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Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends
Duncan and Jess loved to read and re-read, and the
large letters “H.D.” stick out in the pan of the
bookcase in the Gertrude Stein Room simply because
of the size of the lettering and reminds us of Duncan’s
long, never-completed book on HD. For this we can
turn to Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan, which
gives a tour of the couple’s library including the
science books with its substantial collection of books
by and about Darwin; a room full of books by a range
of classical authors, like Ovid and Homer, as well as a
Freud collection and books by a favorite philosopher,
Alfred North Whitehead; a wide range
of children’s books; the large collection
of Joyce and Gertrude Stein in
Gertrude Stein Room, and the
foreign-language books of the central
kabalistic text, the Zohar, in the
“French Room.” It is well known that
Duncan’s letters, interviews, and
lectures – along with his conversation
– are packed with a vast array of
authors. There’s little surprise about
his in-depth reading of the Western
tradition, as well as his twentiethcentury
forebears, such as Yeats,
Pound, Williams, Louis Zukofsky,
Rexroth, Patchen, D.H. Lawrence,
H.D., Anaïs Nin, Dylan Thomas, and
Henry Miller, only the way he read
them and the obsessiveness with
which he read and wrote about some
like H.D. There is also his long
reading of anarchist writers, so that early letters to
Pauline Kael include lists of anarchist books he was
trying to obtain. There are also endless references to
philosophers and social scientists from Emile
Durkheim to Arnold Toynbee, and from the
philosopher Ernst Cassirer to Herbert Marcuse, who’s
Eros and Civilization was part of the background
reading on the Narcissus myth for Jess’s enormous
collage project. And we are often told about Jess and
Duncan’s shared love of fairy-tales and children’s
literature, endlessly reading the fairy-tale writings of
George MacDonald, the science fiction of J.L. Lloyd,
C.S. Lewis, and J.R. Tolkien along with constant
frame of the Oz books. But of particular interest was
the oft-cited fact that Jess and Duncan – before they
met each other – became intense readers not just of
James Joyce but in particular of Joyce’s nearly
unreadable Finnegan’s Wake with its non-stop allusions
and puns, and puns making illusions. Finnegans Wake
is just one, but perhaps a particularly illuminating
touchstone for the work of both men.
Similarly, Duncan was deeply invested in the
visual artistic background of Jess’s work and not only
by having given Jess an original copy of Max Ernst’s
Surrealist collage book, Une semaine de bonté, as a
birthday present in 1952, which became so important
to the aesthetics of Jess’s “Paste-Ups.” He traces Jess’s
work in a “tradition” leading back to Hieronymous
Bosch, and including artists like Henry Fuseli,
William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Odilon
Redon. Even Jess’s teachers from the California
School of Fine Arts, Edward Corbett and Hassel
Smith, make appearances in Duncan’s poetry. It was,
indeed, the immense impact of Clyfford Still’s show
at the artist-run Metart Gallery in 1950 that Duncan
attributed to his not following through with plans to
go to Europe but rather to stay in San Francisco,
where obviously important things were happening.
At the core of An Opening of the Field is an
interdisciplinary collaboration. That collaboration
only starts with the pairing of Jess’s illustrations for
Duncan’s poetry, as in the Duncan’s book of poems,
Caesar’s Gate in 1955. Jess illustrated a children’s
book written by Duncan, The Cat and the Blackbird,
in the 1950s published by White Rabbit Press in
1967, as well as illustrations for Michael McClure’s
children’s book for his daughter, The Boobus and the
Bunnyduck, in 1958. And Jess created cover art for
numerous friends’ books, like Michael Davidson’s The
Mutabilities & Fould Papers and Lynn Lonidier’s A
Lesbian Estate: Poems 1970-1973. Significantly, he
contributed art reproduced in a wide range of little
magazines by friends of the couple, such as a comic
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Robert Duncan by Jess