"Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith" by John Szwed (FSG, 2023)

Tosh's Journal: September 3, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-374-28224-0

Cosmic Scholar is an excellent description for Harry Smith: the filmmaker, music collector, and magician, and the entranceway to everything fascinating. A figure like him doesn’t come often, and when he/she/they arrive, it can change how one sees the world. It takes a while to grasp Harry Smith. I think I first saw him as a filmmaker; although I haven’t seen his films, I did have an old copy of Film Culture with him on the cover. Years later, I heard about his field recordings and record collection, which eventually became the Anthology of American Folk Music, a legendary collection of music lost in the landscape of time and culture. For mid-century folk musicians like Bob Dylan, it has become a foundation of modern music to a certain degree. And then later, I heard he was a student of Aleister Crowley’s magick practices. That is a true definition of a Beat in a very straight world. Well, not his world. To be perfectly honest, it’s more weird than straight.

John Szwed, who specializes in brilliant, outstanding biographies of such artists as Sun Ra and Miles Davis, had found another figure who would go and shape culture as an avant-garde explorer. There is the bourgeoisie, and the Bohemian is an off-shoot of that culture. Members of the Avant-Garde are not bohemians because they only reinvent themselves and are often against the norm of their times. The Bohemian needs the bourgeoisie culture to exist. Someone like Harry Smith lives only on his terms and refuses both the bourgeoise and bohemian life for only a world in which he accepts and exists. It’s a landscape that I’m familiar with since I’m the son of an artist, Wallace Berman, who knew that world very well. But as far as I know, I don’t think Wallace met Harry. Still, I’m reminded of the existing class system. And some artists know how to handle themselves among the bourgeoisie, usually in the bohemian class. On the other hand, Harry will always be in the avant-garde because someone like him cannot function in either of the two different classes.

Szwed does a great job connecting the dots of someone like Harry Smith because that can’t be an easy assignment due to Smith's vast interests. One can focus on just one aspect of Harry’s life and career, yet there is so much more to his life and work. So this biography is an excellent entranceway to Harry Smith and his odd and wonderful world. It is hard to focus on one aspect of Harry’s anti-career because it jumps from his study of Native American culture to folk music to paper airplanes, among others. He saw everything as connected, but that may not be obvious to an outsider. Smith hit on so many practices and left such a fantastic impact that it will take more than one book to expose this aesthetic magician fully. But the Szwed biography is a great start.