Thinking of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book, which I’ve been mulling over now literally for years, it seems, one of the questions that digs at me is why that book at that moment in Duncan’s life? In 1960, when Duncan began the work, he is 41 years old & has just completed the first of the three great books of his prime years, The Opening of the Field, although – as Lisa Jarnot spells out in her forthcoming biography of Duncan – he had not yet found a publisher, or at least not yet settled on one, turning down Macmillan before agreeing to go with Grove. Grove in 1960 was known as a rather threadbare publisher right at the edge where the avant-garde and pornography crossed over into one another. Macmillan was the New York trade presses personified, the publisher (if memory serves me right) of such establishment bad boys as W.S. Merwin.
The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, & Bending the Bow – I think of the three volumes as a single movement or creative arc in Duncan’s life as a poet – also represent a turning away from Duncan’s earlier writing, key poems of which were collected in Selected Poems, the tenth book in City Lights’ great Pocket Poets series – and a book that Duncan apparently never allowed to be reprinted once the initial edition ran out.
Selected Poems came out in 1959, but gathers poems only up to 1950, including nothing from a manuscript that Duncan had planned to call A Book of Resemblances, poems from 1950 through ’53, Letters, another planned volume, containing works from 1953 through ’56 and, finally, a manuscript that, in the frontispiece to Selected Poems, Duncan still calls The Field (poems 1956-59). Instead, Duncan’s writing between 1950 and 1956 falls into a sort of limbo, coming out from smaller presses with limited print runs – Letters from Jargon in 1958, A Book of Resemblances from Henry Wenning, a New Haven publisher, only in 1966. I’ve never actually seen either of these editions, nor Writing Writing, published by Sumbooks in 1964, nor Fragments of a Disordered Devotion, published by Island/Gnomon also in 1966. Indeed, it is not until 1968 – the year in which Duncan completes his trio of great books with the publication of Bending the Bow – that a British publisher, Fulcrum, makes all of this writing generally available in an edition called Derivations.
My argument, or at least my sense, is that something occurred. In choosing – or perhaps simply becoming able to publish with – a trade press, even one as marginalized as Grove, Duncan is positioning himself as Poet – it is often capitalized with him, in his mind even more than on the page – so that fugitive nature of his earlier writing actually becomes an advantage. The Field thus in a very literal sense transforms into The Opening of the Field. Duncan takes up his correspondence with H.D. proper – he had sent her his suite Medieval Scenes, written in 1947, either as a typescript or in its 1950 Caesar’s Gate edition, plus what he calls his “New Year Poem” in 1950, although it is not clear that H.D. read these or responded at that time. He is starting to compose Roots and Branches, whose fourth work is “A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s 73rd Birthday.”
The H.D. Book thus begins at a critical – possibly even the most critical – juncture in Duncan’s progress as a poet. He has had a recognition that he is now embarked upon his mature writing, and that this writing gets under way first with The Opening of the Field and he is just turning 40. Jarnot is surely right when she suggests that a good part of the connection between Duncan & H.D. can be traced to his sense of her upbringing as a religious minority, a Moravian, not so distant from his own childhood as the adopted son of theosophists in the harsh San Joaquin Valley farm town of Bakersfield. In addition, there is a second coincidence Duncan finds as well. His birth mother died when he was born in 1919. H.D. herself very nearly died in London in the flu epidemic of that year, in part because she too was giving birth to her daughter, Francis Perdita. H.D. however was rescued by Bryher, a young lesbian admirer of her imagist poetry, who also just happened to be the heir to one of the great fortunes in the United Kingdom.
Also important, however, is that H.D. fits not just into Duncan’s pantheon of hero-poets, those he recognizes and announces as Master, again with the capital letter, but of the modernists she is one of three who, for Duncan, achieve their greatest writing not during their modernist years of the First World War or immediately thereafter, but literally during or after the Second World War – which is to say a time when Duncan himself is already a publishing poet. Duncan himself will note this in the H.D. Book:
In December of 1944, H.D. had finished her War Trilogy; she was 58. At Pisa, Pound was 60 when he finished the Pisan Cantos. William Carlos Williams at 62 in 1944 was working on Paterson I. For each there was to be ahead, in the last years of their lives, a major creative phase.
For Duncan, a critical feature of modernism is not simply its challenge of the habitual forms of centuries of the School of Quietude, but also – at least by 1959 & ’60 – for the possibility of a new model for the poet’s career, one that need not be a long narrative of decline a la Wordsworth, or of the short-wicked candles of Keats, Shelley or Rimbaud, burning out well before the age of 40. Duncan is explicitly searching for a figure of the Older Writer. Further, what is distinct about all three – at least in Duncan’s eyes – is that their later work is characterized by a deeply personal quality. The H.D. of The War Trilogy or of Helen of Egypt is something completely apart from Pound’s somewhat fictive creation, H.D. Imagiste. Pound, living in cages at Pisa not unlike their more recent kin in Guantanamo Bay, is figured here not as the writer of The Cantos, but of The Pisan Cantos, notable not just for their extraordinary beauty but because, to a degree unprecedented in that epic’s earlier sections, they include Pound – his life at last becomes the focus of the poem. Williams likewise Duncan reads as coming to a new level of maturity – for Robert, it is the turn he locates in The Desert Music where, for the first time really, Williams has begun to compose by the phrase & is fully freed at last from counting syllables in his lines. Paterson in this reading – which is Duncan’s, not mine – makes this possible again by making the poetry personal.
The H.D. Book, like the poems to H.D. & like his correspondence at last with his modernist hero, which fully gets underway only in July, 1959, just 27 months ahead of her death, all occur at a moment when Robert Duncan is newly conceptualizing the project of his writing, extending out from a book he has already written toward others that at some level he must already apprehend he will write. The 1960s will be Robert Duncan’s decade. Indeed, after Bending of the Bow, Duncan will take a 16 year hiatus from publishing his new work in book form, with just two volumes to account for the final two decades of his life, a sharp & final contrast with the three great books that occupy this 12-year-arc. It is worth asking just what makes a poet of 40 turn to the conjunction of three writers who, in his narrative of the modernist myth, take on major projects in their late 50s or 60s. But it seems to me inescapable that this animates his poetry, but
the H.D. Book as well. Robert Duncan is consciously seeking out how to be an older poet.
