The Godfather: Kenneth Rexroth
Little remembered today, Kenneth Rexroth was a major influence on the art world through the middle of the twentieth century, especially in San Francisco. In a fittingly Fortean way, he both recurs throughout the history of Forteanism and is peripheral to the subject. He never wrote directly about Forteanism, and his work shows no influence from Fort. But, it is impossible to write about the development of Forteanism without referencing him.
Rexroth was born in South Bend Indiana in 1905. He was raised in a family that had extensive ties to socialism and had been involved in abolitionist movements, including working on the Underground Railroad. These would have significant effects on Rexroth throughout his life.
His father, Charles Rexroth, had originally intended to become a doctor, but never finished his schooling and instead feel into pharmaceutical sales. If socialism was one influence on Rexroth, then his father’s alcoholism and philandering was another, causing drastic shifts in the family’s fortune—from mansions to shared rooms—and putting the boy into untenable situations, as when the young Rexroth was forced to live with his paternal grandmother, who was senile and beat him mercilessly for no reason. (Rexroth would, in turn, become abusive.) Kenneth was close to his mother, Delia, but she had many illnesses and eventually died in 1916, when he was about eleven. (His father died two years later.)
Little remembered today, Kenneth Rexroth was a major influence on the art world through the middle of the twentieth century, especially in San Francisco. In a fittingly Fortean way, he both recurs throughout the history of Forteanism and is peripheral to the subject. He never wrote directly about Forteanism, and his work shows no influence from Fort. But, it is impossible to write about the development of Forteanism without referencing him.
Rexroth was born in South Bend Indiana in 1905. He was raised in a family that had extensive ties to socialism and had been involved in abolitionist movements, including working on the Underground Railroad. These would have significant effects on Rexroth throughout his life.
His father, Charles Rexroth, had originally intended to become a doctor, but never finished his schooling and instead feel into pharmaceutical sales. If socialism was one influence on Rexroth, then his father’s alcoholism and philandering was another, causing drastic shifts in the family’s fortune—from mansions to shared rooms—and putting the boy into untenable situations, as when the young Rexroth was forced to live with his paternal grandmother, who was senile and beat him mercilessly for no reason. (Rexroth would, in turn, become abusive.) Kenneth was close to his mother, Delia, but she had many illnesses and eventually died in 1916, when he was about eleven. (His father died two years later.)
After his mother’s death, Kenneth became close with his maternal grandmother, Mary Reed (nee Newman). From her, it seems, he inherited his mystical tendencies, including what he called the “annoying habit” of second sight: annoying because his prescience always involved trivial matters. Mary Reed knew tales of ghosts, monstrous births, the sea beast of Lake Erie and stories about the family’s tradition of horse whispering. According to Rexroth, she had tales of meteorological phenomena to “rival Fort.” In his autobiography, he wrote, “Her home in Elkhart seemed to be advantageously sited for the witnessing of inexplicable happenings in the heavens and I witnessed two of them myself.”
In the first case a sapphire blue, spinning fireball—about the size of a basketball—appeared in the attic, came downstairs and out the front door, hit a bike, and exploded. In the second, a fish-shaped hole filled with dull red flames opened in the summer sky. It lasted about fifteen minutes.
At this time, Rexroth also turned to Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy and the writings of PD Ouspensky. These, too, would influence his mystical thinking.
(Incidentally, they also showcase his autodidactism. Rexroth read through the Encylcopedia Britnannica each year, as though a novel, and his facility with obscure knowledge was legendary—and intimidating.)
Rexroth moved to Chicago, where he became part of the Bohemian scene there. He was especially influenced by surrealism and Dadaism. As well, he became interested in Anglo-Catholicism and, of course, continued his interest in socialism and communism. Rexroth travelled extensively, eventually coming to San Francisco in 1927. He went west in part because—although he himself was influenced by European movements—he wanted to be as far from their reach as possible, where he could be free to develop his own ideas. In San Francisco, Rexroth continued writing poetry as well as literary criticism, becoming probably the central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1940s. He mentored Duncan and Spicer and Lamantia and Everson, frequenting the Bohemian clubs of the Bay Area and converting his own home into a salon of sorts.
His politics evolved during this time, especially as World War II approached. Like many leftists, Rexroth was interested in communism, but his attachment was conflicted. He was friendly with Bernard Zakheim, the communist muralist who painted the library scene in Coit Tower (the one that showed a man reading about the “Weird Spirit” and also showed Rexroth on a stepladder). But, Stalinism repulsed him, as did the hard line being taken by Western communists. By 1938, he had repudiated his connection to communism and developed, instead, a pacifist anarchism (or libertarianism). Rexroth was a Conscientious Objector, assigned to work in a psychiatric hospital (where he further differentiated himself from many leftist peers by learning to hate Freudianism). To develop his ideas, he read widely through the history of pacifism and also came upon the writings of the German mystic Jakob Boehme. Boehme argued that nature was a reflection of the divine order—a claim that had influenced the Romantics. Rexroth, himself mystically devoted to nature—he made frequent trips to the headlands of Marin and the Sierras—found much in sympathy with Boehme.
At the same time he was plumbing the Western mystical tradition, Rexroth also became interested in Asian philosophy. He would go on to translate many Japanese and Chinese works. As well, self-consciously following in his family’s tradition, he became an activist against the treatment of the Japanese during World War II. He was even part of an Underground Railroad helping first-generation Japanese immigrants avoid internment. After the War, he would host a number of conscientious objectors at his home.
Rexroth was in full command of his literary powers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (He did spend parts of 1949-1952 in Europe and New York). He was a constant presence in the cultural life of San Francisco, appearing on KPFA radio, in newspapers, and at readings.
Journalist Stephen Schwartz sees Rexroth’s socially engaged mysticism and pacifism as a revolution against mainstream thought that was ultimately more fruitful than the sclerosis of American communism in the 1940s.
And throughout this very active life is woven Fort. Rexroth claimed that his father, Charles, was a friend of Charles Fort. This is possible, as Charles and Delia had their own Bohemian tastes, which they would indulge with trips to New York, where they made the circuit of writers’s bars and clubs. Along with others in the San Francisco Renaissance, Fort was familiar with Fort’s writings. As far as I can tell, he didn’t explicitly elucidate the reasons for his interests, although it is possible to offer informed speculation.
The first is that Fort seemed to chronicle odd events no one accounted for—but which were real to the people who experienced them. This would have accorded with Rexroth’s own experiences: he had witnessed uncanny phenomena, too. Fort, then, seemed to more truly reflect the world than other writers.
It also seems the case that there was some elective affinity between pacifism, anarchism, surrealism, and the writings of Fort. Other writers influenced by surrealism—Philip Lamantia especially although not exclusively—was steeped in both. And Tiffany Thayer’s Fortean Society vocally opposed the war. Of course, this was not a consistent correlation. Robert Barbour Johnson, for one, disliked Thayer’s anti-Americanism, and, of course, George Haas had voluntarily joined the war effort. But the ideas did seem to hang together.
This connection was especially intense in Bohemian circles. For example, Rexroth knew Ben Hecht, a surrealist-influenced Bohemian who was the first to use the word Fortean. (They knew each other in Chicago.) Rexroth was also familiar with Buckminster Fuller, who would also become a Fortean. And Rexroth knew Henry Miller. As well, he worked with George Leite, founder of Circle, which was an explicitly Fortean art magazine.
I suspect the connection is as simple as: Fort stood against convention. Convention was the enemy. It was conventional thought that led to war and violence. World War II, after all, was a very scientific war—with pesticides and atomic weapons. If the idea was to see beyond convention—to a world that was peaceful—it was imperative to see beyond the conventional boundaries of science.
