THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF
ROBERT DUNCAN
Advisors
Bill Berkson
Robin Blaser (1925–2009)
Michael Davidson
Joseph Donahue
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Susan Howe
Nathaniel Mackey
Marilyn Schwartz
Mary Margaret Sloan
Christopher Wagstaff
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book from the Jess Collins Trust and the ongoing efforts of its trustees.
The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
The H.D. Book
The H.D. Book
Robert Duncan
The H.D. Book
Edited and with an
Introduction by
Michael Boughn and
Victor Coleman
University of California Press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2011 by the Jess Collins Trust. Used by permission.
Frontispiece: Jess (1923–2004), “his mind / ours a sublime community,” from Emblems for Robert Duncan, 1989, paste-ups, 6¼′ × 5. Seven ovals (with seven alternates) were created by Jess especially for this edition. Courtesy of the Jess Collins Trust.
For acknowledgment of previous publication, see credits, page 659.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duncan, Robert, 1919–1988.
The H.D. book / Robert Duncan ; edited and with an introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman.
p. cm. — (The collected writings of Robert Duncan ; 1)
A collection of 17 essays, composed from 1959 to 1964.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–520–26075–7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Poetry, Modern—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Boughn, Michael. II. Coleman, Victor, 1944– III. Title.
PS3507.U629H3 2011
814'.54—dc22
2010005640
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Book 1: Beginnings
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Eros
Chapter 4 Palimpsest
Chapter 5 Occult Matters
Chapter 6 Rites of Participation
Book 2: Nights and Days
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Appendix 1: Preliminary Notes toward Book 3 of The H.D. Book
Appendix 2: Composition and Publication History of The H.D. Book
Appendix 3: A List of Works Cited by Robert Duncan in The H.D. Book
Credits
Index
Illustrations
Emblem by Jess
Robert Duncan, circa 1960, at the time of his meeting with H.D.
H.D. in 1960, at the time of her meeting with Robert Duncan
Duncan’s typed title page for the aborted Black Sparrow edition
Duncan’s typed copyright page for the aborted Black Sparrow edition
A page (173) from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript C) showing Duncan’s early wording
A page (174) from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript C) showing Duncan’s holograph revisions
A page from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript D) showing Duncan’s revisions
Duncan’s early notebook entries when he was beginning to identify H.D.’s personal and publication history
A page spread from Duncan’s notebook containing his preliminary notes for Book 3
Acknowledgments
All the manuscripts for The H.D. Book are housed at the Poetry / Rare Book Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo. We would like to thank the staff at the Collection, and especially the curator, Michael Basinski, and the assistant curator, James Maynard, for making us welcome and for their help in locating Robert Duncan’s materials and making them available to us. James Maynard, in particular, not only quickly provided all the materials we asked for, but used his extensive knowledge of the collection to go out of his way to suggest material we would have taken weeks or months to otherwise locate. Without his generous assistance this project would have taken much longer than it did. Christopher Wagstaff, Mary Margaret Sloan, and the Jess Collins Trust have also been extremely generous and timely in their support of this work.
In addition, Mr. Maynard generously read an early draft of our introduction. His support and criticism were essential in helping us shape it into its final form. Peter Quartermain also took valuable time out from his own editorial tasks to offer us support and criticism. For that we are deeply grateful.
We would also like to thank our respective spouses, Elizabeth Brown and Kate Van Dusen, for their patience and support during our various trips to Buffalo and the cottage.
Without Laura Cerruti’s trust, we would never have had the opportunity and the privilege to live so closely with Robert Duncan’s mind and language for so long. And without Rachel Berchten’s patience and dedication, we would never have gotten this far.
Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman
Introduction
Today I will allow myself whatever projects of what might come of this mining (You’ve to dig and come to see what I mean/where I, in that poem, almost wanted to point to that word “come”; because there is something about real thought that is as autonomous as ejaculation; and has the further mystery of the orgasmic if it have spirit). —Robert Duncan to Norman Holmes Pearson, July 2, 1960
The H.D. Book is one of the great “lost” texts in the history of American poetry. In 1959, when he began writing the book, Robert Duncan was already an accomplished and well-known poet, connected with the Berkeley renaissance and the San Francisco renaissance, as well as Black Mountain College and the Beat poets. He had published a number of important works—including Heavenly City, Earthly City; Medieval Scenes; Fragments of a Disordered Devotion; Caesar’s Gate; The Venice Poem; and Letters—and was about to appear in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry. His mature work, however, had yet to come. The H.D. Book would be the alembic in which that work was gestated.
Composed from 1959 to 1964, various chapters of The H.D. Book appeared in little magazines between 1966 and 1985 (see appendix 2). It was never published as a completed book, however. Perhaps lost overstates the case, since it was never forgotten, but for some forty years, the only access to the text was photocopied assemblages of the various magazine publications, treasured—and sometimes passed from hand to hand
—by Duncan’s loyal readers. In 2001, we posted a transcription of the magazine publications on the internet; while this made the existing text available to those who did not have the photocopies, it did not include the many revisions Duncan had made over the years to his ever-changing text. A complete, edited version of the book remained elusive, the stuff of endless complaint and speculation.
Duncan began writing The H.D. Book when H.D.’s friend and literary executor, Norman Holmes Pearson, asked him for a short homage to present to H.D. on her birthday in 1960. Duncan had long admired H.D.’s work. As he tells the story in the opening chapter of The H.D. Book, her poem “Heat,” read to him by a high school English teacher, was his first experience with the magic of poetry, an experience that led him into his life-long devotion to the art. What began as a simple homage quickly turned into an epic meditation and exploration of what Duncan felt were the hidden springs that fed the roots of modernism and the work of the poets and writers he took on as masters: H.D., Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, among others.
Duncan’s early work on The H.D. Book coincided with his correspondence with H.D., which lasted for about two years (not including an early letter from 1950), from July 1959 until her death in September 1961.1 Much of the thinking that began to take shape in The H.D. Book was echoed in these letters. Their talk of myth and Hermetic philosophy mixed with and informed their talk of other poets. Both shared a history of connection to outsider or repressed spiritual knowledge and practices. H.D. had been raised in the Moravian Church of Count Zinzendorf and had traveled in circles during the 1920s that engaged with magic and various occult practices. Duncan had grown up in a family with connections to Theosophy and spiritualism. This, too, bound them together.
Both had also turned away from such practices. H.D. wrote in a letter (October 27, 1960) to Duncan how Yeats and his wife, Georgie, had invited her to Oxford—presumably to participate in some Rosicrucian ritual—but “something held me back.” Duncan interpreted this as “the disinterest of a growing thing for possibilities outside its law, its real” (October 31, 1960) and proposed that Yeats (unlike H.D.) seemed not to have known “the numinous woodland and shoreland, the events of god outside the ritual.” Duncan, an inveterate anarchist, was always loyal to the sense of an inner law, often, if not always, in the face of an outer law, a demand by society to conform to its practices, even when they were the rituals of obscure cults. What Duncan (and H.D.) derived from that youthful experience was not a set of beliefs or practices dictated by churches or cults, but a deep sense of the possibility of other modes of thinking the world.2 These modes of thinking, grounded in the freedom of the imagination, were fed by hidden or lost or excluded material, material deemed silly or superstitious or heretical by a society whose forms of life dictated a totalitarian “normality.” For both poets, the matrix for poetry was in the spaces between those given forms. They shared a commitment not to the this or the not this, not to the self or the other, but to the fissure from which such forms arise into the conditioned contingencies of the given.
Robert Duncan and H.D., circa 1960, at the time of their meeting.
Photo of Robert Duncan by Helen Adam, courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust. Photo of H.D. by Islay Lyon. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Such recognitions held important political implications for Duncan, whose anarchism arose from an Emersonian commitment to a further self,3 a self whose moral perfectionism led Duncan toward the recovery of what had been lost or forgotten, as part of his commitment to the fullness of the world—what he called “What Is.”4 His sense of the world’s wildness was linked to his resistance to the suffocating culture of bourgeois conformity he knew well from his youth in Bakersfield. His pacifism—which went hand in hand with his anarchism—grew out of that, as did his attention to what was not known, or not allowed to be known; among other things, say, the obscured sign of his homosexuality in the official constellations of the culture. The hidden from sight. The occult.
If there is a master word that haunts the thinking in The H.D. Book, it is, in just this sense, occult.5 In, call it Bakersfield, modernity had realized itself in a social world of drastically constricted possibility.6 Its collective imagination of its own “virtue” gave it permission to impose a strict sense of the “normal” (not to be confused with the “ordinary”) on the community.7 Part of that normality is a given world without depth, what some have called a disenchanted world, referring to the Enlightenment’s legacy of equating the “real” with the material and the commensurable, a world restricted to measurable quantities.8 It is also a world whose restricted vision gives rise to a counter-impulse of illicit traditions of cults with elaborate theologies and ritual practices.
“Occult” is a loaded word in such a culture. The illicit theologies and ritual practices are identified as “the Occult” and deemed ridiculous superstitions. But beyond the organized ritual cults lay all that is outside the “normal”; the worlds of hidden fact, hidden history, hidden mind, hidden body, as if all of us live on the edge of an occult reality that is really quite ordinary. Duncan’s reading of Freud located Freud’s unconscious as just such an occult reality. The traditional knowledges of Eros rooted in ancient human experience and banned and repressed by Judeo-Christian doctrine were also, for Duncan, part of that occult reality. One of the crucial issues for Duncan in this regard, an issue central to The H.D. Book, was the dismissal of the authority of both actual women and that range of human experience identified as the feminine, occulted beneath layers of patriarchal authority, and reflected in the repression of the knowledge of the leading role of women writers in the invention of modernism. At a time when anthologies and university reading lists contained almost entirely male authors, Duncan argued for the centrality of women in those ranks. He was a pioneer in singling out and tracking down the work of Edith Sitwell, Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, and Laura Riding and arguing for their importance as the hidden inventors of modernism.
H.D. was the main focus of this revelation. At the time Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1960, H.D. had been dismissed from the ranks of serious poets by the official arbiters of literary taste and had largely disappeared from public recognition. Until the 1950s her reputation had rested, however incorrectly and fragilely, on her ongoing identification as the quintessential “Imagist,” a hangover from her work of some thirty-five years previously. Then Randall Jarrell and Dudley Fitts dismissed H.D.’s Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) after their publication, characterizing her visionary poetry, as Duncan notes several times in The H.D. Book, as “silly.” Following that, Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur dropped H.D. completely from the 1955 edition of Louis Untermeyer’s influential anthology Modern American and Modern British Poetry, thus banishing even her Imagist poems from the halls of academically acceptable poetry. She became lost, hidden to the official world of poetry, her work out of print, her memory kept alive by a few dedicated readers.
The H.D. Book in one sense was an effort to undo that injustice, that occultation. A number of times Duncan humorously imagined himself as a knight coming to rescue H.D.’s honor with her scarf tied on his arm. But in the process of unpacking the hidden assumptions and judgments that led to Jarrell’s condemnation of H.D. as “silly,” Duncan found himself increasingly caught up in the revelation of further lost or hidden dimensions in the history of modernism. Duncan’s recovery of an occulted H.D. began specifically with a poem, “Heat,” which, like the scent of the madeleine in Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu, opened into a cosmos, as if it were a seed, and that cosmos, that world, was hidden in it. In his revisions to Chapter 1 of Book 1, Duncan eventually added an epigraph by A. E. Waite from his book on the Rosicrucians:
As regards the Lost Word, it is explained that the sun
at autumn has lost its power and Nature is rendered mute, but the star of day at the spring tide resumes its vital force, and this is the recovery of the Word, when Nature with all her voices, speaks and sings, even as the Sons of God shouted for joy in the perfect morning of the cosmos.
This invocation of the “lost word” marked Duncan’s entrance into a world of hidden things—lost words—coming to light, the light of a recovered Word, a perfect morning:9 the hidden memory of Miss Keough’s classroom, the hidden (esoteric) writing presented by the teacher to the few students worthy of it, the hidden intensities of feeling brought to mind by the poem, the hidden worlds of thought behind the stultifying bourgeois superficialities of Bakersfield, and the hidden meaning of “image” behind it all. “The poem had a message, hidden to me then,” Duncan wrote, “that I felt but could not translate, an unconscious alliance that made for something more than a sensual response. . . . More than sensation then, more than impression, gave force to the image. It was not only a vivid representation of sensory data but an evocation of depth” (1.1). The depth of the world was a hidden thing that Duncan’s meditation on “image” and “imagism” brought forth. “There is a crucial difference between the doctrine of the Image where Poetry itself is taken to be a primary ground of experience and meaning in life, and the image which is taken as a fashion in the literary world” (1.1). This thinking then led him to a tradition that goes back to Renaissance and medieval Hermeticism, the Troubadours and the trobar clus, Hellenistic neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, and Arabic angelology, in which Images (and the Imagination which is their ground) mediate between another world and this, open this world to hidden powers.
Occult histories, occult teachings, occult memories, occult mind, occult inheritances, occult language, and above all, occult meanings—Robert Duncan unfolded them all in The H.D. Book in a kind of proliferating, symphonic performance of, as he puts it in his letter of July 2, 1960, to Norman Holmes Pearson, thinking as orgasm, thinking as an explosive release linked to Eros, rather than the traditional notion of a disciplined exposition, Logos, with footnotes and citations. The importance of hiddenness itself unfolded along with them, orchestrated into a weave of shadow and light—in corners and at the far edges of the mind where a certain kind of light or enlightenment cannot, or at least will not, reach, playing itself out in shadows dancing. What is hidden is constantly brought into the light of the language of the poet, a frail light, finite, playing over the face of what is hidden, bringing it to attention. That is, after all, the poet’s craft—to bring what is hidden to our attention while honoring its hiddenness.
The H.D. Book Page 1