Some writers are bold enough to tell you how it is. Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was one of those. He was experienced, went to the school of hard knocks, but like Nelson Algren, was urbane and sophisticated in his responses to the environment. He asked questions before sticking it on you. No, he had from an early period in his life as an orphan been a voracious reader of classics, positively hoovering them up by the set. Yet, in this instance, he was not a guy like Aldous Huxley who took volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica around with him in his suitcase - no the knowledge was palpable and streetwise. He was hip. However, like the hard-boiled Algren, Rexroth was a romantic of sorts. Always courting the ladies. All of them would leave him, bar one, who married him in the end as it was convenient. Rexroth had his soft and spiritual side - he was though in his way just as misogynistic as D.H. Lawrence. His rather phony idea of the sanctity of marriage is seen in his description of the epiphanic moment in Lawrence's writings:
Reality streams through the body of Frieda, through every place she steps, valued absolutely, totally, beyond time and place, in the minute particular. The swinging of her breasts as she stoops in the bath, the roses, the deer, the harvesters, the hissing of the glacier water in the steep river--everything stands out lit by a light not of this earth and at the same time completely of this earth, the light of the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, whose source is the wedded body of the bride. from "Poetry, Regeneration, and D.H. Lawrence" (p. 189) in Bird in the Bush (1959.
I might get caught up in this erotic-mysticism if I was an adolescent kid just graduating from masturbating and looking or hankering towards something more meaningful. Sex is situated in the natural - but it is for Rexroth and Lawrence - one-way sex, not the I and Thou dialogue. Yet, Rexroth does catch the drift of the complexity of Lawrence, and in the next descriptive take on the minor prophet, echoes Lawrence's gift for communing with nature (probably his forte):
The accuracy of Lawrence's observation haunts the mind permanently. I have never stood beside a glacier river, at just that relative elevation, and just that pitch, with just that depth of swift water moving over a cobbled bed, without hearing again the specific hiss of Lawrence's Isar. These poems may not be subliminated (whatever Y.M.C.A. evasion that may refer to), but they are certainly pure and eternal. (ibid)
I like the swipe at the Christian prudery. Our Ken knew how to do those literary rabbit punches, hurt them good. He is also, as a poet, one who as a critic, which he categorically refuses to be in this collection, very good at quickly cutting to what matters in Lawrence. While some people have difficulty understanding the acoustics and metrical system of Lawrence - Rexroth, brilliantly captures it:
I think Lawrence was simply very sensitive to quantity and to the cadenced pulses of verse. In the back of his head was a stock of sundry standard English verse patterns. He started humming a poem, hu hu hum, hum hum, hu hu hum hu, adjusted it as best might be to the remembered accentual patterns, and let it go at that. (ibid., p.179)
As a poet, Rexroth excelled at finding out what was going on in other poet's works. In his other capacity as a translator, he had prejudices. He preferred the Chinese classics to the Japanese classics. Perhaps it was the bawdiness - like ranging Chaucer against Dante? I do not accept this approach. I can read the Chinese classic, The Monkey by Wu Cheng'en (translated by Arthur Waley) and enjoy its satire, and then lay it to one side and pick up the exquisite account of the Shining Price in the Tales of the Genji by Murasaki Shikabu ( translated by Edward Seidensticker). Nevertheless, one can really enjoy Rexroth's riff on Chinese literature and why he likes it. It is addictive. You really do want to go to the university library or onto Amazon/Abebooks and get a hold of the The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Water Margin . Yes, it is true, if you read these kinds of works, just like the sets of the classics you submerge yourself into another world, more than any role play game can do. That's the point of these essays. Enthusiasm. Eventually, despite wanting to lose your temper with Rexroth when he crudely deconstructs, but honestly, your taste for a writer or even a belief, you do want to thank him, because he got you engaged rather than passively sucking up literature - like a robot vacuum cleaner. In an essay on Martin Buber, "The Hasidism of Martin Buber", Rexroth like Edmund Wilson on the Dead Sea Scrolls, again gets you hooked on a different perspective to religion - not the Sunday school type. I suppose, Buber is in that group of writers and thinkers we (especially guys) like to incorporate into our worldview, a kind of intellectual brand statement. Today I am wearing Franz Kafka briefs, and Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский patent shoes, Martin Buber aftershave, a Jean-Paul Sartre white shirt. We are caddis-flies, really. Now, in the midst of reading the essay, and getting dreadfully lost in the Gnosticism, I spotted a typo. Thank (no)God/s for typos. It was the Idealist philosopher, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (3 September 1866 – 18 January, 1925). He had become a McTeggart. I do not think the two would have got along very well. McTag changed his name to inherit, and McTeg might imply a snipe at this name changing. Though it does in the ordinary language sort of way open up the possibility of discussing the reality of names. And (never start with and - but I do to flout convention), I once had a book from McTag's personal library. Not much kudos there. You cannot walk into a cafteria and say, look I got a book that once belonged to a British idealist philosopher. They would think you were completely crackers or daft - the subject of another short essay.
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