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Rexroth’s San Francisco
1962
Reveling in Cultural Diversity
Golden Gate Park
The Persistence of Pseudoscience
Last Stand of la Vie
Méditerranée
In Praise of Live Music
One of the best things about living in America us the tremendous richness of
the diverse cultures that still survive amongst us. With a little persistence
you can still ferret them out, even though the immigrant groups that brought
them here are now far more assimilated than they were a generation ago.
There is a congregation of Falasha, black Abyssinian Jews, in New York. The
Polynesian colony in San Francisco still get together for pig roasts and hulas.
On Burns Day you can stuff yourself with haggis and usquebaugh while the pipes
skirl. You can learn to sit down with a mouthful of flaming daggers and flip
your legs out with bona fide Cossacks. You can take up tumbling in a Czech
Sokoj.
You can even, in an aggressively Low Church diocese like San Francisco, go to
garden parties where ladies in flowered prints pour and children curtsey and the
new vicar propounds slightly fast conundrums or takes eggs out of his ears.
In fact, be it ever so weird, if it’s a national custom, you can find it
somewhere.
I have always been a tireless world traveler in the foreign quarters of
America’s great cities. I learned to do that funny wiggle with my head and neck
from a Cambodian girl I met in a Chicago speakeasy. Speaking of speakeasies — l
also found that the safest drink during prohibition was oozo, moustike, or arak
— the anise flavor grappa — served in Levantine coffee shops while the fiddles
whined, the belly dancers wiggled and ululated, and the menfolk held
handkerchiefs and bounded about on the dance floor like bears.
For me at least, this is the worst thing about living in a monolithic culture
— say in Italy. After awhile you get tired of the 570 varieties of pasta and
“Ciao, Ciao, Bambino” on the radio. There are only two public collections of
Far Eastern art in all Italy, in Venice and in the Vatican, and they are
pointless collections of bijouterie. No Swedes dance the hambo in the Pincio.
Only more little beggar boys with trained sparrows.
And you remember how the Hasidim of Williamsburg on Long Island come out in
the park and dance their unearthly akimbo dance, welcoming the new moon and
showing her her own stigmata — the lunes on their fingernails.
For a time it looked as though all this cultural diversity would die out. The
second generation was ashamed of the ways of their parents. But now the third
and fourth generations have come along, and they are all for a return to their
traditions. [...]
This is all a preface to the news that Chinese opera is playing at the Great
Star Theater. [...]
Going to the Chinese theater is my favorite indoor sport. I used to go at
least once a week, back in the days when it cost only 35 cents after 10 o’clock.
(Prices are now the same as other theaters.) I learned more about dramatic
technique, playwriting, audience communication, than I have from all the Western
plays I have ever seen. If these plays were put on under the auspices of a
foundation, in a downtown theater, the audience would be full of enraptured
highbrows and sensation shoppers. Here it is in its natural habitat, with an
audience in total communication.
Go. You’ll get used to the noise in a few minutes. Much of the action is
self-explanatory and you’ll find somebody near you only too glad to
interpret. [...]
[11 February 1962]
Last Sunday I took the children bicycling in Golden Gate Park. San Francisco
weather has only a vague relationship to the calendar. It was a full summer day.
All the world was out. The cherry blossoms were blooming, everything was bright
and new.
I never cease to wonder at Golden Gate Park. There are certainly no public
parks in the Northern Hemisphere to compare with it. Kew Gardens, the Bois de
Boulogne, the Pincio, look small, worn and starved in comparison. The great
Chicago parks have size, but they are unimaginatively landscaped.
The mixing of dark and light, slender and round trees, the interplay of lawn
and foliage and water, the long vistas and sharp details — these are unequalled
by anything I have ever seen.
In my young days, bicycling through the park, I used to come on little John
McLaren, only slightly larger in fact than his memorial statue, directing the
sawing of a limb or the planting of a clump of bushes. What an extraordinary art
his was. Music flows by in a continuous present. When the poem or picture is
finished, it is there for all to see and enjoy, including its creator.
McLaren designed Golden Gate Park with visions of beauty in his mind that
would not come into full realization until a generation after he was dead.
I often wonder if I am unjust, but it seems to me that the nobility of
McLaren’s conceptions is slowly being eroded. Bit by bit civil servicitis and
the itch of immediate demands gnaw at the integrity of what is, we too seldom
realize, one of the world’s great works of art.
If highway engineers proposed to draw a narrow line of concrete across
Rembrandt’s picture of his brother, there wouldn’t just be a frightful outcry.
Everybody would agree they were demented and they would be put away.
I can’t imagine anything more absurd than sacrificing a park, of all places,
to the demands of the automobile. A good many people would probably agree that
we’ve allowed the highway engineers to destroy far too much of the park
already, and we shouldn’t allow them any more destruction.
But how about no automobiles in the place at all? Last Sunday the traffic of
cars was so dense that it seriously interfered with all the other uses for which
the park had been designed.
Horseback riding has been made so complicated and expensive that it is hardly
worth the trouble, and, for youngsters, who whatever their skill must ride in
guided parties, no fun at all. Bicycling is forbidden on the paths, and on a
clear Sunday, dangerous on the roads. The restaurants are gone these many years.
Maybe I suffer from old timeritis. Still, I’m glad I won’t live long enough
for children, marching around some niggardly open space amongst 200-story
skyscrapers, to get a breath of fresh air and be initiated into the delights of
walking with one’s legs, to paused in their serried ranks and ask, “Grandpa,
tell us what it was like before the population explosion.”
[11 April 1962]
Off to Aspen to take part in a seminar on “The Public Understanding of the
Role of Science in Society.” [...]
For the vast bulk of the population, of however many years of schooling, the
terms and procedures of science are as awe-inspiring and as incomprehensible as
the dances and spells of a witch doctor, and the end of science is still magic,
the coercion of fate by mystery.
My earliest memory of the public image of the scientist is the man in the
white cost who used to subject a popular brand of canned beans to rigorous
scrutiny in a test tube while a white coated colleague, his face alight with the
glow that shone from Watt’s tea kettle, transcribed his discoveries in a
notebook.
They are still doing it, but now beans seem to sell themselves and they’ve
gone to work on deodorants, cigarette filters and lipstick. Otherwise, the
public is acutely aware that a group of Bela Lugosis and Boris Karloffs were
locked up inside a cyclone fence in the New Mexico mountains and cooked up
something that blew up a couple of Japanese cities and now threatens to blow up
the planet. Beyond this meager image lies only a vast, dim, frightening
confusion.
You think I am kidding? One of California’s best educated candidates for
Governor [Upton Sinclair] was a passionate supporter of the Abram’s Electronic Diagnosis Machine.
Another writer [Paul Goodman], perhaps the most trenchant social critic of my generation, and
an excellent poet, dramatist and short story writer as well, is to this day a
devout believer in the Orgone Therapy of the late Wilhelm Reich.
Movie producers, major stock market investors, industrialists, as well as the
Sage of Big Sur [Henry Miller], plan their daily activities with the aid of pulp magazines of
astrology.
These are all educated men, some of them even learned, yet any Boy Scout who
had passed his Science Merit Badge could expose their utter ignorance of the
simplest scientific facts.
In the common meaning of the term, this is the Public. Far worse than
their ignorance of matters of fact is their misconception of the nature of science.
Most people, even in the civilized nations, still live in a prescientific age.
Abram’s Machine, Orgone Box, astrology, cancer cures, trick diets, fake
medicine, dianetics, cybernetics, pseudo-psychiatry, tiger’s milk, or the lost
continents of Mu and Atlantis — in every case we are dealing with the
manipulation of reality on the basis of unsupportable hypotheses for the purpose
of easing the minds of the insecure. This is precisely what the Arunta in the
Australian Desert do when they chop holes in themselves, fill the gashes with
emu feathers and point sharpened sticks in the direction of their enemies’
village.
This is why the public will give its enthusiastic support to expensive and
spectacular toys like space rockets and view with indifference the impending
revolutionary breakthrough in the cheap desalting of seawater.
Space gadgets are reassuring precisely because they are spectacular and
expensive. There is nothing spectacular about a glass of water, while an
astronaut around the earth is as great a solace as a bag of asafoetida around
the neck. When the Russians had two beeping balls and a dog aloft at once, the
country was beside itself. We’d been out-magicked. Our shamen, on whom we’d
spent all that money, had failed us.
I wonder if the hundreds of scientists who have taken part in the last few
years in just such symposia as I am going to, realize what thin ice they are
skating on? It is true that we need improvement in the science education offered
by our schools; we need to close the gap between Sir Charles Snow’s “two
cultures,” between the scientist and the humanist; we need to preserve the
integrity of science in the face of the demands of Big Business and Big War; we
need to cherish and nourish the informed lay public that
does exist; we need to spend
more money on research and less on “development” — that is, gaudy hardware;
we need to rout the comic and/or subversive image of the egghead and the
highbrow from popular mythology, and so on and on.
But these are all concerns of an elite, the scientists themselves and the
genuinely informed laity. Both these groups live in and on the wider public. As
long as this circumambient public is, scientifically speaking, living
intellectually in the Stone Age, the scientists and their own small “public”
are going to be as ill at ease as salt water fish who have been forced to adapt
to life in fresh water.
[10 June 1962]
[...] One of the most remarkable examples of effective mid-20th
century public
relations hereabouts is also one of the more enjoyable musical events of the
year. I am not even sure if it was started with any public relations end in
view. Knowing the people involved, I am inclined to think it was in fact a
devotion to good music finding outlet in an act of gracious patronage. Whatever
the intention, it surely must be good indeed for the business concerned.
As you may suspect, I am talking about “Music at the Vineyards,” the
chamber music concerts which the Fromm brothers stage each summer at the Paul
Masson winery above Saratoga. Last Sunday was an all Schubert day, with the
Trout Piano Quintet and the Octet in F Major. The music is amongst the loveliest
of its kind. It was played with a swinging ease that matched the setting. But it
was the setting itself which, as always, was the star of the show.
The site reminds me of a place I stayed a few years back with my girls — the
convent-pension of Monte Berico, perched on a shoulder of the Berico hills,
overlooking the Veneto plain, above Vicenza.
This was as near to paradise on earth as I have ever experienced, but the
site of the Masson winery must run it a close second. Palo Alto is not Padua,
but it has its towers; Sunnyvale is not Venice, but there’s the dome of the old
dirigible hangar, all shimmering in the midsummer haze.
What counts are those essential signs of civilization, the vine, the olive
and the fig, falling away in terraces, high above the busy towns. The birds are
not nightingales, but as the violins rise to the high notes and fall away, they
sing just as madly in the pomegranate trees. Even the winery itself — it’s just
a winery, though very old by California standards, but it looks much like a
little Romanesque church perched above some Italian village, unknown to tourism.
What is really important is not that it is like Italy, but that it is like
northern California. It’s ours, and it is we who are the last stand of la vie
méditerranée, the life of the vine and olive around that slopping tideless
sea which is all the civilization Western Man has ever been able to manage.
Barcelona is a haunted city. Even the Provençals say Marseille is “just like
Chicago” — even though it isn’t, quite. Genoa and Naples are warrens of
blood-chilling poverty. Athens, with all its joy of life, is today a provincial
town. The light that shone on the Jerusalem of Solomon, and the Athens of
Pericles, and the Rome of Marcus Aurelius has come to shine on us, half way
around the world. [...]
[1 July 1962]
Last year somebody said, “Only you could write about a performance of the
San Francisco Symphony solely in terms of the feminine beauty of its lead
harpist!” Too true. And it’s the same way with chamber music. There is only one
person as faithful as myself in attendance at all quartets, quintets, trios,
madrigals and motets — the town’s handsomest model.
She’s the real reason I go, and sit there, gnawing my nails, washed over by
the schwarmerei of Brahms and the glistening glissandos of Schubert. Who is
Heifetz to me or me to Heifetz? Now Jo Heifetz, his daughter, is one of the most
beautiful women I’ve ever met — but I didn’t see her at the concert last
Sunday.
Seriously — it was a wonderful evening. What was wonderful about it was not
that it was, as the menu said, a “musical summit meeting,” but that it wasn’t.
It was, in fact, very domestic indeed, as chamber music should be.
My mind went back to childhood, and the Relic House on Lincoln Park West or
the restaurant of the Nordside Turnverein on Sunday afternoons and people who
worked at dull jobs all week dropping in with oboes and violas under their arms
to steal a few hours of nobility from life. So, too, these great men, all of
them great enough to be modest, managed to transmit to the audience a sense of
participation in a chamber music jam session in Heifetz’s living room of an
autumn evening.
I am an incorrigible addict of live music. I have a huge record collection
and a hi-fi that, strung out along the side board, looks like the American Navy
at Manila Bay. I hardly ever use it.
I’m all for pure music, but I like my pure music mixed with plenty of
impurity — Leon Fleisher humming the lead strings as he plays piano — as well
as acting out everybody else’s, part... the imperious face of Piatigorsky, like
one of the Fathers of the Church (as Mary whispered to me, “All he needs is a
cave, a book, a lion and a donkey!”)... Primrose, playing with that
unbelievable intonation, equaled only by Casals in my lifetime, or turning pages
for the others with a kindly aplomb, looking completely like what the British
call “a very clubbable man.”
I am sure that if they put their minds to it IBM could turn out a pile of
apparatus that could emit fugues electronically that would make Bach sound like
a duffer, or Casals or Schnabel sound clumsy. Maybe someday they will and that’s
all there’ll ever be forever after.
But I will remember De Pachman’s crazy eyes seeing Chopin standing beside the
piano, or Paderewski’s storm-tossed beehive hairdo, or Harold Bauer with the
dignity of an International Banker or an Anglican Bishop, or Heifetz, worn with
years of spiritual discipline, or Piatigorsky, who really does look like St.
Jerome.
And of course, that lovely model. Someday maybe I’ll write a book, “Women I
Have Watched at Concerts.”
P.S. I did so listen. I liked the Schubert best.
[14 November 1962]
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
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