I rarely read biographies (for several reasons not worthy of your time), but I’ve just begun Linda Hamalian’s A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), largely favorable reviews of which I recall when it first appeared. Just a few pages in and so far, so good. It’s little gems like this which will hold my attention:
“In their Bohemian moods, the Rexroths [Kenneth’s parents, Charles and Delia] entertained circus performers and burlesque artists, but with their family background of political activism, they also sought out the company of social reformers. By Rexroth’s account, Charles’s father [Kenneth’s grandfather], George, was a descendant from the Schwenkfeldians, the German Pietist sect that originated in the sixteenth century. George Rexroth, a plumber, voted the Socialist ticket and called himself an anarchist. He was apparently a friend of Eugene Debs, founder of the Social Democratic Party [only one of many notable accomplishments], who used to visit him when he wanted to relax: ‘they used to sit on the front porch of my grandfather’s house, with their socked feet on the railing, drinking whiskey.’ At Sandusky, Kenneth’s maternal great-grandfather ran a trading post which served as a last stop on the Underground Railroad. His great-grandmother, who lived until she was ninety-five, was a Socialist and a feminist who defied social convention by retaining her own name when she married, and smoking little cigars or china pipes. She entertained Rexroth with stories about his family that sometimes contained more fiction than fact, like the one that he had Tecumseh blood. (Rexroth continued to believe that his paternal great-grandparents were part Indian, possibly Iroquois). By the time the Rexroths arrived in Battle Creek, it had become a natural stopping point for lecturers from black and women’s rights groups. The great civil rights pioneer Sojourner Truth had lived there for thirty years, until her death in 1883. The Rexroths had the pleasure of extending hospitality to such distinguished activists as Mrs. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell. Thus in his early years Kenneth breathed an atmosphere of political dissent.”
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More Hamalian on Kenneth Rexroth and his childhood:
“Disaster struck the Rexroth family in 1915, causing them to move “from their Garrison Street mansion to a furnished three-room apartment in a building infested with rodents and roaches. Reduced to pawning or selling their possession, the Rexroths had little more than their clothes to bring with them. [….] Under these cramped physical and financial conditions, daily squabbles inevitably erupted and the emotional climate became unbearable. Charles and Delia once more faced the inevitability of separation. Charles responded to the crisis by drinking until an attack of delirium tremens landed him in the Keely-Cure Sanatorium.
Charles got a grip on himself and resumed his career as a traveling salesman in the wholesale drug and liquor business. [….] Frequently, Kenneth and Delia accompanied Charles on his business trips around Michigan—his territory had been drastically modified. [….] But there were exciting trips to New York City, where they stayed either at the Brevoort or the Lafayette, both popular with writers, artists, and journalists living in or passing through Greenwich Village. The Lafayette edged out the Brevoort as ‘the unrivalled meeting place of high bohemia,’ reaching its peak of popularity somewhat later in the twenties. Charles and Delia seemed to prefer this ambiance to all others, and they would drag their nine-year old son to these two hotel cafés, and places like Polly’s Restaurant on MacDougal Street, owned by Paula Holliday. There the anarchist Hippolyte Havel, who served as cook and waiter, would address the people who ate his food as ‘bourgeois pigs.’ Emma Goldman was an habitué of Polly’s, as well as of the Brevoort and the Lafayette, and Kenneth once overheard a debate she started over fellow anarchist and lover Alexander Berkman, who in 1892 attempted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clark Frick during the Homestead Strike against Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh. From his father, Kenneth learned about Berkman’s fourteen years in prison; many years later he wrote an introduction for a new edition of Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.”
In a note, Hamalian informs us that the “book was not published until 1970, by Frontier Press. Rexroth believed that Berkman was ‘a typical political assassin, naïve, isolated, and fanatical,’ and that his prison years ‘turned him into a man of exceptional maturity and wisdom,’ his memoirs ‘the record of a personal reformation quite the opposite of that expected by the prison system.’”
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Kenneth Rexroth’s early yet deep intimations of “virtue epistemology:”
Kenneth Rexroth had a rather peripatetic upbringing but neither his formal nor informal educational experiences noticeably suffered as a consequence. This passage from Hamalian’s book speaks to one instance of the latter experience: his mother seriously ill and bedridden, indeed, not far from death,
“Kenneth was at her side constantly. Delia did not make him go off to school. Instead, she read to him from books on history, the natural sciences, and the lives of great artists and writers. She felt a great urgency to instill in her eleven-year-old son a sense of independence, and implanted in him the idea of the moral value of knowledge, or as Rexroth would later express it, that epistemology is moral. She wanted him to be a writer and an artist, but urged him to make sure, above all else, to think things through for himself. He listened well, caught up by the powerful truth of her advice, and perhaps by a boy’s love for his dying mother.”
Thus, in addition to learning the abiding—and Godwinian-like*—value of thinking for oneself, it seems Rexroth had an early and deeply instilled existential sense of the value of what today is called “virtue epistemology,” a sub-branch of epistemology proper in the profession of contemporary philosophy, a specialized domain that had its formal beginnings in the 1980s (although its philosophical precursors are found here and there throughout the history of philosophy, east and west).
* Hence the centrality of his rational doctrine of “private judgment” in tandem with his belief (shared with Condorcet) in “perfectibility.”
I hope to post more from Hamalian’s biography at a later date.
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