★ 07/01/2023
The Fugs played at Harry Smith's (1923–91) memorial service; speakers included Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Dave Van Ronk, poets, film scholars, a psychiatrist, and an archivist from the Smithsonian. But who was Harry Smith? Award-winning biographer Szwed's (Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth) newest book shows that Smith was—sometimes all at the same time—a painter, filmmaker, record collector and recorder, anthropologist, UFO/parapsychology enthusiast, habitual drug user, and, near the end of his life, Neo-Gnostic bishop. Smith also edited the classic six-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, which was drawn from his own collection of recordings. He's portrayed in this book as someone who lived on the cheap and who often mooched off others to fund his projects. When he died, he left behind 120 boxes of books and records. Going through them is like entering Borges's Library of Babel: anything may be there but how does one find it? Szwed is the ideal chronicler for a person worth knowing but so hard to pin down. VERDICT Szwed, as lively a writer as he is scrupulous, has produced an excellent and engaging biography, the story of an elusive but important and utterly fascinating figure.—David Keymer
2023-05-02
An overdue, comprehensive biography of a strange, singular man.
Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a polymath who “effaced, erased, or trashed most of the facts of his life, as he did his art.” Nonetheless, Szwed, piece by obscure piece, masterfully puts his puzzle of a life together. Smith was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in Washington in an unusual family and isolated childhood, and Szwed, biographer of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and Alan Lomax, admits Smith’s past is rather murky. He was frail, precocious, and fascinated by the local Indigenous population, and he began photographing, filming, and making recordings of them. At 18, he began an ambitious dictionary of Samish and Swinomish languages and began his lifelong obsession with string figures and, much later, paper planes. He was painting, drawing, reading widely, watching movies, and collecting many records, especially folk and blues. Smith spent the mid-1940s in the Bay Area soaking up its rich cultural and artistic milieu—and drugs. By 27, he discovered nonobjective hand-drawn animated film and visual music, his surrealistic “record paintings.” A job at the San Francisco Museum of Art’s cinema program enabled him to hone his prodigious skills. In the late ’40s, invariably broke, he taught a course on Afro-American music and started friendships with poet Jack Spicer and musicians like Gillespie, Monk, and Mingus. Smith’s experiments with light shows earned him much-needed financial support from the Guggenheim Foundation. After he moved to New York City in 1951, his mythic reputation grew. Szwed ably describes the substantial impact that Smith’s momentous Anthology of American Folk Music had on folk singers, and he offers telling looks at many of the people Smith came to know, like Allen Ginsberg, whom itinerant Smith stayed with. The author is clearly impressed with Smith’s accomplishments, especially his experimental animated film work, which filmmaker Jonas Mekas called “magic.” Smith was more sage than scholar, and his peaks-and-valleys life was one of a kind.
A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure.
"[Cosmic Scholar] is the first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . It’s a knowing and thoughtful book . . . [by] a perspicacious reporter. [Szwed] wrestles this material into a loose but sturdy form . . . He allows different sides of Smith’s personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right mixture of reverence and comic incredulity to his task." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"[A] highly enjoyable biography . . . Cosmic Scholar is an impressively full portrait of an erratic subject." —Timothy Farrington, Wall Street Journal
"Any book by John Szwed or about Harry Smith is a must-read, so Szwed’s biography Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith is irresistible." —Ian Penman, The Guardian
"Szwed has ably shaped [Smith's] chaos . . . a mammoth recording of Smith's movements. Szwed is sharp enough to not play judge and takes no sides in the Compassionate Harry versus Nasty Harry debate. He knows that Smith's social interactions, the spitting and kicking, are crucial to his legacy, in part because Smith destroyed so much of what he produced." —Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum
"This biography argues persuasively that Smith’s contributions to art, anthropology, avant-garde film, and, most of all, popular music were profound. Szwed, also the author of an excellent biography of Billie Holiday, shows how the legacy that Smith left behind—including the six-LP “Anthology of American Folk Music,” from 1952—influenced the sensibilities of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and countless others." —The New Yorker (Briefly Noted)
"The treatments that Szwed gives Smith’s life, and that the Whitney provides for his art, are masterful feats of reconstruction, and long overdue." —Michael Casper, The Baffler
"Illuminating, definitive . . . Szwed is a scholar, but he is also a storyteller, and he makes you feel like you are taking in Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot and running into Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, and Robert Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea." —David Yaffe, Air Mail
"Szwed confronted both a mammoth and chaotic trove of materials and an even larger void of tragically lost artworks and collections as he assiduously and passionately constructed this engrossing, revelatory, often beyond-belief portrait of a reckless, maddening, cosmic, and transformational genius.” —Booklist (starred review)
"Szwed is the ideal chronicler for a person worth knowing but so hard to pin down . . . As lively a writer as he is scrupulous, [he] has produced an excellent and engaging biography, the story of an elusive but important and utterly fascinating figure." —Library Journal (starred review)
"In this vividly detailed biography, music scholar Szwed brilliantly captures the life and legacy of the enigmatic filmmaker, folklorist, painter, producer, anthropologist, archivist, Kabbalist, and alchemist Harry Smith . . . Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject’s emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders [Smith's] extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life . . . A masterful ode to a 'strange and singular character' in American arts." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Szwed, piece by obscure piece, masterfully puts [Harry Smith’s] puzzle of a life together . . . A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure.” —Kirkus Reviews
"Harry Smith was a mythic figure in plain sight, a twentieth-century counterpart to Athanasius Kircher or John Dee, and he always seemed more legend than fact, even in his lifetime—even in the same room. John Szwed's dedicated and hard-nosed biography gathers all the evidence, weighs it judiciously, and delivers a nuanced portrait of the mass of contradictions that was Harry." —Lucy Sante, author of Nineteen Reservoirs
“Harry Smith was one of those underground geniuses who truly was a genius, a maddening, willful, unkempt scrounger of immense intellect whose greatest achievement inflected modern culture and who achieved much more besides. Smith’s mercurial life should have defied any biographer, yet John Szwed, amazingly, has pulled it off, with discrimination as well as sympathy.” —Sean Wilentz, author of Bob Dylan in America
"With quirky brilliance fitting the subject, John Szwed shows how Harry Smith was much more than a bohemian caricature. He was an early master of creative curation and a pre-digital influencer: a profound influence on people who influenced people we recognize as profoundly influential." —David Hajdu, author of Love For Sale: Pop Music in America
"Best-known for his labor-intensive experimental films and indispensable Anthology of American Folk Music, Harry Smith was an impoverished polymath, multiculti practically from birth - because he cherished repressed realities - and too spiky to fit even a slot in the counter-culture. Yet Harry Smith influenced the influencers. Now thanks to John Szwed and his crackerjack research, this visionary is no longer a complete enigma." —Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
"Harry Smith did more than compile the world's most influential mixtape; he was a polymath creator, scholar, anthropologist, film maker and premier-league New York City art scene hustler. John Szwed's an anthropologist, too, but also a mystery writer, drawn to figures like Smith and Sun Ra in part for their spectacular unknowability. This biography again transforms facts into magic-laced storytelling — which is what Smith was all about." —Will Hermes, author of Lou Reed: The King of New York
"A tormented transcontinental seer who lived like a freeloading visitor from another dimension, Harry Smith existed in obscure subcultures but knew every important artist, writer, musician, and filmmaker from the 1930s to the 1980s. John Szwed’s book captures the druggie angel/devil hoarder musicologist/filmmaker at work building a new reality, one we’d inhabit today if we could get to it." —A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018
