To Live and Write in California : A LIFE OF KENNETH REXROTH, <i> By Linda Hamalian (W. W. Norton: $25; 439 pp.)</i> : KENNETH REXROTH AND JAMES LAUGHLIN: Selected Letters, <i> Edited by Lee Bartlett (W. W. Norton: $27.50; 241 pp.)</i>

Despite Linda Hamalian’s obvious sympathy for her subject, Kenneth Rexroth comes off in this first major biography as a not very likable man. Nevertheless, she also makes abundantly clear, lest anyone forget it, that American literature in the 20th Century would be immensely poorer had he never lived.

Rexroth published 50 books of poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography, plays, translations and collections of other writers during a career that spanned 60 years. The power of his work came from the many different conflicts he managed to embody in it, and those conflicts came directly from the contradictions in his own personality.

He was both scholarly and irrational, a spokesman for the highest civilizations and a lover of the wilderness and the primitive life, tenderly lyrical (his love poems are among the finest in the English language) and politically cynical, a Christian, a Buddhist, and, for many years, a Communist.

In his love of the Western landscape and his appreciation of indigenous art and political movements, such as jazz and the Wobblies, he was intensely American, and yet his greatest contribution may well be his introduction of Oriental thought and writing into American cultural life, chiefly through his celebrated translations of Chinese and Japanese poems into a down-home American idiom.

Rexroth’s interest in culture and history was sparked when his parents took him to Europe in 1912, at age 7. His mother especially nurtured his intellect and sense of aesthetics, providing him with French and dance lessons and a private tutor. His parents also had a taste for “high bohemia,” and at a young age, Kenneth was introduced to Greenwich Village. His education in socialism began with observing his grandfather and Eugene Debs drinking and chatting on the family’s front porch.

But when both his parents died unexpectedly in his early teens, the bottom dropped out of Kenneth Rexroth’s security, and his future was placed squarely in his own hands. He spent a couple of years with an aunt and uncle in Chicago, but at 16 dropped out of high school and began taking care of himself.

He took courses at the Chicago Art Institute and attended literary soirees where he met Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, Lawrence Lipton, Vachel Lindsay and Clarence Darrow, among many others. He was also introduced to what Hamalian calls “the elite of the international art and literary world”: D. H. Lawrence, Eleanora Duse, Bertrand Russell, Isadora Duncan and Sergei Prokofiev, as well as “leaders of the labor and radical movements in the United States”: Bill Haywood, John L. Lewis and Wobbly poet Charlie Ashleigh.

The young Rexroth, as ever in his life, did not lack for resources. He was a tall, strong, handsome young man with a thick head of dark wavy hair, and he had a good deal of personal charm as well. One of his most important characteristics was his ability to absorb and thus represent a host of the major contradictions inherent in his time--and this penchant for paradox began as early as his teens in Chicago. For when he wasn’t hobnobbing with the cultural mandarins, he was exploring with equal enthusiasm the seamy side of life--the strip shows on North Clark Street, the whorehouses, the jazz clubs.

It was during these early years in Chicago that Rexroth became involved in union organizing and participated in a variety of anarchist and pacifist discussion groups. He learned to speak well and to convince others of his beliefs. Women were strongly drawn to him, and he had numerous affairs, but he had difficulty settling on one--largely because he was so haunted by the specter of his beloved mother Delia. He was also, he felt, diminished in women’s eyes by the fact that he often lacked a visible means of support--a problem that dogged him through much of his adult life.

He vagabonded a good deal around the country and down to Mexico, but always came back to Chicago, where in 1926 he met Andree Schafer, a woman slightly older whose “incredible angelic purity and seriousness” reminded him of Delia. She earned a decent income as a decorator but had dreams of becoming a successful painter, just as Kenneth did.

Kenneth and Andree soon were married, but typical of all of Rexroth’s marital relationships (he was married four times), Andree found that she was expected to support Kenneth both financially and as a literary secretary, and that her dreams and ambitions always came second to his--on top of which, Rexroth began cheating on her with other women almost from the beginning, and his infidelities toward her and his other wives continued almost until he was so old that he could no longer get out of his chair unaided.

One of the difficulties of writing about Rexroth is that he was prone to continual lying to aggrandize himself. Hamalian gets around this problem by judiciously interviewing others in Rexroth’s life to get their versions of events, which often prove most enlightening.

Rexroth, for example, would have people believe that almost all the literary greats who came through San Francisco, where he settled, immediately sought him out, and that those who lived there invited him to visit almost as soon as he hit town. Quite to the contrary, Hamalian relates Rexroth’s insistent efforts to meet literary celebrities. He would usually arrive on their doorsteps unannounced. Often as not he would be let in, where his charm would do its work. But sometimes he would be fended off, as he was several times by Yvor Winters’ wife, who kept him at bay in the front yard.

Rexroth’s literary reputation and influence grew throughout the 1940s, almost in proportion to the rise of his friend James Laughlin’s publishing house, New Directions. Although Rexroth’s first book of poems, “In What Hour,” was published by Macmillan, most of his important works that followed were published by Laughlin. Rexroth assumed for Laughlin the role that had first been performed by Ezra Pound, as the scout who pointed promising new writers in his direction. Rexroth found a host of major writers for New Directions, including William Everson, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder.

One of the sad aspects of Linda Hamalian’s biography is learning how greatly the humanism and compassion of Rexroth’s writing diverged from the reality of his personal life. Although it is true that he often was capable of immense altruism--as when he fought in behalf of the community of Japanese-Americans who were being treated as enemies during World War II--he also was capable of turning on friends and, if they were writers, cutting them to pieces in highly unfair reviews. He also was shockingly cruel to the many women whom he idealized in love poems.

While still living with Andree, he began an affair with a nurse, Marie Cass, whom he eventually married after Andree’s death. Marie supported him for many of the crucial years as his career got under way. He repaid her by endless adulteries, and while still living with her began an affair with a graduate student named Marthe Larsen, 20 years his junior, whom he married bigamously in 1949.

Kenneth was no more faithful to Marthe than he had been to his previous wives; in fact, as his fame grew in the ‘50s, more and more sexual opportunities came his way, and he never failed to seize them. Yet not only did Marthe stay on with him and accede to replacing Marie as his amanuensis, but Marie, whom he eventually divorced after the birth of his second daughter with Marthe, continued to live nearby and to provide him and his new family with financial support.

If Hamalian has one major failing as a biographer, it is her omitting to explore the mystery of this continuous devotion to Rexroth of a number of women, who despite the rudimentary stage of feminism should have known better. In fact, one suspects all along that Hamalian has just a bit too much sympathy for Rexroth’s peculiar needs as a literary genius, and it leads her occasionally to such oversimplifications as “(Rexroth) could not always get his head and his heart to work together.”

If Rexroth and his women become a sort of high soap opera, Hamalian is on surer ground when she describes the arrival of the Black Mountain and Beat writers in San Francisco in the mid-’50s. It is a sad tale but one that had a profound effect on our literary history, as first Rexroth welcomed them to the city and heralded them as new American prophets--telling Allen Ginsberg, for example, that he would be “famous from bridge to bridge”--and then turned against almost all of them for a very personal reason: Marthe, fed up with Kenneth’s philandering, decided to have an affair with Robert Creeley. Those who were Creeley’s friends, such as Kerouac, became guilty by association. Without thought to the fact that he was contradicting himself yet again, Rexroth, who had at first praised Kerouac’s writing to the skies, suddenly began tearing the younger writer apart in a series of incomparably vicious reviews.

The real tragedy for Rexroth was that success came too late. For while the Beat writers were reaping the harvest of fame whose seeds Rexroth had helped to sow, Rexroth, in Hamalian’s words, “was still waiting for his own ship to come in.” Ironically, Rexroth finally got his own measure of fame as an “elder statesman” to the Beats. Suddenly he found himself in demand as a reader of his own work, and almost single-handedly he created the hybrid medium of jazz/poetry readings, a forerunner of modern performance art. Readings, in turn, gave Rexroth the exposure he needed, so that a wider audience could take note of what a fine poet he really was, and during the 1960s and ‘70s, awards poured in so fast that the once penurious poet could now afford to decline some of them on moral principle.

Hamalian’s portrait of Rexroth’s last years is terribly poignant. We see the old bohemian fire-eating anarchist transformed into a gentle, sometimes doddering old guest professor at UC Santa Barbara and living in the genteel suburb of Montecito, an area he described to Laughlin as “Nixonville with a vengeance.” At this time he was cared for by his fourth wife, Carol Tinker, who was much younger even than Marthe. Together they hosted a new round of weekly literary evenings, this time attended by students, not his poetic equals, so Rexroth could at last obtain the unqualified adulation he had always sought.

As though to confuse everyone, Rexroth asked for and received Catholic last rites before he died, on June 6, 1982. It is to Hamalian’s credit as a biographer, though, that by that point in the story we have grown so fond of the old trickster and his sudden turnabouts that his traditionally dignified exit only seems fitting.

Rexroth’s letters to James Laughlin, which are being published in tandem with Hamalian’s biography, are a fascinating read because Rexroth is always so opinionated, always takes a strong and usually well-grounded stand, just as he did in his conversations. While the early letters, in which he tried to impress Laughlin, are rife with name-dropping--I counted 14 writers named in a one-page letter--almost all of them shimmer with Rexroth’s encyclopedic learning (in fact, he supposedly read through the “Encyclopedia Britannica” once each year). They also provide a deeply personal glimpse of the man, obnoxious sometimes in his cruel gossip, at other times noble in his defense of other writers whose integrity he respected, as when he reads the riot act to Laughlin for the cowardice of retracting a blurb he had informally given to Kenneth Patchen.

Perhaps most important, the letters reveal the quiet side of the man. When he is not boasting of his own talent or excoriating others whom he imagines to be lesser talents, Rexroth often talks of his love for mountain climbing and nature in general. In such passages, there’s a natural gusto and an uninhibited and precise cataloguing of phenomena that contrasts sharply with his intellectual showmanship. As a result, the letters trace his many paradoxes like a map of his consciousness.

They also show us what a difficult thing it was to be Kenneth Rexroth’s friend. In one letter in the mid-1960s, he wrote angrily to Laughlin that “What I want now is a quit-claim on all books of mine that you publish,” calling Laughlin “an aged schoolboy slumming on Montparnasse in 1930.” Two days later, as usual, Rexroth phoned Laughlin to apologize. More than anything, the letters testify to the forbearance and patience of James Laughlin as a friend.