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Rexroth’s San Francisco
1961
Pacifica Radio KPFA
Hemingway
[...] Years ago a friend of mine, publicity man for Columbia University Press,
and for a while out here with Stanford University Press, once said, “I honestly
believe that KPFA is the most remarkable single cultural institution in the
United States, and that includes any single university, museum, or any other
such body.” Possibly that was overenthusiasm, but KPFA is certainly remarkable.
It is a noncommercial educational FM station, owned and operated by Pacifica
Foundation, a democratically run, more or less cooperative, board of local
leaders of every variety, united largely by their sense of community
responsibility. It has no other income than the subscriptions and donations of
its listeners.
From 7:00 in the morning until midnight, KPFA’s transmitters pour out a
steady stream of the finest classical music, readings and discussions of
literature, commentaries, panels, lectures, on every variety of questions of
public concern and current events, lectures and discussions of all the sciences
— both general popularization and the up-to-date presentation of new
developments, resumés of the news and opinion of the press of the world, full
length plays and opera, children’s programs, book reviews, poetry readings,
imports from the BBC Third Programme and from similar things in other countries
— and so on and on — modern jazz, traditional jazz, ethnic music, folk songs,
a program “Music of the Italian Masters” which is far better than anything on
the air in Italy.
Many people say, “Oh yes, KPFA. Like the British Third Programme, isn’t it?’’
It is not. It is far better. I have lived in England and listened to the Third
Programme for months at a time. The best word for BBC programming is
“unexciting.” Some of it is just dull. Once in a great while you get an
outstanding program, but by and large it’s highbrow Yorkshire pudding.
Furthermore, British musical taste at its most advanced is far narrower, more
provincial and conventional.
KPFA is not only exciting to listen (it becomes a religion almost with many
of its subscribers) it is stimulating in the literal sense of the word. Its
programs move people to go out and do things, to assume social responsibilities,
to explore further avenues of learning or music first opened to them by a KPFA
program. More than any other factor, it is KPFA which has set the character of
San Francisco culture in the postwar period. It has been the most powerful
single stimulus for the San Francisco Renaissance, in the arts and sciences but
most especially in our own 1961 San Francisco way of looking at life.
Try it. Tune in today, 94.1 megacycles, FM.
[12 February 1961]
NOTE: Rexroth’s own book
review program on KPFA ran every week for some twenty years.
Before I read Joseph Alsop’s vignette of Hemingway I had planned to devote
part of this column to what might be called noncommittal tribute to an
unquestionably important writer. I’m sorry, but I just have to speak up. I find
all this glorification of Hemingway for his manifest evils nauseating.
This picture of a bunch of aging journalists and international bohemians
staggering into a peasant cockfight and making grand whoopee is — is what? —
you name it. One thing it certainly isn’t, and that is the expression of an
appetite for intense significant experience.
I don’t care much for people who enjoy killing things, but I am willing to
put up with hunters as long as they don’t carry their habits into private and
public life. (Trotsky wired Zinoviev re the Kronstadt sailors, in revolt for the
fulfillment of the promises of the Revolution, “Shoot them like partridges.”
Bertrand Russell commented, “A hunter should never be allowed to lead a
revolution.”)
I abominate people who make of killing a spectator sport. I honestly believe
that all Americans who go to bullfights in the Spanish countries should be
locked up on their return to the States.
How can anyone say that Hemingway loved life? It was death that fascinated
him, as he never tired of saying. Love is not the word — that implies extreme
positive evaluation. Death fascinated him as snakes are supposed to fascinate
sparrows, with an empty but irresistible lure.
Life comes at the characters of Hemingway’s fictions not as experience, but
as sensation. He is master of the brilliant still life — nature like a
stereopticon picture, far sharper than reality. Far sharper, but that is all —
never more meaningful. Similarly his people are perfectly delineated cutouts,
more defined than people, who shade off into all sorts of obscurities, ever are.
His speech, which once sounded so realistic, is the same way — reading
Men Without Women, it seems to be in a kind of blank verse, the ceremonial
language of a religion without deity, without faith, hope, or charity.
Compare his novel of the Spanish War with Malraux’s. I think much of
Malraux’s moralizing and philosophizing is flashy and dishonest. But it is
dishonest — when it is so. Honesty, motivation, evaluation, have nothing to do
with Hemingway’s story. His Spanish War was not a tragedy — but an enormously
complicated fiasco, like a bullfight, but about girls with no place to sleep and
men with nothing to do but die.
Do not think I have sat down to write an attack on Hemingway. Quite the
contrary. He was a very great writer. His attitudes to life have become a
codified faith of the faithless. They make a substitute for religion amongst the
technical and professional intelligentsia all over the world — a class far more
alienated than ever was Marx’s working class. His empty, clipped, ominous speech
is parodied by television detectives and French philosophers. Bullfights are now
legal in the country of Montaigne.
Long ago, when his first books came out, somebody — was it Wyndham Lewis? —
said that you knew Hemingway was terribly cultured and brainy, because his
characters never used good English and never said an intelligent thing. This is
what he stood for from the beginning, the conscious rejection of what we call
the Humanist tradition. He was a bullfight aficionado because Shaw was a
vegetarian and Rolland a pacifist.
For so many, the rationalistic, humanistic society that had evolved in the
Western World for three hundred years came to trial in the First World War and
was found wanting — utterly wanting. Lady Brett and her pals and the old man
and his fish, the indictment never changes. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”
People have said that in the face of an empty but still hostile world.
Hemingway’s only value was courage. But courage involves fairly complex
relationships with other real people. His response was not an act of evaluation,
it was rather a reaction, a kind of lonely attitude of flat defiance.
In his own personal life it often assumed the character of childish
truculence. Truculence, they say, is an expression of insecurity. Hemingway’s
world was awfully vacant; there weren’t any comfortable nooks and shelters in
it.
The significant thing is that it is also the world of vast numbers of people,
and especially overcivilized people today. Irrationalism, hidden anguish,
unrelieved insecurity, defiance — these, once individual, personal qualities or
defects, are becoming the characteristics of our civilization.
It is a measure of Hemingway’s stature as an artist that he embodied them
unmistakably. He, more than any one else, first shaped a new archetype, a new
myth, a different kind of Modern Man. This modern man is certainly a tragic
figure, but the tragedy is not a literary one, it is society’s.
[9 July 1961]
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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NOTE (February 2010): I have just begun a project of
posting ALL of Rexroth's SF Examiner columns 50
years after their original appearance.
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