The Autopsy of a Friendship

The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 857 pp.

The relationship of Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan is a cautionary tale. Two poets, supposedly of the same school ("Black Mountain," though in Levertov's case it is somewhat a misnomer), both proponents of "organic" form, who shared an almost religious reverence for the mystic properties of language, a fondness for cats and Victorian fairy tales, two whose friendship, although consigned to paper, was, by the same token, free of the demands of physical intimacy; a relationship entirely of inclination, not of obligation—it nonetheless reached a place of irreconcilable difference as surely as her concurrent second marriage did. The reader who holds The Letters in his hands holds the actual friendship, with virtually no sense of scenes played out elsewhere, and accordingly is offered a rare chance to understand where two old friends went wrong. Spanning some thirty years and comprising a paperback as big and bulky as the phone book, the collection manages what would seem unlikely in material so sprawling: to tell a coherent story. The letters have an arc—a rising action, a climax—the clashing of the two principals, those who once "corresponded"—Levertov crying out "Bullshit!"—a catastrophe to which in retrospect it seems that everything tended.

The denouement was provided by Levertov, on the occasion of Duncan's death, in the form of a poem:

To R. D., MARCH 4th, 1988

You were my mentor. Without knowing it,
I outgrew the need for a mentor.
Without knowing it, you resented that,
and attacked me. I bitterly resented
the attack, and without knowing it
freed myself to move forward
without a mentor. Love and long friendship
corroded, shrank, and vanished from sight
into some underlayer of being.
The years rose and fell, rose and fell,
and the news of your death after years of illness
was a fact without resonance for me,
I had lost you long before, and mourned you,
and put you away like a folded cloth
put away in a drawer. But today I woke
while it was dark, from a dream
that brought you live into my life:
I was in a church, near the Lady Chapel
at the head of the west aisle. Hearing a step
I turned: you were about to enter
the row behind me, but our eyes met
and you smiled at me, your unfocussed eyes
focussing in that smile to renew
all the reality our foolish pride extinguished.
You moved past me then, and as you sat down
beside me, I put a welcoming hand
over yours, and your hand was warm.
I had no need
for a mentor, nor you to be one;
but I was once more
your chosen sister, and you
my chosen brother
We heard strong harmonies rise and begin to fill
the arching stone,
sounds that had risen here through centuries.

While offering the kiss of peace, Denise steps on some toes. The idea that Duncan was her "mentor" is a stretch. Only four years her senior, it was Duncan who initiated their correspondence by writing her a fan letter. Admittedly, his letter was so cryptic as to be incomprehensible; and Levertov, uncomfortable on a pedestal, was probably content to misunderstand (she thought he was mocking her) and to reverse their roles ("I'm certainly glad you admire my poems because I've been admiring yours for about 4 years now"), putting them on equal footing as they entered what turned out to be an orgy of mutual admiration. Neither regarded the other as a mere student, of that you can be sure. Duncan named Levertov—together with Pound, Marianne Moore, and Williams—as one of the poets whose achievements were such that "my pleasure is never untainted with envy." She gave him the benefit of her instruction as early as her third letter, with a list of twenty...