Polymorphous Poetics: Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book

[T]he great invitation of Freud was the sense of multilayeredness.

Robert Duncan, Interview

Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book began in April 1960 as a paid commission given to Duncan by H.D.’s friend Norman Holmes Pearson for a “small book” or “tribute,” visualized by Pearson as a gift-book intended for H.D.’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1961 (Duncan, H.D. Book 435–36; Jarnot 193). Now published, fifty years past its due date, it is 678 pages long, a major essay in literary history and poetics.¹ Although she may have seen a draft of a few chapters, the work was never delivered to H.D. After she died in September 1961, Duncan continued to write The H.D. Book; in fact, he never declared it finished, and it is unclear when—or even whether—he stopped working on it.² The work became a continuous nursery for his emerging poetics and, as now published, an example of the “boundless creational field” he continuously sought (Selected Prose 221). After the death of H.D., Duncan stated to Denise Levertov, “When I work on the book, she does not seem dead but to be still the recipient of it” (Duncan and Levertov 382). A celebration of the life of H.D. had been the first purpose of this book; with the death of H.D., it took on another long-term life, inflected by Duncan’s assessment of H.D.’s oeuvre but also by the vibrant risks and mercurial insights characteristic of Duncan’s writing. The H.D. Book is central to Duncan’s oeuvre, in large measure because both the premise and the promise of polymorphous perversity is that it can dissolve contradictions among Duncan’s many, dramatized psychosexual roles.

Duncan hints at his uses of this work from its very inception; he warned Pearson that the book would involve “the unresolved matter of my own poetics” (H.D. Book 436). The “unresolved” extends to the real and imaginative range of sexual directions in this work; poetics and sexualities are linked. The H.D. Book sought transformation and breakthrough, becoming a text in which Duncan dramatized, performed, and explored the vocation of poet, in part by his reconstruction of modernist literary history, in part by philosophic/spiritual meditations, in part by traveling an intense path of erotic revelation, pleasure, and shame.

Within Duncan’s oeuvre, this profuse, polymathic, and wayward book in prose serves the same encyclopedic and situating functions across time that the multidecade, “hyperspace” long poems The Cantos, Paterson, The Maximus Poems, and “A”—almost all similarly incomplete—serve: in The H.D. Book, Duncan made a synoptic and syncretic work of cultural assessment with the goal of cultural and (loosely) psychosocial transformation. Similarly, the work parallels H.D.’s own long poems by postulating that personal transformations of subjectivity (through a probing cultural psychoanalysis) were crucial to historical shifts mainly concerning the status of gender, as well as the role of war, in their complex effects on consciousness and society.

Despite its title, The H.D. Book is not “about” H.D. in any limited sense of the word about. While an interpretive survey of her writing career is indeed one thread, the book’s ostensible concern with the works of H.D. is intertwined with—matted with—Duncan’s stakes, memories, associations, and dreams, with a goal of cultural renovation. H.D., her oeuvre, and her ideas are a portal to much else—to “revelation[s]” that mark Duncan’s counterhegemonic Romantic, heterodox, odic, and sublime thinking (H.D. and Duncan 62). This book is “about” his family and their spiritual commitments, an autobiography in theosophy. It is “about” Duncan, a meditation on his Bildung and an essay on poetic vocation. It is a brief for the “heretics” of world history (religious, sexual, and intellectual) (H.D. Book 325). It is “about” the network of moderns and their achievements as a kind of collective mind, with their convergences and conflicts eagerly, insistently displayed, along with a strong tilt toward discussing and exemplifying...