SNAKY BIOGRAPHER Hamalian’s reference to Rexroth as an “old goat” (quoted without source, 309), her malicious and unsourced claims that “some people said that ‘he’d screw anything that moved—male or female, two-legged or four.’” (415) and “Rexroth once told a friend that he was afraid he had damaged his mouth and throat from too much oral sex.” (418, my italics) are rabbit punches which speak to the low consciousness (and subsequent lack of conscience) of the biographer, as well as inattention or worse by the editor and publisher. Who are some people and a friend? She also quotes hearsay in a flagrantly derogatory fashion, “Rexroth…would ‘fuck a snake if it would hold still for him’” (182, my italics). This last remark is sourced as second-hand gossip, “According to David Koven, Jim Harmon described Rexroth’s sexual behavior in these words.” (402-3). Hamalian even interviewed and gained the confidence of Rexroth’s two daughters and fourth wife, Carol Tinker, before publishing her “old goat,” “male or female, two-legged or four,” and “fuck a snake” vulgarities. Hamalian chose to include allegations without sources and hearsay, and one can only wonder why she would do so except as a forced attempt to seem both politically correct and “juicy” (Hagedorn, jacket back cover). Hamalian grew up on slapstick cartoons, and she swipes with a wooden plank, hitting a defenseless man in the back of the head. Rexroth is now headless and beyond responding, and her damage continues unabated. Ironically, Rexroth spent over half a century actively standing up for the weak and defenseless and could amply take care of himself in any argument or physical confrontation. The main thesis of Hamalian’s biography—tediously underlined in the preface, body and epilogue—is that Rexroth was abusive. Because in her estimation he was an abuser, she’ll abuse him back now that he is six-feet under. Her approach is conceptually parallel to the eye-for-an-eye mimicked by Henry Miller in his World War II pacifist pamphlet Murder the Murderers (157), but Miller’s courageous public stance stands in stark contrast to Hamalian’s personal hostility. THE MIND BEHIND, DECEPTIVE SCHOLARSHIP Hamalian is not only one-dimensional in a way that I don’t happen to like, but she is at times guilty of deceptive scholarship. I wonder if she would approve of a student of hers pulling off the following misuse of materials: “Rexroth said his poems were about the ordinary things in his life—[1] ‘the stuff I see, the girls I’m sleeping with, or something else like that.’ He liked to sound casual: [2] ‘The girl I fuck in this poem must now be about forty-five. I look her up sometimes.’” (341). “a variation on his standard [3] ‘this is a girl I used to screw’ introduction.” (353). In the above three quotes the first is from a journal interview Rexroth did in 1976 answering questions about his poetics. Speaking off the cuff, he mentioned that his poems came from everyday life, including “the girls I’m sleeping with.” That seems honest enough. When I read the second quote attributed to him, “The girl I fuck in this poem must now be forty-five. I look her up sometimes.” I thought it sounded quite crude and unlike my memory of how Rexroth used to speak in public, yet Hamalian described him liking “to sound casual.” Checking her endnote (419) I was surprised that Rexroth never spoke those words, in fact they were written by Stephen Spender who “attributes the remark to a poet named ‘Waxwrath.’” Stephen Spender’s playful mocking of Rexroth while he was alive has, in Hamalian’s rush to belittle him, undergone a transformation into words uttered by Rexroth himself. Waxwrath = Rexroth and you’d never know unless you happen to check the endnote. This is not only sloppy scholarship but a willful and malicious merging of disparate sources. If she had cited a source’s misquote, that would be a forgivable mistake (called in Japanese “magobiki” 孫引き[“pulling a grandchild”]), but in this case she is misquoting her own source. I shudder to imagine how she would analyze that conduct were it by Rexroth. Here she is revealing more about herself than her subject. And, now that Hamalian’s head is full of recycling Rexroth equals Waxwrath and has naturalized the concept of him introducing his poetry at readings with crude boasts about sexual conquests, we find her flippantly writing a few pages later, “…a variation on his standard ‘this is a girl I used to screw’ introduction.” (353). Circular logic implants Spender’s mocking comment and now she delivers it as factual. I kept wondering if it is or isn’t odd that someone who pulls such a stunt—evidence of a palpable (unconscious?) bias running throughout her work—can sit accredited by an English department in an American university. NEGATIVE AGENDA SEGUES INTO GOOFY CONCLUSIONS Hamalian’s pitch unfortunately gets ever more strident as the book progresses. Despite Rexroth’s sympathetic translations of women poets of China and Japan, she reads his attitude in a negative light, “His identification with these poets suggests that, despite outward appearances, he too felt trapped.” (341). Why did he necessarily feel “trapped”? Hamalian, the English professor, seems unable to grasp the point that Rexroth sought and found and translated excellent poetry. She seems to need reminding that he was first and foremost a poet, and poetry and emotion can be intertwined (although not necessarily), and the act of translating poetry isn’t always to cover up marital shortcomings. Much more significant than if he “felt trapped” is that many literati consider Rexroth’s translations of Japanese classical poetry to be among the best so far produced in the English language (including Howard Hibbett, a highly-respected Japanese literature specialist and professor emeritus at Harvard University). Hamalian, however, in her myopic crusade and acting like a “hysterical bride in the penny arcade,” (Bob Dylan) declares unequivocally that Rexroth is “doomed…to a life where he would feel betrayed by love, and disappointed by his family and friends. Unlike these [Asian] women poets, Rexroth had built his own prison.” (341). Does she mean Rexroth’s “prison” was the home where she had been invited for a fun dinner and wished he had written a poem for her? (x). Does she mean that his mind was a prison, if so why was he so jolly most of the time and how could she extrapolate her existential condemnation from a cursory reading of his empathetic translations? Given the choice between her derailed judgments and Rexroth’s considerable accomplishments, it’s a no-brainer (versus a “genius.” [x]). In the Epilogue, highly-strung Hamalian gets in her final licks with, “[his] nasty level of sexism” and “[despite his spiritual aspirations] he was too much in the world.” (375). Like a matador going for the final thrust of the sword, she ends her biography reiterating her main point, “he was genuine in his poems the way he could not always be in his life.” (375). Does that back-handed compliment mean that he was “genuine” or “not genuine,” assuming it was not in his life but only in the poems? Is she suggesting that he was genuine only in the realm of the poem as autonomous object? If so, what does “genuine” mean (crafted, crafty)? Rexroth the poet certainly got sideswiped by what Hamalian had to offer in her analysis of his extraordinary talents. Ken Knabb is the sole reviewer who comes to a similar conclusion (“A Clueless Life of Kenneth Rexroth,” www.bopsecrets.org). No one would suggest that Rexroth was perfect. Some of the faults Hamalian chooses to focus on were also noted in his own correspondence, so he dealt with those issues. Sure he was a bundle of contradictions like anyone else. Who expects poets in our society to be saints? But Hamalian’s overarching bias and relentless bashing cloud any reasonable assessment of Rexroth’s legacy, because she turns her years of research into a hatchet job. She often quotes Rexroth’s disdain for east coast, academic, reactionary, establishment critics, and ironically Rexroth got one of them as his biographer. How could he have known what havoc the twenty-one year old Hamalian would wreak on his reputation a decade after his death? I’m sure she would never have dared write that kind of book while he was alive. He would have pulverized it in a review with far more eloquence than I could ever muster. Hamalian notes that she visited Rexroth with her husband a few weeks before his death, after a stroke rendered him unable to speak, “His steely brilliant blue eyes lit up in recognition, but only a series of grunts issued from his mouth.” (422). Behind the grunting was Kenneth desperately trying to say that he didn’t think her broccoli was perfect after all and that he wished she’d leave his life alone? I think that not to bracket what she highlights of Rexroth’s alleged behavior towards some of his wives is also to turn a blind eye to what he was up against in the larger picture of his struggle to fight the Social Lie at all costs in the US during the middle fifty years of the 20th century. Selden Rodman summed up the situation already in 1951: “The whole dull, grey, standardizing, conformist, amorphous weight of contemporary American civilization is pitted against the few remaining individualists in the Emerson-Thoreau tradition, of whom Rexroth is a splendid example. If his isolation makes him occasionally outrageous and shrill, that is understandable, and more power to him.” (176). That is not to excuse any inexcusable behavior—which I’m sure as a sensitive human being Rexroth would have amply regretted—but in general is it too much to expect empathy rather than disdain for the subject of a biography? Is it her duty to take the side of all the women she feels were wronged by him and then re-fight their battles as a proxy without his participation? Everyone who knew Rexroth seemed to enjoy his hipness while he was alive. No one was as sharp and direct and funny. He could elucidate subtleties of world history and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu metaphysics, and the next moment transition to an off-color joke, all smoothly and effortlessly. Once in my presence, late in the evening, Kenneth was lying on the couch listening to Thomas Parkinson, a professor from the University of California at Berkeley and an old friend of his who was trying to engage him in conversation. Kenneth had spent the day driving back with Carol and Tom to Santa Barbara, and I had been house-sitting in their absence. Kenneth was admittedly tired and seemed to have exhausted his patience with Tom’s nagging. To show displeasure while Tom bellowed away, Kenneth slowly turned his back to him, loudly farted and then fell fast asleep. It was a hilarious performance. No one was earthier in action and loftier in thought than Kenneth Rexroth, and that dichotomy was difficult for some people to handle. HAS DEFAMATION BECOME THE NORM? I don’t usually read biographies that are unsympathetic to their subjects. To give examples from rock ‘n roll, books that raid the skeletons in the closet (such as Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon [1988], Elvis [1981] and Elvis: The Last 24 Hours [1990]) don’t interest me, whereas I prefer portraits such as those by Jerry Schilling (Me and a Guy Named Elvis [2006]) and Jerry Hopkins (No One Here Gets Out Alive: Biography of Jim Morrison [1980]). The genre of ransacking dead people’s lives for their purported weaknesses has always seemed inherently unfair, lame and sleazy. I know that it is part and parcel of trashy tabloid culture, and since Christina Crawford’s scathing book Mommie Dearest (1978), the genre has gained in popularity. Readers naturally eschew hagiography, but wanting a generally amiable biographer should not be out of the question. I am disturbed that the goalposts of “fair” and “honest” have been moved in the last few decades, if Hamalian’s book is normative. Authors should beware if fame necessarily implies being skewered after death. I am amused that some writers have praised the Rexroth biography, even if they happen to be blurbs on its back cover. --Diane Wakoski, “How refreshing! A biography which seeks out truth without distorting or vilifying the subject.” (jacket blurb; my italics). I wonder how much more Hamalian could vilify Rexroth. I know we are in the age of intensified double-speak, and I expect it from the political news—based on the Social Lie—but not necessarily from an intelligent poet. Jessica Hagedorn also writes a blurb for the book. A poet whom Rexroth had nurtured from age fifteen, Hagedorn is described in Hamalian’s book as follows: “[Rexroth] was very sympathetic to her artistic aspirations, her Filipino childhood, and her education. He set her on a course of reading—which included anthologies of black writers and French writers like Apollinaire, Artaud, and Clevel—and invited her to use his library whenever she liked…. Rexroth decided that Jessica needed to develop her ear, and invited her to read with him at a small coffeehouse….” (320). This sounds to me like a generous mentor in the Bohemian tradition and, significantly, there is no hint of sexual impropriety involved. Hagedorn “repays” his unusual gift (in the book she is quoted as saying, “Rexroth was magical.” [320]) by writing a blurb for the book’s jacket: “Hamalian is both fair and honest biographer—revealing his dark side without stripping Rexroth of his dignity.” (my italics). I imagine he would have thought that his dignity had been stripped by the examples I’ve already cited, even the single sentence: “[he] would fuck a snake if it would hold still for him.” Maybe Jessica didn’t have time to read the book closely or was flattered with the opportunity to write a blurb. Nevertheless, I think the book is neither “fair” nor “honest” unless vicious hearsay, unsubstantiated libel, and poor literary criticism are the order of the day. --[Donald Gutierrez….] “Hamalian has turned out a…generally judicious account….” (1993; zinkle.com; my italics). ---Herbert Gold, “Gradually Linda Hamalian allows developing understanding of the rogue poet’s flaws—a fabulizing of his own life, plus vanity, capriciousness, erratic judgment , abusiveness toward both enemies and ex-friends—to stain the portrait….” (jacket blurb; my italics). Gold at least seems to be discussing the same book that I read. The publisher significantly puts Gold’s list of qualities on the jacket cover as a way to titillate readers about a “rogue” poet’s life. Gold notices that there is mudslinging (or exposing) going on, and yet he is circumspect in eluding the main thrust of her book, namely Rexroth’s alleged mistreatment of women. THE NEEDLING AND THE DAMAGE DONE In my opinion, Hamalian’s book has done irreparable harm to Rexroth’s reputation. During the almost two decades since it was published, his literary stock has fallen precipitously. Because of her fastidious research into many of the facts of his life— despite her bias—few writers are likely to redo the project anytime soon. His work will not be consistently under-appreciated, it rises like cream in a myriad of fields, yet her book, as the most comprehensive “biography” of his life, is where many readers will continue to go for an appraisal of the man as a whole. While reading her unflattering portrait, I started to imagine how readers who never met him would evaluate him. A crucial tenet of Rexroth’s belief system was that a poet must be an intelligently functional human being, but ironically Hamalian has reduced him page after page to the dysfunctional freak stereotype demanded by straight society. [Note: Two years after writing this paragraph I was delighted to hear that a new biography by Rachelle Katz Lerner, A Rage to Order: Kenneth Rexroth, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan.] In sharp contrast to Hamalian’s rude and crude approach, most of Rexroth’s prose essays, several on topical issues, are resilient and often more poignant today than when they were first published. And some of his poetry still defies assimilation by bourgeois society, because the Social Lie he unmasks so articulately has become ever more transparent as the hypocrisy of USA foreign policy unravels (cf. Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize speech). Incidentally, Rexroth was using the term “post- post-modernism” already in the 1970s, before theoretical works by Fredric Jameson and others on postmodernism became popular. It is high time to move past Rexroth’s controversial personality and delve into his provocative ideas. He and like-minded friends started the Randolph Bourne Council in the early 1940s and the Libertarian Circle right after the war in San Francisco, the latter to “refound the radical movement after its destruction by the Bolsheviks and to rethink all the basic principals and subject to searching criticism all the ideologists from Marx to Malatesta.” (149). At the very least we can enjoy Rexroth’s insights and humor in his poetry and prose, but it would be even more important if people could come together to “refound the radical movement” and “rethink all the basic principals,” perhaps on a blog site (while keeping in mind Robert Fisk’s caveat: “‘Activists’ spend hours and hours emailing each other to no purpose it seems to me, other than to say, ‘we’re losing.’”). The ideas of Rexroth’s generation of anarchist poets run the risk of being marginalized as those of quaint dinosaurs. I hope that people like him who dedicate their lives for more than personal fortune will not be demonized. WACK-A-MOLE Kenneth Rexroth’s multi-faceted activities make him difficult to classify. He reminds me of the Japanese game “mogura-tataki” 「土竜叩き」(wack-a-mole) in which you hammer down moles with a mallet but they reappear elsewhere. The object of the game is to be faster at striking them down than they are at reemerging. Rexroth’s various talents are akin to the moles in the game that refuse to stay put. Right-wing critics might shoot down Rexroth’s radical politics, but they’d probably be moved by his exquisite love poetry. Critics who consider his love poetry compromised by not being in synch with his life story as they understand it (like Hamalian) can still have high regard for his nature poetry. Refer to the nature verse as merely California regional “bear-shit-on-the-trail” school of poetry (as he self- mockingly did), yet you might acknowledge that Rexroth was a great translator and a philosopher who encompassed wisdom of the west and east (cf. Morgan Gibson’s fine study, Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom [Hamdon, CT: Archon Books, 1986]). For those who knock the profundity of philosophical and theological meanderings, he was a thoroughly down-to-earth poet (like this unpublished ditty in his old age: “Love Poem: All over the world/ At this moment, beautiful/ Women are wiping / Their assholes.”). (355). You may find his ribald side inappropriate to your bourgeois taste (Hamalian refers to his “bad jokes and sophomoric remarks” [401], forgetting that Rexroth was a repository of American humor from cowboys, vaudeville, the Ozarks and elsewhere, and in this respect he resembled Gershon Legman [1917-1999], who faithfully copied graffiti limericks from toilets and other locales around the USA). Disregard Rexroth’s bawdy side and his paintings might impress you as exploratory and sophisticated, way beyond the dilettantism associated with most writers who pick up a brush. His paintings were as much his essence and as meaningful to him as his poems. (He told me, “If the house starts burning, just save the paintings.”) And if you happen not to be moved by his painting (like Hamalian), you might still respect Rexroth’s detailed guidebook to flora and fauna of the High Sierras. If poetry with jazz or original poetry or translations don’t suit your fastidious tastes, you probably would still consider his erudite essays on the world’s classical literature to be an education in itself. And so on and so forth. Rexroth’s house of culture has so many windows and doors open that he will not be relegated to obscurity because of bad press in any one section. Wack-a-mole here and there, but Rexroth will still astonish you with another fascinating angle. One day if “The Complete Works of Kenneth Rexroth” is published, then readers will be astonished at the breadth of his diverse achievements. Hamalian wrote that the first time she visited Rexroth he “talked…politics (of the conspiracy theory kind) into the early morning hours.” What if the F.B.I. or C.I.A. or N.S.A. or a nameless intelligence organization was troubled by what a nation of people who agreed with Rexroth’s revolutionary (not “re-volvo-lutionary”) politics and cultural attitudes could do? After all, he was a key figure in the break-apart 1960s and had mentored Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other Beats before they were radicals, and the Beats then merged into the Hippies before spreading worldwide. There would be no better way to neutralize such a figure than to have a biography like Hamalian’s downplay his or her overall importance by harping on a perceived personality shortcoming. Highly significant is that she never once addresses the potential of Rexroth’s ideas in the contemporary world but continually bashes him until he is trivialized as a cantankerous buffoon. The history of the anarchist movement in the USA also deserves better treatment of one of its leaders. Along the way, Hamalian impoverishes us and herself. The neo-cons currently in Washington, D.C. should be proud to have her book on their shelves and I’m sure they wish they had such a biography for each and every radical thinker with potentially threatening ideas. Hamalian, whether inadvertently or not, in the cloak of feminist righteousness has been doing the Man’s job. LIBERATING KENNETH REXROTH WORDS In my opinion, Rexroth’s foremost talent was his “ability” (the literal meaning of the Japanese “Noh” theater that he was so fond of) to construe almost any situation— grave or ludicrous—into a phrase that is eminently quotable. His times and what he said were quite different from those of Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde, but Rexroth had a similar knack for witty and memorable utterances. I see Rexroth’s legacy as radiating out from his quotes to people who subsequently search out his paintings, poetry, prose and recorded performances. Using Linda Hamalian’s book exclusively, I fished out some of the gems she quotes from various sources (including An Autobiographical Novel) under topics that I titled. I did so to recuperate his voice, because reading her book made me think that his quotes were lotuses blossoming from her unfriendly mud. In his own words he is freed from the scandal and gossip, the agenda-raising and rancor, as if to present the reader a plateful of vegetables without pouring an unnecessary spicing on top to make their edibility questionable. If you enjoy the mind behind any or some or all of the following Kenneth Rexroth quotes, then I suggest that you skip reading Linda Hamalian’s A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (unless you are researching “unfaithful poets and their [un]faithful wives” or taking Professor Kevin Blackburn’s “Tutorial 1: Biographers Who Hate Their Subjects” which focuses on “the pitfalls of bias in the writing of biography.”).* You may prefer to go directly to the dozens of books Rexroth wrote and translated and the website that has much prose material by him and some about him: www. bopsecrets.org. *[http://www.hsse.nie.edu.sg/staff/blackburn/biography&history.htm] Now that almost a quarter century has passed since Rexroth’s death, we should be able to evaluate which of his utterances turned out to be correct and which were off the mark. He managed to be ahead of the curve, if not prescient on many matters, and his work pushes us to consider seriously the importance of ecology, individuality in art praxis, the dehumanization and alienation under hyper- capitalism, and strategies to recover sacramental human relationships in a vapid political climate. He might even have some insights about what to do about people like Hamalian who have “discovered the use of the rhetoric of radical politics for reactionary purposes.” (360). Hamalian really shouldn’t have the last word on Rexroth (and neither should I). Until a more sympathetic biography is written, I prefer to let him speak for himself. His quotes follow my untitled poem. Kenneth when you were alive you were larger than life you never said when dead you'd be larger than death you pirouetted integrity your best friend, Laughlin called you omniscient in your late thirties you wrote him a letter admitting you couldn't feed yourself and were a beggar from sheepherder cowboy cook horse wrangler painter and poet driver for Al Capone's lieutenant you almost had to take a job as a rat catcher not even a dog catcher a poetry book of yours won a California prize you had to borrow a suit to attend the dinner party you were rough on some no patience for evil you pushed yourself to starburst heights pioneer of jazz poetry points massager front guard aiding Japanese and Japanese-Americans in San Francisco to escape from horse stable fate you hid them in your four rooms you sent many mid-west on a scam you devised enrolling them in correspondence schools yet you couldn't afford a $10 pair of shoes when you were almost forty years old you saw the capitalist system as doomed but wouldn't be fooled by Stalin's tactics you led a hard life for a long time because you always kept it real as everything unravels people will catch your worth bodhisattva among reeds shaken by the mindless and soulless humans never again free as you were future prohibits it like the softly waving hand of an Indian dancer your poetry will last as long as the language * * * page 1 page 3 |