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Kenneth Rexroth’s Autobiography
(Excerpts)
Editorial Note
These excerpts, though extensive, comprise less than a fifth of Kenneth Rexroth’s
autobiography. I have tried to present a representative sampling of his adventures, but
there are hundreds of other fascinating anecdotes in the book, and many of Rexroth’s
explorations in all sorts of areas, political, philosophical, literary, artistic or
erotic, are scarcely touched on here. If you enjoy these selections, I think you’ll
find the entire book equally interesting.
The book’s title, An Autobiographical Novel (which was adopted on the
urging of the original publisher in order to reduce the risk of libel suits), and the
remarkable range of Rexroth’s experiences have led some readers to question whether
one person could have met so many people or done so many different things. My own view,
based on those areas that I have some familiarity with and on a number of independent
corroborations that I have come across, is that Rexroth’s book is as true as most
autobiographies are — that is, allowing for the fact that we all have a tendency to
remember, and perhaps embellish, the most interesting and admirable events in our lives
and to gloss over the most boring or embarrassing. Granting that his story probably
includes a few “stretchers,” as Huck Finn would put it, I think that most
questionings of its reliability can be attributed to various combinations of ignorance,
inexperience and envy. I cannot do better than to quote one of the few reviewers of the
book who was honest enough to recognize this:
Glancing back over his book, I perceive that Mr. Rexroth did quite a few things in his
youth that I haven’t yet gotten around to. I’ve never shared a prison cell with
a man in drag, or so much as seen any dingfobs: “life-sized rubber women which were
exported by the Kobe Sex Shop, probably to all the prisons in the world.” I’ve
never changed the locks in an office building, uncovering evidence which forced several
people out of the IWW. I never got caught in the middle of a typhoon. I never attended a
Black Mass in the Bronx, or hung around in a place patronized by lesbians who were really
escaped nuns. I never met a girl whose stories, still unpublished, were better than those
of Katherine Mansfield. I never sold health books to country folks using a Gila monster
and “slowly peeling an orange in one continuous spiral” as part of my pitch. And
I never fell in love at first sight with the girl I subsequently married.
Being a skeptical and conservative fellow, I
couldn’t help wondering whether Mr. Rexroth was laying it all on a bit thick. So, as
we happen to live in the same town, I called on him and asked him bluntly if he was a
liar. He said no, he wasn’t, and went on to tell me several stories that he’d
left out of the book. During an evening of delightful and rambling conversation, he told
me several things about my home town in England which I didn’t know, including the
name of the family who ran the place back in Tudor times and some details about the rood
screen in the cathedral. On the basis of this and others aspects of our conversation, I
was obliged to conclude that Mr. Rexroth did experience all the events he describes. He
himself maintains that the variety was only possible because the social structure in the
West was then so open and because it was easy to drift into what would now be much more
tightly guarded groups. . . .
I strongly recommend this first volume of his memoirs
to anybody who wants to know what the life of action is really like. But it would not, I
think, make suitable reading for the envious, since it is all too likely to depress them,
making them brood over how little they know and how much time they’ve wasted. [Sarel
Eimerl, The Reporter, 19 May 1966]
The first edition of the book (Doubleday, 1966) ended with Rexroth’s move to San
Francisco and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in August 1927. The “Postlude”
was added to a 1978 reprinting of that edition. Some later chapters were published in a
small volume entitled Excerpts from a Life (Conjunctions, 1981). The present
selection is drawn from the posthumous edition edited by Linda Hamalian (New Directions,
1991), which incorporates the Excerpts chapters and some other previously
unpublished material, bringing the story up to 1949. Page numbers are indicated at the end
of each selection. Headings and other material within square brackets are mine.
Ken Knabb
May 2001
CONTENTS
- Introduction
Home Schooling and Indian Lore
- Soapboxes, Salons and Speakeasies
- Cub Reporter
Jail Time
Political Education
- Trips Out West
Monastic Interlude
- France and Mexico
Andrée
San Francisco
California Mountains
Psych Ward
- World War II
The Libertarian Circle
Postlude
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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