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Rexroth’s San Francisco
January-July 1960
Here I Am
A Night Out in the City
Beckett and Ionesco
In Praise of Amateur Shakespeare
The Civil Rights Sit-ins
Poets in the News
Kabuki Theater
The Popularity of Poetry
Well, here I am. When I was a boy, back before the other war, my father had a
friend whom he admired tremendously and of whom I stood in utter awe — the
critic James Gibbons Huneker. He was not just a critic. He was a journalist.
When he wrote about de Pachmann playing Chopin, you could hear it. And he had a
nose for news, an infallible nose, what in another context would be called good
taste. He looked at the first exhibitions of modern art, back in 1908, and said
that the Cubists would change the history of painting and that the Futurists
were self-deluded fakes and would pass as a fad. He played Bach like an angel,
but be also welcomed the first music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
Huneker had a true journalist’s whimsy. He wrote a fascinating guide to the
beer of Europe, full of dry mockery of the wine snobs. He wrote about the
tortured Danish philosopher Kierkegaard long before he was discovered by the
intellectuals, in fact, before Sartre and the editors of America’s highbrow
quarterlies were born. He did all this in the newspapers, back in the nineteen
hundreds when nobody was supposed to know anything. In my adolescence I read all
his books, imitated his attitudes and resolved to follow in his footsteps.
So I went to work on the old Chicago Herald and Examiner back in the
wild days immortalized in The Front Page. After a spell of Chicago
newspaperdom of the Twenties, I decided it was all too rough for me. My father
had died of drink and I saw myself following quickly in his footsteps, not
Huneker’s. The years went by and I led a quiet life. About the time when, if I
had stayed in the business and had kept alive, I just might have been offered a
stint like Huneker’s, the telephone rang and they said, “This is The
Examiner.” Think of all the time I’ve saved. Going on for 40 years, taking
it easy. It just goes to show.
What is this column going to be about? Oh, just things, whatever strikes my
fancy. One thing, for sure, I am not going to be a professional Angry Man. I
think I live a fairly civilized life and I enjoy living it and I enjoy telling
what it feels like. Maybe once in a while some Big Issue might turn up and I
might be what they call “fearless.” I hope I don’t even know it. I think one
of the symptoms of being civilized is that you never know when you are being
courageous.
One week maybe I will write about a book, another about a show of pictures,
or maybe even just one picture, another week about jazz, another week about a
good meal, another about a recital of Renaissance motets.
I like rock climbing, ski-mountaineering, dry fly fishing, maybe I will write
about them. I am all for Issues, too, but I have the vulgar, journalistic
opinion that Issues should be hung on pegs. If you talk to the public you should
always talk about things, not about abstractions, however noble. If you can’t
find a peg to hang an issue on, probably it isn’t an issue. In this the public
is smarter than a lot of writers, and a lot smarter than most thinkers.
[...]
San Francisco seems to have always had a peculiarly salubrious climate for
personal journalism, the occasional essay, the intimate column, from Bret Harte
and Ambrose Bierce to Fremont Older and John D. Barry, it’s a great tradition.
Today the papers are full of them, excellent, good, bad and indifferent. They
are not now and never have been, these columnists, all of them sensationalists.
Even the gossipiest ones have never been as invidiously gossipy as some
elsewhere in the country. A lot of them have purveyed, between the lines, a lot
of wisdom and light.
As I say, it’s a great tradition and I’m proud to be associated with it.
Anyway, Huneker, here I am!
[31 January 1960]
Spring has come to California. It began at the turn of the year, when the
steelhead and salmon started up the rivers seeking the shallows to lay their
eggs and die. We went walking in Devil’s Gulch, between the bright green hills
and the dark forest and the males were surging and fighting in the riffles over
the narrow thread of eggs. My little girls stole cautiously along the bank and
cried out each time they saw them. Next week was Chinese New Year. The fish were
still there, but worn and tattered. In a few days they were scattered, rotting
along the bank. The first blue flowers of the hound’s tongue were already out.
Next week the first trillium were up. In Golden Gate Park the first almond
blossoms were blooming, just as they bloomed for us last year outside our little
villa near Aix-en-Provence, overlooking Cézanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire that he
painted so often.
We took some foreign friends to Nam Yuen restaurant for Chinese New Year’s
dinner and had a sumptuous meal. There was a stupendous battery of dishes,
amongst others a very French dish of stuffed, boned chicken breast and wings
(yung gai yick) which would have cost a pretty franc in Laperouse. We finished
off with Ng Ka Pe (a liqueur made from a blend of herbs), which my friends
thought a most odd drink with food. Then to Enrico’s for cognac or espresso, and
the lively comments of that Belgian waiter named Moriarty. Then to the Cellar
where a whole band of visitors was blowing up a storm behind Pony Poindexter.
All the town was out. It looked like the Boulevard Montparnasse on a warm June
night all over North Beach.
We sat and compared the scene with other places, other cafés, other times —
Piazza San Marco, the Closerie des Lilas under the trees by the great fountain
in Paris where the poets used to go 50 years ago, the cafés along the wonderful
boulevard in the Cour Mirabeau where the shade of the ancient plane trees is so
thick it seems as if the world had sunk deep in an underwater seaweed jungle.
We agreed that these California crowds, out in the first warm nights of this
early spring, were different. Obviously, they had more money. But they had
something else, something that Europe once had far more than America, and now,
it seems each year, has less and less. Good manners and a kind of radiant good
will, the happy courtesy that is the sign of a full, confident, civilized life.
Americans are supposed to be driven, frustrated, competitive, predatory, sex
ridden. These people certainly didn’t look it. They looked like they were having
an easy time relaxing. Our marriages fail, our juveniles are delinquent. Nobody
seemed to be noticing. Strontium 90, the Berlin Corridor, failure to plant the
Stars and Stripes on the moon, everybody should have been harried and worried,
but they weren’t. They were far from being the idle rich, either. Most of them
were young white collar workers, but plenty were blue collar workers, out for
the evening, in Ivy League suits, and all their wives looked, as my friend said,
like fashion models.
There was another difference, though. In comparison with a European crowd,
they had, with few exceptions, a strangely virginal, unspoiled look. To a
European writer who had spent years under bombs and months in concentration
camps, they looked childishly innocent. A few looked hard, but far fewer looked
wise with that special expression of wisdom that comes only with experience of
long drawn out social tragedy and final disillusion. It was just a little
frightening to think that in the hands of these people between our two oceans lay
the destiny of at least half the world. They didn’t seem to know it, and it seemed
they cared less. Furthermore, all unprejudiced observers agree that the crowds
out for a holiday in Moscow are marked by a very similar innocence.
In spite of all the efforts of 40 years of propaganda, ordinary Russians seem
to have difficulty keeping their own pictures as men of destiny in focus.
Instead, the two peoples in whose hands does lie the destiny of mankind right
now, act like good children trying out a reward called History just like it was
a piece of pink candy. All except a few opinionated intellectuals, anyway.
Then we went to the Chinese theater. Whirling pheasant plumes, clashing
banners, oversensitive heroes, weeping maidens, righteous magistrates, all-wise
grandmothers who can always straighten everything out — for at least 800 years,
night after night in millions of theaters before billions of people, the Chinese
drama has built and reinforced and ensured for perpetuity the dominant image the
Chinese people have of themselves. This is all the common people knew of history
or philosophy or literature — but they knew it thoroughly. All our “media”
from the funny papers to highbrow chamber music can hardly compare for impact.
Communist China has absorbed this drama as it has everything else, but after a
few false starts, they discovered that they could tamper with it very little —
too much alteration, and immediately they passed a point of diminishing returns.
The public demanded an image of what it knew itself was like. By and large it’s
an admirable image — brave, magnanimous, sympathetic, temperate, and if need
be, wily. Whatever happens to the Chinese people, even if weren’t for their
immense numbers they would probably never come to disaster, simply because of
the clear, confident, and yet very wise picture they have of themselves.
Back to the sidewalk café at midnight and it was easy to understand the
difference between these crowds and those you’d see on a similar night from the
terrasse of the Coupole or the Deux Magots. “The Image of Modern Man” — like
the Chinese, those French crowds, too, have an image of themselves. It is a
badly battered image, a lot of them don’t like it, in fact they hate it, and one
of its principal social functions is precisely that so many do reject it —
“alienation” they call it. But it is there to reject. One way or another it
has to be coped with.
[21 February 1960]
By now I guess everybody who planned to see Ionesco’s Jack and The
Chairs that the Actors’ Workshop has been giving at the Encore has done so.
The plays were held over by popular demand for several weekends. This last
sentence is usually used for super spectacles, light comedies and an occasional
mystery. That in San Francisco it should be applied to plays by Ionesco,
Beckett, Adamov, Genet, Arrabal, the whole new school of theater, never ceases
to astonish wandering highbrows from Manhattan and points transatlantic. Not
only that — but Sam Beckett’s Endgame is coming next, “returned by
popular demand.” As far as local popular demand is concerned, the boys could
still be playing Waiting for Godot to full houses. It was threatening to
become San Francisco’s unofficial City Anthem when the actors finally took it
off because they were tired of playing it. What sort of new and strange
“popular demand” is this?
Don’t let anybody fool you, these playwrights may be the sensation of Paris
and London, but they don’t draw any such audiences there.
[...] In New York, they
flopped, hard. [...]
I think the real difference is that the rest of the world has come to these
new plays with overly self-conscious attitudes. They are not all that
intellectual. “The Theater of Anguish,” “Theater Cruel,” “Anti-Theater” —
balderdash. The first thing that comes to mind after the curtain comes down in
Jack is, what a vehicle for Buster Keaton and Zazu Pitts in their salad
days! And then, fine as the Actors’ Workshop people are, you realize how much
Buster Keaton and Zazu Pitts would have improved the play, tightened it up,
given insistent pace and, not least, meaningful contemporary reference.
Possibly in Bordeaux they still need to satirize the folkways of the French
lower middle classes of the middle of the last century. But there are far
greater evils and follies abroad in modern Paris, and San Francisco, too, for
that matter, and a satirical art which beats only dead dogs is, perhaps, not
“Anti-Theater,” but it is certainly anti-satire. It leaves the audience with
comfortable feelings of amused superiority. Likewise The Chairs. This is
potentially a fulminating cap of an idea: Properly hitched up, it could set off
a charge of TNT. But again, good as our actors, Symonds, Linenthal and Israel
are, and they are splendid, think of Laurel and Hardy and Ben Turpin. The upper
classes may just be discovering this theatrical medium, but it has been there
under their noses all the time, in the tent shows at village fairs and in the
low dives of the slums of Paris or Berlin. When we saw Waiting for Godot
in San Francisco we immediately recognized it for what it was, a deepened and
enriched burlesque routine, a wonderful chance for four broken down, wino,
gravel voiced, unemployed, burleycue clowns to put across what they really
thought about it all.
Beckett is a great dramatist. He touches all the hidden nerves that lie at
the sources of life and at the same time he is a perfect conjuror of all the
enthusiastic monkey shines that are the pure essence of show business. Ionesco,
no. His plays are clockwork mechanisms of dramaturgy. They race and rattle
along, ominous ticks are heard in the air, bells ring, the cuckoo bird pops out
and says, “Angel Food” in deaf and dumb hand language — but the characters
are completely devoid of interiors. The objects of Ionesco’s satires are not
relevant. Everybody can have a relaxed time disapproving of the feudal
imbecilities and servilities of a bygone concierge of a ruined castle in
Graustark or of the stultifying lives of the petty bourgeois families of the
French provinces, three generations ago. This is entertainment, not drama, and
if its exoticism didn’t throw us, we’d recognize it as pretty commercialized
entertainment....
No. This is not humour noir — black humor — of bitterness and
revolt, it is just plain theatrical merchandise — light comedy with a few
gimmicks borrowed from the surrealists and existentialists. Its much vaunted
“mystification” is no more mysterious than the inexplicable goings on that
used to go on in the Marx Brothers or Olson and Johnson — it’s just a little
more clumsy, and so seems highbrow to misguided Americans.
Right now in Paris there is an Ionesco on, all about how everybody in a
village gets a new disease, rhinocerositosis, and turns into rhinoceroses,
except one indomitable soul who says, “No! Never! Not me! I am human and human
I shall remain.” The parable is obvious. Too obvious. Too convenient. The
Communists can say, “He means Fascism.” The Fascists can say, “He means
Communism.” The chauvinists may say, “He means Americanism.” There’s
something in it for everybody. And who is it who accuses our mass media of never
treading on anybody’s toes? After all, everybody’s human, nobody’s a rhinoceros,
yet.
Still, this whole new departure in drama is refreshing. It does mean new
style, new formulas, new kinds of plot, and the return of the theater to its
popular base in ancient, enduring folk forms, the circus clown, the burlesque
comic, the nightclub turn. [...]
[6 March 1960]
Shakespeare in town. King Lear at the Golden Hind, Hamlet at
State College, and then on tour of schools in the Bay Area throughout April. Too
many people put down performances like these as “amateur,” and so miss the
opportunity to see something of Shakespeare’s every year, year in and year out.
Not only that, but I, for one, greatly prefer simple, moderately amateur or
student productions of Shakespeare to most of the more sumptuous efforts of the
commercial stage and its great names.
In the first place, they are more like Shakespeare. They are usually more or
less like the stage of Shakespeare’s day, with few or no changes of setting, and
therefore rapid pace, with simple costumes that convey clear ideas of the
characters, and with a forthright, no-nonsense sort of acting. Shakespeare on
Broadway or in the movies is usually a “vehicle” for a star and this almost
always throws the play out of balance. Big names have power. Stars and directors
can force their special interpretations on Shakespeare, and they tend to do this
very self-consciously. If you have seen an awful lot of Shakespeare I guess this
is all right, but I certainly would not wish to have made my first acquaintance
with him via the last movie versions of Hamlet or Macbeth. Student
actors who try such eccentricity just flunk the course and are never cast.
Shakespeare may be very deep and complicated and psychological, but it is my
opinion that he is too deep and complicated and psychological to be trusted to
the “interpretation” of any but the very greatest actor or director. His
profundity, insight into human motives and character, his sense of the unending
interrelatedness of men and their actions, all these things should be allowed to
come across the footlights on the simplest terms. Behind the rich Elizabethan
language his own art of drama is a pure and lucid medium, so transparent that we
become aware of its tremendous depths only as we ourselves acquire depth,
insight, experience, wisdom, if you will, to bring to it. We judge our own
lives, our own selves, in plays like these and those of the Greeks.
Doubtless the great tragic heroes of Shakespeare mean very much to a famous
international star, but his rather gaudy and tempestuous life, as he brings it
and projects it through Hamlet or Macbeth or Lear, is not my life or yours, and
so, all too often, we get less, not more from the play. Speak the lines clearly
and simply, the poetry will come through, it doesn’t need to be interpreted. The
most vulgar cannot miss the slapstick, the blood and thunder, the broad jokes,
the pathos. The wise will find wisdom past philosophy. The job of the actors,
the director, the designer, should be just to let Shakespeare do the work. So I
go to all the Shakespeare I can find and I always take my children. I hope I
gain each time in insight, and they, for sure, are never bored, although they
are only 5 and 10 years old.
Some day I would like to write about King Lear. It is a special play,
unlike any other, a sort of savage, terrible comedy. The spirit which moves all
through it is a comic, not a tragic spirit. And the structure is that of a
conventional comedy. It is as though Shakespeare had decided that comedy, if
pushed far enough, could find a sorrow, and a pity and terror, beyond tragedy.
This is a big and different subject. First things first — today there are
some things I want to say about Hamlet.
All great actors want to play Hamlet, even Charlie Chaplin. Of all
Shakespeare it is the play most easily corrupted by special interpretations, and
it is the one which benefits most from modest, straightforward presentations. It
is enormously popular, everybody in the world likes Hamlet except Mr.
T.S. Eliot. People like it for reasons you might never suspect if you sat down
and spent a couple of years reading a small part of the vast mass of Hamlet
criticism. It is a simply plotted, fast-paced action play. It has everything in
it that you can find in the paperbacks in the rack at the drugstore — a ghost,
a mystery, adultery in High Society, social satire, suicide, a family scandal, a
rebellious son, a shipwreck, and buckets of bloodshed — “The Floating Virgin,
or the Case of the Poisoned Cup.”
It is one of Shakespeare’s most profound plays, but its profundity is so
simply presented that a large portion of the world’s critics, literary and
academic souls knowing little of life, have missed it completely. Hamlet has
become the very name for a mind divided against itself, for the man who cannot
act, for the sick will. Time and again the play has been treated, not as a work
of art, but as a psychiatric case book. Oedipus Complex, death wish, impotence,
incest, mother fixation, and not least, plain ordinary schizophrenia, the
psychological critics have found them all. You would think, if you never read
the play but just some of the critics, that nothing goes on in it more decisive
than nail biting.
I think the facts of the story reveal quite the opposite situation. Hamlet is
proud, sensitive, impetuous — the typical Renaissance prince. His virtues and
faults are the standard aristocratic ones. Contrasted to him are three
essentially comic middle class characters, the family of Polonius, Laertes, and
Ophelia. Polonius is a pompous, dimwitted bureaucrat who has forgotten nothing
and learned nothing in a long life. Laertes is an overgrown innocent, half way
between a Joe College type and an Organization Man. Ophelia is far from a
heroine, so weak willed and weak witted that she permits her father and brother
to forbid her to see Hamlet for no better reason than inverted snobbery. It is
she who is destroyed by her inability to make up her mind and act with courage
and conviction.
Once Hamlet becomes convinced of his stepfather’s guilt he moves steadily and
carefully towards his destruction. The only interruptions are those necessary to
create suspense and make a play. It is his impetuosity, his rashness, not his
procrastination and will-lessness, which is his “tragic flaw.” In a moment of
rage and folly, he kills Polonius. This action is the key which unlocks all the
rest of the play. Once it is done there is no turning back. From it flow,
inexorably, all the terrible consequences. And the point is that Polonius’s
murder is not just a pathetic accident. Polonius is carefully drawn as just
another of the vast mass of nonentities that take up space on the earth — as a
man so trivial that he is beneath the wrath of a hero, so far beneath, in fact,
that to permit oneself to become angry at him, let alone to destroy him,
destroys all heroic value. The hero is autonomous, he moves himself and others.
But the man who permits himself to become trapped by involvement with fools
loses all ability to act for himself and is swept away in a torrent of events as
senseless as a shower of falling stones.
Such, I think, is the Hamlet which emerges from the modest and direct,
amateur if you will, presentation. In the long run I think this simple wisdom is
more profound than all the passing fancies of amateur or professional
psychiatrists who have so confused the play.
[27 March 1960]
NOTE: Two other Shakespeare plays, Macbeth
and The Tempest, are discussed in Rexroth’s Classics Revisited.
For a week now I have been traveling through the South, talking to all manner
of people. [...]
I have talked to Negro mechanics, warehousemen, janitors, to the
gambling boss of Negro New Orleans, to white college professors from old
Southern families, to college students, to carpenters. Every newspaper man or
woman who has interviewed me on this lecture trip, I’ve interviewed right back.
I was at the first Louisiana sit-in with a girl from the local paper who had
interviewed me that morning. She was typical, full of dying prejudices,
misinformation and superstitious fears. But she knew it. She was trying to
change. Well, the sit-in did a good job of changing her. It was terrific. A
group of gentle, well-bred, sweet-faced kids from Southern University filed in,
hand in hand, fellows and girls in couples, and sat down quietly. Their faces
were transfused with quiet, innocent dedication. They looked like the choir
coming into a fine Negro church. They weren’t served. They sat quietly talking
together. Nobody, spectators or participants, raised his voice. In fact, the
bystanders did not even stare rudely. When the police came, the youngsters spoke
softly and politely, and once again, fellows and girls hand in hand, they filed
out, singing a hymn, and got in the paddy wagon.
The newspaper girl was shaken to her shoes. Possibly it was the first time in
her life that she had come face to face with one of the great moral issues of
being a human being. She came to the faculty party for me at Louisiana State
that night. Her flesh was still shaking and she couldn’t stop talking. She had
come up against one of the big things in life and she was going to be always a
little different afterwards. After all, how many of us do face life in these
terms and how often? Mostly, life just goes on. Lucky for us we are not often
called upon to be all out moral human beings. There was nothing wrong with this
girl’s response and she had not been prepared by past training to make it.
[...]
In the world of 1960, and all over the world, if we don’t learn to live
together as full human beings pretty quickly, we are going to have to get ready
to die together pretty quickly. Not so long ago I despaired of the future, I
thought we were incapable of learning. In the last few years it has seemed to me
a new feeling of mutual humanity, a new wisdom, is slowly seeping into the
stubborn heads of quite ordinary people everywhere. It is a fine thing to watch
the tears streaming down the face of a piney woods housewife out on a shopping
tour and brought suddenly face to face with dignity, courage and total lack of
hatred. [...]
[10 April 1960]
NOTE: A more in-depth account
of the civil rights movement can be found in Rexroth’s
Beginnings of a New Revolt.
The last few weeks have been exceptionally troubled ones in the history of
the world. The papers have been full of earthquakes, riots, bitter quarreling
between the two nations who hold in their hands (in the hands of a few fallible
and none too saintly men) the destiny, in fact the survival, of the human race.
Still, unless somebody pushes the wrong button, it will all pass away soon
and men will ask what all the fuss was about. Only the earthquakes will have
made a small difference in the earth’s surface.
Horace said it long ago, and after him Shakespeare, and then Théophile
Gautier. Homer has outlasted Troy more than 3000 years, and a poem to a girl all
the Caesars, and a book of sonnets and plays the rise and decline of the
mightiest of all empires.
Three poets have been in the news in this time of moving and shaking. Boris
Pasternak died, officially dishonored in his own land that he so stubbornly
refused to leave. Certainly the day will come when one of the few things
remembered about Khrushchev is that he embarrassed the old age and hastened the
death of a great poet.
Future ages will probably see little difference between our commercial mass
culture and the Russians’ — except over there you have to like it, you can’t
get away from it, and it is pretty much all there is. Imagine what life would be
like if they looked you up for insisting that you didn’t like Wouk or Welk. What
makes vulgar literature vulgar is the lack of all true comedy or tragedy.
The Russians, or rather their leaders, are still convinced they can afford
little of either. Pasternak was certainly their greatest writer, and his work
reminded me of that other great disillusioned revolutionary, Turgeniev, full of
the wry pathos and comedy and melancholy of Russian life — somber nights, the
flowing of vast rivers, plans that come to nothing, obscure lives that might
just as well never have been. This is hardly wholesome literature for a nation
constantly striving to overtake and surpass itself and everybody else. It’s bad
for business.
Jules Supervielle was one of the most inconspicuous of all modern poets. He
never wrote anything startling, he never did anything startling. He never signed
any manifestoes. He was never part of any movement. His poetry was quiet,
whimsical and uncomplicated. When he died last month the French realized, with a
start, they had lost one of their greatest writers.
Like some of the other greatest poets in history, he wrote modestly about the
great platitudes. In a period of rampant experimentation, he introduced a few
valuable innovations in poetic technique, but so quietly you had to be a poet to
notice them.
Supervielle wrote mostly about himself, nature, animals, lovers. He had no
unusual ideas about any of these subjects. In many ways he was very much like
Pasternak, if Pasternak had flourished in a less troubled country, or like our
own Robert Frost. “Wry pathos, sad comedy, melancholy” — all life has it, not
just Russian, but in France it was easier for Supervielle to laugh. He and his
work both seemed so simple and unpretentious. But looking back, now that he is
dead, all the critics realized that here, for once, they could apply to a writer
a word — magnanimous — which isn’t merited by many writers nowadays. A great
heart, a noble purpose, a quiet voice, how many modern poets have them?
In the midst of international turmoil and domestic politicking, the United
States Congress authorized the preparation of a special gold medal, and
instructed the President to give it to Robert Frost. No reason — just
admiration and good feeling. Here again the future may well call this a lucid
interval in a time of lunacy. [...]
Since certainly no other paper in America, and few in France, will have
quoted anything by Supervielle, and since you, patient reader, will probably
never hear of him again, I think it would be nice to leave you with his farewell
poem, written some years ago when he learned that he had a fatal disease. The
translation is my own.
HOMAGE TO LIFE
It is beautiful to have chosen a living home
And stayed there awhile, and to have let the hands
Light on the world, as on an apple
In a little garden, to have loved the earth,
The moon and the sun, as old friends
Who have no equals, and to have committed
The world to memory as a bright horseman
Gives himself to his black steed, to have given a face
To words like “woman,” “children,” and to have been a shore
To the wandering continents, and to have come upon the soul
With quiet strokes of the oars, for it is scared away
By too brusque an approach. It is beautiful to have known
The shade under the leaves, and to have felt age
Creep over the naked body, accompanying the pain
Of the dark blood in ourselves, and gilding its silence
With the star, Patience, and to have all these words
Moving around inside the head, and to choose the most beautiful of them
And make a little feast with them, to have felt life,
Hurried and loved, to have ended it
In this poetry.
[3 July 1960]
NOTE: Rexroth later published
a somewhat different
translation of this poem.
This coming week the Kabuki Theater from Japan will be here, and in our
family, for one, we are all going. Our two little girls are devoted to Oriental
theater and we go to all the shows in Chinatown and to Japanese and Chinese
movies, at least to those that reproduce the conventions of the old time
theater. I can imagine nothing more entertaining for children, including the
circus.
When my oldest daughter was 4 she loved to get dressed up in kimono and
swords and give a performance of Benkei on the Bridge, a Noh play which
she had seen just once in a movie. I see they are giving some episodes from
The Forty-Seven Ronin on the second bill. This should hold spellbound even
those little boys who care for nothing but horse operas on television.
[...]
Is “it’s fine for the children” good theatrical criticism? It certainly is.
The greatest plays in history deal with permanent and characteristic human types
involved in relatively uncomplicated situations, the simple predicaments all men
everywhere might get into. True, the heroes and heroines and villains may have
quite complicated responses to those simple situations, but these complications
must be, as they are in life, deeply imbedded in clear and definite actions.
Psychological and moral depth must be there, but there only to be discovered
by those in the audience who themselves have such depth. These qualities cannot
be written on the surface or they destroy the integrity of the action. The
surface meanings of the action must be such that anybody but a fool could
understand them immediately. It seems to me that this defines a drama which can
be understood at its simplest level even by children.
I have always taken my girls to every performance of Shakespeare, no matter
how amateurish, that turned up in San Francisco. They never seemed to have the
slightest trouble understanding what was going on. True, the understanding was
in their own terms — but they kept track of the actions and enjoyed the jokes
and thrilled to the tears and deaths. Behind the surface they saw lay mysterious
tangles of the human mind that critics and psychoanalysts will argue over for
centuries. I suppose that it is in this way that the greatest drama can be said
to “teach life.” From our first experience we are tempted to take the pill by
the sugar coating, but in drama, without the sugar coating there is no pill.
This does not mean that great drama is not true to life — that is the way
life is. They may not deal with the most wholesome subjects, or with situations
that we think of as common in our society, but who would deny that a child, or
the simplest adult mind, could understand the great Greek tragedies of the
family troubles of Orestes and Oedipus?
On the other hand, simplicity in itself is nothing. It must be like the lead
at the tip of a pencil — the sharp point of action behind which lies a whole
instrument or vehicle, made up of troubled and struggling human minds. At hand
we have two perfect examples, both, it so happens, dealing with the Orient.
The World of Suzie Wong is not a vulgar and trivial play because it makes
prostitution attractive. It is immoral because it falsifies life and reduces
human motives not to a simple, but to a silly pattern.
Its star is one of the most beautiful and talented young actresses I have
ever seen in my life. Is it “good entertainment”? I think not. If you are
easily moved, it’s fun to watch, but afterwards you feel tricked. You do not
feel tricked by A Winter’s Tale or The Merry Wives of Windsor,
both of which, incidentally, were written for no other reason than to make
money.
So with the Japanese Kabuki and Noh plays. You may feel a little like a
non-Catholic who has strayed for the first time into a Solemn High Mass on
Whitsunday at a cathedral. Everything is in an incomprehensible language. Every
motion is accompanied by mysterious music and outlandish chanting. The actors
are busy doing things for no apparent purpose, yet they behave as though each
act had the most tremendous import. Everyone is robed in the most splendid
garments of red and gold. People treat each other with the most elaborate
courtesy.
You say, “This is all a meaningless ritual.” Then suddenly, for no reason
you can tell, it all slips into place and you are caught up in the dramatic
illusion, carried away by the spell. Gradually you realize, by means of the very
ritual itself, that the performance is dealing with the most important issues of
life, stated in the noblest terms.
The vulgar theater pretends to be realistic. Shakespeare, Greek tragedy,
Kabuki, each is a more fantastic illusion than the other. Kabuki is far more
formal than classical ballet, and like nothing that ever was “really” on
heaven or earth. Yet when you come away you don’t feel tricked. Instead, you
feel that, for a little while you have lived on another planet, where the
ordinary life we live is restated in noble terms, with a beautiful clarity and
ritual elegance.
[10 July 1960]
Thanks to the people who wrote or phoned about the Supervielle poem. No,
there is no collection of his poetry in English. Yes, I have translated other
poems by him, but I have never thought of publishing them. Any of the many local
poetry publishers care to make an offer?
The good thing about this response is that it demonstrates once again
something I am always saying, that people do like poetry. They like good poetry
that says something to them. It is true that for many years there has been a
very poor audience for most current American poetry. But why not? Most of it has
been, not “modernistic,” but dull academic stuff by petty people who lead
dull, petty, academic lives. In the right circles it has been thought terribly
unfashionable to write about anything so vulgar as love, death, nature — any of
the real things that happen to real people. The reason, of course, is that real
things don’t happen to petty people, and if they do, they can’t understand them,
much less assimilate them and glorify them for others.
As for any hint of social responsibility — for many years the poetry prizes
and fellowships and teaching jobs have been controlled by a little clique of
imitation Southern Colonels of literature, disciples of Thomas Nelson and T.S.
Eliot, the “classicist, Anglo-Catholic and Royalist” from St. Louis. Who, pray
tell, outside a Confederate Veterans Home, has been interested in such stuff as
that?
On the other hand, poets as widely different as Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg,
e.e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, sell better, much better, than most novels. It has nothing to do
with modernist or conventional verse. It has less to do with social attitudes.
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, absurd reactionaries though they are, sell well,
because they convey the immediate conviction of meaningful life. This is perhaps
the primary function of the poet, to give life convincing meaning. “I am come
that you might have life, that you might have it more abundantly.” People who
fulfill that promise may be crucified, they are rarely ignored.
[...]
[17 July 1960]
Rexroth’s San Francisco (columns from the San
Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Magazine). Copyright 1960-1975 Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced by permission of
the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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