Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth
I met Van Dyke when I was a sophomore in college. I was taking a world literature class and in walked this professor that I knew nothing about. He stood out from the other professors I'd had in passion and wisdom. He let me talk and explore the books with whatever absurd questions I had and encouraged me to go deeper. Needless to say, I've respected him ever since. He is kind, generous of spirit, and wickedly smart. He asks good questions and lets students figure things out on their own without ever enforcing his own views. I asked him to join up with this book Review site because we both love books. I also asked him because I value his opinion in literature and every time we see each other we talk about what books we are reading. If he recommends a book I can't help but pick it up. I think you will find the same to be true for you. This is his first post and there will be plenty more. Enjoy!
Kenneth Rexroth was a poet, essayist, and philosophical anarchist who laid the groundwork for the San Francisco cultural renaissance of the 1950s. Yet in many ways he was a renaissance unto himself, and he probably should be as well-known as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, or anybody else who was writing in the middle part of the twentieth century.
Rexroth was raised in the upper Midwest by free-thinking parents who both died before he was fourteen. Sent to live with an aunt on Chicago’s south side, he pretty much raised himself from then on. After dropping out of school (which bored him) at fifteen, he continued his education by reading every book he got his hands on and by participating in the bohemian and radical culture of Chicago’s “near-north” side (see his Autobiographical Novel for all the juicy details). And so by the time he was old enough to vote, Rexroth, who never received so much as a high school diploma, had few peers in terms of the amount of sheer knowledge he commanded.
In 1927 a twenty-one year-old Rexroth moved out to San Francisco and quickly took the lead in developing the city into an internationally important cultural and literary capital. Along the way, he immersed himself in radical politics, wrote several award-winning books of poetry, became an important cultural critic, and spent most summers camping and fishing in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains. For me, though, who discovered Rexroth twenty years ago, he has always served primarily as a teacher. Through his writings, he has taught me more about literature, politics, and culture than anybody else I’ve ever known or read. And I think he still has much to teach us.
One of the many ways Rexroth educated the public was through a monthly column in The Saturday Review that ran from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. In this column he systematically wrote about dozens of “classics” in world literature, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the poems of William Carlos Williams; later, these columns were collected by New Directions into the volumes Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited.
Far from being dry recitations of the contents of dusty works from old, forgotten eras, Rexroth’s discussions of these “basic documents in the history of the imagination” were infused with both universal and contemporary relevance. Writing within the context of an increasingly inhuman world (Vietnam was just getting going), Rexroth focused on the deeply human aspects of these works – the ways in which they revealed the profound mysteries of human personality and the various joys and woes of human relationships. He stressed that most of those works deemed “classic” were not too difficult for the general reader to navigate, and that in fact the majority of them communicated in very clear and direct ways their authors’ humane, mature, and oftentimes practical, visions of reality. For example, in his short essay on Chekhov’s plays, Rexroth writes:
“It is [his] genius for stating only the simplest truth as simply as can be that makes Chekhov inexhaustible – like life. We can see him for the hundredth time when we are sick of everything else in the theater, just as we can read his stories when everything else, even detectives and science fiction, bores us. We are not bored because we do not feel we are being manipulated. We are, of course, but manipulated to respond, `That’s the way it is.’”
The little essays in this book only take about five minutes apiece to read; however, each one contains dozens of insights that, while peculiar to Rexroth, carry a certain indefinable authority. They also make you want to read books you would have never otherwise paid any attention to, like The Mahabharata, Herodotus’s History, Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. He convinces you that these authors have contributed something not only important, but essential, to the development of our idea of what a human being is and should be. As Rexroth says about the Chinese poet Tu Fu, “he has made me a better man, a more sensitive perceiving organism, as well as, I hope, a better poet.”
In the end, Rexroth conveys the message that a true “classic” is a book we return to, not to find quick and easily quotable epigrams about how to live, but to find ourselves again, even if only for an hour, in the midst of our confusing and fragmented lives.