Anyone For Tennis?

Back in Blighty, the Pimm’s is flowing freely on the lawns and corporate suites of SW19, although this year its secret recipe is not being further diluted by London rain. I’ve recently moved into a house, with a roommate, a pool, and a TV. Of course, much else has changed, but the additions of roommate, pool, and television have been the most significant thus far. I lasted about eleven months without a television. Now I am faced with summer vacation, extreme heat, and the Wimbledon quarterfinals. If it didn’t start at 8 am I might actually pour a Pimm’s and join in the fun from across the pond more fully. The strawberries and cream will have to suffice.

While not watching Wimbledon, I’ve been flicking through The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. This poem, “Vitamins and Roughage,” leapt out at me as particularly apt, given its fourth, fifth, and sixth lines. Something tells me this poet would have enjoyed the physical advances women’s tennis has undergone since his death in 1982. Rexroth has his moments of perversion, but they are fewer and further between then, say, those of Philip Larkin. The male gaze to which he subjects the “daughters of California” is one such hint of a moment. Included in his 1944 collection The Phoenix and the Tortoise, this poem was written some time in the early 1940s. Born in 1905, Rexroth would have been in his late thirties. It is the poems written in this stage in his life that take on the darkest, most masculine tones. He and his first wife divorced in 1940, and she died later that year. He was living with another poet, Marie Kass, in San Francisco. Together, they hosted literary discussions, anti-war protesters, and other free-form gatherings. It was not until 1948 that Rexroth would marry Marthe Larsson, the mother of his two daughters, after the birth of which Rexroth’s poetry takes on a more familial, homely shape. He has scores of poems about his young children playing in the garden. Most of them are rather dull. On my mother’s recommendation, I have moved the poem itself to be situated immediately before its analysis, so if you liked it better at the top, talk to her about it.

Vitamins and Roughage – Kenneth Rexroth

Strong ankled, sun burned, almost naked,
The daughters of California
Educate reluctant humanists;
Drive into their skulls with tennis balls
The unhappy realization
That nature is still stronger than man.
The special Hellenic privilege
Of the special intellect seeps out
At last in this irrigated soil.
Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers
Are stronger than Socrates’ hemlock;
And the games of scrupulous Euclid
Vanish in the gymnopaedia.

While growing up, Rexroth was rigorously home-schooled, and his interest in classics shines through here, where it is elegantly juxtaposed to his modern life. The poem outlines the battle in both 1940s California and Ancient Greece between man and nature. Needless to say, nature wins. The poem is divided into three parts, like a Venn Diagram, illustrating this juxtaposition: lines 1-6 describe the current situation; lines 7-9 link the formation of humanist thought in Ancient Greece with its final conquest in modern America; and the remainder of the poem focuses on events in various centuries BCE, ambiguously linking them to those in 1940s California.

The opening triumvirate of participial phrases modifying those beauteous “daughters of California” defines the poem’s scope and its gaze. It ranges from pure strength in “strong ankled” to female sexuality in “almost naked.” One can imagine Rexroth eyeing one such woman from her feet on up, noticing first her ankles, then her sun burned legs, and finally her skimpy clothing. This range reappears in line 9, this time in the pair “Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers.” By this stage the intensity of both the athleticism and sexuality have climaxed. They are both generative, leaving their traces. By pairing them in line 9, Rexroth has brought them closer together. Both produce liquids – liquids that can be referred to with collected nouns. Just as the athletes all sweat a similar sweat (as long as they’ve been keeping away from the garlic), the lovers produce similar juices, or perhaps a commingling of juices (as long as they’ve been keeping away from the asparagus).

To return to the first half of the poem, the “daughters of California” are referred to as such because they grew up there. But there is an extended sense in which they have absorbed the liberal sunshine, that the Golden State has something in its water that makes people just that little bit different. These women are trying to teach “reluctant humanists” about the joys of nature. Rexroth notices the sexuality of nature’s creation in these women, but these humanists cannot. They are caught up in their thoughts. As a result, force is necessary – athletic force. The effort with which these women play tennis is imagined to be also used to convince these skeptics about the power of nature. But there is another potential meaning secondary to the primary one of this message being carried in these whizzing tennis balls: perhaps all these humanists have for brains are tennis balls. How can they have brains, if they can’t notice this image of athleticism and sexuality for what it is, if they can’t get caught up in it.

The transition between the first and second sections of the poem is elegantly executed by the use of the adverb “still” in line 6. It has been that way for over two millennia, but it is now being reinforced. Moving into lines 7-9, Rexroth sarcastically repeats “special” to attack the limited appeal and availability of this humanist intellect. It does not have a wide appeal, and one can hear its opponents lathering on the sarcasm when attacking the Greek thinkers: “Oh, you think you’re sooo special, with your precious dialectics, your forms, and your metaphysics, don’t you?” I’ve known how Rexroth felt ever since I took Introduction to Ancient Philosophy in college. It all seemed so fantastic beforehand – the height of knowledge, the intellectual reverence, the arguments that I could never before follow. But despite the efforts of Tad Brennan and his wonderful mustache, it simply wasn’t for me.

The idea of liquids mentioned above is also used in this middle section. This “privilege” takes on liquid form and “seeps out // At last into the irrigated soil.” While slightly contradicting the “still” in line 6, these lines display an image of nature embodied metaphorically in the soil finally conquering human intellect. That it is “irrigated soil” tells us that we have jumped back to the tennis courts of 1940s California, a leap of time that is reinforced by the prepositional phrase “at last,” as in, it has taken up until now to happen.

Finally, Rexroth conquers humanism once and for all with references to two Ancient Greek thinkers. Socrates was killed by being forced to drink hemlock. This hemlock was strong enough to kill him, but not his ideas, which have lived on through Plato primarily, but have finally been finished off in Rexroth’s present day. Euclid, my brief internet research tells me, was a mathematician. I don’t know how many “games” he had, but they were mathematical games; that is to say, humanist ones. One of them can be played here. The mention of the game pairs well with the gymnopaedia, a Spartan festival involving the dancing and athletic games of nude youths. Oh, to be a Spartan! The adjective’s synonyms in my thesaurus include harsh, frugal, and stringent, but it’s high time we threw naked, nude, bare, and birthday-suited in there as well. But I digress. Two kinds of games: the athletic – and coincidentally, nude – ones win out over the mathematical ones. Sounds about right to me. And from the rhythmic grunts emitted from the coverage of the women’s quarterfinals on NBC today, I can only agree.