Introduction
KENNETH REXROTH (1905–1982) grew up in the Chicago area, raised mostly by his mother Delia. She died when he was twelve, and his father, who was never much involved, died when he was fifteen. After that he lived a bohemian youth in the Roaring Twenties, spending his teenage years as a truant anarchist and café intellectual, with summer stints as a horse packer in the Pacific Northwest. At age twenty-two, he and his young wife Andrée hitchhiked around the American West, and when they arrived in San Francisco they settled there. “The ocean was at the end of the streetcar line. Down the peninsula and across the Golden Gate, the Coast Range was still a wilderness, and the High Sierras were a short day’s trip away. . . . We decided to stay and grow up with the town.”*
For the next four decades Rexroth did that, becoming one of San Francisco’s leading intellectuals. His life was turbulent; he married four times, raised two daughters, and made his living by literature, though he was also at various times an organizer for the National Maritime Union, a conscientious objector working as a psychiatric hospital nurse, a salon host, night-school teacher, radio personality, and newspaper columnist. Exceptionally well-read, sure of judgment, and clear in expression, he made his journalism into a kind of ongoing education in the humanities. He consistently defended classicism and modernism, also Asian cultures, environmental causes, and the erotic and mystical literary traditions; he just as consistently attacked the military-industrial complex, imperialism, and the New York literary establishment. He was always slightly ahead of the zeitgeist, and many aspects of what we think of as California culture were early interests of his. All his activities together made him the single public intellectual most responsible for the character of the San Francisco Renaissance, which is often associated with the Beat Generation and then the Sixties.
In this tumultuous San Francisco life Rexroth always had an enduring island of calm, located on the other side of the state: the Sierra Nevada of California. This high-mountain range serves as the spine of the California landscape, extending along the east side of the state from north of Lake Tahoe to the southern end of the Great Central valley. Public land from the start, the range has become more and more protected as wilderness over the decades. Like many Californians before him and since, Rexroth took a youthful trip into the High Sierra and fell in love with the place, and for the rest of his life went back as often he could. In almost every summer from 1927 to 1967 he hiked and climbed throughout the southern Sierra, usually taking along rented horses or burros, which allowed him to stay out for a month or six weeks at a time. He also made shorter spring and fall trips, and ski toured and snow-camped in the winter. In the thirties he took a few climbing classes with the Sierra Club; these were also the years he began climbing and skiing in the Sierra with his longtime publisher and friend, James Laughlin of New Directions. In 1937 he stayed in Yosemite so long that his wife Marie had to explain to investigators from the relief rolls where he had gone. During the Second World War, gas rationing slowed him down, as it did everyone, but afterward he went to the Sierra more than ever, often renting a cabin at Grant Grove for the month of June, writing there while the snowpack was still heavy, then in August hiking or riding into the high country. He had a few hiking friends, especially Frank Triest, and he also went frequently with his wives, Andrée, Marie, and Marthe, and with his daughters Mary and Katherine in their childhood. If you were to add all of Rexroth’s time in the Sierra together it would come to a total of around five or six years, in other words about the same amount of time John Muir spent there.
This intense and sustained Sierra experience was crucial to Rexroth, as he often said himself. “I have always felt I was most myself in the mountains. There I have done the bulk of what is called my creative work. At least it is in the mountains that I write most of my poetry. . . .There whatever past emotion and experience I choose to recollect and write down, take on most depth and meaning.”** Though no single book of Rexroth’s was devoted to the Sierra alone, he wrote about it often enough over the years that a book’s worth of pages accumulated. This is that book; it contains most of what Rexroth wrote about the Sierra Nevada.
The material comes from many sources, and was written and published over a period of about forty years, between 1937 and 1980. His mountain poems form the bulk of the book. Most of these are set in the Sierra Nevada, but there are also some about Mount Tamalpais in Marin County just north of San Francisco, where Rexroth used a small sheepherder’s cabin as a getaway; there are one or two about the Rocky Mountains, and one or two about the stars. The mountain poems among his famous translations of classic Chinese poetry are also included. Together they make one of the most striking and attractive groups in his overall body of work.
The second part of this book contains most of Rexroth’s prose writing about the Sierra. Like the poems, these pieces made their first appearance in various places through the years, including Rexroth’s autobiographical novel, his newspaper columns, and a camping handbook he wrote for the WPA, never published but now online. A third section includes James Laughlin’s few descriptions of his mountain adventures with Rexroth, letters between Rexroth and Laughlin discussing their mountain trips, and an essay by California writer Carter Scholz discussing the star references in Rexroth’s poetry. These prose selections form an entertaining composite description of a style of Sierra life common to many Californians in the mid-twentieth century; they also give us some personal context for the poems, creating a kind of portrait of the artist as mountaineer.
It has been a real pleasure to gather all of Rexroth’s mountain writing and realize it makes one of the great books about the Sierra Nevada. It can be thought of, perhaps, as the replacement for Rexroth’s lost WPA handbook, but hugely better—something to take a permanent place on the shelf of American literature, somewhere between Muir and Snyder.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON