Late in life, Philip Lamantia drafted fragments of a memoir under the working title

View, Lamantia was contacted by Berkeley-based poet/editor George Leite, 
who would shortly launch his own magazine, 
Circle. Leite would publish Lamantia 
in 
Circle alongside such international literary figures as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and 
First author photo, San Francisco, 1943. Courtesy of The Bancroft 
Library, University of California, Berkeley.

---

high poet xxix
Yvan Goll. More important, on the night before Lamantia’s departure for New York, 
Leite invited him to dinner to meet anarchist-pacifist poet Kenneth Rexroth, thus 
preparing the way for his entry into the San Francisco milieu of oppositional writers, 
artists, and intellectuals upon his return to the Bay Area. In 
An Autobiographical 
Novel (first published in 1964, revised in 1991), perhaps wishing to claim discovery 
of the teenage poet, Rexroth presents a highly fictionalized account of their initial 
meeting that writes Leite out of the picture:
One day I got a telephone call from someone I didn’t know who was an English teacher 
in a high school. . . . 
He said, “I am sending you over a student in whom I think you would be interested and 
who you might be able to help. He is a poet with immense talent.”
In a few days, we got a phone call from Philip Lamantia. We asked him to dinner that 
night. It was an amazing experience. He was about sixteen years old and extremely hand-
some— a small Italian lad who seemed already to have read most avant-garde literature 
and who, again, was already the best of the third generation of surrealists. . . . I have never 
known anyone else who started out, without preliminaries, with no five-finger exercises 
or scales, as an achieved poet.
13
Having published three books of poetry by that time, Rexroth was well versed 
in avant-garde literature and active in radical politics; he had visited Paris in the 
twenties, when surrealism was at its height of influence, and even claimed to have 
met some of the group’s members. He had also resided in New York, but ended up 
rejecting that city’s intellectual culture as “too European.” Rexroth, robust in body 
and spirit, was attracted to what he perceived as the wilder side of the American 
continent, taking up residence in San Francisco in 1927. His influence on the young 
Lamantia would prove to be both deep and lasting.
As soon as he arrived in Manhattan, Lamantia was plunged into an exhilarat-
ing— but at first, undoubtedly bewildering— milieu where he encountered many of 
the famous surrealists whose work he had studied in the past year. He took up his 
post as an editorial assistant at 
View, “mostly rejecting the daily deluge of unsolicited 
manuscripts.” As Lamantia recalled in a 1998 interview with David Meltzer,
My milieu was mainly among the many English-speaking French and other European 
painters and intellectuals: Max Ernst, Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Nicolas Calas, Kurt 
Seligmann, Pavel Tchelitchew, André Masson, the critic Leon Kochnitsky— and their 
American counterparts, the writers Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Abel, Parker Tyler, the 
painter William Baziotes, and Paul Bowles, who introduced me to world music [and, 
as Lamantia notes elsewhere, to modern jazz, especially bebop]. There were weekly gal-
lery openings, jazz on Fifty-Second Street, endless parties, and almost daily invitations to 
lunch and dinner.
14
Lamantia found Breton himself to be less accessible than he may have hoped, partly 
because of the language barrier (Breton spoke only French), and partly because, as 

---

xxx high poet
Lamantia jotted in his autobiographical notes, Breton was “not social, and didn’t go 
to galleries.” Their first encounter occurred by chance, when Breton came by the 
View 
offices at 1 East Fifty-Third Street to sign the contract for a bilingual selection of his 
poems,