One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: what the title means — Kesey wrote the novel on night shifts at a psychiatric ward

The title is a single line lifted from a children's counting rhyme that most American kids in the 1940s could recite. The strange part is where Ken Kesey was standing when he decided to use it.

Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on 1 February 1962, aged 26. He had enrolled at Stanford's creative writing programme in 1958, studied under Wallace Stegner, and was living with his wife Faye in a cottage at 9 Perry Lane in Menlo Park — an unincorporated sliver of bohemian California just west of Sand Hill Road. Everything that produced the book happened within about two miles of that cottage.

The rhyme, line by line

The traditional version runs through a string of nonsense syllables before arriving at the part Kesey wanted:

Three geese in a flock,
One flew east, one flew west,
And one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

Kesey uses a garbled, sing-song variant as the novel's epigraph, and drops it into the book itself as something Chief Bromden's grandmother sang to him as a child. It surfaces in Bromden's head during an electroshock session — the point at which the reader learns where the title came from.

Two readings sit on top of each other. "Cuckoo" has meant mad in English since at least the sixteenth century, and "cuckoo's nest" was common slang for an asylum, so flying over one means going out of your mind — or going over the wall of the institution. The title keeps only the last line of the three-bird sequence: the one that gets out.

There's a second layer people reach for, and it's worth flagging as interpretation rather than authorial intent. Cuckoos don't build nests. They lay in other birds' nests, and the hatchling shoves its nest-mates out to die. Randle McMurphy arrives in a ward he has no business being in, displaces its existing order, and does not survive it. Chief Bromden — the narrator everyone assumes is the broken one — is the bird that flies.

The night job

The novel came directly out of Kesey's employment. In 1960, as a graduate student, he spent roughly six months as a paid volunteer test subject at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, taking LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, Ditran and IT-290 and reporting the effects. He wrote in the 2002 Penguin Classics edition that this was where the idea came from.

The programme Kesey was being paid to take drugs for was Project MKUltra — the CIA's mind-control research effort, which was funding work at Menlo Park and dozens of other institutions at the time.

After the trials ended he took a job as a night aide on the same hospital's psychiatric ward, working the graveyard shift from roughly 1959 to 1961 depending on whose account you take. He talked to the patients across long empty hours, watched how the ward ran when the day staff had gone, and wrote sections of the novel on shift. Kesey said he wrote Bromden's opening passage while on peyote, and that the character came out of a hallucination of a large Native American man sweeping the floor.

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What happened to the book afterwards

It sold in the millions, became one of the most frequently assigned and most frequently challenged novels in American schools, and turned into Miloš Forman's 1975 film, which won all five of the major Academy Awards — Picture, Director, Actor for Jack Nicholson, Actress for Louise Fletcher, and Adapted Screenplay.

Kesey took no pleasure in it. The film dropped Bromden as narrator, which removed the entire device the title depends on, and Kesey said he never watched the thing.

For the record: he considered his 1964 follow-up Sometimes a Great Notion the better novel, and spent much of the rest of his life on a Day-Glo bus called Furthur, which Tom Wolfe wrote up in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

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