Beaten
By KENNETH ALLSOP DASSING through London last week was a founder-member of America's Beat Genera- tion, Mr. Kenneth Rexroth, poet, painter and innovator of the experimental poetry-jazz move- ment which is currently being imported here into the Third Programme and the Royal Court by our Mr. Christopher Logue and the Tony Kinsey Quintet. But Mr. Rexroth is no downy-cheeked rebel. At fifty-three, he has for thirty years been a fixture on the San Francisco cultural landscape and is one of the elder statesmen of the much- ' publicised 'California Renaissance.' In the early days of the beats he was their Daddy-o. Now there seems to have occurred the classic Freudian schism between father and sons.
In fact Mr. Rexroth appears to be more and more in monolithic isolation in his artistic stand- point. His long poem Thou Shalt Not Kill (pub- lished here in his In Defence of the Earth*) in- cludes a detailed obituary column of old com- rades who brazenly sold out, furtively conformed, or wrote everything off in disgust. 'Where is Sol Funaroff?' asks Mr. Rexroth ominously. 'What happened to Countee Cullen?' And many other names are named. He proceeds to put on record -without any fooling exactly what did happen to them .all.
One ended up in skid-row poverty with lice in his armpits and crotch. Among the flock of suicides were a couple who drowned themselves in a bath, and a girl who soused herself in petrol and ran blazing into the street. Another buddy died of syphilis, and one of the girl-friends of the old gang 'went up to Harlem, took on thirty men, came home and cut her throat.'
Those were the times (you might well be say- ing), the dear, dead days of yesteryear when all true-hearts took the honourable way out of put- ting a match to themselves or finishing it off with a bang in Harlem. But Mr. Rexroth still has to deal with the deserters from these Flanders Fields of the American arts. He continues blisteringly: How many stopped writing at thirty? How many went to work for Time? How many died of prefrontal Lobotomies in the Communist Party? How many are lost in the back wards Of provincial madhouses?
How many on the advice of Their psychoanalysts, decided A business career was best of all? One name that does not, and quite properly does not, figure in the drumhead roll-call is that of Kenneth Rexroth. Mr. Rexroth has stubbornly stuck to his xsthetic guns and has become an implacable one-man literary terrorist movement, raking the fat flanks of American gracious living with his small-arms fire—but no longer a beat generation guerrilla.
In the early days of the go-go-go cult Mr. Rexroth seemed content to be lumped together with Cleflon Holmes, Alan Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac and the rest of the hobo existentialists who became identi- fied as the Beat Generation, or beatniks for the convenience of headline-writers. But a year ago, when I first met Mr. Rexroth at a poetry-jazz session in a Bowery rendezvous called The Five Spot, the empathy seemed to be withering.
Then Mr. Rexroth said briskly in reply to the question if he was himself actually a beatnik: 'An entomologist is not a beetle.' Shortly before, on a TV programme, Kerouac, author of the high- school best-seller On The Road, had declared, rather hurt, that he had been thrown out of the Rexroth home. Mr. Rexroth confirmed this schism in the beatnik camp. `He arrived with a gallon of muscatel inside him and I didn't find him amus- ing company,' he enlained.
Last week Mr. Rexroth was briefly visiting Britain from Aix-en-Provence, where he has been living with his wife and two small daughters all winter on two grants worth together 2,000 dollars. When I met him in London I observed that he had gone native as far as his headgear—a dark blue beret--but, for the rest, was still in Californian Renaissance uniform : baggy suit, chocolate shirt and string tic. He has a pugnacious snub face, pistol-point blue eyes, a moustache and grey- hair cropped to a thin turf.
'I'm no longer especially interested in the beat- niks,' he told me. 'I'm a poet and an abstract painter in my own right and my own idiom. The beats, I think, have gone. When my London pub- lisher brought out my poems I told him not to take the beat angle, not to get hung up with an overstock of Davy Crockett caps.
'Ten years ago I was the only critic saying it *Hutchinson, 15s. wasn't true that every American writer was a conformist businessman or a college professor, and that there was a generation in revolt, and a new literature arising comparable with juvenile delinquency. I kept repeating that the feeling of revolt was so intense that the problem was to keep these youngsters from committing emotional suicide once they got into print.
No one else was willing to champion them. I did—and ever since I've had them :round my neck. The trouble was that this was just what Madison Avenue wanted. They turned it into a craze, like goldfish-swallowing or pole-squatting. There aren't many of the beatniks who can stand out against that sort of publicity. I think Ginsberg is probably the best of them—he's become a kind of folk hero, like W. H. Davies—but Fm not sure that he hasn't written himself out.
'The truth about the beatniks—like your Angry Young Men—is that they basically have bour- geois appetites. They know America's at a point of satiation--that you can only swallow so many commodities. But they hanker for the goods of Mammon while at the same time they're sickened with them. Some try to counteract this by owning nothing you can't leave out in the rain and not keeping appointments. Well, you can play at being a beatnik in America because it's so damned prosperous. But the fallacy is exposed by the fact that if you tried to be a beatnik in Italy or France you'd drop dead of starvation or typhus before anyone noticed.
'Certainly Kerouac's books have had an influence on the teen-age set Every small town in America has girls in black stockings just wait- ing to hitch-hike to Greenwich Village. But the whole thing is based on a discredited idea that a lot of American writers abroad are still propa- gating--that you can't live as an artist hi America. That's thirty years out of date. Thirty years ago if you went into Iowa anything you said would be incomprehensible to the local , Babbitt. But now he and his wife talk about Kierkegaard or Francis Bacon's paintings. The administrative and technical class in America are now the great retail culture-buyers of the world.. They have the money and the leisure, and they're hungry for books and art.
'You don't have to exist like a bum—or a beat- nik—if you're a writer in America. Whatever Kerouac and the crowd say, the artist is respected and lives well. I know one poet who gets 150)0 dollars a year at a university and another who collects sports cars. I don't personally want those sort of things. I live like a European—the sort of life the average English free-lance lives. 1 . find it very easy to live, and also much easier to write for the bourgeois 'kept' press. The New , York Times don't care what you write as long as it's well written and entertaining. And they pay five times as much as the highbrow magazines.
'But I believe I know what I'm doing. I can handle it. The beatniks don't seem to know what a dangerous position they're in. It's true that the feeling—the hopelessness of the world of Stron- tium 90—exists in a bona fide Way. But the truth of all revolutions is not that they turn into counter-revolutions but that they become boring. Already people are bored with the beatniks. And what will happen to them then? They'll vaporise and be no more.'
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