If It Don't Swing, It Ain't It
MURRAY, WILLIAM
If It Don't Swing, It Ain't It Digging that San Francisco 'renaissance' By William Murray I'm ashamed to confess publicly that, though I was at least familiar with the names, if not the work, of...
...The doctor always says—¦ get out of New York before it kills you...
...He is a somewhat bashful spokesman, however...
...Man,' I said, quoting the colossus, "if it don't swing, it ain't it," and I shut the door on his fingers...
...I found it pretty hard, at first, to believe that the soul of an artist could have survived such a formidable conspiracy, but underneath the ice pack, says Rexroth, there beat a living substance centered in San Francisco, "one of the easiest cities in the world to live in...
...I have to admit that it didn't seem that simple to me, at first...
...This particular issue (Volume 1, Number 2) is entitled "San Francisco Scene" and deals exclusively with the work of that "vigorous new generation of writers, painters and musicians in the Bay Area...
...The world of poet-professors, Southern Colonels and ex-Left Social Fascists from which they have escaped has no more to do with literature than do the leading authors of the court of Napoleon III whose names can be found in the endless pages of the Causeries du lundi...
...So the Taoism and Buddhism of Far Eastern culture functions as a keel and ballast to the ship of state...
...We must love one another or die," he trumpets, adding that this is the message of practically every utterance of importance since the Neolithic Revolution...
...It was only raining in Squareville, but I got that feeling again about all those slobs peering down my neck...
...He therefore sums up in one unforgettable paragraph: "Poets come to San Francisco for the same reason so many Hungarians have been going to Austria recently...
...No wonder we've got this Renaissance out there...
...The nearest thing in Rome was Catullus, and it is apparent, reading him, that there stood behind him no anonymous and forgotten body of Bohemians...
...None of the literature of the past two hundred years, Rexroth continues, is of the slightest importance unless it is "disaffiliated": "There were no Baudelaires in Babylon...
...It's raining, sir," the elevator man said as we reached the ground floor...
...I've never been in Seattle, so I wouldn't know about all those weeping Wobblies in the shadows, but the cocktails they serve in taxicabs these days are pretty tough on the old system...
...I got a bit confused wondering what all those Southern Colonels were doing in Hungary in the first place...
...You may think you know what's going on, but I'm telling you, this guy Rexroth, he's the one who digs it all...
...Upstairs I found my chick and the kid sitting around in bobby sox drinking this putrid Coca-Cola like they do in those wholesome ads...
...There has been so much publicity recently about the San Francisco Renaissance," he begins, "that I for one am getting a little sick of writing about it...
...They belong to the ancien regime—all anciens regimes as against the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...
...In New York, after one week of living on cocktails in taxicabs, I have to go to a doctor...
...At this point in my enlightenment, the only problem I had was how to apply what Rexroth was telling me about the human condition to my personal life...
...They are exactly like the astronomers and philosophers the Mongols took off from Samarkand to Karakorum...
...That is, until one day I casually picked up a copy of Evergreen Review, a literary quarterly edited by Barney Rosset and Donald Allen and published in paperback format by Grove Press...
...So that's the way it was in Babylon, Rome and China—after which Rexroth turns his guns on the deluded attempt by "Marxist estheticians" to woo the artist and writer into the service of State Capitalism...
...Then, when the kid reached for her knife, I pulled the chair out from under her...
...The chick started to shout...
...I get nervous walking down the streets of Seattle with all those ghosts of dead Wobblies weeping in the shadows and all those awful squares peering down my neck...
...I knocked him down and went out to get a taxi...
...This was because they didn't understand the origin and nature of the intellectual elite: "Artist, poet, physicist, astronomer, dancer, musician, mathematician are captives stolen from an older time, a different kind of society, in which, ultimately, they were the creators of all primary values...
...Then I have to admit that I'm not as well up on the doings at the court of Napoleon III as I might be, but I do know what he means about T. S. Eliot and the fog factory...
...I wasn't fooled...
...It is just that simple...
...Fortunately, he soon warms to his subject, and it isn't more than a couple of quick sentences before he is in hip deep, and I mean hip, in an explanation of what our underground artists, "those who reject the Social Lie," have been up against: "For ten years after the Second War there was a convergence of interest—the Business Community, military imperialism, political reaction, the hysterical fear and mud-drenched guilt of the ex-Stalinist, ex-Trotskyite American intellectuals, the highly organized academic and literary employment agency of the Neo-antireconstructionists—what might be called the meliorists of the White Citizens' League, who were out to augment the notorious budgetary deficiency of the barbarously miseducated Southron male schoolmarm by opening up jobs 'up No'th.' This ministry of all the talents formed a dense crust of custom over American cultural life—more of an ice pack...
...Then, full of love for his fellow man, Rexroth addresses his readers: "Listen you—do you really think your kids act like the bobby soxers in those wholesome Coca-Cola ads...
...Boy, what a mistake those rats made...
...The Vaticide Review is simply the Saturday Evening Post of the excessively miseducated, and its kept poets are the Zane Grays, Clarence Bud-ington Kellands and J. P. Marquands of Brooks Brothers Boys who got an overdose of T. S. Eliot at some Ivy League fog factory...
...If It Don't Swing, It Ain't It Digging that San Francisco 'renaissance' By William Murray I'm ashamed to confess publicly that, though I was at least familiar with the names, if not the work, of such eminent California hipsters as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, I had never heard of Kenneth Rex-roth...
...Well, Rexroth had really done it this time...
...For it is Kenneth Rexroth, himself a poet and avant-garde critic, who in his introductory essay, "San Francisco Letter," speaks out ringingly for the entire movement...
...Naturally, I was excited at the prospect of discovering a bold new literary movement with which I could associate myself and I hurried back to my dismal garret to find out what it was all about...
...When we got to my place, the cabbie leaned out the window and asked me about jazz...
...It is not that we have lost sight of them in time...
...It was when he began to discuss the work of his fellow Renaissance Man, poet Allen Ginsberg, that I fully understood the cosmic significance of his message...
...Darling," the chick said, "you're soaking wet...
...Until this point, I hadn't understood the significance of the Renaissance or what brought it about...
...Don't you know that across the table from you at dinner sits somebody who looks on you as an enemy who is planning to kill him in the immediate future in an extremely disagreeable way...
...Shaken but no longer rectangular, I strode out of my garret, a graceful ellipse, into the gloom-dust of the city night...
...Don't you know that if you were to say to your English class, 'It is raining,' they would take it for granted you were a liar...
...No sooner had I plunged into the awesome prose-poetry of Evergreen s 159 searing, revolutionary pages than 1 came face to face with the guiding genius behind the creative surge sweeping eastward from the Pacific...
...They write the sort of thing they do for the same reason that Holderlin or Blake or Baudelaire or Rimbaud or Mallarme wrote it...
...As if that weren't bad enough, just listen to what was going on in China: "Tu Fu censured the Emperor, but he wanted to be recognized for it—he wanted to be a Censor...
...It was a crazy ride, man, and the cocktails that driver served were murder, sheer murder...
...That would seem to be clear enough —those Mongols were tough cookies, all right—but Rexroth is worried that he may have been going a bit too fast for everybody...
...I always feel I ought to get a passport every time I cross the Bay to Oakland or Berkeley...
...The prospect of ever having to leave such a paradise fills Rexroth with horror: "I for one can say flatly that if I couldn't live here I would leave the United States for someplace like Aix en Provence—so fast...
...Keep cool," I told her...
...Hence the Renaissance...
Vol. 41 • January 1958 • No. 3
