Of all the major projects undertaken by the New American generation of poets – which for the sake of definition lets presume consists of the 44 poets included in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology that gave its name to such different tendencies of poetry as the New York School, the Black Mountain or projectivist poets, the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats – only one appears never to have been published in book form, Robert Duncan’s booklength critical volume, The H.D. Book. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but the major blame – if we are to use that word – lies with Duncan himself.

 

Begun in 1960, at a time when Robert Duncan was embarking – and understood that he was embarking – on his major literary project as a poet, commencing with The Opening of the Field and continuing on through two additional volumes before he took a 15-year hiatus from publishing volumes of poetry, The H.D. Book was projected to consist of three parts:

 

·        An nine-chapter first part, entitled Beginnings

·        An eleven-chapter second part, entitled Nights and Days

·        A third part, of unknown length and chapters, to consist entirely of a reading of H.D.’s Helen of Egypt

Duncan worked hard on the first two sections in 1960 and ’61, a time when he was in frequent correspondence with Hilda Doolittle, the one member of the so-called high modernist generation with whom Duncan seems to have had a serious dialog, begun after an abortive attempt to sustain an earlier one with Ezra Pound in the late 1940s.  Doolittle herself passed away in September of 1961 at the age of 75, having had both a long & unusual career as a poet and a surprisingly difficult life for someone who, for the last forty years of her life, never had to worry about either work or money. 

 

Duncan continued to think about, and occasionally to work on, this project so far as I can tell for the remainder of his life. Dates given in the sections published in journals suggest that there was a flurry of writing in 1963 and 1964. The second section of Chapter Five of the second part gives three different years of composition – 1961, 1963 and 1975. Duncan published a selection of excerpts from the second part of this project first in Origin, Second Series, Number 10, in 1963, but didn’t begin to publish chapters systematically until 1966, when the first chapter appeared in Coyote’s Journal, a magazine edited by James Koller & a rotating band of co-editors that included at times Edward van Aelstyn, Peter Blue Cloud, Carroll Arnett, Steven Nemirow, William Wroth and William Brown.

 

[I don’t think it’s possible in today’s world of webzines and phenomena such as Spencer Selby’s list – which includes roughly 370 “experimental poetry/art magazines” – to fully appreciate the scarcity of publishing resources that existed in the middle 1960s, and thus to appreciate the greatness of the best little magazines of that time. In the period immediately prior to the creation of Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar, Coyote’s Journal – on which Caterpillar was loosely modeled – was easily the best little magazine in the United States, including everyone from Richard Brautigan to Tom Clark, Larry Eigner, Anselm Hollo, Ted Enslin, Edward Dorn, David Bromige, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, Douglas Woolf, David Meltzer, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Basil Bunting, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Ronald Johnson, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen. The exclusivity with which the journal focused only on white men was not, as they say, a differentiator in 1963. After eight issues or thereabouts in five years, Coyote’s Journal turned into an occasional project of Koller’s as he bounced around from Portland to the Bay Area and eventually east to Maine.]

 

Duncan published that first chapter of part one in 1966, the second one the following year (again in Coyote’s Journal) plus the first half of the sixth chapter in the initial issue of Clayton Eshleman’s  Caterpillar. In 1968, the second issue of Caterpillar completed the publication of the sixth chapter, plus chapters three, four, and five. Duncan also published the first chapter of the second part that year, again in the first issue of a new magazine, this one Sumac, a publication edited by baby-food heir Dan Gerber and budding novelist Jim Harrison.

Duncan published chapters two, three and four of the second part of the volume in 1969, plus the first section of chapter five. Then Duncan didn’t publish anything from The H.D. Book until 1975, when he published three additional pages from chapter five of the second part, plus chapters seven and eight in the second issue of Credences. Chapter nine appeared in 1979, chapter 11 in 1981, and chapter ten in 1983. In 1986, Duncan published a reworked version of part two, chapter five in a Sagetrieb issue devoted to his work and chapter six of the second part in the Southern Review.

 

A note that Duncan published in 1983 suggests that at one time there were to have been three additional chapters in the first part, plus a twelfth chapter of the second part:

 

Chapter 5, which addresses the matter of the State and War, remains in large part unpublisht. Chapter 6, which has to do with the transmutations of genital and poetic experience, has not been publisht at all (contrary to the impression given by the checklist in Scales of the Marvelous [New Directions, 1979].

Both this note, and a second one that is appended to the PDF version, suggest that some or all of the unwritten chapters were to have been composed after the completion of the third section, the reading of Helen of Egypt. Presumably because of The Southern Review publication,  Chapter Six is included in the PDF.

The PDF file is worth noting because it is the only version of this project that is readily available in 2004, and thus is the edition most contemporary readers are likely to have come across. It’s not clear just who produced this version – the credit to Frontier Press is an allusion to Harvey Brown’s Buffalo press that, in 1970, brought out the lost classic original version of William Carlos Williams Spring & All, seemingly in a pirated edition. The success of that project – easily the most influential critical text of the early 1970s, if not at the moment of its original publication in 1923, when it more or less sank like a rock from view – was thought by many readers to have forced New Directions to return the great early prose works of Williams the high modernist to print. So this “Frontier Press” edition is rather something of a similar prod, in this instance to the University of California, which must eventually publish The H.D. Book in some version in its collected works of Robert Duncan, and to that series’ general editor, Robert Bertholf. The PDF file has circulated through a number of different sites on the net over the past four or five years, and can currently be found at OneZeroZero, a virtual library of English Canadian Small Presses.

 

The PDF file is little more than a reprinting of the chapters that had appeared in little magazines prior to 1983 and even on that score it has flubbed the job, publishing the fourth chapter of the second part both in its correct position within the manuscript AND as the fourth chapter in the first part as well. (One can still find an occasional issue of TriQuarterly number 12, in which the real fourth chapter of the first part appeared in 1968 – I have a poem in that same edition.)  It’s worth noting that TriQuarterly calls the book as a whole just H.D., not The H.D. Book. Duncan also called it The Day Book in its initial appearance in Origin. In short, this was a project that never fully came together.

Duncan’s second note in the PDF file largely concedes this point:

 

Note: The last three chapters of Part I and the remaining chapter of Part II I think to be dependent upon what happens in Part III, of which no sentence has yet been ventured. The first draft of the Book was done in 1961, considerable over-lays were written in 1964, with dream material entering into the Book as late as 1964. It had been commissioned by Norman Holmes Pearson as a Book for H.D.’s Birthday, but at the time of the commission I had warnd him that I saw H.D. as the matrix of my finding my work in Poetry itself. “I askt him for an H.D. book,” Norman Holmes Pearson said sometime in the 1960s, “and he’s writing an LSD book.”

– RD

By the time Duncan died, some 70 handwritten pages of the third section existed and the first part was now complete at six chapters. But the final chapter of the second part appears never to have been written. What we have, then, if we turn to the PDF as the best widely available resource is a document that is missing two published chapters, plus all that exists of the third section. At best, The H.D. Book we have is shards of a working that Duncan himself was not able to complete even though he worked on it, off and on, for over a quarter of a century. When the UC Press edition comes out, perhaps as early as the end of this year, it will be interesting to see if we can now answer the question as to why a project to which Duncan appears to have given such importance was ultimately left undone.