Robert Duncan and Norman O. Brown: Correspondence

Abstract

6 July 1959 (Stinson Beach, California)As an aftermath of the Wesleyan press venture, I have found a reader, I think, in Norman Holmes Pearson.1 The letter he sent me representing the Wesleyan committee gave me a personal opening to send Letters and yesterday he wrote: “The Letters is an achievement. Quite apart from taking or rejecting any single manuscript volume, there simply isn't any doubt that you are a poet. You are in Letters and you are in The Field . . . Naturally being a poet doesn't mean that everyone will like your poetry, and your approach to it simply isn't critically popular at the moment.” Well, I press from which grapes what wine of recognition I can [assume, for instance, that Dr. Pearson is careful of his judgments].219 November 1959I have finally come to the place in my recent work where I see a book, not thematically designed like The Opening of the Field but almost casual, free hand.3 I've paid my debt to the literary I hope in committing the Field—and the new pieces which you will find in Spicer's “J” I am sending you along with the first Enkidu [Surrogate] are not written as parts of a whole. Whatever forecasting and recovery goes on is only a leftover of the obsession for design in The Field.4Your description of and response to McClure and Whalen is fitting.5 Breathless or no, McClure ain't entertaining, he scorns any possibility that those verses might be tainted by the art of poetry (making / a form) and / or the old devotion to the song. I find his work authentic but fierce, and in large deadly: charm has something to do with life. McClure substitutes self-will for intent (I've got in mind here a primacy Dante talks about in de Vulgare I think), and a furious automation for Elan Vital [sic].Whalen has a quick and ready mind . . . his poetry still straddles two horses of wit and heart; and like many witty men he often practices seeing thru desire and is deceived therein. He is not to date at home in wit (could one pose a contrast to Lewis Carroll who is passionately witty, whose wit is not divorced from creative desire?) and at times shows that he hopes to be “sincere”; we are left confronted by his gesture and not by a feeling. There are contradictions to this impression. His work where it projects landscape and place has been moving to me; that enchantment of the listening mind to become a screen of solid scenes he has mastery of.18 May 1960 (Stinson Beach)Well N.O.B. I did, I guess “fall in love,” and either had to or had not to come back to Middletown. There is still—I've only to be exposed—a root or route of what was once passion or obsession. And, not permitting myself to seek fulfillment (both from the restraint my will for my household commands, and, sadly, from the fear and pride that does not dare test reciprocity of feeling), I've had then to return to earliest feelings of unrequited desire, old traces of a need happiness does not erase.15 July 1960 (Stinson Beach)But then as a realm of possible, imaginable being, I am not an initiate nor to be an initiate—I am a servant of the life in words and would be servant of the imagination.6 Even to be a master, in the sense that to be an artist at all one has, I have “mastered,” come to the use of the sacred medium—incurs a risk of the vital thing—the proportion, the ever important estimate of what one is. Yet in your speculation about civilization and mystery you are at the edge of what I feel . . . that we've to keep the mysteries, not reveal them, means searching in order that only the mystery is kept as mystery, and searching in fear and love. . . . Well, that one sentence of yours is most valuable to me: I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret; and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned.7But contemplating the way of my responses, I find that what I believe is disclosed, the creative germ of a civilization, is a praxis, not a mystery; a “how to”—the alphabet, the grain—the bow-lyre—that is at the seed point of what life will be. The mystery is just that the praxis is vital, a living thing.[Referring to NOB's discussion of “superman” in his Phi Beta Kappa speech] I am fully a primitive. I live in fear of that potentiality. And then, what I seek to find is the image of Man—the variety and essence of a species. For me the concept of “superman” is the potential always there of a new species; not of individual transformation. But the poet is rightly thot of by Plato as of the lowest orders. Being a devotee of Hermes, I think the Platonists provide perspective. That poets in their form of god-knowledge (and few among poets it is) seem to be, are, more worthy than statesmen only shows that the lowest has become the highest where all has fallen into a shambles.“We too require the divine fury.” I hold as a need as you do N.O.B.—but the divine fury, the fire of the sun, is our potency as Man—let Superman spring as he will. But how anthropomorphically provincial is the ambition to succeed ourselves as Men—the hope that we will not only be what we are but what life will be. Life beyond itself will be, if it be new—beyond the mammalian evolutionary changes, revolutionary changes—must be at some such totals level as the basic terms of life—not the special features like “mind” which is our elaborated organ, our lovely aberration.1 March 1969 (20th St. San Francisco) [fig. 2]You and I share that we are drawn to work in what will be too much for us.8 To conquer what is fearful? No wonder the admonitions felt in Job are troubling. (In “An Imaginary Woman” the She of the poem instructed me—that was 1952—and I was just beginning to search out her environs:Thirst notThe well is full.Do not trouble the water.)9But it is our calling to trouble the water, Nobby. And needs all the (most happily) inspiration of our imagination or (most unhappily) cunning of our art to obey the “Do not trouble the water” to mean troubling the water.Often my thought has returned to you; my confidence is great (and not I think confused by the admiration and indebtedness I have for your work since with Love's Body you too have undertaken the burden of poetry)—my faith that your calling in these Metamorphoses is true to you indeed; but I am the more acutely aware of the trouble troubling the water brings and I know no strength in that trouble except faith and most important that it is as we know it is blind. If it not be blind, we've seen men who “see” looking with things and contriving their corrections of sight to render mystery obvious.“Wisdom” I think is feeling not knowing, and I am of its party and hence not didactic. And there must be a “beyond wisdom as such” where “feeling” is dissolved before the reality of “living”—well, as you know, the poem will carry us in its [illegible] key and feeling into a “life” more living than mostly we can realize.10 Have we not to revive again the seed, the cow-lyre? The commodity is a profanity and money, if it be not exchange, is a profanity. But the thing “kept” is a mystery. . . . Well, I wanted to warn against how you talked about power: against “that human history goes from man to superman,” the “one who seeks for them, and who has some notions which way to go to find them” against the supernatural powers.9 January 1959 (Berkeley)Also Wednesday, was smitten with admiration for the first poem in Letters. I do not discover in it a new chapter in my own Bible (as I do for example in Novalis: perhaps I read too much this way), but something not mine which I must respect.You say I want to write a primary text. I wonder. You cannot mean, can you really, in spite of some of your sentences, that I want to or should impose on the public testimony of my primary experience: in fact my primary experience is books: horrible fact, perhaps, but a fact: I am not Dylan Thomas no Gary Snyder. And yet I would like to yet. Perhaps the next book can move from abstract to mythology and symbol. . . . Let's face it—if Duncan succeeds (not if he fails) he becomes like Joyce the property of English Departments. The antinomy book/life is not overcome in a book of poems. “Anality” may let the reader reach his anus better than “turd” and “ass-hole”; the silence, the shadow, (the rest is silence) may be the real part of words. And so if my book makes you ask for something other than that book may be all is well. I silently laugh at my own cenotaph and [illegible] and unbuild it again. Or the cenotaph unbuilds itself?circa 1959 (Berkeley) [figs. 4 and 5]Robert, son, Father Brown thinks you ought to review his book, or write an essay around and about it. You have already: I can give you back your two letters. Of course Father Brown would be flattered by the attention; but the attention might be unflattering, as I think it is not the little Machiavellian ego speaking. . . . And, Duncan, please reconsider and revolve in your own mind how much poetry, at what tempo, the human ear can take in one evening without becoming numbed.11 Quantitative value for our money is not to be given or had in this commodity. I day-dreamed of when I hope you will read at Wesleyan next year. The form I dreamed was say 1 hour (+15 minutes?) performance maximum: but somehow with pauses in between poems, pauses like strumming of the guitar, consisting of light or solemn talk by the poet—for example what you put into the DISCLOSURE manifesto, but seeded in. And (at least at Wesleyan) there can be more later for a smaller remnant of rapt if rapture takes flight I am willing to be shown I am uncouth on this point: but am I?circa 1959 (Berkeley)I don't want to press the question of criticism, but I guess I do. This way. What would you say you were doing in your review of poor Broughton?12 Seems to me you were like Tacitus like a judge in the underworld, like God saying God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom's divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians. But Jesus says Judge not: the gods who passes sentence (yes Structure of Rime I) is Death, and all sentences are death-sentences. That's why I am suspicious of your and Pound's invocation of the law. The dancer (field #2) will make light of the law . . . I am confused. Can we get out of this confusion by, first, distinguishing the criticism which is damnation, and repudiating it—at least I find it hard to justify: though (more confusion) I have to testify. . . . We shamans are of course alienated, the point of the alienation is to make us a perfect hecatomb to enter the arena the dust and the heat. So like the Pharisee I thanked God I was not like other shamans are. I was glad I was anchored in teaching in the city of (?) where alienation has to be fought for daily. so there. . . . I was moved again . . . by the Ode for Dick Brown; nor will I right now go along with your own reservations.13 I am disposed very charitably to all efforts to deal with large public themes: I do not go along with this age's obsessive hostility to rhetoric. Rhetoric is copious, is a form of generosity: this age's style is too parsimonious—anal. It seems to me boring to “find faults” in the poem: it still is, is your handwriting on the wall. Perhaps I am fond of it as a personal clue to you—a clue to the political you; a link to the more political me.circa 1959 (letter on Wesleyan University letterhead)I could have written on blank paper, but prefer to appear before you in crown of thorns for you to mock.circa 1960I am so glad you sent me the HD Shakespeare book. She is one of mine now and I owe her to you. I know you are going to write a wonderful book.14circa 1960You know in reading your poems—also Spicer's volume—I believe I have at last outgrown the academic way of reading poems to judge how good they are. Instead they begin to exist as vegetable phenomena, as organisms.. . .I read “Man's Fulfillment in Order and in Strife” this morning and the Preface to Bending the Bow yesterday. I do indeed sometimes find in your prose a kind of rhetorical prolixity which is to me not so much confusing as enervating as opposed to stretching, but I keep going, and am rewarded. pp. 243–5, working with Blake, Lawrence, were like testimony needed as confirmation, and also instruction.1531 July 1984Ground Work just arrived today and I immediately spent an hour rediscovering Ancient Questions and Santa Cruz Propositions and altogether how much we have in common, how much I owe to you.15 January 1985I don't quite know how it happened, but it happened after the Pound Conference, in reading Canto 116 and reflecting retrospectively on many errors and a little rightness, Zukofsky for the first time came alive and close to me, Marxist poetry in the Thirties, when I started out with Marxist politics but as poetry. 16 A1, A-9 and “Mantis” with the Communist Internationale and Shelley's “West Wind” set to new measures which is the old measure of Dante's sestina Al poro jiorno, as in Canto 116. And in A-9 first the labor theory of value set to the music of Pound's beloved Donna mi prega, in the first half, written in 1948–50, the turn from Labor to Amor or more precisely Love's Body, in which Amor is the true Labor (“until I labor in labor lie”)—It is the insistent return to Dante, in 2, in EP in RD's Ground Work. that I hear: is it possible?