‘There is a lefty poet from America here – Kenneth Rexroth – and he wants to meet some of us. Heard of him?’
‘Vaguely,’ I say to Cooper, a dodging reply. ‘When?’
‘Tomorrow night.’
We arrange the party or ‘soiree’ as Gillian insists on calling it. We hope Rexroth isn’t going to be too eccentric because as Gillian says, ‘American eccentrics can be tiring at close proximity because they expect you to like them for it.’ She prefers British eccentrics because they don’t expect to be liked. ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘it’s their way of pissing people off, isn’t it?’
We look Rexroth up in our poetry books.
But we are more interested in biography than verse at this stage, but find little. We are interested, for instance, in his age – is he under forty like us or what? Trust no one under forty. We vaguely associate him with Ginsberg and Kerouac and the old Beats. God Bless. (Though Ginsberg keeps pace with the literary fashions, doesn’t he?) We find Rexroth’s poems but they don’t tell us much – biographically, that is. We find he did write a poem in praise of a masseuse and prostitute.
I ring Cooper back. ‘I found him,’ I say, ‘I found him in a footnote to a book called Writers on the Left.’
‘Read it to me,’ says Cooper.
‘“Born 1905 in South Bend, Indiana. Some members of his father’s family, Ohio German, belonged to a communistic religious sect, and Owenites could be found on both sides. The son of a ‘passive socialist’ wholesale druggist, Rexroth joined the Wobblies when he was a precocious teenager. As an ‘inveterate hitchhiker’ he worked as a fruit and grain harvester, in the forest service in Washington and Montana, and at one time or other, according to his own testimony, passed through almost every incorporated town in the country. Rexroth talked to I.W.W. men, carnival performers, criminals, front men, female impersonators …”’
‘What?’ says Cooper, ‘what did you say then?’
‘Female impersonators. There’s more,’ I continue ‘“… and anarchists. His first poems appeared in Blues. Besides his activities in the unemployed councils, the John Reed Club, and other party organisations during the ‘third period’, Rexroth painted a mural for a Public Works art project and worked on one of the federal writers’ projects. ‘I believe the time will come soon,’ he wrote to Cowley, circa 1938, ‘if not interrupted by Fascism when every working stiff will be lots eruditer than E. Pound if he cares to be and folks will read Dante’s Canzoni often for fun. I write that kind of poetry because I think it important and beautiful. I also think that unless a few intellectuals get busy and shake the farts out of their drawers and write things people, real people, busy and harnessed here and now, are going to understand and read, they are going to be dead, and the working stiff mentioned above isn’t going to read at all. And by farts I mean funny ideas about what Marx should of thought about Wallace Stevens …’” ’
I finish.
‘Is this one of your jokes?’ asks Cooper.
‘I swear it’s all true.’
‘Well. Well, he has all the qualifications for the all-American poet-revolutionary.’
‘But that’s not all. He endorses some San Francisco Hotel or restaurant. I saw an advertisement in an American magazine.’
‘My goodness.’
‘I dare say, though, it’s a good restaurant.’
The evening begins in a relaxed way with Cooper introducing him as ‘Rex Kenroth’. The evening also begins good naturedly with me asking him if he is here on a Congress for Cultural Freedom grant. J-o-k-e. Like some of the people in our group he is unable to detect the delicate irony of the remark and takes it seriously and defensively. I have to hint that I am j-o-k-i-n-g without insulting his sense of humour. I do this by digging him in the ribs. His secretary is about twenty-five and wears a pair of attacking spectacles and says, ‘No, Ken is paying his own way,’ and they both give me a left-wing winking look to show they are awake to the machinations of the CIA and also, now, to my joke. And they don’t think it’s that funny.
‘Ken writes a syndicated column for some newspapers,’ his secretary rushes to tell me as if to answer the implication that if he isn’t on a grant then perhaps he is indigent and wants us to collect for him. Not that we’d mind. God knows we collect for everyone else. Is Seeger out of gaol yet?
We are wearing suits and ties, which is unusual enough for us, still being blue jean personalities at weekends. Katherine is also wearing a suit and tie which subdues the bourgeoisosity of the scene with a dash of deviation. I wear my ‘I am an enemy of the state’ badge. ‘Terrified of being late,’ as Gillian is wont to add.
‘Bunny’ Stockwell Anderson has hay fever and can’t come from the English Department so they don’t have an observer. Hence Stockwell Anderson misses rubbing shoulders with an American Literary Figure which as it turns out is little more than two ships scraping the sides of each other in the night.
‘We saw a reference to your magazine in the Provo stuff in Amsterdam,’ says Rexroth.
‘Yes, in a list of fraternal publications,’ his secretary amplifies, ‘published as a supplement to their own publication, Provo, in November.’
‘She’s well detailed,’ I comment to Gillian who tells me to belt up. But we all shuffle. We haven’t published an issue for a year. We don’t know why.
‘What are you guys doing in the way of protest these days?’ he asks, moving away from the magazine, about which we are still formulating excuses.
We try now to think about protest.
‘Actually we don’t hold much interest in protest these days,’ says Wayne.
These days of all days, I think, these days of rapid change and dehumanisation. And we choose to relax on protest. Our lives, I observe, are spent wading against trend.
‘Some of us might be what you call existential protestors,’ I say, ‘but no reformist protestors.’ Everyone in the room looks at me except Gillian who looks up at the ceiling.
‘We see the protest thing more as a permanent thing – you know … a way of life … in conflict with the authoritarian nature of society,’ Cooper puts in.
The rest look at him gratefully.
We walk up the historical escalator the wrong way. That’s what we do.
‘That’s our bag,’ I say, but no one admits to hearing me.
‘That’s our bag,’ I say.
Gillian makes a nauseated face.
‘Oh you people should see what the Provos are doing,’ his secretary says, with the enervating enthusiasm common to American business executives, folk singers, and tourists.
I listen. Perhaps, I think, it will transmute our political ennui into go-man-go. I always feel that Americans are about to launch me into the space of endeavour. But it never happens.
They don’t drink much. But we do.
We sit on the polychromatic poufs trying not to look at each other through the fluorescent clear silence. I move to sit on the edge of the table – edge of the world – nonchalantly ill at ease. Of course, I say to myself, it had to be like this. This was the way it had to be.
‘We had a demonstration not so long ago,’ Cooper says, remembering suddenly, ‘against the gaoling of a musician – I forget his name – on a homosexuality charge.’
‘You went on the streets for a queer?’ Rexroth asks incredulously.
‘It was our summer camp,’ I say brightly.
Everyone chuckles – as I look at them.
‘Before my time,’ says Murphy, disowning it. He’s only twenty-five and very much de novo.
‘For Godsake it was only four years ago,’ I say aside to Murphy.
‘That was my Theatre of the Absurd stage,’ he says in a whisper to me.
Crap it was, I think to myself. You were still struggling with logic exercises.
‘We’re having trouble at the university – we had a sit-in, about … library fines,’ I say, the whole ten of us. I feel acutely just how far short we fall of Berkeley. Still, it had that Berkeley sound about it. It at least had that about it.
‘The Provos,’ Rexroth was saying, ‘are really moving, man.’
‘They know how to organise – don’t they, Ken?’ put in his secretary, who uses the word ‘organise’ as if it is an ultimate new thing in trendy orgasm. She talks, too, as if she has prepared.
‘Man, they really know how to organise a demonstration,’ says Rexroth. ‘Whish!’
‘Tell them about West Germany, Ken,’ she says. ‘Tell them about how the Provos did it over there,’ she says with a surf of enthusiasm.
You tell us, Ken, I think, drinking down my scotch. Which everyone else is drinking down, I notice. Any other night we’d be drinking cheap flagon wine. Tonight we have a celebrity and everyone drinks my scotch. So much for fucking anarchists.
She turns to me. ‘Down in West Germany they really had things moving.’
‘Man, they really know how to do things,’ he says.
I say I must have missed it in Newsweek.
‘Oh it was all over Newsweek, you couldn’t have missed it,’ she says.
‘I did,’ I say.
‘Those kids really know how to organise a demonstration,’ she adds.
‘Whish!’ says Rexroth through his teeth, shaking his head with the very memory of it.
I’m still thinking how I could have missed it in Newsweek. I mean, you can’t miss things in Newsweek. If you can’t collect information from Newsweek you may as well chuck yourself down the well. It’s designed for loose-brained people.
‘They really know how to turn it on,’ Rexroth says, recapitulating.
‘It’s funny,’ I say, ‘how I missed it in Newsweek.’
‘You couldn’t have missed it – it was all over Newsweek,’ his secretary tells me.
‘I must have been away sick that week.’
‘It was definitely there,’ she says, ‘in Newsweek.’ As though I am suggesting they’re lying about the demonstration.
‘I’m not suggesting that it didn’t happen simply because it wasn’t in Newsweek,’ I say, with a good natured smile.
‘It happened all right,’ says Rexroth, ‘boy, it happened all right.’
‘You’d have to see it to believe how they did it,’ his secretary suggests. ‘It was all in Newsweek,’ she adds emphatically.
Our underground film-makers come in the door. He is wearing his psychedelic union jack trousers and fuckyou tee shirt and we are all relieved to see him. He seems so much more the part and a better show for Rexroth than he’d been getting so far. And we are especially pleased to see his girl Jane in her psychedelic peep-through mini-skirt. So tactile. We are peeping away, including Rexroth. At least, I think, they look something like the Newsweek photographs of Berkeley, Amsterdam, Haight Street, and Carnaby Street.
‘This is Stewart, our underground film-maker,’ I say, meaning it as an introduction but it sounding more like a proclamation. Or sounding, I think playfully, like a neon sign with an asterisk border. Tactile-audile-visual.
‘And the girl you can see through is Jane,’ I say.
‘Will you sit down and shut up,’ Gillian says in a hurled whisper.
We all look at Stewart as if possibly he might make an underground film for us there and then, and prove me not a liar.
‘Ciao,’ say Stewart and Jane in unison, thrilling me. So much more swinging than ‘Pleased to meet you Mr Rexroth, sir,’ which I said.
‘Ciao,’ says Rexroth, peeping through at Jane.
‘Ciao,’ says his secretary.
‘It’s Italian for good day,’ I say to Gillian.
‘Oh belt up, you chickenshit,’ she says. ‘It’s Italian “good-bye”.’
‘Actually,’ says the secretary, ‘you can use it either time.’
The secretary is a polymath.
‘How do you know, then,’ I smirk, ‘whether they have just arrived or are just leaving?’
‘What’s happening on the underground film scene?’ the secretary asks, turning to Stewart. I gather it is her job to ask the fact-finding questions. A sort of Inquiry into Provincial Anarchism. I practice saying ‘Chow’ to myself.
‘We’re doing stuff similar to Bob Rauschenburg,’ says Stewart, and I stun at the avant-garde sound of it all and we all look across at Rexroth for approval.
‘You should do something of your own,’ says Rexroth depressingly.
‘Do your own things as the kids say in Haight-Ashbury,’ says his secretary.
We sit nonplussed and then I fall over backwards into silence like a skindiver. We have nothing of our own to do, I contemplate, nothing. We are culturally incapacitated and dependent. Everyone has known this in his heart now for some time. Actually we’re Anglo-American. A composite mimic culture. Miserable shits.
Then I observe that, in a sense, all cultures are interdependent and derivative and that perhaps we are a remarkably rich synthesis. Perhaps we should go with the synthesis instead of painfully pursuing a unique nationalism. Exercising once again my capacity for finding countervailing partial truths for consolation.
‘We made a film about a lesbian who marries a homosexual,’ Stewart ventures, and we all look at Rexroth again, feeling however that this sounds as if we are trying perhaps too hard? ‘The film is blurred,’ I say. Gillian derisively points out to me that this is in fact ‘mood focus’. At the mention of lesbian, Katherine, in suit and tie and riding boots, begins to camp it up in the corner with a young girl with curly-doll hair-do. They have their hands on each other’s tits. For Godsake.
‘And it was censored,’ Jane says with pride. I feel that this is of interest, one of us being censored. That should do the trick, I think.
‘And you’re the writer,’ I hear Rexroth say. To me. It seems to come at me like a ground-to-air missile.
I had forgotten temporarily but manage to say, ‘Arriere-garde by overseas standards.’ I grin with simple-simon charm. Gillian looks at the ceiling.
‘Why, hang overseas standards,’ Rexroth roars, crushing me with encouragement. I fell for the same trap as Stewart. I don’t learn very fast.
‘Go for your own standards,’ counsels his secretary.
‘You’re a young new people – grow your own fruit,’ Rexroth shouts.
‘Do you publish in underground magazines?’ she says, turning from counsellor to fact-finder.
‘No,’ I say, ashamedly, ‘I write for a girlie magazine – a sort of imitation Playboy,’ biting my tongue reproachfully.
They turn away from me.
I feel humiliated but released. I sound not only not avante-garde, I observe, but positively corrupt. I remember, though, that Rexroth endorses hotels or something and I rally. ‘The magazine publishes so-called serious fiction,’ I say. But they no longer listen. ‘I only compromise on fuck and cunt,’ I say morosely. At times I fall back on myself like a boxer against the ropes.
‘You’re just a pile of compromising chickenshit,’ Gillian says in a whisper.
‘Everything here is some sort of damn imitation of America,’ Rexroth explains to the fact-finding secretary. A sort of interim finding.
‘Isn’t it!’ she corroborates, clubbing us with an exclamation.
We sit for a while, condemned, staring between our humiliated legs.
‘Some supper then?’ says Gillian, rising and leaving for the other room where she has laid it out. Some of us figuratively fall off our poufs because we haven’t had supper served at parties since high school. Some leap to their feet and bolt for the other room.
Ever polite, I stay back with Cooper and Rex and the secretary.
‘Shall we have a bite, then?’ says Cooper to Rex, slapping both knees emphatically before getting up in a way I’d never seen before. The four of us clumsily ‘after you’ our way into the other room.
Spread on the table had been a buffet meal of chicken legs, prawn cutlets, oyster savouries, asparagus rolls, and the rest. Marvin, Malden and Scott have eaten all the prawns, the chicken legs, and the oysters off the savouries. They are arguing about Jerry Lewis – the director not the actor – and shouting at each other while they stuff food down their throats. One shouts while the others eat.
I don’t deny that I’m basically bourgeois – but I don’t let it dominate – I don’t think anyone can say I let it dominate. It is after all, though, a part of our formation. We can modify our personalities as a whole only so much even though we may change our intellectual position radically. To live by our intellectual position when it conflicts with the emotionalism of our formation is a suffering sort of life. You feel bad about situations when intellectually you should not. In these situations you intellectually restrain yourself from crying – in fact, you intellectually try to laugh indifferently. Having hungry friends eat all the choice food before the honoured guest can get his hands on it is such a situation. It is compounded by them shouting among themselves about Jerry Lewis, the director not the actor, ignoring the guests, and behaving like slobs.
I die inside while laughing my head off.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much left,’ I say, laughingly. Ha ha ha, I go, to the secretary and Rexroth.
‘We ate very well at the hotel,’ the secretary explains to me.
‘Under the circumstances that is your good fortune,’ I say, laughing away my social pain.
‘Perhaps a cup of java, then,’ I say, remembering my American.
Over at the tables my anarchist friends are like fowls pecking away at the crumbs.
With what I judge to be a certain amount of attack in the musical sense I introduce the name Marshall McLuhan into the conversation hoping somehow to airlift us from a conversation ambushed, so far, by insularity and at the same time hoping to manoeuvre the guests away from the subject of supper. ‘McLuhan has an internal contradiction,’ I venture. ‘He is by inclination a technological determinist and yet ideologically maintains the position of a political rationalist.’
But my remark, despite its appeal, is lost in the roar of conversational engines as Marvin, Scott and now Stewart, shout about Jerry Lewis – the comedian not the director.
I had thought to follow McLuhan with Marcuse.
Rexroth finds an oyster.
He is now talking with Fonda, saying, ‘The university today is unrecognisable from pre-war. There has been a revolution of immense proportion resulting from the coming about of the populist university – all people now feel they have a right to such an education. Universities are simply no longer places for the elite. They have become revolutionary.’
The fact-finding secretary is now half-turned away from me and is giving Gillian back a few facts. ‘San Francisco Bay is like an ovary while your harbour is like an outstretched hand – the fingers being the numerous coves.’
Why is it I can hear everyone else clearly but they don’t hear me?
And Charlie Brown, I say to myself, Charlie Brown, what do you see? ‘I see a little red fire engine, I see boats on the water.’ So do I, Charlie Brown.
I realise that my venturesome remark about Marshall McLuhan which I considered had attack has fallen noiselessly through the conversation to the floor. To retrieve it would be like searching for a cent on a crowded bus – on a wet day – on crutches.
All the beer, I observe, has been drunk and we have now started on the flagons of red and white wine. I know this because Malden is luring them out from behind the cupboard where I had put them ‘in reserve’ so to speak.
I stand there asking people questions, not hearing their answers, and people do the same to me – as they pass.
Marvin, Malden, Scott and Stewart are arguing about Jerry Lewis, the clown not the mime.
‘The central problem of American life today is very much alienation,’ the secretary is saying, ‘not of man from his production in the Marxist sense, but the alienation of the person from the institutions of his society.’
I stand watching the words leave her mouth.
‘He feels surrounded, as it were, by organisations which are against him, which are using him,’ she propounds. Of course, this is felt most deeply by the Afro-American.’
Niggo-Americans.
Rexrotty is saying, ‘I remember Rahv and Phillips kicking off the Partisan Review – it was originally a rejection of what they called then, “mechanical materialism”.’
Rexrooty pulls at his ribbon tie. ‘Your Clem Christesen – old buddy of mine – but man, he’s not coming at things the right way, you know?’
Such as his approach to my short stories.
It is about now that I think I say to myself, ‘Tell us about the working stiffs reading Dante’s Canzoni for fun.’
But evidently I don’t say it to myself. I say it aloud.
Cooper spins down on me with a frown.
Rextroth says, ‘I’m sorry? What was that?’ with a sharpness which suggests to me, as perceptive as senility, that he heard me.
‘It doesn’t matter, Rextroth,’ I say.
‘Roth – Rexroth,’ his secretary says.
I stare at her.
‘I’d like to know what you said,’ Rexrothy insists.
Now, I think, now they’re listening to me.
‘I said,’ I say, ‘tell us about the working stiffs reading Dante’s Canzoni just for fun.’
‘I’m afraid, pal, I don’t know what you mean.’
Gillian arrives. ‘What’s this pile of chickenshit been saying? Take no notice, he’s drunk.’
‘I may be drunk,’ I say, ‘but in another sense I am quite sober.’
‘Had we better be moving along, Ken?’ I hear the secretary say.
‘It appears that at one stage in your varied career you felt it imperative that the working stiffs, so-called, should read Dante’s Canzoni.’
‘Belt up,’ says Gillian.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rexrough says, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t dig you, man.’
They are being ushered to the door by Gillian and Cooper.
I follow behind, not having finished what I intended to say.
‘Let the people have their pop and the arties their art,’ I say, ‘to each his own.’
They are saying how great it was and all.
‘Cultural exchange,’ I say, ‘I have yet to see evidence …’
‘Shut up, chickenshit – I’ll deal with you later,’ says Gillian out of the back of her head.
‘… I have yet to see evidence,’ I continue, undeterred, ‘that the meeting between people of different cultures brings any mutual … enrichment.’
The fact-finding mission is saying to Cooper and Gillian, ‘At a party back home in the States everyone would be on acid, sitting around grooving to music.’
‘Everyone should be in orbit,’ Ken confirms. ‘This scene is more like the States in the forties.’
‘All this argument,’ she adds, ‘and Ken, someone was actually still talking about McLuhan seriously!’
Cooper and Gillian have somehow surrounded them and I can’t get through.
‘About the testimonials you write for patent medicine,’ I cry, ‘about the testimonials.’
Cooper takes my arm. ‘They’re gone,’ he says.
We go back into the party.
Gillian says not a word to me.
Stewart and the rest are playing charades which they do until the red and the white wine runs out. Their nostrils.
I don’t play. I sit in the corner sniggering at graffiti I carve into my brain.
Gillian says, from time to time, ‘Why don’t you go to bed, you big pile of chickenshit.’