`The Basic Documents'

I hadn’t thought about Kenneth Rexroth in many years until I recently discovered the Bureau of Public Secrets and its extensive Rexroth archive. I had filed him away in a drawer labeled “Beatnik-Lite,” which is unfair, I know, but reading is a Darwinian enterprise that winnows out the weak, and even a hearty reader has finite patience and time. Rexroth’s poetry still seems trifling, too voluble and slack, too sentimental, too in thrall to Pound and his Cathay translations, but the literary essays, especially Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited, if not as reliable as, say, comparable work by Hugh Kenner or Guy Davenport, are admirably enthusiastic and personal. Rexroth has lived a long time with most of the books he writes about. As critic or literary journalist, Rexroth is sometimes old-fashioned, sometimes bohemian, sometimes both simultaneously, but it’s safe to say he was more deeply read than most of his countercultural admirers. He’s no Kerouac, who often sounded illiterate. Rexroth’s essays entered the world as journalism, not scholarship, and were published first in such periodicals as Saturday Review, The Nation and the San Francisco Examiner. In his Introduction to Classics Revisited (1968) he writes:

“Men have been writing for over five thousand years and have piled up a vast mass of imaginative literature. Some of it is just writing that happens to have lasted physically. There are, however, a small number of books that are something more. They are the basic documents in the history of the imagination; they overflow all definitions of classicism and, at the same time, share the most simply defined characteristics.”

The most significant phrase is “a small number of books that are something more.” Rexroth is writing on the eve of the ascension of institutional nihilism, when scorning the supreme accomplishments of humanity became fashionable. His unspoken opponent is not today’s tenured radical but yesterday’s conventional illiterate, though the two are easily confused. In More Classics Revisited, he describes the work of St. Thomas Aquinas as “very entertaining reading,” and writes:

“The flaws in Aquinas are the flaws of the age before rigorous experimentation and before the development of an acutely sensitive humanitarianism. He may have believed that vultures were only female and fertilized by the wind, and that one of the minor joys of the blessed is the contemplation, from the walls of Heaven, of God’s Justice inflicting suffering on the damned in Hell, but quaint notions like these, painlessly expurgated by most of his modern editors, have nothing to do with the integrity of his system. If they had, it would not be possible for a thoroughly modern man like Étienne Gilson to find Thomism a completely satisfactory world view.”

Rexroth’s voice is Johnsonian in its confidence and common sense. Its chief defect is a striving too hard after provocative bluffness, as though he wished to say not only, “This is good stuff,” but, “This is good stuff even if it seems lousy, and if you don’t agree the fault is yours.” Also, like many writers of his generation (he was born in 1905, and died in 1982), Rexroth overindulges in the empty language of psychology, throwing around “archetypes” and “gestalt” and other quaintly shopworn rubbish. His love of great books, however, overcomes the inherited clichés of the age. In his piece on one of my favorite novels, Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford, Rexroth articulates some of my own evolving feelings about fiction:

“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there is only about a ten-foot shelf of books which can be read again and again in later life with thorough approval and with that necessary identification that Coleridge long ago called suspension of disbelief. It is not ideas or ideologies or dogmas that become unacceptable. Any cultivated person should be able to accept temporarily the cosmology and religion of Dante or Homer. The emotional attitudes and the responses to people and to the crises of life in most fiction come to seem childish as we ourselves experience the real thing. Books written far away and long ago in quite different cultures with different goods and goals in life, about people utterly unlike ourselves, may yet remain utterly convincing….remain true to our understanding of the ways of man to man the more experienced we grow.”

I found this passage oddly cheering. Fiction, perhaps because its stuff, the matter of which its narratives are composed, is so inextricably rooted in our social dailiness, ages poorly, like a heavy smoker. Nothing grows stale so quickly as the timely. This is why Proust remains as fresh as this morning and Denis Johnson already smells musty. Of Parade’s End, Rexroth writes:

“The result is a little as though Burnt Njal had been rewritten by the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”

Who can resist?