Memories of Radical Chicago
Kenneth Rexroth's Autobiographical Novel
“More than any of the official educational and cultural institutions my favorite school was the Washington Park Bug Club. This was a spontaneously evolved public forum which met every night except in the dead of winter in a shallow grassy amphitheater beside a lagoon off in the middle of the park. Years later it was to be moved to another part of the park and equipped with a concrete floor, benches, a podium, and an all-powerful Party faction. In those days it looked like something in ancient Greece, very sylvan and peripatetic, and I suppose, if the truth be known, it really was like ancient Greece, of which possibly the cynical Jewish doctor St. Luke was a better judge than Plato or Pater. Here, every night until midnight could be heard passionate exponents of every variety of human lunacy. There were Anarchist-Single-Taxers, British-Israelites, self-anointed archbishops of the American Catholic Church, Druids, Anthroposophists, mad geologists who had proven the world was flat or that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, and people who were in communication with the inhabitants of Mars, Atlantis, and Tibet, severally and sometimes simultaneously. Besides, struggling for a hearing was the whole body of orthodox heterodoxy - Socialists, communists (still with a small "c"), IWWs, De Leonites, Anarchists, Single Taxers (separately, not in contradictory combination), Catholic Guild Socialists, Schopenhauerians, Nietzscheans - of whom there were quite a few - Stirnerites, and what later were to be called Fascists. There were even leftover apostles of Free Silver and unemployed organizers of the Knights of Labor. It was better than Hyde Park. In fact, the only place I have ever seen anything as good is Glasgow.
At the Bug Club I met a man who I suppose was then a small determinative influence in my life. His name was Walter Freeman Cooling. He had once been a police magistrate and was always referred to as Judge. He was about sixty-five years old, moderately and rather loosely plump, with fine white hair which always needed trimming, and one of those rare but specially Welsh, infinitely wise moonfaces that you see in Wales on men just like the Judge—profoundly learned, unbelievably intelligent, and totally wrongheaded. A. E. Waite and Arthur Machen looked something like the Judge, and with proper make-up he could have been played by Orson Welles or Peter Lorre. He had created singlehanded an all-encompassing system of dissent. With the intelligence of an Aristotle or an Aquinas, he disagreed all along the line with all organized thought. He had elaborated a system of total eccentricity which encompassed practically every department of thought known to man from ontology to mechanics to cookery. Philosophically he called himself an Aristotelian, but his interpretation of Aristotle was as odd as a cabalist's interpretation of Genesis. The core of his system was a fantastic cosmology. This involved his own special physics, astronomy, and geology and led to a religion which was outlandish beyond belief. Even in economics, he had worked out a doctrine which he called a development of Henry George's Single Tax and which was, if I remember rightly, a kind of combination of Social Credit and Mutualism, Single Tax and the systematic inflationary theory which was just then being evolved by J. M. Keynes. He wasn't just a crackpot who thought these things up out of thin air. For most of his life he had been writing a great book of many volumes—a complete exposition of his system, organized with the rigor of the Summa Theologica. He kept this in about a hundred old-fashioned letter cases and several steel files. They were chock-full of photographs, diagrams, mathematical equations, thousands of quotations in all the civilized languages past and present, most of which he read fluently. It was wonderful to hear him in the twilight, under the trees In the park, get up and attack a Catholic or a Socialist or a Darwinian. He would rattle off a series of hair-raisingly incongruous ideas, all tied together in a sorites of irrefutable syllogisms and end with a long quotation from Homer, the Rig-Veda, or the Zend-Avesta in the original language and in the sonorous tones of a Welsh revivalist or labor leader.
I might mention that he had special dissident theories on the correct pronunciation of Creek, Sanskrit, and ancient Persian, and I must admit that he always sounded better than the professors at the University. One night, to make a point, he quoted a long passage that sounded vaguely like Hiawatha in Japanese. "What is that, Judge?" I asked. "Why," he said, "I am surprised you didn't recognize it. That's the Kalevala, the great Finnish epic." I have known a lot of polymaths in my life, but I don't believe even Carl Jung, who was always talking about the Kalevala, ever bothered to learn Finnish to read it. It occurs to me now that he was a natural for Jung. He had read everything on alchemy in all the scholarly libraries in Chicago and in this instance, curiously enough, he had hit on the correct interpretation - that it is a kind of elaborate physical code, based on magical psycho-physical parallelism, for what we would call sexual Yoga. Not only could he quote the Talmud or the Pirke Aboth, but he knew most of the Zohar by heart and great chunks of Rabbi Nachman, Luria, or Avicebron. He could not only quote anything from Aquinas, but most everything else in Migne's Patrologia Latinae and Graecae. He introduced me to Duns Scotus, who, once I had acquired the Latin, fascinated me for years, and also to the incomparably beautiful poems of Abelard. After he got through with his evening dispute at the Bug Club, where he was always attended by throngs of fascinated listeners, he and I would sit on a bench by the dark lagoon and he would expound his system to me till midnight.
Now, for the system. He believed that the galactic universe was an immense organism and that the heavenly bodies were its cellular parts. The solar system was a kind of ovary of which the earth was the just-fertilized ovum. The comets were rejected spermatozoa. At the beginning of historical time the earth had been enclosed in an ectoplasm, a living film which completely covered it above the atmosphere and reflected the sun's light more or less evenly over the entire surface of the earth. Hence, the subtropical coal measures found near the poles. This ectoplasm descended as a kind of funnel through the North Pole and into the fecund nucleus within the earth. Out of it came all life, thus accounting for the puzzling arctic radiation of species past and present. Within this funnel was an island, the Garden of Paradise, a trial hothouse for all new species. Through the living film of this funnel they passed out over the earth. “This,” said the Judge, “accounts for the peculiar grain of the hair on the head and arms of the human species, which so interested Darwin. Adam and Eve used to put their arms over their heads as they came and went through the film.” He believed that all species past and present had flourished as contemporaries prior to what has come down in legend as the Deluge. The reason for this sudden proliferation of life on the earth was due to its fertilization by a comet. Within the earth in what has survived in myths as the Heavenly City, were Christ and the Twelve Apostles, the polar centrosome and the twelve chromosomes, who could assume the forms of living men. Below the Heavenly City, arranged in its sewers in layers, each damned soul feeding on the feces of the other, were the rejects of creation who had been tried and who had failed on the earth. Coiled against the antarctic pole was the Kraken, the great serpent of the Edda, the worm Ourabourous, Satan biding his time until the fulfillment of the process of creation, the antipolar centrosome.
This process was in its final stages, marked first by the Deluge when the ectoplasm of the earth had broken and fallen to the surface. Following some mystic law of its own of like seeking like, it had enveloped the various species arranged by paleontology in evolutionary sequence and laid them down in the geological strata we know all in a period of forty days and forty nights. This detail, I might say, was the only thing in the Judge's system which he could not prevent from being hopelessly implausible. After the Flood, there occurred a diffusion of culture over the earth from what the Judge called the Aryan Commune of Mesopotamia, where the survivors of the Ark, a whole city of men and animals, had settled after the Flood. The Ark had indeed landed on Ararat, but it was an electrically controlled airship larger than the largest ocean liner, powered by atomic energy. Obviously, the cultural diffusion which took place was comparable to the survival of culture passed on to savages by men who had landed in a jungle from a strange planet; that is, for thousands of years before the appearance of Cro-Magnon man it had been continually declining and only with the late Paleolithic did it turn to start up the long road toward civilization again. To announce the coming of the end of the earth - Christ had appeared on earth to preach the coming of the Kingdom. Here the Judge quoted in Coptic from the apocryphal gospel of Thomas: “Those who are close to me arc close to the fire. Those who are far from me are far from the Kingdom.”
All this was substantiated with photographs of the spiral nebula of Canes Venatici (obviously a budding amoeboid cell); the cast of a machine-sewn boot welt in the Jurassic of Arizona im-printed by someone fleeing from the Flood; fossilized tree trunks in the Nova Scotia coal measures which go right on up through two or three layers of sandstone and mudstone of widely separated orthodox dates. He must have had a couple of thousand photographs and drawings. He was a master of the late nineteenth-century fashion for comparative mythology. He could bring to bear on every question a battery of quotations from The Sacred Books of the East and the observations of travelers, missionaries, and anthropologists which would have made Max Muller and The Golden Bough look like Guffey's First Reader. The history of the world, past and future, was dated by the constellations, which had been arranged by the wise men of the Aryan Commune of Mesopotamia as a historical clock, timed by the precession of the equinoxes.
This all sounds like Ignatius Donnelly or Eliott Smith, but the Judge’s learning and his enormous mass of relevant information so far surpassed theirs that there is really no comparison. The system of Charles Fort, whom the Judge knew (it happens that Fort was a friend of my father, too), was absorbed and explained in the Judge's system, where it was only a minor detail. Like Fort, the Judge had gathered from the newspapers of the world thousands of items of inexplicable meteorological and similar occurrences. All this was delivered in the speech and written down in the style of an Elizabethan bishop. His prose resembled nothing so much as the sermons of Donne or the writings of Sir Thomas Browne shorn of their flowers of rhetoric, or perhaps a more excited Richard Hooker. There was nothing wrong with the Judge's system, except one thing. Elaborate as it seems, it never violated Occam's razor - entities were never multiplied without necessity. More than conventional thought, it recognized in the universe the rule of the same laws of reason to be found in the human mind. Its mass of evidence was stupefying, but it violated the principle of sufficient reason and, like all other totally organized paranoias, it was impossible for the nonparanoiac to accept. It just didn't seem likely. But it was sure beautiful.
The Judge taught me that all knowledge has its unreal system. St. Thomas Aquinas has all the answers but he ignores most of the questions. So, to a lesser degree, does Lyell or Einstein. Back in those days, incidentally, the Judge was one of the few men who understood Einstein and he had worked out a different set of equations which did not take the speed of light as a constant, but assumed that it slowed up as it passed through vast spaces, a theory not unlike Eddington and Whitehead's light reddens and grows old as it travels through space. Now the Doppler Shift and the exploding universe have always worried me and here I think he well may have been right. He anticipated the modern Cambridge school and believed that hydrogen atoms were continuously appearing out of nowhere (according to him, out of another space-time continuum). Before most orthodox astronomers he believed that the galactic nebulae were separate universes, which extended on forever, an endless herd of animals of light. Speaking of light, he knew all about light metaphysics from the ancient Persians through the Shingon Buddhists, the Gnostics, the Manichaeans and Cathari, the Hasidim, and St. Bonaventura to the German romantic philosophers. One of his favorite thinkers was Jacob Boehme, of whom I had heard from Mennonite distant relatives.
The Judge taught me to sit lightly, not just to human opinions but to philosophy and science, and to appreciate it all as a great work of art - man's construct over and against the ultimately unfathomable universe. As I grew older I introduced him first to Rabbis Hirsch and Gonzales and then, later, to Sam Putnam and Ben Hecht. We persuaded Pascal Covici to publish a large selection from his immense masterwork with an introduction by Sam Putnam. But the Judge got the idea that he was being brought out as a literary curiosity, and refused. Several years went by. I left Chicago and returned for a visit about 1929. I met Putnam and asked him how the Judge was and if he didn't think it might be possible to revive this project. Sam told me that the Judge had died the year before. “Well,” said I, “that's a terrible shock. I certainly loved him. But at least his pride will no longer stand in his way. His widow should be able to live on the royalties of the book for a long time. Look at how amateurs like Charles Fort and Ignatius Donnelly sell.”
Now the Judge had a wife who was a perfect submissive hand-maiden. She went to all his lectures and typed all his manuscripts and kept his immense files in order and went childless and kept his house spotless and fed him good French cooking - he was quite an epicure, with special theories about food - and attended him every night at the Bug Club and lit his pipe, which was always going out, and picked up after him and for all I know bathed his feet every night and dried them with her hair like Mary Magdalene. She was a little gray wisp of a woman, so inconspicuous that many of his close friends never noticed her and were unaware of her existence, although she was always present. Sam said, “You're due for a still nastier shock. Before the sun had set on his dead body, she took everything he had ever written and all his cases and files and burned them up.” From the Judge I learned a great deal about the nature of human thought. From his wife I learned even more about life.”
“On Thursdays the Loebs kept open house, but there wasn’t much difference between Thursday and any other day - the place was always full of people. It was usual to have twenty people helping themselves to a big pot of stew or spaghetti at dinnertime.
I knew the place only in its last couple of years. There I met everybody who was anybody in the Chicago of the Twenties and everybody who was anybody who was passing through town - D. H. Lawrence, Alexandra Kollontai, C. K. Chesterton, Harold Bauer, Prokovief, Bertrand Russell, the Loeb who founded the Loeb Library, Sen Katayama, Micho Ito, Isadora Duncan, Eleanora Duse, and various European painters I can no longer keep straight in my memory. Besides the famous transients, many of whom stayed in the place, the house was full every night of the cream of Chicago's intellectuals in the brief postwar period of Chicago's second renaissance. It seems rather pointless even to list them - any of them - because they were all there: Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson, Mary Garden, Rosa Balsa, Adolph Bohm, Sam Putnam, John Alden Carpenter, Leo Sowerby, Frederick Stock, Eric Delamater, Rudolph Weisenborn, Edgar Miller, Emil Armin, Fred Ellis, Bert Eliot, Stanislas Szulkawlski, Frank Lloyd Wright - the list could go on for pages. Every few days the neighboring florist sent over a boy with flowers to decorate the house and a suitcase full of the best cognac and Scotch whisky. The florist's name was Dion O'Banion. There were young people - Ruth Page, Lawrence Lipton, Oscar Williams and his wife, Cone Der-wood, and two boys of my own age, Nathan Leopold and Dick Loeb. Present, too, were all the leaders of the labor and radical movement of America - Bill Haywood, Bill Foster, Carlo Tresca, Morris Hillquit, Bill Dunne, Abe Caban, Fitzpatrick (who organized the great steel strike), John L. Lewis. Charlie Ashleigh, the Wobbly poet, lived there. Even Morris Fishbein, the bead of the American Medical Association, and Dr. Lindlhar, the country's leading naturopath, were there. I remember them as arguing in every room in the house about all the most important problems the human race has ever concerned itself with. At the time of the famous murder, the gutter press tried to make out that this intellectual commotion had a deleterious effect on Jake's nephew and his friend. It certainly had a wonderful effect on me. Once introduced, I went there night after night and sat quietly in the corner, and left long after midnight to travel back to the South Side in the cold empty rattling elevated trains, my head full of fireworks.
Every time I heard a book mentioned I wrote it down and went to the library and got it out and read it. Every time I heard a subject discussed that I didn't understand I did my best to bone up on it. I've never understood how Jake managed to let in the door everybody who rang the bell and yet kept the bums and bohemians under control. If you attempted something like that now in any of the major cities of the world, the place would soon break down in a shambles and be raided by the police. Yet at Jake's the conversation was always dominated by the mature, the successful, the intelligent. If psychopaths and drunks interrupted Clarence Darrow, Bertrand Russell, or Harold Bauer when he was in the midst of an argument, I have no memory of it. I suppose a great deal of the credit goes to Claire Loeb, who was a hostess of consummate skill, inconspicuous in the way she managed people. It is not that I met famous people - it is that I learned by listening to impassioned discussion among mature people, all of whom were out in the world putting their ideas into effect. None was an academician whose ideas had never encountered any more severe tests of reality than his students’ acquiescence.
Loeb's salon flourished while I was in high school. By the time I had moved up to the Near North Side and was living on my own, Jake was dead. However, he established a tradition which lasted all through the Twenties and which, even today, hopeful Chicago rich try to revive without success. The "at homes" of the two competing doctors Fishbein and Lindlhar were very popular, though always a little more inchoate than the Loebs’. Their respective wives never acquired Claire's skill in handling brokers with pocket flasks of bathtub gin or bohemians who came for the canapes. There were two sisters whose names I have forgotten who had a large old-fashioned apartment house on the Near North Side equidistant from the universities. They made a practice of Having Youth In. This wasn't so bad as it sounds. The Red youth of the Thirties is largely a myth, but in the early Twenties, at least in Chicago, there was tremendous ferment in the colleges, and at this place I met dozens of youngsters who were later to become famous.
I also met a considerable number of young colonial revolutionaries - among them Krishna Akbar, who was Gandhi's first American representative and who introduced me to Gandhi’s movement when it was still in its infancy in India. He had been expelled from graduate school for some article he had written. There was another fellow who had been expelled as an undergraduate from college. After I was expelled from high school we started a magazine of, for, and by expellees, called The New Student (a name later used by a Communist publication.) We got an office and a letterhead, and Krishna produced a harem of perfectly fascinating and utterly devoted stenographers and editorial assistants, but to the best of my memory we never got out an issue, though we gave some lovely parties to raise funds and we entertained visiting students from Germany, India, China, Africa, and Russia.
One who accompanied Mme. Kollontai as a secretary and looked like a young Alla Nazimova quit her employer in Chicago and after what I guess they call whirlwind affairs with the editors of The New Student vanished into American life to emerge first as a literary flapper. She vanished again and reappeared as a movie writer. On the side she was, as they say, "the Representative of the Center" in the organization of the ''Swimming Pool Soviets," but she never lost the look of the Princess Alexandrovna, a dueling pistol in either hand, shooting wolves from the back of a racing droshky. Another visitor to The New Student and to the sisters' salon was a young man from the University of Washington who was reputed to be a secret Russian representative of the Komsomol (the Young Communist League was then organized in an International of its own). He was a prize student in philosophy, under the very bourgeois bead of the philosophy department in Seattle, a man who was to have a long history of developing mediocre baby Santayanas and having them turn Red in his hands. This youth had a girl whom he later married, who was rumored to be the daughter of an ex-prime minister of Russia. Years later, in a secret trial, he was expelled from the American Communist Party as a right-wing deviationist, without his name ever being mentioned. Later he was accused of being a police agent. Still later he was reputed to have become Harry Hopkins' personal one-man brain trust, and commonly slept in the White House. After the Great Patriotic War, the FBI and the Immigration Bureau spent years trying to lock him up or kick him out of the country, but if he was any of the things he was reputed to be he had covered his tracks, and he died recently in peaceful retirement on a government pension. I met him only once or twice, but even as a very young man he was one of the most arrogant and disagreeable people I have ever met, and deserved a worse fate.
Wen I-to, the finest of China's revolutionary poets, I met at this place and his friends, the twins Barbara and Robert Ng. They were the children of a wealthy merchant in Chungking and had been raised in that world of Swiss progressive schools and Versailles lycees frequented by the young of the Shah of Persia and the Aga Khan and the children of American billionaires, and had done graduate work at all the world's best universities. I was devoted to Robert, in love with Barbara, and, after they went back to China, corresponded with them frequently for several years. The last letter I ever received was from Hong Kong. They were on the committee from the Canton Commune, which went to Hong Kong to deliver an ultimatum to the British. When they went back to Canton they were executed in the street. There were others as extraordinary, one an African prince who called himself an Anarchist, got drunk, and recited Rimbaud in the Sunset Café. He had quite an effect on the members of the King Oliver Band and other New Orleans musicians who had just come to Chicago. He was always greeted with a fanfare of brass when he came into a joint. He was later assassinated in Africa by a rival claimant to the throne of his Gold Coast kingdom. On the Chicago Gold Coast the neighborhood boycotted the laundry they discovered doing his wash.
At this same place I met the bohemian Anarchist nuisance Louis Kramer, who claimed to have been Alexander Berkman’s cellmate in Atlanta prison, although he must have been a boy of fifteen at the time, and who for thirty years was a social problem not unlike a noisy Maxwell Bodenheim in American highbrow circles. I was always able to forgive him all his embarrassing faults because one night an insufferable Main Line Quaker youth in a dickey and mirror-polished shoes, who had been a conscientious objector in the war, appeared. He sat down in a roomful of people busy enjoying themselves, put the tips of his fingers together, cleared his throat, and started out, “The subject of my talk tonight will be…” Everybody stood around in embarrassed silence until his hour-long speech was finished. Louis Kramer, then a handsome, redheaded, red-bearded Jewish youth in white silk sport shirt, lurched up from the corner of the floor. “You filthy pretentious swine. You're the dirty Christian who broke the strike at Leavenworth…” and went on with a tirade of unrelieved, obscene abuse until the poor guy burst into tears and ran out of the place. Years later, when this man had become one of America's more insufferable celebrities, I always looked back with amusement on Louis Kramer's driving him from the temple.
I can't remember any others of the sisters' youth salon very clearly. They all struck me as what we then called scissorbills and were later to call squares - very innocent, dreadfully earnest, and too well dressed, and they were always quoting textbooks at one another - things that nobody except students ever read. In an argument about the Irish Republic, or free love, or the New Economic Policy, they would fix you with a bold defiant eye and say, “Oh, but you haven't read Liebovitz and Murphy,” and leave you speechless. Pretty and eager though the girls were, it was not my world. Out of this circle of students came a magazine called The Circle, published at the University of Chicago. One night at this place where set speeches were never given, the editor, just back from a summer in Germany, gave a speech which held everybody spellbound for a couple of hours. He described the student Germany that he had just seen - a country that we thought of in terms of the Munich Soviet Republic and the revolution in the Ruhr. He described how the old dueling clubs had come back, the pounding of steins in the beer cellars, the persecution of Jewish students, and the heckling of Jewish professors. He prophesied that what we thought was the rising tide of revolution was ebbing all over the world, and that the first country to slip back into black reaction would be the country which we considered the most civilized and Socialist.
I remember that night as though it were last week. It was before Mussolini's march on Rome early in 1922. The talk was detailed, backed up by documentation and economic statistics. I can even remember the ribbons of the dueling clubs that he showed us. Like any rash juvenile, he made a step-by-step prophecy of what would happen in Germany - and, almost as an afterthought, in Italy, a country nobody took very seriously. Every bit of it came true. Somehow, listening to his young voice that night, we knew it would.”