The H.D. Book (3 page)

In Book 2 Duncan left the essay behind and moved to a new form (and the idea of form is central here), the day book. The day book reintroduced time as an element of form, locating thinking in its temporal fragility—its finitude—even as it subverted the temporal by repeatedly returning to the same issues from different angles. This repetition, which some have criticized as if it were a question of “style,” was an expression of Duncan’s growing sense of the open-ended nature of his undertaking as his quest for a poetics began to absorb the lessons of his first essays into what he called the
Opus.
To return again and again was his method. With each return, new facets of meaning were revealed, new depths of thought plumbed. His understanding of
palimpsest
was crucial here. In the opening of Chapter 7, which is dated with multiple dates (October 8, 1964, and March 20, 1961) in his last revision, he wrote:

I seek now in working upon the later draft of the book not to correct the original but to live again in its form and content, leaving in successive layers record of reformations and digressions as they come to me. The form realized then is not to be a design immediately striking, like those housing developments and landscapings that rise where disorderly areas of a city have been cleared away, but it may be like an old city—Freud’s picture of Rome upon Rome—in which in the earliest remains, in the diary of March 10th to March 15th, March 20th to March 29th, then May 25th of 1961: later additions may appear, anachronistically like the Gaudi restorations in the gothic cathedral of Palma or the Casa Guell’s art-nouveau romanticism in the midst of old buildings, where we are aware of periods of creative activity and conservative inertia. (2.7)

These accretions are revelatory. Each passage opens the work to the further emergence of still-hidden form and content. There is no singular “meaning” to be recovered, only the potentiality for further meaning to be encountered. Meaning is not a sum to be arrived at, but an ongoing engagement unfolding in the poet’s language. As Emerson, anticipating Duncan by some 125 years, pointed out in the address to the Harvard Divinity School that got him banned from speaking at the university for thirty years, “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done,” going on to argue that like the “refulgent spring” (which is of the mind as the mind is of the world) with which he opens the address, only a continually renewed opening to the “moral sentiment,” a commitment to knowing rather than knowledge, can keep the revelation alive and full of meaning.
¹⁰

Book 2, then, became an enactment of the dynamics discussed in Book 1, or more accurately, the discussions of Book 1, the essays, were converted into the form of their contents, form that goes on to continually recast and renew the contents, or perhaps to resituate the contents as emerging form.
¹¹
Duncan’s analysis of Roheim’s Freudian study of the ritual practices of the Aranda in Book 1 became an opening into an actual ritual invocation of the forms and powers hidden within Duncan’s thinking of H.D., forms and powers that day by day and moment by moment erupted into the poet’s consciousness, emerged from his language.

Dream became increasingly important as a channel for hidden information, unconscious content, occult meaning, roiling to the surface of thought, as in the Sally Rand episode that runs through Chapter 8. Emerging from sleep, Duncan jotted down the remnants of a dream of which he remembered only an image—caressing H.D.’s naked back—and the words
SALLY RAND
, words that left him feeling uneasy, even repulsed. Sally Rand, the name of a notorious fan dancer, initially seemed to offer Duncan nothing. But working and reworking the material, the words began to yield. What they yielded was a field of thinking in which each moment bloomed with a new significance, a new form erupting from the language that had unknowingly contained it. It was a masterful performance of the very ritual engagement Duncan had written about in Book 1.

When Duncan began
The H.D. Book,
much of the literary history that he recovered had been lost to the official protectors of Literature. His concern, especially with the work of the women who were so central to high modernism, was unprecedented. The writing of Edith Sitwell, Laura Riding, Djuna Barnes, Mary Butts, and Dorothy Richardson had largely disappeared into the mists of time, ignored by the almost entirely male cohort of professors who collected anthologies and wrote literary histories, patrolling the boundaries of Literature. That history was part of the occult content he sought to bring to light. And while his discussions of the work of Pound and Williams, of Yeats and Eliot and Lawrence were a significant contribution to the criticism of modernism, his focus was not on the literary, but again on those aspects of the work and its context that were considered out of bounds by the strict moralisms of the New Criticism.

The H.D. Book
is not fundamentally a work of literary criticism or literary history. Nor is it, as some have proposed, an attempt to articulate a literary theory. In fact the book is deeply anti-literary in just about every way possible. In the same vein, although it delves into the thinking of various esoteric cults including Theosophy, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, and psychoanalysis, it is neither a Theosophical nor a Hermetic nor a psychoanalytic text. Duncan’s concern throughout was to create a space, an opening, into which the hidden, the occult, could emerge. Long before the wave
of postwar European philosophies entered the awareness of North American academics, Duncan was already exploring the significant moves they were to make to reopen the world to the multiple realities foreclosed by modernity’s singular Real. The indeterminacy of meaning, readerly texts, the diversity and multiplicity of the truths of the world, the fluid boundaries of “time” and “space,” the fictionality of the subject, all these openings into those dimensions of the world rendered occult by the disciplinary institutions of modernity, were the playgrounds of his thinking.

His goal there was straightforward—to discover a poetics. For Duncan, the idea that poetry could arise from a theory—be it a theory of linguistic production, a theory of economic production, or a theory of psychic production—was not only ridiculous, it was profoundly damaging to the spirit of poetry. Poetry for Duncan was always inextricably implicated with What Is, his designation of the world’s plenum. And that plenum was fully determined at any given moment only with the admission of what was outlawed, repressed, excluded, ignored—what was hidden. This is the occult reality that defines the unfolding engagement of
The H.D. Book.
No theory can approach that. Instead, a poet, a maker, must find/forge a methodology that allows What Is to emerge, to find forms. Just as there is no singular Truth that can be theorized, there is no singular methodology. Each poet must find her/his own way into that process.

As he pursued this quest through the writing of
The H.D. Book,
Duncan published
The Opening of the Field
(1960) and began to compose what many feel are his mature works—
Roots and Branches
(1964) and
Bending the Bow
(1968). Out of impatience with the distractions of the competitiveness and careerism that came to the fore in “the poetry scene” in the 1970s, Duncan vowed not to publish for 15 years, even as he continued to work on his final masterpieces. In 1984 he finally published
Groundwork—Before the War,
but died before its companion volume,
Groundwork—In the Dark
made it into print in 1987. All of this work springs from the remarkable quest for a poetics recorded in
The H.D. Book.
“The poet and the reader,” Duncan wrote, “who if he is intent in reading becomes a new poet of the poem, come to write or to read in order to participate through the work in a consciousness that
moves freely in time and space and can entertain reality upon reality” (1.6).
The H.D. Book
is a unique record of such a journey.

•

We began this editorial project with a firm belief that Robert Duncan wanted
The H.D. Book
to be made into a book. As open-ended as his compositional method was—constantly writing and rewriting and then rewriting again—his goal was always clear: publication. “I build even as I prepare the book for the publisher at last,” he wrote in Book 2, Chapter 7, “living once more as I copy, and take over wherever I see a new possibility in the work.” Circumstances conspired against him and he never got to see
The H.D. Book
published, but he left us, his editors, with a clear goal. We wanted to make the book that Robert Duncan wanted to make, at least as far as that is possible. That is the principle that has guided this undertaking.

It was not always easy. The initial occasion for the book, the invitation from Norman Holmes Pearson in 1960 to write a little piece on H.D. for her birthday, almost immediately began unfolding into something much larger. Duncan never settled on a definitive sense of the final form of the book. Even as he typed up a version for publication, he was still thinking of some further form—another three chapters for Book 1, a twelfth for Book 2. The process of composition was a process of allowing form to arise, to make itself evident in the act of creation. So in one sense it could never finally be settled.

Robert Duncan was an accretive writer, and
The H.D. Book
was a constantly evolving entity. He began with notes on scraps and pieces of paper, few of which survive, although he refers to them in correspondence with Pearson as a method for avoiding a totalizing relation to his materials. He rewrote those notes into notebooks, then rewrote that again with a typewriter, revised in hand on the manuscript, then rewrote again with the typewriter. With each passage the text expanded and changed. Sometimes the changes were minor punctuation issues, sometimes they had to do with diction, often they were substantive textual additions. It was a process that coincided with his understanding of the palimpsest as he articulated it in Book 1, Chapter 4, mind as palimpsest. As with the mind, nothing is ever lost. One layer forms on top of another, but the lower continues to make itself felt, and each layer, as it changes from what is before and after, exists in a complex web of modulated meanings.

Duncan’s typed title page for the aborted Black Sparrow edition.

Photo courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust.

Duncan’s typed copyright page for the aborted Black Sparrow edition.

Photo courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust.

In addition to the published versions, multiple copies exist of each chapter of
The H.D. Book,
none of which is dated. In the case of some chapters like Book 1, Chapter 6, up to seven copies exist in various forms. Some are done on different typewriters, some are carbon copies, some are photocopies of carbon copies, some are whole stand-alone copies of individual chapters, some are partial copies, some are included in manuscripts of the entire Book 1. Changes exist on almost all of them.

For Book 1, Chapters 1–5, the problem of dating was solved by circumstance. In 1971, after Duncan had tried and failed to get the book published by Scribner’s and others, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press proposed to do it. By that time all of Book 1 and Chapters 1–5 of Book 2 had been published in various little magazines. The copyedited typescripts from which the magazine versions were set are easily identifiable in Duncan’s papers (though even some of these contain holograph corrections that were made after publication). Based on the deal with Martin, Duncan proceeded to retype the entire book. Most of those manuscripts, all done on the same typewriter in the same run, are also identifiable. After retyping them, Duncan then edited them by hand. Here it gets a little tricky. He went completely through Book 1 making changes by hand. He also apparently made some changes in Book 2 as well. There Chapters 4, 5, and 6 show significant changes; 1, 2, and 3 have minor changes; and Chapters 7–11 have almost no changes. Many of the changes appear to have been done at different times.