Richard Kostelanetz Interviews Kenneth Burke

Abstract

KENNETH BURKE is the dean of eccentric American people of letters, perhaps the eldest survivor of a tradition that includes Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound?writers so original and idiosyncratic that they could be born and raised only in America. As unusual in his lifestyle as in his writing, Burke lives where he has always lived for the past sixty years, amid a jum ble of renovated barns, small farmhouses, garages and outhouses in north ern New Jersey, within communications range of New York City, but as far away culturally as the Midwest. His age notwithstanding, he lives alone, taking care of himself in a small house that looks like a thousand others from the outside, but on the inside resembles a literary bachelor's pad, with books and papers strewn about and a piano in the middle. Kenneth Duva Burke was born 5 May 1897 in Pittsburgh, PA. He at tended the local public high school, where his classmates included Mal colm Cowley, and then briefly took classes at Ohio State and Columbia universities. He began publishing poems in 1916, fiction in 1917 and critical essays in 1921, always in literary magazines, and has since then been the epitome of the successful little magazine writer, whose work is so unslick it could never be mass-merchandised. Most of the books he has published are actually collections ?of poems, fictions and essays; and among the most prominent titles are Counter-Statement (1931), The Philos ophy of Literary Form (1941), and The Language as Symbolic Action (1966) ? all of which are classified as literary criticism?and then Collected Poems, 1915-1967 (1968) and The Complete White Oxen: Collected Short Fiction (1968). There are yet other books, likewise collections, that are so wide ranging and cross-circuited they are unclassifiable by conventional stand ards; they really deserve a shelf of their own, appropriately labeled Burk ology: Permanence and Change (1935), Attitudes Toward History (1937), A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), A Rhetoric of Re ligion: Studies on Logology (1961), and Dramatism and Development (1972). At last count, all his books were in print. Few writers are so fortunate. Though he married young, and had three daughters by his first wife, and then two sons by a second wife (who was the first wife's sister), Burke