Bohemian Half-Worlds
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Bohemian Half-Worlds The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World By Kenneth Rexroth Herder and Herder. 196 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature"; author,...
...Rexroth is too old a lion to be easily foxed by rhetoric, and he is alive to the follies and perils of counterculture demagogy—to the sds politicians, the Panthers and the Trotsky-Maoist groups who have tried to seize hold of a youth movement which, in his view, is significant precisely because it is anti-political and anti-ideological...
...I do not mean passages of poems that might be interpreted one way or another...
...in a society of abundance, where the poor live better than Charlemagne, everybody can afford to be ethical...
...For what Rexroth is really describing is a tradition of dissent that is not new (Bohemia as a counterculture has existed, as he points out, from the time of Villon) but rather has taken on new aspects in our day after passing out of traditional radical, artistic and marginal groups into the wider circles of American society...
...The first accusation might stand on the basis of passages in Eliot's poems, but for the latter I can find no supporting facts...
...Accordingly, The Alternative Society is subtitled "Essays from the Other World...
...Some of the essays are on non-literary themes...
...Two pieces discuss community planning and urbanism...
...another opens with the environmental crisis and ends in a criticism of the multiversity...
...author, "The Writer and Politics" Kenneth Rexroth, as I have said at length in these pages, is one of America's best living poets...
...it will always have enough tough and crotchety life to keep the attention of a reader who dips beneath the cover...
...If one regards the purely social essays as subsidiary to the literary ones—sociological glosses, as it were—the book does acquire a kind of discursive unity...
...they never discuss a single work of poetry or a particular poet at all intensively...
...Happily, nothing Rexroth writes is likely to be throttled by any publisher's efforts...
...The flaps offer one of those foolish, gushing blurbs ("Kenneth Rexroth doesn't write poetry and essays, doesn't write philosophy and social criticism, he does them...
...Although not a critic in the orthodox sense—poets of his type rarely are—Rexroth is a chronicler of a vivid and idiosyncratic kind who knows an astonishing amount (much of it from his own experience) about the North American cultural underground...
...But most are on poetry in the United States since World War II, and are written from the point of view of an old anarchist who—like so many of us—has found the very label "anarchist" too square to be sustained...
...exacly where is it "on record" that Eliot was "in favor of eliminating the Jews...
...If such a statement exists, I have missed it, and am ready to be convinced by proof...
...the picture presented is highly personal and impressionistic, jeweled with the fragments of knowledge an accomplished polymath loves to display...
...They equally evade being history in any ordinary sense, however...
...The Alternative Society is interesting primarily for the character it projects, that argumentative, opinionated personality which is indeed part of Rexroth, but is not always easy to reconcile with the exemplary order and serenity of his best poetry...
...employed by publishers with habitual perversity to kill at birth the books they issue and therefore presumably admire...
...The uniting thread is Rex-roth's own still-active interest in bohemian half-worlds and their values...
...For example, talking of T. S. Eliot: "He is not only on record as being an anti-Semite, but on record as being in favor of eliminating the Jews...
...Of course, one often disagrees with Rexroth, questions his interpretations, and occasionally questions the facts he presents, usually without documentation...
...It consists of occasional, journalistic pieces previously published in periodicals—except for one Rexroth refused to rewrite for the New York Review of Books, whose editors mistakenly interpreted his San Francisco orientation, as "provincialism," and another done for the bbc, mistakenly described here (those publishers again...
...I mean an actual statement by Eliot saying: "I would massacre the Jews," or words to that effect...
...Featured on the back of the dust cover is a benevolently leonine portrait of Rexroth, now in his middle 60s...
...He is no less alive to the way protest is dependent on technology and the affluence it brings...
...as the "British Broadcasting Company...
...If it does not exist, I must regard the accusation as the kind of wild remark that will discredit an otherwise valuable book —discredit it more than, in my judgment, Rexroth's essential sanity and sincerity deserve...
...The Heat," originally written for Playboy, concerns the attitudes of American policemen and their reasons for hating the counterculture...
...That is a harsh accusation, and I wonder what facts Rexroth can bring to prove it...
...These pieces may not be criticism...
...He is also, and has been for the past 50 years, a principled defender of successive countercultures...
...It is perhaps the intuitive grasp of connections and analogies that is most important (as in the fascinating comparison of medieval and modern popular song-poetry in "Back to the Sources of Literature"), and the flashes of wisdom that repeatedly illuminate his running comments on the contemporary scene...
Vol. 53 • September 1970 • No. 18
