Life as Fiction

...MARTIN KILSON is a lecturer in government at Harvard...

...What emerges from this romance, although Rexroth does not really make a point of it, is a portrait of the destruction of the old American radicalism...

...Reviewed by Paul Trachtman In this wordy, rambling chronical of raw youth in the last days of a radical America, poet Kenneth Rexroth has left his daughters, and any other readers, a large assemblage of old family portraits, true confessions of the private life of Midwestern bo-hemia, and gossip about great men and the sort of beautiful women who showed up at his flat late at night, dressed only in a raincoat...

...MICHAEL D. REAGAN is a professor of political science at the University of California in Riverside...

...But there was more to it than corruption politics and the class war...

...Rexroth ends this memoir in his twenty-first year, with the week in which Sacco and Vanzetti were executed...

...an Chicago...

...RICHARD C. KOSTELANETZ is a free lance writer who lives on the fringe of Harlem...

...He wrote "Politics, Economics, and the General Welfare...

...This work was not written at all, but talked into a tape recorder and later typed out...

...Whether or not it is a novel is of no real consequence...

...Born in 1905, as a child Rexroth saw an America that now seems as unreal as a Longfellow idyll, an America of drowsy drugstores with gold-labeled jars and overhead fans, where pills were hand rolled and opium and camphor mashed in mortars, an America of "horses in yellow net negligees, with their ears sticking out of straw hats...

...Rexroth calls this a novel, and why argue...

...The result is a sort of porch-front prose, plain and almost never dull, but more often long-winded than modest...

...PAUL TRACHTMAN is a free lance writer and reviewer...

...ROBERT SKLAR is an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...

...Both of Rexroth's parents died before he was sixteen, and it was not long before he made his way as a pie-card artist and soapbox poet, moving into a studio in the midst of bohemiTHE REVIEWERS HOWARD ZINN, associate professor of government at Boston University, is the author of "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" and "The Southern Mystique...

...The pages are crowded with burlesque queens, anarchists, intellectual hoboes, and homosexual cops...

...He is coeditor of "The Political Awakening of Africa...

...The years in Chicago, and of roaming the country as fry cook, pitchman, and horse wrangler, are pure picaresque...

...In the ferment of Chicago's Dill Pickle and Green Mask and Penguin Coffee Shop, and in similar hangouts from Greenwich Village to Seattle, the free-thinking of the old, revolutionary pietists and abolitionists was ending up as a coffee house culture...

...If they stuck to the language of the left, few had the courage to endure...

...He grew up in the early days of progressive education, in towns where men like Ambrose Bierce lived down the street, in a society where the likes of Eugene Debs came to sit on the front porch and eat chicken and drink whisky and talk about unhappy marriages...

...He sees his life as a "story of picaresque adventure," which is the oldest form of novel in the language...

...After World War I the erosion of the old radical tradition brought forth a breed of bo-hemians who would live not in, but at the edges of the real world...

...In that week, he says, the world in which he had grown up "came forever to an end...

...The IWW had already splintered before Rexroth's Chicago days, and the Communists were just then enlisting intellectuals in search of a commitment...

...For young Kenneth Rexroth, radicalism was a family inheritance, a part of the genetic stock of "Shwenkfelders, Mennonites, German revolutionaries of '48, Abolitionists, suffragists, squaws and Indian traders, octoroons and itinerant horse dealers, farmers in broad hats, full beards, and frogged coats, hard drinking small town speculators," who made up the fact and legend of the Rexroth past...