The Last Bohemian

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL by Kenneth Rexroth. 367 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Just when it has become uncertain what a novel is, everyone seems very sure that what he writes is a novel. There was Truman Capote's jumbo crime documentary, and now there is this "autobiographical novel" by Kenneth Rexroth.

Novel it is not, but it is a novel autobiography. The author is not the victim of an unsatisfactory love affair with his own personality: he takes himself for granted and spends his space telling about other people, places and ideas. And what people! Rexroth's book is a Who's Non-Who of every oddball in the nonEstablishment U.S. of the past generation--feminists, Wobblies, Free Silver men, free-love ladies, anarchists, proto-bolsheviks, pacifists, radicals, populists, vegetarians, ragged Utopians, prophets without portfolio and plain cranks. His record makes the current anti-Establishment of beatnik non-opters seem limp and goofy. " 'Free love, free liquor, free Mooney,' proclaimed the banners of my youth,"* Rexroth says happily today. He has produced a splendid piece of Americana of a kind that defies academic research; it could only have been told by a survivor.

Today, he is the Last Bohemian, a conformist who chose to cleave to a tradition of dissent. Rexroth has some thing like Chamber of Commerce status in San Francisco, safely beached on the shore where the last wave of American radicalism washed up. He is a legend as poet, horse wrangler, hobo, perpetual avant-gardesman, painter, and finally, at 60, Grand Old Man of what used to be called the Youth Racket.

Left-Wing Boy Scout. In Rexroth's world, people call him "Duke," a term used in hobo jungles for the classy fellow in a sub-society of declassed men. "It's no great compliment," says Rexroth. "The most affected girl in a whorehouse is usually called 'Duchess.'

There is a slightly different type, who in the words of Engels has also cut himself loose from the upper classes and who is usually called 'Professor.' Possibly I occupy that ambiguous status between Duke and Professor for which there is no name."

As duke, professor and poet, Rexroth functioned magnificently in the sub-worlds of Chicago, Greenwich Village and the syndicalist meeting halls of Seattle, until he came at last to the big rock candy mountains of San Francisco. From the time he was an eagle scout in Toledo, Ohio--operating, he claims, from what must have been the only left-wing gangsterized troop in America--Rexroth's big German-American farm boy's face shone with the vocation of the radical outsider proud of belonging to people who have no belongings. Whether he was selling snake oil to farmers in the Southwest (his three-page sales pitch is a masterpiece of W. C. Fieldsian conmanship) or living it up in those all-purpose ashrams known as "studios" in Greenwich Village, Rexroth was on top of the left-wing game. What with his poetry, his industrious sexmanship and painting (he was set up with his own studio at 16), he was a busy man, with a jovial disregard of what other men would regard as crippling misfortunes.

"Plain Speech." He recounts the successful defense of his heterosexual hon or against the assault of perverted Chicago cops--and later of giant Negro homosexuals in jail--with the same modest gusto of a college quarterback telling Coach how he managed to shake the field. It was a rough world, not just on the picket lines but in the interminable ideological warfare among the power addicts on the outer fringe of communoid politics. This kind of politics seems as dead today as Joe Hill. The reader will wonder how, among his chosen society--the failed saints, moral riffraff, ignorant zealots, sex addicts and refugees from bourgeois society who people his book--Rexroth almost alone seems to have survived as his own man, still spouting verse and invective, and still in splendid spiritual health.

Part of his strength came from a sense of tradition rooted in his dissenting German-American ancestors, who were Utopian colonists, freethinkers, socialist craftsmen and abolitionists. The rest of it came from an indestructible innocence that helped him to survive bohemia's bad art, freewheeling sex and bogus labor evangelism. He did not renounce his old causes; the secular faith of socialism simply ran out on him. "The moral content of the old radical movement has vanished altogether," he writes today. "The classics of socialist and anarchist literature seem at mid-century to speak a foolish and naive language."

Rexroth's own language is simple. His mother had taught him that plain speech was a mark of personal distinction. In his case perhaps it was.

* Mooney, not money. Meaning Tom Mooney, labor's biggest martyr of the '20s and '30s, sentenced to death when convicted with Warren K. Billings of killing ten people in 1916's San Francisco Preparedness Parade, eventually released from prison in 1939.

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