Edited snippets from Kenneth Rexroth Book Reviews and Essays at The Bureau of Public Secrets
Maple Walnut
[On the role of the poet in society]:
“Dryden, loyal to the Stuart dynasty which grudgingly supported him, hammered out a new kind of verse and a new attitude towards reality, presaging the oncoming secular, republican, rationalist eighteenth century. This empiricism, before the death of Dryden, was to destroy the power of the Stuarts and the anachronistic feudalism they represented. Dryden himself, of course, growing progressively more reactionary, was completely unaware of this.” – 1936
Rocky Road
[From an introduction to DH Lawrence’s Selected Poems]:
“Hardy could say to himself: ‘Today I am going to be a Wiltshire yeoman, sitting on a fallen rock at Stonehenge, writing a poem to my girl on a piece of wrapping paper with the gnawed stub of a pencil,’ and he could make it very convincing. But Lawrence really was the educated son of a coal miner, sitting under a tree that had once been part of Sherwood Forest, in a village that was rapidly becoming part of a world-wide, disemboweled hell, writing hard, painful poems, to girls who carefully had been taught the art of unlove. It was all real. Love really was a mystery at the navel of the earth, like Stonehenge. The miner really was in contact with a monstrous, seething mystery, the black sun in the earth.” – 1947
Cherries Jubilee
[On Erich Fromm's post-Freudian take on post-War America]:
“Dr. Fromm knows that our society is sick, deranged, demoralized, and that it is no good trying to heal the sick, deranged and demoralized by attempting to adjust them to it, even on its most civilized levels. On the other hand, it is a little like watching Voltaire trying to exorcise an intelligent and thoroughly malignant dinosaur from his Swiss garden by the sole means of his dry, wise, but somewhat stereotyped irony.” – 1951
Rum Raison
[From a review of The Victorian Temper]:
“What we want to know first about the Victorians is how they got that way. We do not need books to tell us what they thought of themselves; we can always visit our relatives. The other countries in the nineteenth century had a brutalized working class, subhuman paupers, hordes of newly rich parvenus, and all produced masterful art out of it, while the Victorians wrote atrociously and painted worse. Certainly one of the things wrong with the major Victorians is that they were all more or less implicated in the guilt of the society that produced them, whereas Delacroix, Degas, Seurat, Baudelaire, Flaubert, even Hugo and Gautier, were definitely exiles from a future time. For this reason the Victorians who interest us most today are minor artists whom personal eccentricity or circumstances dislocated from their fellows, who were cut off, by cranky ideas, geographical isolation or some other accident, from the pervasive spirit of the time. It is these we need to know about, not Carlyle, Ruskin, Morley, Bagehot, Tennyson, who all can be found today in the newspapers, especially on Easter, Labor Day and the anniversary of Hiroshima.” – 1951
Raspberry Sherbet
[On Matteo Ricci’s Chinese Journals]:
“When the Pope ordered the Jesuits to abandon their efforts to adapt Christianity to Chinese culture and to present Roman Catholicism in strictly Western European terms, the Chinese Emperor was aghast at the folly of his Western cousin. As Toynbee says, at this point Christianity had a chance to become a true world religion and rejected it. Never again in history has that opportunity presented itself on such favorable terms. Had Ricci and his colleagues been permitted to continue their translation of Euclid into Chinese, of Chinese classics into Latin, their introduction of maps, astronomical instruments, globes and medical devices, there is certainly no question but that the history of the world would have been far different.” – 1953
Lemon Sorbet
[On the Brahmin heart of the great Historian Francis Parkman]:
“For forty years he devoted himself to justifying the triumph of anal over oral sexuality — or, in the words of another great Puritan, the ways of God to man.” – 1955
Black Currant Sorbet
[On Grousset's history of the Crusades, published while Algeria was raging]:
“Even at its highest levels of scholarship it is obvious that French chauvinism has forgotten nothing and learned nothing.” – 1955
Dark Chocolate Gelato
[On the recent deaths of two artists he had known]:
“Like the pillars of Hercules, like two ruined Titans guarding the entrance to one of Dante’s circles, stand two great dead juvenile delinquents —Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas, both overcome by the horror of the world in which they found themselves, because at last they could no longer overcome that world with the weapon of a purely lyrical art…It is impossible for an artist to remain true to himself as a man, let alone an artist, and work within the context of this society.” – 1957
Pistachio
[On “the youth problem” circa 1957]:
“I believe that most of an entire generation will go to ruin — the ruin of Céline, Artaud, Rimbaud, voluntarily, even enthusiastically. Social disengagement, artistic integrity, voluntary poverty — these are powerful virtues and may pull them through, but they are not the virtues we tried to inculcate — rather they are the exact opposite.” – 1957
Coffee
[On William Blake]:
“Following the ill-informed snobbery of T.S. Eliot a lot of nonsense has been written about Blake’s lack of tradition. Nothing could be less true. Mr. Eliot’s tradition goes back to Aquinas as interpreted in the pages of L’Action Française. Blake’s goes back to the Memphite Theology and the Pyramid Texts. It is the tradition of providing the heart with images of its alienation. If the individual or society can project the dilemmas which reason cannot cope with, they can be controlled if not mastered. This was Blake’s function. He saw the oncoming Business Civilization and prepared a refuge.” – 1957
Peppermint Stick
[After being voluntarily tested by a quasi-governmental socio-psychological institution with a lot of initials on it]:
“All this foundation jive is just a very fancy way of making the profits of the automobile factories in Detroit and the steel mills in Pittsburgh feed and clothe and shelter the unemployable children of the middle and upper classes like the lilies of the field and the foxes of the earth—about as socially useful as an intercontinental ballistic missile.” – 1957
Blackberry
[On his assignment to write about the (to him non-existent) link between Zen and Coleridge]:
“Coleridge’s mind was as muddy as yen-shi soup. He could take the clearest ideas and make them hopelessly obscure. He liked them that way. Vagueness, indefiniteness, obscurity, excited him. All the moral and intellectual qualities which the eighteenth century abhorred, he liked best — in fact, he dug them. As a thinker and esthetician he is renowned for his theory of the imagination. Numerous books have been written on this subject. None of them agrees as to what Coleridge’s theory was.” – 1958
Bananas Flambé
[On Arthur Rimbaud]:
“The average poet turns to writing because he can’t compete with his schoolmates in track and football. High school dances frighten him. He never learns the proper passes that score with a chick in the back seat of a convertible. In fact, he never gets near one. But there are always a few girls, not very appetizing, most of them, who will be nice to a fellow who has made “The Lit.” So, he invests in a set of Dowson, Housman, and T.S. Eliot and starts in. This was not Rimbaud’s approach. He applied to literature, and to litterateurs, the minute he laid eyes on them, the devastating methods of total exploitation described so graphically in the Communist Manifesto. He did things to literature that had never been done to it before, and they were things which literature badly needed done to it . . . just like the world needed the railroads the Robber Barons did manage to provide.” – 1958
Sour Cherry Sorbet & Caramel aux Buerre Salé
[On the French influence on American poetry]:
“People tend to forget that the heart of the United States was once French. Not only was all of Canada and all of the Mississippi drainage from the Alleghenies to the Rockies under the French flag, as everybody knows, but French and French-Indian mountain men had penetrated to the West Coast before any of the officially recognized explorers and discoverers, for whom they were in fact often the guides. Deep in the Northern Rockies is the town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. In Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon, many of the leading merchants in the small towns often still name their children Pierre, Jeanne and Yvonne. Not only are towns all over the Middle West named such things as Prairie du Chien and Vincennes, not only are their leading families named Sublette and Le Sueur and Deslauriers, but — something very few people realize — French life survived intact in hundreds of small isolated communities until well into the twentieth century.
When I was a boy, during the First World War, I took a canoe trip down the Kankakee River from near Chicago to the Mississippi. We passed through many villages where hardly an inhabitant spoke a word of English and where the only communication was the wandering tree-lined river and a single muddy, rutted road out to the highway. There was a popular humorous dialect poet, Drummond, who used to recite his poems in high-school assemblies and on the Chautauqua Circuit (a kind of pious variety tent show for farmers, now vanished) back in those days. ‘I am zee capitain of zee Marguerite vat zail zee Kankakee.’ This was not off in the wilds somewhere — it was a long day’s walk from the neighborhood of Studs Lonigan.” - 1958
Peach
[On ‘The Beat Generation’ – a term he coined]
“Art is a weapon. After millions of well-aimed blows, someday perhaps it will break the stone heart of the mindless cacodemon called Things As They Are. Everything else has failed.” - 1959
Tutti Frutti
[On Jack Kerouac as Madison Avenue’s nihilistic projection of youthful rebellion]
“If the only significant revolt against what the French call the hallucination publicitaire is heroin and Zen Buddhism [then] nobody will ever be able to escape from the lot of this tenth-rate Russian movie called ‘The Collapse of Capitalist Civilization’ onto which somehow we all seem to have wandered.” – 1959
Butter Brickle
[On The Social Lie]:
“The object of all advertising is to stir up insatiable sexual discontent.” – 1959
Crème de Menthe
[On Greek tragedy in translation]
“Take away the costumes and the grand language, it is the same pride, the same doom haunting Orestes that haunts every certified public accountant, every housewife, every automobile salesman. How much nicer people, and how much happier, they’d all be if they only knew it.” – 1959
Prune
[On the Hasidism of Martin Buber]:
“Take away God [from Existentialism] and there is absolutely nothing left. Nothing but black bile. Nobody there. Take away Martin Buber’s God and nothing important in his philosophy has changed. It remains a philosophy of joy, lived in a world full of others. It is not only easy to avoid lying, stealing, fornication, covetousness, idolatry, lust, pride, anger, jealousy, and the rest, it is a positive pleasure. Essential to such a life are magnanimity, courage, and the love and trust of other men. These are above all others the Hasidic virtues, along with humility, simplicity, and joy. These are all virtues of direct dealing with other men — the virtues of dialogue. To the Hasid the mystical trance is a dialogue. The self does not unself itself, but “forgets itself” in conversation with the Other; and from the Other, i.e., God as the ultimate and perfect partner of dialogue, flows out the conversation with all others.” – 1959
Persian Rose
[On the Social Lie]:
“What holds a natural society together is an all-pervading Eros which is an extension and reflection, a multiple reflection, of the satisfactions which are eventually traced to the actual lover and beloved. Out of the union of the lover and the lover as the basic unit of society flares this whole community of love. It is unfortunate that the Judeo-Christian wrath of Marx and the Prussianism of Engels has so transformed us that we forget that this is what lay back of the whole notion of the Hegelian absolute.” – 1959
White Chocolate Truffle
[From an introduction to G.R.S. Mead’s Fragments of a Faith Forgotten]:
“The dilemmas posed by Christianity, Gnosticism attempted to solve with a magical doctrine of correspondences in which man and the cosmos reflected each other. As such, it was a step in the history of science as well as in the history of religion. It was a wrong step, but one which still influences thought, not just the Theosophists, but those who think that Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminancy is an ontological discovery rather than a mathematical formula. Alchemy was Gnostic through and through, an attempt to achieve both wealth and salvation by parallel manipulation of the microcosm and the macrocosm. But the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead is based on the same principle — an enormously sophisticated Smaragdine Tablet. We can learn nothing about the solar system from Gnosticism and little about good and evil, in the world, but we can learn considerable about ourselves.” – 1960
Marronglace
[On hearing of the death of his friend Richard Wright]:
“His struggle, and the struggle of the American Negro, had been for full participation in Western Civilization. His colleagues at Bandung expected that he would hate the white imperialist for the same reasons they did, and they were puzzled and disoriented when they found out that the two emotional areas didn’t overlap at all.” – 1961
Coconut
[On why privatization will not solve the anti-humanism of 20th century urban planning structures]:
“A very large proportion of the population of our cities is spending 25 percent or more of income on housing. What would have happened to the class of birds if at some time in its evolutionary history all birds would have had to spend a quarter of their time every day in the year building their nests?” – 1964
Honey
[On why a recent Indian Art Exhibit showed a decided Hellenic influence]:
“Mahayana Buddhism grew up, flourished, and spread across Asia to Japan from the Bactrian Kingdom established by Alexander after he conquered the Persian Empire to its eastern limits at the Indus River, in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, cut off from the rest of the Greek world, Greek artists and decorators filled the temples and monastic caves of Further Asia with vast quantities of Greek-inspired paintings and sculpture; plays of Euripides were performed in courts that looked out from the Hindu Kush over the deserts of Central Asia; Hercules and Vishnu, Bacchus and Shiva were confused on their coinage; and here, Buddhism, originally a kind of atheistic religious empiricism, was turned into a Mystery Religion of the Mediterranean type. For a long time philologists were puzzled by an Aryan language spoken by a few savage, murderous, filthy robber bands in the mountains and valleys of the Northwest Border. They were certainly the most debased and intractable of all the inhabitants of an intractable region. Then somebody pointed out that the language was simply a degenerate form of the language of Plato. Amongst what sort of savages in what lonely mountains do you suppose English will survive two thousand years hence?” – 1964
Zabaillone
[On his favorite poet, Tu Fu]:
“He comes from a more mature, saner culture than Homer, so it is not even necessary for him to say that the gods, the abstractions from the forces of nature and the passions of men, are frivolous, lewd, vicious, quarrelsome, and cruel and that only the steadfastness of human loyalty, magnanimity, compassion redeem the nightbound world. For Tu Fu, the realm of being and value is not bifurcated. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are not an Absolute, set over against an inchoate reality that always struggles, unsuccessfully, to approximate the pure value of the absolute. Reality is dense, all one being. Values are the way we see things. This is the essence of the Chinese world view. There is nothing that is absolutely omnipotent, but there is nothing that is purely contingent either.” – 1968
Vanilla
[On Chekhov’s Plays]:
“It is this genius for stating only the simplest truth as simply as can be that makes Chekhov inexhaustible — like life. We can see him for the hundredth time when we are sick of everything else in the theater, just as we can read his stories when everything else, even detectives and science fiction, bores us. We are not bored because we do not feel we are being manipulated. We are, of course, but manipulated to respond, 'That’s the way it is.' Since the professional manipulators of the mind never have this response in view, we are quite unconscious of Chekhov’s craftiness — it is hard to believe a playwright who comes to us and says, 'The schoolteacher and the two stenographers next door to where you live — these are the real archetypes.' But until we have learned this — and most of us will never learn it — we will never learn to approach life with the beginnings of wisdom.” – 1968
Amaretto
[On Jane Kramer’s Allen Ginsberg in America]:
“The counter-culture may have become the most profitable in history when Big Business in the form of the Mafia discovered that it could sell methedrine and heroin to adolescents as enlargement-of-consciousness sacraments of a new religion, but her description of the Coming of the Kingdom of the Flower Children reads like nothing so much as Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga and Roo all running around with their clothes off, high on pharmaceuticals beyond the fondest dreams of Huxley, Watts and Leary. Said Dorothy Parker, “Tonstant Weader thwowed up.” I know all these people, most of them very well indeed, and believe me, there is nothing whimsical about what they propose to do to the old culture. Immediately behind Ginsberg stands Whitman and the founders of communal groups from Oneida to New Harmony, from the Schwenkfelders to the Mormons, those noble souls who almost won, who almost established America as a community of love. It is quite impossible to domesticate a person like this, even in the most sophisticated stately homes of Scarsdale where New Yorker ‘Profiles’ go when they die.” – 1969
