered were the fragments of my life, and mind.”
All along D. R. has been meaning to visit his friend Eddie in St. Louis. Instead, he arrives in time for his friend’s wake — Eddie has been shot in the dope wars. The wake is a Walpurgisnacht for D. R., and he is reduced to a stuttering ninny. While televisions cackle Billy Graham and The Dating Game, Eddie’s dope-dealing friends offer D. R. a Whitman Sampler of psychedelics, and he casts all the bummers of the I-Ching: Stagnation, Adversity, Weariness, the Estranged, Decay, the Abysmal and the Abyss.
Back in the bus, as if things couldn’t get worse, Estelle and D. R. have a fight which erodes D. R.’s attempts at mental balance. When they arrive in Cincinnati, D. R. deposits Estelle at the bus terminal, and goes out to visit his sister Marcella and family. D. R. finds Marcella’s husband Doyle a changed man — he has got religion. Doyle relates that he, too, once felt that he was going crazy but, like a latter-day Jesus-freak or Kesey’s Joe Ben, he has found solace in down-home fundamentalism.
That D. R. should run into so many people in the same fragmented condition — each with his own solution — appears coincidental but it is not. The idea that gives structure to the novel is “synchronicity,” that principle of the meaningful co-existence of particulars that underlies the I-Ching and that Tom Wolfe found in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test informs much of the Prankster tradition out of which Norman writes. Every occasion, Wolfe declares, provides an opportunity for an allegory. This is, finally, the method of the Whole Earth Catalog: to let every description of a tool serve also as a parable.
When for example, D. R. watches a Saturday morning cartoon show with is nephew, he is exposed to an allegory that he will soon unravel: Johnny Hero with the help of Spider Woman enters the cave of the dragon but from this point on, Spider Woman explains, he must proceed by himself. Sure enough, when he returns to the terminal, Estelle has left him and D. R., like St. George, must fight the dragon himself. The dragon Divine Right must fight is David Ray.
It is not a coincidence, then, that God speaks through Mrs. Godsey in a telephone message, telling D. R. that his Uncle Emmit is dying at the home place. He leaves immediately for Kentucky, the mythic land of Daniel Boone, now scarred by strip mining and mourned by the poet Wendell Berry.
In Kentucky, D. R. comes to grips with the dragon, and, in the tradition outlined by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces, he is assisted by a Helper. When his bus breaks down, D. R. is pointedly aided by a miner who mistakenly but prophetically calls D. R. by his mother’s maiden name: Collier. At this point, the hero’s mind is at the highest pitch of disorder and he is pursued into a mine shaft by his hallucinated double. In that cave, Divine Right triumphs in a struggle over David Ray and emerges a new man.
It is a much calmer hero that enters Mrs. Godsey’s store as she sorts mail for: Wendell Hall, Barry Berry, Mr. McClanahan and Stewart Kesey. Mrs. Godsey preaches trust in God as she sips her R.C. (cola, not the church) and helps D.R. on his way to tend the dying Emmit. It is the combined exigencies of Emmit’s passing to the land of “the honey pond and the fritter tree” which put D. R. to work and begin to clear away his stupor.
In the epilogue, D. R. and Estelle marry. The wedding party consists of Kentucky residents as well as people recognizable as Pranksters and the staff of the Whole Earth Catalog. When one of the young girls speaks of her desire for natural birth, a mountain woman says, why she has always depended on a nanny. Ginseng, the organic medicinal tea of the hip? Known for years in the hills as ‘sang’. Communal, non-nuclear living? Just all the kin living on the farm. The marriage comes to mean the wedding of hillbillies and hippies, folks and freaks, after the fashion of the Whole Earth Catalog and the back-to-the-land movement. The ceremony itself is holistic, with readings from the Bible (“A double-minded man . . . “) and the Book of Tao (“The surest test if man be sane is if he accepts life whole, as it is”). The wedding and the book conclude appropriately with D. R. dressed as Daniel Boone listening to the last hexagram of the I-Ching: “The transition from the old to the new time is already accomplished. In principle, everything stands schematized, and it is only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved.”
D. R. is folk hero and Gurney Norman’s novel is a folk tale since it mythologically sums up the history of the counter-culture in the seventies: set upon by Dixon; enticed by the prospect of obliteration — the Greek’s Nirvana; bottoming out when the head turns hood, mixing up drugs with crime; finding Doyle’s Jesus may be the answer for some but not all; and finally coming to the position that the land of America is going to be reclaimed from the disasters of physical and spiritual strip mining. This is a fine story, our story.
This review first appeared in The Nation (23 Oct. 1972) with the following contributor note: “Griswold teaches English at the University of Connecticut. He is the editor of minding the store, usually described as Connecticut’s Whole Earth Catalog.” Remastered 12/2/2019.
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