The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. University of California Press. 678 pp. $49.95. January 2011.
Robert Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1959 and finished it except for embellishments in 1961; yet only now, half a century later, has it reached book form. A prose masterwork that begins with the story of Duncan’s initiation as a poet, over the course of its 646 pages it morphs into a visionary meditation in which H.D., the American poet born Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), remains the thematic touchstone. In The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004), Duncan writes to Levertov as he undertakes the book that he needs to guard against letting his distress over dismissive reviews of H.D.’s work by Randall Jarrell and others deflect him from his deeper purpose. Exploring the generative resources and implications of H.D.’s work, he was surely aware too that he was also setting the course and realizing perhaps the fullest expression of his major phase as a poet. The irony is that half a century later one must guard against allowing the analogous treatment of this book to deflect attention from what is here at last.
Robert Duncan (1919-1988), whose mother had died giving birth to him, was raised by caring, attentive foster parents in a Theosophist household in Bakersfield. A city at the southern end of California’s agricultural Central Valley that might seem an unlikely setting for a young poet’s coming of age, in fact the city has nurtured such diverse talents as Merle Haggard, William Everson, and Frank Bidart. As a high school student Duncan encountered a teacher there, Edna Keough, who brought to class one of H.D.’s early Imagist poems, a teacher who lovingly recognized in Duncan a special student, and shared books with him outside the classroom, becoming with H.D. the initiating figure of his vocation as a poet.
In 1944, after his poem “Toward an African Elegy” had been accepted by John Crowe Ransom for publication in the Kenyon Review, Duncan’s pioneering essay “The Homosexual in Society”—in which he came out at the age of 25—appeared in Dwight MacDonald’s magazine politics, and Ransom withdrew the acceptance. By the mid-fifties, after a peripatetic decade in Europe and on both coasts of America, Duncan had settled with his partner, the painter and collagist Jess Collins, in the Bay Area, now a central figure of the post-war American poetry heralded in Donald M. Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960, which also included the work of Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov and Frank O’Hara, among others.
Along with Olson an elder in this wildly talented, somewhat raucous cohort, Duncan sustained a more measured, ruminative “stance” than others more quickly celebrated and emerged as a venerable elder statesman, an aesthetic and moral resource for several generations of poets. While the three poetry collections of his major phase, The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), were published in timely succession by mainstream New York houses, The H.D. Book was rejected by Scribners, which had published the latter two poetry books; and an arrangement with John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press in 1972, which would have brought Book One (the first 200 pages here) into print, was cancelled over a disagreement with Martin.
As the sixties advanced, so did the darker shadows portended in much of the text, and late in the decade, with the war in Vietnam a point of deepening dissension in the otherwise mutually sustaining correspondence with Levertov, Duncan made the decision not to publish a full-length book of poems for fifteen years.
What was this about? “Responsibility,” he wrote, “was to maintain the ability to respond,” and in a seeming paradox he’d taken issue specifically with Levertov’s public persona as an anti-war activist. Having seen a clip on the news of her making a speech, he wrote her that her “soul is sacrificed to the demotic persona.” In effect her position in the national debate eclipsed what he perceived to be her deeper responsibility as a poet. In its way, this echoes his misgivings at the beginning of the decade about taking on Randall Jarrell at the expense of the rewards of staying on message in tracking H.D.’s journey. (When he does get around to Jarrell on page 518, he seems even-handed and even empathic.) “The poet’s role is not to oppose evil,” he wrote Levertov, “but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoyevsky opposed Raskolnikov—the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov. And we begin to see betrayal and murder and theft in a new light.”
Was there an element of jealousy in Duncan’s imperative to a contemporary whose fame now exceeded his? Perhaps, just as there might have been hauteur in turning his back on the powers that be in deciding not to publish. He wasn’t exactly being pursued. But at the same time there is also the clear sense that he was heeding his own admonitions in not seeking a spotlight on this issue (while opposing the war) because it meant forsaking “all the vital weaknesses of the living identity,” which, he wrote to Levertov, she was sweeping away in her “demotic persona.”
More specifically, the loss Duncan perceives here seems to be the “place for the syllable to occur” which he alludes to early on; the place, that is, where the vowels and consonants occur that, ideally, make a music, and for which the poet is the ground station and receptor: syllable by syllable, phrase by phrase, without any predetermined agenda, that “damnation of systematic rime or systematic thought” that would “be careless of the variety of what was actually going on.” In the turmoil of the moment, as he saw H.D. do in her own tumultuous history, he was at pains to keep his literary garden, “the opening of the field,” intact, albeit just then out of public sight. Speaking publicly against the war, as he saw it, couldn’t be his first responsibility in life or in poetry since it would stifle the deeper possibilities of his vocation.
The H.D. Book, in the end, is an extraordinary meditation on vocation and its power to subsume and reflect intricately the universe at large. Has the affirming power of tragedy, both in Oedipus and in Christ’s passion, ever been so lucidly explicated? Has Ezra Pound’s odyssey?
In the Greek myth, if Theseus looks directly at the Gorgon Medusa, he will turn to salt. The way he defeats her, in the end, is to keep track of her in the mirror of his shield. Vocation, Duncan seems to say, is both mirror and shield. And if its rules are honored, even in the face of tragedy, it provides a way of moving meaningfully through the world, “a rite de passage, a way of survival for the poet in the personal life.”
After the first 200 pages in which Duncan writes of his adolescence and young adulthood and the discovery of his vocation, I kept a pencil nearby to mark benchmark passage after passage:
The mythos, the telling of it, how it is made up is part of our text; the dromenon, how it is enacted in the poet’s life is part, what she went thru in the time of the poem. What they tell and what they do, the text and the action, form in turn a rite de passage, a way of survival for the poet in the personal life. [p. 242]
We made in a poem a place for the syllable to occur as it did not occur in the careless rush of speech. The damnation of systematic rime was like the damnation of systematic thought for it was careless of the variety of what was actually going on, the lead one sensed in incident, in factors so immediate they seemed chance or accident to all but the formal eye. [p. 272]
There is a threatened chastity of mind in Pound that would put away, not face, the thought of hellish things, here in considering the Divine World, as later in considering fascism, where also he cannot allow that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure with the obscene—what goes on backstage. Spirit in The Cantos will move as a crystal, clean and clear of the muddle, even the filth, of the world and its tasks thru which Psyche works in suffering toward Eros. [pp. 306-307]
The avoidance of Christ in The Cantos. A poem that is after all primarily an epic of the gods and of the divine reality, is complex; but even with those gods who do appear in The Cantos, Pound avoids all knowledge of their aspects of embodying our carnal experience of suffering and mortality as a value in life. [p. 307]
After the excitement in the authenticity of masterpieces, having resistant individuality and a demanding skill, I have come to see such works not as the achievement of the inventors or masters or diluters or starters of crazes, as Pound would have us classify writers in his ABC of Reading, not as objects of a culture, embodying original sensibilities, but as events in another dimension, a field of meanings in which consciousness was in process; where I saw psyche and spirit, as I had come thru Darwin to see the animal organism, arising in an evolution of possible forms, surviving, perishing, derived always from an inheritance in which the formal had to live the last of a species, the first of a species, and yet having only its own terms, its own life, in which to make it. [p. 309]
Like the exile of Odysseus, Pound’s exile can be read as the initiation of the heroic soul (the hero of a Poetry) descending deep into hubris, offending and disobeying orders of the imagination, and returning at last after trials “home.” [p. 323]
Freud, and later the theurgist Robert Ambelain, come to lead H.D., as Mussolini and Major Douglas lead Pound. [p. 323]
Later in Helen in Egypt, H.D. will refer to the tradition…of the poet’s restoring to Poetry the truth about Helen, but in The War Trilogy she strikes out, alone of the Imagists, to restore the truth of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to Poetry. Not a conversion to Christianity, but a conversion of Christianity to Poetry. [p. 324]
There is an evolution of life-forms, experiences, yet they exist one in another:
There is a spell, for instance in every sea-shell
p. 324
The “free verse” of high poetry was not abstractly free, but free, specifically, from the concept of a poem’s form as a paradigm, an imposed plan to which the poet conformed. The form was germinal, the germ being the cadence that began in language (“a new cadence means a new idea,” H.D. and [Richard] Aldington had argued in their 1916 Preface), arousing a life of its own, a poem. [p. 326]
It is not in their exemplary character-structure but in their passion, in their ripeness, the fullness in process of what they are, that I am moved by H.D., Pound, and Williams. They move in their work thru phases of growth towards a poetry that spreads in scope as an aged tree spreads its roots and branches, as a man’s experience spreads; their art in language conveying scars and informations of age without armor as a man may gather in his face and his form acknowledged accumulations of what he is in his life, in his cooperation with the world around him. [p. 329]
The germinal form of Man in which we individuate and out of which we are each the immediate occasion of our species is such a figure, “of the whole race.” Here [H.D.] draws upon the biologic identity, as in The Flowering of the Rod, ix, she affirms:
No poetic fantasy but a biologic reality, a fact: I am an entity
like bird, insect, plantor sea-plant cell…
…It is not only the figure of Man then out of which and to which the individual thread has its weaving of intention, but, beyond Man, in the larger field of Life itself, so that the poet strives for organic form as Life form. This is not a humanist art. The “whole race” is ultimately not the species Man but the race of the living. [pp. 331-332]
The full roster of Mr. Eliot’s accusations against Pound, carefully loaded to excite the prejudices of right-thinking critics, was to be applied against [H.D.] by her critics. Mysticism without the sanction of any church, daemonic and ghostly personae, biological and sexual coordinations, and in H.D.’s case, Freudian in place of Confucian rationalism. [p. 361]
Where a democracy is composed of a people in which the individual conscience and nature is not liberated, so that a common standard or consensus of the majority rules and not the union of each in free volition, the state is already totalitarian. [p. 362]
H.D. in her work with Freud followed, she tells us: “my own intense, dynamic interest in the unfolding of the unconscious or the subconscious pattern.” The unfolding pattern of the psyche is not primary for her, but the unfolding pattern of a poem the psyche enacts. The poet, like the scientist, works to feel or know the inner order of things, but for the poet the order is poetic, measures that renew his own feelings of measure in his art. The form in process of the poem, the form in process of the psyche, correspond in turn to the form in process of What Is. “The world ever was, and is, and shall be,” Heraklitus says: “a Fire, kindled in measure, quenched in measure.” [p. 379]
[F]or Freud led the consciousness into territories the mind had forbidden itself. One of the determinants of an art, of our existence as artists, is where the permission is given. It was not only sexual and erotic knowledge that had been prohibited. For sentiment, association, like repetition and ornament, were distasteful—fearful then, in Freudian terms—to the mind of the twenties. “The impact of a language,” H. D. writes “as well as the impact of an impression may become ‘correct,’ become ‘stylized,’ lose its living qualities.” It was, in this sense, away from style itself toward the act of writing itself that Freud helped H.D. [pp. 384-385]
“What you gave me, was not praise,” Freud wrote to H.D.: “was affection and I need not be ashamed of my satisfaction…Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful and so is love.” To admit affection, sentiment and association, and to need not be ashamed would strike at the repression of sincerity in the modern as his admission of the very fact of sexuality hit at the repressions of the nineteenth century. [p. 388]
Words can become correct, stylized, she tells us. She had been the perfect stylist—the Imagist…The thrust of the soul’s life, of energetic imperfections, was keen against the resistance of her perfectionist style. The writing of H.D. gives way first in the prose of the late 1920s…a prose that strives to carry in the stream of consciousness mode the burden of tangling experience. [p. 391]
For the next epoch, announced by the works of Darwin early in the century, and then by Frazer, Freud, and [William] James, it is the comparison of all things or the Mixing of the Waters—but this is the thicket. Bushman, shaman of the Lapland wastes, the child at his watercolors, and Michelangelo are brought into one complex concept of Art. In the new Jungian religious psychology, Attis mixes with Christ; Christ mixes with the dream figures of school-teachers in Iowa; the Serpent in the apple tree mixes with Attis and the beneficent Damballah of the Gold Coast. [p. 392]
The very elements that Williams, Pound, H.D., and Wallace Stevens find most questionable in each other’s work become in turn generative terms of my generation in poetry. Our admission in consciousness of what must be included in our humanity, in our poetic art, in our history is not only vastly extended and complicated but intensified. The experience of men today is one of overwhelming increase, expansion, and density, of over-population in consciousness as well as in social space, of pollution in culture as well as in industrial production—it is the dramatic force of the creative identity, charged and over-charged in the abundance of resources, exploitative, glutted, driven on to lay waste or to conserve but to work with the terms of a world mind which has succeeded the nation mind or the city mind or the tribal mind, driven by the command that no…impression be suffered to die or to be lost. [p. 393-394]
“Posing,” the unkind were likely to judge it, but for her kind H.D.’s tone presented a key in which to live. This ideal is what in my generation Charles Olson has called a stance. [p. 421]
H. D. will all her life be concerned in her work with conveying to our sympathy the fact that agony seems to be in the very nature of deep experience, that in every instant there is a painful—painful in its intensity—revelation. [p. 422]
Shakespeare’s actors reminding us that it is but a stage seems finally to be saying that our actual life is only a stage from which we may be recalled at death. [p. 423]
High mind must labor—Williams in Paterson calls up the figure of Madame Curie working the pitchblende—in obscure matter. But just where the mind disavows its sexual motivation or where the genital organ disavows its mental imagination, a contention begins in man’s nature. What a dark filthy fabric of lies and richness the political figures of our day seem to weave towards their precipitation of “tragedy, disharmony, disruption, disintegration”—as if driven by necessity—the old Judeo-Christian dream of a War to end the trials of Creation in a holocaust of fire. What does it mean? In 1935 and 1936, as Jung began to first publish his studies of Alchemy, that matter of the Second World War was gathering in men’s minds everywhere. These falsifications of memory were tendentious. Possessed by the thought of the enemy, in fear and anger, men turned their high minds to the invention of the nuclear explosion in matter, to the cultivation of last diseases, to research in gasses that would cripple the minds of whole populations. [p. 455]
Then, after the trauma of the Second World War experience, when in the debacle of the Fascist last days [Pound] was forced almost to admit the disorder, the Hell, of Mussolini’s reign which he had held as a model of order, the later Cantos pour forth the contradictions of the mind no longer removed from its underworld. “Tho my errors and wrecks lie about me,” he will sing in Canto CXVI: “I cannot make it cohere.” “But the beauty is not the madness,” he confirms. [pp. 508-509]
In The Pisan Cantos, as the voice of Pound ransacking his broken consciousness begins, like Lear, his testimony of what the heart knows, outrage as well as tenderness comes. God Himself, Boehme argued in the sixteenth century, was the fire of Hell as well as the light of Heaven, wrath as well as love. Ugly flarings up of the Turba—the unrest of all creation—must be there if a man bear witness to what he is and feels, even though he is aware his thought and feeling are dis-eased. For the business of the artist is to bring things to light…Marx, who would compel the mind to take up the cause of the oppressed, and Freud, who would compel the mind to take up the cause of the repressed, appear as enemies of the high mind. [p. 509]
In a conventional art, the sense of Beauty is a sense of what other men will find beautiful, pleasurable, enhancing, and exemplary in their social terms. Poetry would present models of feeling, and reviewers of this order commend or chastise the poet’s being to their taste or exciting their distaste. But there is a higher or larger order of poetry where Beauty is a sense of universal relations, of being brought into intensities of even painful feeling. Here, the virus is life, the hatred is emotion, the breaks in consciousness—that in conventional thought seem inroads of natural chaos or damaged passages that need surgery or correction—are surfs or sun-spots of the deep element. [p. 511]
[Randall] Jarrell’s great forte was that he successfully impersonated and then genuinely represented the needs and attitudes of the new educated literary class that was making its way in the English Departments of American colleges and universities, an increasingly important and established group of professor-poets concerned with what poetry should be admitted as part of its official culture. His appeal in rejecting even the “felt” and “sincere” where it was “queer” and “more than a little silly” was an appeal to some right proper and respectable range of thought and feeling that any member of a university faculty must keep in order to maintain his position. It is not at all clear in Jarrell’s reviews what H. D.’s work is, but it is most clear, if we accept unquestionably all that comes from his authority, that whatever it is is “silly,” “level debris,” “anachronism”—not to be countenanced by reasonable men. [p. 518]
The light of Dante or of Plato, the spiritual light whereby men saw in dreams or in thought, but also the matter of the ancient world, the mothering Life or Great Mother, the dark mysteries of the underworld, offended the Protestant ethos. Seely which had meant “spiritually blessed,” “pious, holy, good” was shortened to silly as the interests of the mercantile and capitalist class took over the direction of society and profitable works won out against grace as a measure of value. [p. 523]
The man who would present himself without the dimension of dream and fantasy, much less the experience of illusion and error, who would render the true from the false by voiding the fictional and the doubtful, diminishes the human experience. [p. 527]
We have left from the waxing twenties, fat after the holocaust of moneymaking in the war, records of what life was like for those who had lost the goods of the intellect for the commodities of a cultured sensibility: the deracinated drift of Scott Fitzgerald or the inhabitants of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Capitalist society, as Marx had rightly pointed out, exploited materials and men’s labor towards a profit that was empty of meaning. The whole speculative possibility of the market grew up around panics of inflation and depression, sales-manias, war-manias, and time-wasting. [p. 553]
[I]n searching out what we suffer or enjoy not as happening to us or belonging to us but as belonging to a design or creation, taking our strength there, we discover a new person who does not suffer but who creates in our suffering, coming into an increase of meaning. [p. 557]
The volition of the artist is to fulfill the form or will that he feels or discovers in the thing he is making. [p. 559]
Oedipus, with the blood streaming down from his eyes, having come into the fullness of the knowledge of his play, is like Christ with the blood streaming down from his hands—eyes that looked with love upon his mother; hands that touched with love his fellow men.
The difference between the neurotic nursing his guilt or sin and the hero is the dramatic gesture, the formal imperative. [p. 567]
What Burckhardt calls the Art’s “high and independent selfhood” is not only the poet’s form, but the underlying relation and meaning in the story of things. It is the selfhood of Poetry that makes of the writer’s self no more and no other than a persona of the cast. [p. 567]
The fact of the risk of inspiration is recognized in the common sense of “touched.” Where men have vision and courage for the experience of life itself, even where it exceeds the uses of understanding, beyond the preservation of the species, silly could mean blissful, and it was deserving of compassion, for it meant to go in peril of the soul. [p. 578]
The design now is of such an order all loci seem to contribute to their own loss of identity in the larger figure: the poet takes over as a higher person from the immediate social personality of the man who sits down to write. [p. 634]
A final note: University of California Press has recently published a meticulously researched and beautifully written biography of Duncan by Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, which I commend to any interested reader.
From February, 2013