Reviews for An autobiographical novel

The average rating for An autobiographical novel based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-05 00:00:00 Ralph Kennington Fascinating. Kenneth Rexroth was the grand old man of San Francisco’s art scene during the second third of the twentieth-century, having come to the city the same year George Sterling committed suicide and been present at the birth of the Beats. He published this biography in 1966, but only took it up to 1927. His biographer Linda Hamalian found some later pieces, which she has appended here. It is not quite correct to say that Rexroth “wrote” this book. He dictated it. Then corrected the dictations with further dictations, which made me think I wasn’t so much reading these stories as hearing them. (Twain tried something similar for his own autobiography, but it just didn’t cohere, in my opinion.) The late-added material is less robust, but still worthwhile. At times, of course, this mode—and Rexroth’s status—can lead to humble-brags (he “got most of the world’s important fiction out of he way in adolescence where it belongs”) and grand pronouncements—including what’s wrong with the current generation: there are no more elites, capitalism has won, and there’s no hope for alternatives. But these can be fascinating, too, simply because Rexroth is an interesting thinker—and he sketches out a history, personal and social, which isn’t often discussed, but which is an important source for our world of today. Rexroth roots his own thinking, and that of his family’s, in the German pietistic tradition, with its focus on doing good work, being quiet and unostentatious, acknowledging that there might be more tot he world than what the senses reveal, but nonetheless focusing on the empirical. The tradition also valued helping others. Thus, he is proud that his family was part of The Underground Railroad and ran something similar himself during WWII, helping Japanese avoid internment. Rexroth had what might be called mystical experiences—he was a horse whisperer, and had second sight, as well as many visions. These lead him to read through philosophy, but most of his reading left him unsatisfied. The philosophical tomes that addressed the subject were occult, and he didn’t accept that system—he found it tosh. Mainstream philosophy mostly focused on epistemological questions, which he found uninteresting, Instead, he wanted a process-oriented, biological and immanent religion, which he found in Taoism (and Whitehead). He was also always drawn to left-libertarianism and anarchism, both of which he thought central the development of San Francisco’s art scene. Personalism was part of it, too, in which everyone emphasized their own empirical experiences. He was Catholic, he said, not because of his beliefs, but because of the things that he did, the rituals that he followed; it was one way of subverting the alienation brought by capitalism. Meaningful work was another way—in his case a life devoted to the arts. Rexroth makes dear that he had little interest in the communists and communism, most of which he considered to develop evilly. Rather than dialectical materialism, he thought the force of history was a small elite, smarter than the rest of the world, which was devoted to the improvement of the world. Of course, he saw himself as a member of this elite. I don’t buy this theory of history, but there is no doubt that Rexroth was on the side of the good guys, and helped usher in a more freethinking, liberal world, even if it has since been engulfed by the renascence of conservatism and the betrayal of neoliberalism.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-03-03 00:00:00 Brenda Soto There is no better way to see the 20th century than through this first person perspective (and perhaps tall tale) of an active anarchist poet... who seems to have been involved in every leftist event up through the 1950s. It's beautifully told, and demonstrates how history is what we make of our lives, retrospectively.