Autobiographical Novel

by Kenneth Rexroth

When the poet Kenneth Rexroth died in 1982, he left behind a sequel to An Autobiographical Novel (1966). His published memoir––all 365 pages of it––stopped at 1927, when the twenty-two-year-old writer and his first wife, Andrée, were about to settle in California. Now revised and expanded, An Autobiographical Novel includes reminiscences that cover another twenty years of literary life and two more marriages. Linda Hamalian, author of A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (W. W. Norton, 1991), sifted through more than 300 pages of raw tape transcriptions. Weighing fact against fictions (Rexroth loved a tall tale and relished gossip), Hamalian has prepared a valuable index that identifies obscure allusions and the real people who figured in Rexroth’s emotionally tumultuous life. “It adds up to a very good read,” she says. “I am willing to bet a nice chunk of money that readers will wish Rexroth had been able to go on and on loosening his talk-tapes.”

Genres: Autobiography, Nonfiction

370 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist.

He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.

Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic themes and forms.

Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982. He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas.

Reviews

[Kiekiat · Rating 4 out of 5]

About six months ago I did a Google search for "autodidact." The first result that popped up was the name "Kenneth Rexroth." Actually, I was not surprised that Rexroth appeared as the first link. I was hoping that would be the case, as Rexroth was certainly among the most learned autodidacts of the 20th Century.

An autodidact is simply a person who is self-taught, who has no formal education or credentials to validate his or her vast storehouse of learning. This is a somewhat murky definition, as in some fields there are autodidacts who have gained the respect of the scholarly community and whose opinions in their chosen field of study are respected. Likewise, there are those in the academy who branch out from their narrow field of study and become experts in totally different fields. An example that comes readily to mind is Bob Brier, who teaches the course on Ancient Egypt for "The Great Courses." Brier has a PhD in philosophy, yet though self-study has become a renowned Egyptology maven

Kenneth Rexroth, a man with scant formal education, gained an expertise in various fields. He was a respected translator of Classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, and also translated many poems in French and Spanish. He published several books giving brief synopses of various world literary classics and was widely-read in many fields. Rexroth was also a respected poet in his own right and was a practicing artist with a vast knowledge of art history. He considered Paul Klee as the best painter of his era. Moreover, he was a skilled mountain trekker and rock climber and had a wide knowledge of botany and reveled in being alone in nature.

Rexroth had not come by his thirst for knowledge accidentally. His parents were avid readers and he was raised in a cultured environment and encouraged to learn. He was also given a lot of leeway to learn what he was really interested in knowing. The outcome of this was that he learned a great many things, both bookish and scholarly and practical and applicable. During his life, Rexroth worked many jobs. He never worked a job he didn't like and tended to use his work to further his knowledge. He was a man who never capitulated just for the sake of making money. Rexroth's father had been a pharmaceutical salesman in the Midwest and part of his job necessitated a lot of glad-handing and forced bonhomie with his clients. Rexroth felt this forced bonhomie had hastened his father's death because his job necessitated affecting a superficial salesman's charm which went against his nature. The bio doesn't say so, but it appears Rexroth must have vowed never to put himself in a situation where he was forced to do something he didn't like just in order to live. What is amazing is that it appears he somehow managed to accomplish this vow.

That said, there are many problems with this book. It was originally written as a 365-page autobiography when Rexroth was a mere 22 years old. Rexroth's biographer, Linda Hamalian, cobbled together further autobiographical snippets Rexroth had later written. This cobbling sometimes gives the book an uneven nature, along with vast lacunae where large parts of Rexroth's life appear to be missing. The reader, then, has no intent as to what form Rexroth would have given the autobiography had he been able to choose what went in it. And by all accounts, Hamalian's bio of Rexroth was a "hatchet job," a take down from a biographer who appeared to have a personal animus against Rexroth.

Rexroth had an amazingly eventful life growing up. After his parents died, he went to nearby Chicago to live with an aunt. In Chicago he was to continue his education and he listened to many soapbox speakers discoursing on topics of the day. During his time there he joined the IWW (Wobblies) and became aware of the harshness of labor disputes and the often unfair wages and treatment that working people endured. This radical antipathy toward unjust labor practices stayed with him the rest of his days. Rexroth also began to learn about art and absorbed a vast amount of on-the-job training through his contacts with local artists. He also became a lover of jazz, a style of music where Chicago was in the vanguard of the times, with many famous players. Rexroth also rubbed shoulders with writers like Sherwood Anderson, G. K. Chesterton, was a character in James T. Farrel's Studs Lonigan books. He also knew the infamous thrill-kill duo Leopold and Loeb, who were members of Chicago's intelligentsia, as was Rexroth. During this formative period, he also read widely, both in art, philosophy, literature and poetry. Rexroth's father knew Theodore Dreiser, James Whitcomb Riley and George Ade. Rexroth met Alexandar Berkman, Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs. What interested me was that Rexroth was not daunted by his contacts with these famous people. He seemed to take meeting them as a matter of course. As a youth in Elkhart, Rexroth had lived next to the family home of Ambrose Bierce.

Rexroth can rightly be described as a "complicated" man. This is not a chronological bio filled with prosaic details of an unusual man's life. Instead, it is a dense book chock-full of references to various types of art, opinions of various poets and novelists and details that help explain, at least to some degree, the formation of one of America's premier autodidacts. This is a book that leaves one wondering about Rexroth's personal life. He was married four times. Most of the book discusses his first marriage to a fellow painter named Andree. This marriage is touched upon the most, usually in terms of what he and his wife were doing, such as taking extensive camping trips in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Rexroth was one of the early advocates of what became the environmental movement and wrote essays in support of being a good steward to the natural world. The reader searching for scandalous details of Rexroth's life should look elsewhere. Rexroth does not go into detail about his sexual escapades, for example, but from the book it appears that he embraced polyamory and felt no need to defend this lifestyle.

One thing to clarify--Rexroth was NOT a "beat" and was of the opinion that the beat movement had ruined the so-called "San Francisco Renaissance." Rexroth was a highly opinionated person and could back up his opinions with his eclectic, wide-ranging knowledge. He was not an easy foe to best in an argument. As San Francisco's leading poet, he championed some of the local writers like Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia, also introducing Allen Ginsberg to poet Gary Snyder. But Rexroth was not easy to pigeonhole and tended to dislike the hype surrounding the beat movement.

One of Rexroth's longest jobs was working as a psychiatric aide in San Francisco during WW II. As with most of his jobs, he used this experience working with psychiatric patients as a learning experience. He was critical of the psychiatric establishment and suspicious about "cures" like hydrotherapy and shock treatments.

I recommend this book for people interested in the life of Kenneth Rexroth, the art world of the 1920's and 1930's and for folks desirous of a picture of life as lived by a singular man in the early part of 20th Century America. It is not the easiest book in the world to get through, but the discerning reader can come away with a better understanding of the poet, social critic and intellectual force that was Kenneth Rexroth.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating.

Kenneth Rexroth was the grand old man of San Francisco’s art scene during the second third of the twentieth-century, having come to the city the same year George Sterling committed suicide and been present at the birth of the Beats. He published this biography in 1966, but only took it up to 1927. His biographer Linda Hamalian found some later pieces, which she has appended here.

It is not quite correct to say that Rexroth “wrote” this book. He dictated it. Then corrected the dictations with further dictations, which made me think I wasn’t so much reading these stories as hearing them. (Twain tried something similar for his own autobiography, but it just didn’t cohere, in my opinion.) The late-added material is less robust, but still worthwhile.

At times, of course, this mode—and Rexroth’s status—can lead to humble-brags (he “got most of the world’s important fiction out of he way in adolescence where it belongs”) and grand pronouncements—including what’s wrong with the current generation: there are no more elites, capitalism has won, and there’s no hope for alternatives. But these can be fascinating, too, simply because Rexroth is an interesting thinker—and he sketches out a history, personal and social, which isn’t often discussed, but which is an important source for our world of today.

Rexroth roots his own thinking, and that of his family’s, in the German pietistic tradition, with its focus on doing good work, being quiet and unostentatious, acknowledging that there might be more tot he world than what the senses reveal, but nonetheless focusing on the empirical. The tradition also valued helping others. Thus, he is proud that his family was part of The Underground Railroad and ran something similar himself during WWII, helping Japanese avoid internment.

Rexroth had what might be called mystical experiences—he was a horse whisperer, and had second sight, as well as many visions. These lead him to read through philosophy, but most of his reading left him unsatisfied. The philosophical tomes that addressed the subject were occult, and he didn’t accept that system—he found it tosh. Mainstream philosophy mostly focused on epistemological questions, which he found uninteresting, Instead, he wanted a process-oriented, biological and immanent religion, which he found in Taoism (and Whitehead).

He was also always drawn to left-libertarianism and anarchism, both of which he thought central the development of San Francisco’s art scene. Personalism was part of it, too, in which everyone emphasized their own empirical experiences. He was Catholic, he said, not because of his beliefs, but because of the things that he did, the rituals that he followed; it was one way of subverting the alienation brought by capitalism. Meaningful work was another way—in his case a life devoted to the arts.

Rexroth makes dear that he had little interest in the communists and communism, most of which he considered to develop evilly.

Rather than dialectical materialism, he thought the force of history was a small elite, smarter than the rest of the world, which was devoted to the improvement of the world. Of course, he saw himself as a member of this elite.

I don’t buy this theory of history, but there is no doubt that Rexroth was on the side of the good guys, and helped usher in a more freethinking, liberal world, even if it has since been engulfed by the renascence of conservatism and the betrayal of neoliberalism.

[Dennis Bolen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though the author and his editors admit that some of this hugely entertaining, fascinating and erudite account might not be exactly historically accurate, one forgives this possibility amid all the delight it freely affords. I brought an appreciation of Kenneth Rexroth--he is my fave of the Beat era, though he is not considered a Beat poet--to this book and then had that benevolence enhanced by this moving tale of loss and gain, sorry and elation.

For such a tragic start--familial uncertainty and the certainty of misfortune--it is truly admirable that Rexroth prevailed to become one of the most respected writers of the American milieu. As an historical document the book might not be perfectly exact but it is a creditable general account of intellectual life in the first half of the 20th Century. Educational. Enlightening. A fine tribute to a singular man.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no better way to see the 20th century than through this first person perspective (and perhaps tall tale) of an active anarchist poet... who seems to have been involved in every leftist event up through the 1950s. It's beautifully told, and demonstrates how history is what we make of our lives, retrospectively.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I normally don't care for biography, but this was enormously entertaining.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rollicking ride through the mid twentieth century with one of the beats, who started in the Midwest radical scene and ended up on the California coast.

[Gerard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a real treasure. There might still be this America somewhere...

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just started this and it is awesome

[Ron Tuohy]

There's some brief but interesting stuff from the time he lived here in Toledo.