'The H.D. Book' Could Save American Art | The New Republic

Magnum Opus

The book that could save American art.

• Jed Perl
• January 4, 2011 | 4:38 pm

I am besotted with a new book that is also an old book. This is The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan, a wild, dazzling, idiosyncratic magnum opus that the poet composed between 1959 and 1964 and that is only now being published in its complete form, by the University of California Press. What began with a request for a brief birthday homage to the American poet known as H.D.—she had been born Hilda Doolittle—morphed into one of the greatest of all meditations on the nature not only of modern poetry but of the modern artistic imagination in its bewitching complexity. Art, Duncan exclaims, makes “what is not actual real.” I am glad to be reading Duncan’s text as we head into 2011—the second decade of the century after the modern century. There is no nostalgia in The H.D. Book. Duncan’s modernism is at once lofty, optimistic, activist, and open-minded. Published a half-century after it was written, The H.D. Book reads like a clarion call. At a time such as ours, when artists are either embattled or co-opted, either locked away in some ivory tower of their own invention or overtaken by market forces and political forces, Duncan argues for the most strenuous artistic ambitions as a dynamic democratic possibility.

In The H.D. Book the great enemy is T.S. Eliot. Although Duncan cannot but admire The Waste Land, he will never forgive Eliot for being so quick to isolate tradition from the present, for giving art, as Duncan puts it, “a histrionic remove.” While Duncan welcomes all the difficulties and obscurities of modern art, he sees them as inextricably related to the pluralism of modern experience. This, I believe, could be Duncan’s great contribution to the arguments that are going on in the art world and the literary world right now. The modern masterwork, according to Duncan, is a new kind of symposium, richer than the Platonic dialogues because it involves gathering together so many more elements. “To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included,” he writes. “The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure—all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man—must return to be admitted in the creation of what we are.” Where Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” saw the modern artist in flight from the heterogeneity of modern life, for Duncan the task of the modern artist is precisely to wrest some new alchemy from life’s crazy quilt richness. No wonder Duncan speaks so warmly about collage—the art brilliantly practiced by his life partner, Jess—where “from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures …form the figures of a new composition.”

The H.D. Book is itself a literary collage that contains both polemical rhapsodies and plangent autobiographical passages. Duncan begins with a recollection of a high school classroom and a salute to a teacher he never forgot, Miss Keough, who from time to time “would present some poem or story as if it belonged not to what every well-read person must know, the matter of a public establishment, but to that earlier, atavistic, inner life of the person.” It is with Miss Keough that Duncan first encounters the work of H.D., the words “Fruit cannot drop/through this thick air…,” heard in “that early summer of my sixteenth or seventeenth year.” “Just beyond the voice of the poem,” he continues, “the hum and buzz of student voices and the whirr of water sprinklers merging comes distantly from the world outside an open window.” The juxtaposition of inside and outside, the masterwork and the ephemeral, is essential to Duncan’s story. Duncan never wants us to forget that his brave and unconventional modernism is a product not of London or Paris but of Northern California, where “in smoky rooms in Berkeley, in painters’ studios in San Francisco,” he read the work of Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell. “I read these works aloud; dreamed about them; took my life in them; studied them as my anatomy of what Poetry must be.” High art, he tells us over and over again, is an American possibility. While some readers of The H.D. Book will be put off by the seriousness with which Duncan addresses the pop-esoteric texts of another era, especially Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, Duncan is making a decisive point here, arguing that the roots of modern artistic expression are as broad as they are deep...source: The New Republic, 'The H.D. Book' Could Save American Art

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