The H.D. Book (2 page)

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.

At the heart of this concern with the occult was Duncan’s quest for, as he puts it, a poetics. Duncan was pushing his sense of “a poetics” far beyond a concern with literary criticism and literary theory. The
Oxford English Dictionary
has
poetic
as “the branch of knowledge that deals with the techniques of poetry.” This notion of knowledge and technique is closer to Duncan’s intent, but even here knowledge must be understood in the fullness of its etymon,
gna,
the
gna
that leads to gnosis and knowing, as having to do with coming into the recognition of what is beyond the Logos, what the Logos necessarily excludes, leaves hidden. Technique follows from that. Allen Ginsberg’s mantra (via Chogyam Trungpa)—“first thought best thought”—resonates here. Duncan was uninterested in Ginsberg’s temporal focus—he worked, reworked, and then revised his reworkings, some might say obsessively, always pushing toward a more finely honed articulation. But the
first
remained shining through all that. For Duncan it was more specifically a question of opening to the occult dwelling in the first, of responding to what is hidden in every moment in order to reveal the plenum of the world, both what is visible and what informs that visibility. If Ginsberg found that in the spontaneous, the unedited, Duncan found it in the immersion of mind in the process of creative release—thinking as orgasm.

In this sense, knowledge and technique are inextricably wed to vision as it extends beyond the visible, the materially commensurable to, say, the visionary. Duncan’s sense of a poetics was rooted in the recognition that what is seen is always already informed, full of form that determines what is seen and how it is seen, even though the forms may remain hidden. His proposal here had to do with the claim that arose from the Enlightenment’s argument with the
ancien régime
that the knowable is limited to the commensurable, and that the incommensurable is what came to be called “superstition.” Only in the late eighteenth
century did “superstition” move from a sense of idolatrous religious practice to a sense of any “irrational” belief (including religion). This grounding of knowledge in the material and rational was part of a vision of the cosmos as matter in motion bound by laws, a vision that went on to determine the culture of the West in modernity. Duncan’s quest for a poetics was a quest to extend his vision beyond those limits to include all that such a culture excluded or hid from itself, as well as what those selves who were formed in such a culture were blind to.

In Book 1 of
The H.D. Book,
Duncan pursued this opening through its multiple implications, sketching out the great themes that run through the book by tracing them in H.D.’s work: hidden or lost traditions of thinking about Eros, hidden or lost modes of conceiving of time and space, hidden or lost ways of representing the self or person, hidden or lost understandings of the source and nature of form, and finally the profound sense of exile that is the lot of the poet who undertakes to recognize and recover these lost things. Duncan was led on in these inquiries by his ongoing argument that the dismissal and occultation of H.D. arose from the unexamined belief, in fact the delusion, that the terms of Realism, as an aesthetic doctrine grounded in and grounding the culture of modernity, were “real,” where “real” marks a reduced and utterly measurable world.

Duncan argued for an expanded sense of the “real”: “The crux for the poet is to make real what is only real in a heightened sense. Call it his personal feeling, or the communal reality, it exists only in its dance, only to its dancers” (1.6). Again and again, Duncan comes back to Randall Jarrell’s judgment that H.D.’s great visionary poems of World War II, written in London during the Blitz, were “silly.” In what came to be known as her war trilogy, H.D. presented the violence of the war as rooted not in politics or economics, but in a cosmic spiritual war. The forces of light and darkness, life and death, battled it out over London in H.D.’s poems, resembling the powers described in ancient Gnostic gospels. Gods played out eternal struggles. Angels came and went bearing messages of hope. Old narratives of death and resurrection reasserted themselves in mundane events. And through it all, the poet asserted the experienced reality of the vision, identifying herself with the prophet John of the Book of Revelations, and his simple declaration:
“I, John, testify.” It was this testimony that Jarrell dismissed as “silly.” Duncan located that word in its etymological roots and used that to reveal the shallowness of Jarrell’s philosophical-cultural grounding. Jarrell became in that sense, along with his cohort, representative of modernity’s arrogant superficiality, its insistence that only the visible, not the visionary, is
real.

In Book 1 of
The H.D. Book,
these themes are explicated in the form of digressive essays which identify what Duncan calls the stars and their potential patterns, a metaphor he develops in Book 2, through which hidden forms will emerge in the sky, the constellations of the mind, forms that will bind Tiamat, the dragon of chaos. H.D., Pound, and Williams, that marvelous configuration of poets, that constellation of stars, who led Duncan into the permissions of poetry, are at the heart of it. Around them circulate the lights of others—Freud, Joyce, Arnaut, Blavatsky, Lawrence, Yeats, Dante, Frazer, Stein, Mead, Harrison, Nietzsche, Browning, Avicenna, Malraux, Plutarch, Plato, Iamblichus, Corbin, Apuleius . . . the circle keeps expanding in its complexities as Duncan tracks the relationships that defined the emergence of this particular possibility of poetry not to “describe” the world, but to ground it in “the dissolving of boundaries of time” (1.6), to rouse the form and content of the world “as the ritual devotee seeks to arouse the content and form of the god” (2.4).