One: The Little Freshman Yes

 

 

I am liable in the late afternoon

lingering to remember in the various cities

the familiar streets, clock-towers, magnolias,

to remember, reconstructing yet not

faultlessly as then, for the singular vision

has departed, reconstructing the cities

in sand, not faultlessly, roughly,

impatiently— indicating only a shadow…

 

—Robert Duncan, “Fragment, 1940”

 

 

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was completed during the fall of 1936, creating a direct route for automobile traffic between the city of San Francisco and the East Bay of Oakland for the first time. From the span, one could view the blue-green waters of the San Francisco Bay, separated from the Pacific by the Golden Gate headlands and Marin County. The waterway inspired the imagination of the inhabitants of the land on all sides of it. A massive harbor that had served as a stopping point for Gold Rush treasure seekers, by the 1930s, the bay was a center of the Pacific Coast maritime industry. 

Freshman class member Robert Duncan arrived at the Berkeley campus of the University of California that September, revisiting the locales of his early childhood and wandering amidst the damp eucalyptus laced hills and groves of magnolias that dotted the school pathways. Founded in 1868 as a merger of the College of California and the Agriculture, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College of Oakland, the school had evolved into a successful research university. Its curriculum was modeled after Yale and Harvard, but its prestige came with its link to modern science. During the decade of the 1930s, Professor Ernest Lawrence built a series of ion accelerators and atom smashers— cyclotrons—in the campus’s radiation lab, for which he won the 1939 Nobel Prize in science. The university’s soon-to-be-named Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory quickly became a nerve center for atomic research.

In classes and among new college friends, Duncan was known as the lanky effeminate freshman named Symmes. He registered for entry-level courses in geology, history, English, and philosophy. During his second semester he added German, and throughout his undergraduate years he was also enrolled in a mandatory military requirement. He quickly found his place in Berkeley, becoming involved in politics and poetry, and with his mother’s encouragement pledging to the Acacia Fraternity, a Masonic order claiming Pythagoras as its inspiration. Acacia, established in Michigan in 1904 by a group of Master Masons, welcomed Duncan as one of its initiates on his adoptive father’s birthday, February 14th, 1937.[1] Indifferent to the obligatory fraternizing, Duncan later claimed he joined Acacia because it had the most dilapidated house on campus and was most in need of his adoptive mother’s financial support. He also assumed that the members of this humble fraternity would be more tolerant of his homosexuality than the other more prestigious organizations on campus.[2]

For the moment, his economic and emotional bond to Minnehaha Symmes remained strong, evidenced by his frequent candid letters to her throughout his late teen years and early twenties. Also obvious were the difficulties he had faced during his first year away from home. The beginning of his college career marked the first anniversary of Edwin Symmes’s death, and at some point during that fall Duncan was pulled away from his studies when he contracted pneumonia.[3] During the spring of 1937, half way through his freshman year, he penned a note home to his mother in Bakersfield:

 

where I could never have weathered this season last year without your protection directly—my personality is safe this year.  While the same problems confront me of course (it is my basic nature and nothing external) last semester being fall season was no threat at all. I did not even have to regard emotional adjustments which [are] a great factor this semester. My House adjustments—the protection of a strong institution and my opportunity in developing a cultural side which takes interest and pursuit all are factors which lead me to say that I am at last safe.[4]

 

 

Duncan’s “cultural side” developed on several fronts simultaneously. While he reported to his mother that his scholarship was “tragic”—earning mostly B’s and C’s[5] —he immersed himself in extra-curricular activities, joining the staff of the campus literary magazine The Occident, becoming a fixture in a local poetry club, and making frequent trips across the bay to the San Francisco opera house. At the age of eighteen he was mapping out a plan for cultural advancement that fell outside of the bounds of the classroom, again reporting home to Bakersfield:

 

Music well under way— Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Sibelius, Wagner etc. etc.—

 

read:      Steinbeck’s Mice and Men

                Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

                Jeffers’ Solstice

 

art:          El Greco       discovered Courvoisier

                                        galleries—

                Federal art exhibit

 

Ella Young’s Celtic lectures…[6]

 

Absorbed in the intellectual opportunities provided by Berkeley and the urban center of San Francisco, Duncan set out on an adventure in search of the persona of the poet. In an introduction to his 1966 volume of poetry, The Years As Catches, he wrote:

 

By my eighteenth year, I recognized in poetry my sole and ruling vocation. Only in this art—at once a dramatic projection and at the same time a magic ritual in which the poet comes into being—only in this art, it seemd to me, could my inner nature unfold.[7]

 

            Duncan’s devotion to poetry was soon tested through his editorial work on the campus literary magazine, The Occident.[8] While other students involved with the publication were loyal to a traditional closed-verse poetics, Duncan often suggested the solicitation of more ambitious pieces of writing. Later in life, he saw that struggle as an indication of his own endurance, a sign that writing was to be his craft. He told an audience in 1969:

 

…while there were some twenty poets who were ruling the whole scene at the University of California, and they all knew what poetry was, it was Auden and Spender, and I couldn’t see this, and so when we were looking at student poems they would be “no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” and a little freshman “yes”…and I had a stubbornness that should’ve told me I was going to be able to hold out for the rest of my life for sure….What  I didn’t know of course is that I would be the only one to survive at the age of fifty…to actually be a poet.[9]

 

 

            Through his work at The Occident, Duncan was introduced to two novice writers, Robert Haas and Louise Antoinette-Krause. Again he reported the news to his mother:

 

I have met this boy at the I[nternational] House and a girl who writes beautifully, Louise Krause…. Both of them encourage me to read Eliot, read Beaudilier [sic] (the one who wrote ‘Flowers of Evil’) I haven’t read either yet. Both warn me to stay away from Stein. I told them that I was easily influenced by other people’s cadences.[10]

 

In lectures given thirty years later he revised the tale. Duncan recalled that when he met the two young poets in the campus’s International House at the top of Bancroft Avenue, Krause insisted his writing was too "lurid", and that he should avoid reading Eliot. Most importantly she uttered a pronouncement that changed his life: “He must read Pound.”[11] Whether it was Krause or another source that turned him in the direction of Ezra Pound, the immense scale of the Cantos opened a breathtaking landscape. To his pantheon of early Modernist masterpieces in painting, music, and literature, Duncan added Pound. Relating this scene from his undergraduate career years later he stressed the significance of The Cantos:

 

...and I went trembling and running to a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue and found there the XXX Cantos. And I opened the page and read  “And then went down to the ship” and I said—I can't bear it, this is too much. For a whole week I went around with "And then went down to the ship." It was a poem that opened up exactly like an Oz book.[12]

 

With its Oz book opening, Pound’s epic project proceeded along like a great Homeric adventure, a collage narrative of history written in multiple languages with colorful characters, villains and heroes, all presented in a form on the page previously unseen in American poetry. The Cantos, begun in 1915, four years before Duncan’s birth, shook the foundations of experimental verse. For Duncan the influence of Pound’s work was two-fold; it became a starting point from which to examine both the form and content of the art of poetry. In 1912, with H.D. and Richard Aldington, Pound had circulated the precepts of a new movement called Imagism. Duncan later integrated the ideas of Imagism into his own poetics and into his study of Modernism, The H.D. Book. One of Pound’s directives, for poets to study the melodies of language and what he called “the tone leading of vowels” became a mainstay of Duncan’s tricks of the trade as a lyric poet. 

And despite Louise Antoinette Krause’s warnings, another Modernist, Gertrude Stein, soon became Duncan’s “patron saint.” Duncan recalled that Krause’s companion Robert Haas, then in correspondence with Stein, had given him access to recordings of the poet reading her work.[13]  An early piece of Duncan’s called “A Bone Only For Jenniver,” opened with the Stein-influenced lines:

 

Only and ever for Jenniver lightly.  And that to for Jenniver

only lightly.  And ever and only.  Ever and only.  Ever and

only.  Ever and only for Jenniver lightly.

Lightly for Jenniver Jenniver only. Lightly for Jenniver

lightly for Jenniver lightly for Jenniver only…[14]

 

While H.D., Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence had been vital to Duncan as starting points into Modernist writing, his peers at Berkeley offered him an introduction to artists engaged in other sorts of aesthetic propositions. The expanding canon of his ambitious self-education became a regular topic in his letters to his mother:

 

If while I am sweeping I murmer [sic] Stravinsky a couple of times I am in absolute ectasy [sic]. Dos Passos, Dostoyevsky and Dickens I would say to myself…write it down…On and on…in the night and over flowers and in spare time talking, writing to myself…Cabell, Colette, Cummings…Shakespeare, Shelley, Sherwood, Sheridan, Shaw, Sophocles, Stein, Synge, Schiller, Four Saints in Three Acts…Fall of a City…and Murder in the Cathedral…and Ezra Pound's  Cantos XXX-XLV.[15]

 

 

Duncan’s Stein derivations continued into the mid-1950s, and Pound’s influence resonated throughout his life’s-work. In an essay entitled “The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound,” he wrote of

 

Pound’s role as the carrier of a tradition or lore in poetry, that flowered in the Renaissance after Gemistos Plethon, in the Provence of the twelfth century that gave rise to Albigensian gnosis, the trobar clus, and the Kabbalah, in the Hellenistic world that furnished the ground for orientalizing-greek mystery cults, Christianity, and neo-Platonism.[16]

 

A ghost of the Symmes family gnosticism welled up in Duncan’s understanding of Pound, but so too did a new relation to music.  From Pound’s sense of poetic melody, it was a short step to Igor Stravinsky’s theories of sound in creative compositions. In writing about Pound, Duncan drew parallels to Stravinsky:

 

In the Norton Lectures of 1939-40 on Poetic of Music, published in 1947, Stravinsky defined melody as “the intonation of the melos, which signifies fragment, a part of a phrase. It is these parts that strike the ear in such a way to mark certain accentuations.” From the unit of the musical phrases, music and poetry too seemed to be turning to the articulation of the immediate particle—the melos or syllable.[17]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two: A Company of Women

 

“All of us poets need women to listen to us. And Robert Graves is right about the muse. You’re way ahead when you have a circle of them around looking enthralled.”

 

                                                            —Robert Duncan, Vancouver, 1963

 

At Berkeley there were these little record concerts in the afternoons, we’d go and sit and listen to records. There were about five, maybe ten people who would do that….And I’d see Robert and Mary and Lili and then Cecily there. And they were always having a wonderful time, so that I expected that he would be very witty. And he was, fantastically.

 

                                                                         —Virginia Admiral, 1998

 

Six months into his college career Duncan met two women crucial to the development of his ideas about art and politics, Lillian Fabilli and Cecily Kramer. He paid homage to them in the opening chapter of The H.D. Book where they appear as Lilli and Athalie. Fabilli had been raised in a large close-knit Italian Catholic family, and had spent much of her childhood in the San Joaquin Valley town of Visalia. In Berkeley she supported herself by working as a housekeeper for a well-to-do couple living in the Berkeley Hills. A lonely teenager with little money, Fabilli spent her first several weeks in the Bay Area engaged in her studies and in the tasks related to her new working life. During that first autumn away from home, she met another Berkeley student who became a fast friend. Cecily Kramer, "a jewess" as Duncan and Fabilli later described her, was a San Francisco native also enrolled at the college. It was the outgoing Kramer who first befriended Duncan and introduced him to Fabilli. From there, the company of women who came to form the core of his social and domestic life at Berkeley grew quickly. Lili Fabilli, her older sister Mary, Cecily Kramer, Virginia Admiral, Ida Bear, Pauline Kael, and Janet Thurman all converged to shape Duncan’s unofficial education. Key early mentors to him, he often referred to them as his sisters. The Fabillis had brought with them to Berkeley working class ideals and a sophisticated grassroots intellectualism that intrigued Duncan. When he met Lili Fabilli in 1937, she was a painter, a writer, and a self-declared anarchist who also dabbled in Trotskyite politics. Through her example and later through the example of Virginia Admiral, Duncan found the permission to carve an unusual place for himself in the commotion of pre-war politics. Before he articulated his own positions, he listened to his new advisors. Virginia Admiral later remembered a key fact about this process, that “when Robert came across new people he was very open. Almost as though he said to himself ‘I want to learn everything I can from this person.’”[18] At Berkeley, there were idiosyncratic sects of the political all around him. Years later he recalled, “We know about Stalinists and Trotskyites but in those days you had to know what a Lovestonite [was] and it went on and on. It was fascinating and it was wonderful, like knowing all the medieval heresies.”[19]

In that fertile environment, Duncan was quick to jump into the fray. He had graduated from high school while German troops were on the march in Rhineland. On another front in Europe, Spanish Loyalist forces were battling the fascist Nationalist front led by General Franco. By the early fall of 1937 nearly three thousand Americans had joined a brigade of international volunteers in Spain to aid the Loyalist troops. Discussions of the political situation in Europe were a focal point for the student body of the University of California, where the administration had begun implementing anti-communist legislation, marking the beginnings of three decades of political conflict between students, faculty and administrators in the University of California system. At Berkeley, Duncan discovered that he was among the ranks of those “looking around at politics and feeling where we were in it—the Spanish Civil War was the thing.”[20]

Removed from the conservatism of his Bakersfield household, Duncan’s political consciousness bloomed. Early in his college career he wrote: “Now I come to the certain realization that no poet or writer today is going to progress without a certain consciousness of the social problems and movements.”[21] He outlined the logic of his chosen political affiliation to his mother, describing how he had considered a number of leftist groups from church organizations to the YMCA to the “only too wishy-washy Young Communist League.” In the end he joined the American Student Union (ASU) of the Berkeley campus, explaining “I had more friends there, friends who were leaders (tho I have quite a few among the YCL) and because I couldn’t really be sincere in the YCL.”[22]  Duncan further told his mother that at his first ASU meeting he had been named “director of publications” and would be “sitting on an executive council with three young communists and five moderate socialist students from cooperative houses, [and] student heads of student labor unions…”[23]

The formation of the American Student Union heralded the beginning of the student movement in the United States, and laid the foundation for the youth activism of the 1960s. As a coalition of the previously existing National Student League and the Student League for Industrial Democracy,

 

[d]uring its peak years, from spring 1936 to spring 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 college students (about half the American student body) in annual one-hour strikes against war. The movement also organized students on behalf of an extensive reform agenda, which included federal aid to education, government job programs for youth, abolition of the compulsory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), academic freedom, racial equality, and collective bargaining rights.[24]

 

 

The eastern border of the Berkeley campus then extended as far as the architectural landmark Sather Gate. In what was known as the "Sather Gate tradition," students held gatherings at the perimeter of that landmark, observing the rules restricting political meetings on University grounds, while remaining conspicuously within sight and earshot of those inside the boundaries of the campus. Sociologist Max Heirich wrote of “the Sather Gate tradition” in The Beginning: Berkeley 1964:

 

This compromise in fact allowed proselyters access to a voluntary audience of university personnel but without the overt concurrence of the administration or faculty.  At several points during the nineteen thirties University President Robert Gordon Sproul made it clear that students had a right to attend meetings at Sather Gate if they chose to do so, but that the university was not involved in the proceedings.  After 1938, when collection of funds was added to the list of prohibited political activities (to counter a student attempt to raise funds for medical relief in the Spanish Civil War), fund raising also became assigned to the Sather Gate area.[25]

 

At the outset of his sophomore year, Duncan was deep enough into the political scene to incite a fraternity house controversy. In October of 1937 he wrote to his mother that the “anti-neoculture and the upper rotc boys” took offense at his involvement in the ASU:

 

Their contention was that just on principle it was not for the good of the house that I should be associated with the leftist front. They insisted further that I shouldn’t be seen with friends of mine who were even more prominent leaders in the field. “WE will be labeled reds” they cried…. The whole thing was that since the ASU was an activity that might associate the house with the leftist front I should drop it.[26]

 

Rather than discontinue his association with the ASU, Duncan dropped the fraternity and moved toward a deeper engagement with activities outside of the strictures of the university.

Duncan later organized the first chapter of The H.D. Book around memories of these Berkeley politics and the role his new female companions played in educating him. He conjured a particular scene of his afternoons spent outdoors reading James Joyce’s poetry with Cecily Kramer and Lili Fabilli. On the Berkeley campus, Duncan, alongside the rest of his fellow male students, was required to engage in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) drills twice a week, a prelude to the United States’ impending involvement in the Second World War:

 

            In the jostling streams, lower classmen, some in uniform, some still to change into uniform, went from all parts of the campus toward the gymnasium. It was the hour for R.O.T.C. classes that impended.

            "You don’t have to go," Lili commanded, raising her hand in a dramatic gesture that had been delegated its powers by the conspiracy of our company. "Stay with Joyce."[27]

 

He wrote later in the chapter, “Turning from the authority that the requirements and grades of the university or the approval of my teachers had once had over me to a new authority in the immediacy of what I had come to love, I came into a new fate."[28] 

The fate of turning from authority and institution may have been opened to Duncan through his infatuation with Edna Keough in Bakersfield, but it was consolidated through the influence of the women he was closest to in Berkeley. In conversations with them he arrived at a belief that his own work as a poet was an inherently political act and that the freedom of humanity as a whole necessarily transcended the freedom of any particular separatist group. Out of the commotion of the many left wing fronts surrounding him, Duncan eventually positioned himself as an anarchist. Later in his writing and in public statements he remained true to a vision of anarchist politics, espousing a distrust for governments and doctrines, and as he wrote in his 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society”:

 

...only one devotion can be held by a human being seeking a creative life and expression, and that is a devotion to human freedom, toward the liberation of human love, human conflicts, human aspirations. To do this one must disown all the special groups (nations, religions, sexes, races) that would claim allegiance.[29]

 

 

With poetry as a ruling vocation, the field of the political was folded into his life’s work. Anarchism became a metaphor for Duncan’s attention to a system of spiritual orders far outside the realm of man-made law.

 

The convergence of Duncan, Cecily Kramer, and Lili Fabilli, stood at the beginning of a chain of events out of which a community was formed. Their adolescent enthusiasm spilled over into their public life together and they soon attracted others to their company. During January of 1937, twenty-three-year-old Mary Fabilli arrived in Berkeley, leaving her hometown of Visalia at the urging of her sister Lili. Raven haired, with a stern, square face, Mary Fabilli entered the budding literary scene with an air of authority. She first found housing with her sister Lili, and then later lived with Virginia Admiral, sleeping on the sofa in a large room that Admiral rented at a Bancroft Avenue boarding house.

Her initial meeting with Duncan occurred early during the fall of 1937 on the grounds of the campus. Cecily Kramer had spoken to her about “a wonderful young man” who was interested in the arts and writing. Fabilli and Duncan had read each other’s poetry in the Occident, both having been published in its March and April 1937 issues, Fabilli under the pen name Aurora Bligh. Duncan was eighteen-years-old, and as Mary Fabilli later recalled, he was already an obsessive monologist.[30] Like others who encountered him, she was also struck by his physical appearance, his large-head and

 

unruly straight black hair, a conventional hair cut, with dark eyes, one of which looked at you and the other roamed elsewhere into space....His shoulders were broad enough but his hips very narrow, his hands large and expressive in the wrists....[31]

 

The two were classmates, sitting side by side in American literature and philosophy classes, during which they fended off boredom by exchanging notes and comical sketches.[32] Throughout his life, Duncan considered Fabilli to be one of his three central peers in poetry, alongside Sanders Russell and Jack Spicer. Given his wide range of associations with writers over several decades, such a statement stands as testament to Fabilli’s early influence. Fabilli reciprocated the sentiment, writing in the introduction to her 1968 collection of poems Aurora Bligh,

 

Robert seemed to be a magician of the marvelous, arriving at the most unexpected times to show us his discoveries whether of records (music and poetry), books, or reproductions of paintings. His enthusiasm was unfettered and often contagious, his devotion to poetry religious and his pen prolific.[33]

 

The intimate Berkeley circle gained another new member during 1938, an art student named Virginia Admiral from Chicago. Admiral had completed a degree at the University of California during February of 1938, and remained in Berkeley to attend graduate classes in the art department. Lili Fabilli remembered being in a restaurant one day in 1937 or 1938 when Admiral approached, asking to share her table. Admiral had a different memory of her first contact with Fabilli and her friends:

 

… just before I met them I had a tachycardia that put me in the hospital, and nobody knew what caused it and it went on for what seemed like weeks.  I finally figured out it was because my boyfriend had died the previous fall….I had moved from the top floor of this rooming house to a room on the ground floor and I was spending most of my time in bed and I had sort of dropped out of the university….and I saw Lillian turned away by landlady after she had come up to the house.  I assumed she had applied for a room, and she said there are none. So I went out and got her and said “you can share my room” because I thought I’d like to know them….Then at that point I began to take interest in life.[34]

 

 

At some point not long after Admiral’s meeting with the Fabilli sisters, Duncan also entered her world. She remembered their first encounter for its peculiarity:

 

I was sharing a room I think with Mary at the time. A garret it was, on Bancroft. It had these windows that opened out, and it was the top floor. We had a mimeograph machine. Robert was up there. He was reading a poem. I think it was probably “Ritual” and he was squirming around.  He said later he had crabs.[35]

 

As their friendship developed, their conversations meandered into the field of politics, and Admiral attempted to set the younger Duncan on an improved path. A Trotskyite sympathizer, she discouraged Duncan away from the ASU:

 

He was in the ASU, that is the American Student Union, which was a blanket group following policies of supporting collective security which was a dilution of the Communist Party line….Whereas the group I was associated with (I wasn’t actually a member at that time) but became later, was Trotskyites.  There were about seven Trotskyites and about 30 YCLers [Young Communist Leaguers], and by that time they had stopped speaking to each other…. We congregated by an education group, which had a storefront. And one person or another would talk. And different people could come, and outsiders could come….At that time I didn’t go to  internal meetings. I was just what you’d call a sympathizer. But I was doing leaflets and I was doing a lot of stuff. And Robert was in the ASU and I explained to him how terrible it was to be in the ASU and all the different problems associated with it— that it was wrong-headed and all of that stuff. And he went along with it. So he was similarly a sympathizer with the Trotskyite youth group.[36]

 

 

Duncan also joined forces with Admiral in a literary venture, editing a mimeographed magazine called Epitaph. The first and only issue was published during the spring of 1938 with a cover illustrated by Mary Fabilli, and contributions of writing and artwork from Duncan, Fabilli, Admiral, Ida Bear, Antoinette Krause, and James Fitzgerald. Duncan’s offering came in the form of three poems, "Ritual", "Relativity, A Love Letter, and Relative To What; A Love Letter", "Self Portrait at 90", and three drawings. Stylistically, the poems hinted toward the influences of T.S. Eliot and Ogden Nash, but it was in the realm of Stein derivation that Duncan showed some prowess, opening “Relativity, A Love Letter” with the lines:

 

Dark leads into the streets and dark leads into the streets and a shut door. Partly only into being and a shut door.  Partly only in being and a shut door.  Being as in being nowhere. Being as to come into being in partly only and outside. Dark leads into the streets and a shut door.

To come suddenly upon something. Suddenly upon something and partly only in being. To be outside and partly in being in by the inside. Suddenly inside to come suddenly partly only to being. Being only as for one partly understanding and a shut door.[37]

 

The literary collaborations between Duncan and Admiral extended in another direction as he began to share his poems with her and she became a meticulous critic of his early writing:

 

I’d actually go over his poetry word for word, line for line, and I was a fanatical punctuator. And I’d say “Now what does this line mean?” I remember there was one poem, something about the monkey on his back in a park, and I said “now what does that mean?  Tell me where you got it,” and he was trying to explain it. I would say that’s too personal an allusion. An allusion has to be related to by the person who’s reading the poem… and I said that’s incomprehensible.[38]

 

By 1938, the pull of creative life had begun to overshadow any vague academic aspirations Duncan may have had when he enrolled at Berkeley. He was spending more time with Admiral, the Fabillis, and Cecily Kramer, and less time in the classroom. Engaged with a group of sincere young people with whom he could share his interests about art and politics, a familial dynamic took over. Duncan’s real education came through that bohemia, remembered with fondness years later by Virginia Admiral:

 

Robert and Lili loved to cook. We listened to Robert’s records: Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bach cantatas, Edith Sitwell, T.S. Eliot. In the evenings Mary and I would be doing watercolors or drawing, and Lili had developed a way of making crayon designs on cloth, then fixing them with a hot iron. Robert would be typing, listening to music, talking, none of it interfering with the poem he was working on.[39]

 

Three: The Dance

 

For my Other is not a woman but a man

the King upon whose bosom let me lie.

 

                         —Robert Duncan, “The Torso”

 

 

Despite his talkative nature, Duncan didn’t articulate many details about his sexuality to his female admirers. Virginia Admiral noted that he sometimes acted “campy,” and Mary Fabilli recalled that when Duncan first mentioned his sexual preference to them, “none of us were interested because we didn’t think of him as a boyfriend.”[40] But Cecily Kramer did seem to take issue with her friend’s sexuality, as did Mary Fabilli later in life when she became more deeply involved in the Catholic Church. Virginia Admiral remembered:

 

Cecily was very concerned with philosophical and spiritual aspects of something she felt to be a terrible mistake. Well in those days there was a lot of feeling against homosexuality and I didn’t have it, but I know Mary did, but she wasn’t trying to turn Robert away from his choice. But basically he could assume that all three of his friends—Cecily mainly, and Mary and Lillian secondarily wanted him to become heterosexual.[41]

 

Duncan briefly shared an apartment with Virginia Admiral and Mary Fabilli, and provided a number of mixed messages to his female companions. He made a habit of entering their bedrooms in the middle of the night to recite new poems to them, and he clung to them for emotional support. In a 1940 letter to Lili Fabilli he wrote:

 

...from the time Cecily, Mary and you and I talked together it was a world in which people were kind to me, in which there were people of love and peace.  Yet I know how my need was one to be loved more than to love. I have not helped you as you have rescued me so many times.[42]

 

 

Mary Fabilli remembered another frustration that arose in her friendship with Duncan, that he treated her as “another Robert,” oblivious to her individuality.[43] While Fabilli reciprocated familial feelings toward her younger friend, Duncan’s demands for attention came to tear at their relationship.

Throughout his teens and twenties, Duncan remedied such situations by finding new households to descend upon, starting fresh into a cycle of monologing and helping himself to the contents of the kitchen cupboards. In addition to his stay with Fabilli and Admiral, he lived in a boarding house north of the campus at 1542 Hawthorne Terrace, and also with a friend of the Fabilli sisters named Vincent Elgrin, where he found a bridge between two worlds, that of his female friends and that of the gay community in Berkeley.[44] North Berkeley at the time hosted a small cluster of streets recognized as a homosexual ghetto, and Duncan, in a Gay Sunshine magazine interview also spoke of his fraternity as a place of sexual exploration:

 

I began to see this wasn’t like high school. There’s a very busy circle of things going on. We’d go to a place where you could dance, where they’d drink quite a bit, and I began to be aware. All frat houses took their pledges to Finochio’s just to give ’em this shock of what they’d never seen before....This was 1936. Finochio’s had imported from Japan this great youth, he was probably 18, and they also had another 20 year old gorgeous, bewildering male presence in women’s clothes yet. Well, I saw there were pleasure boys. So, that was hovering in my mind…[45]

 

Whether the goal of expeditions to Finochio’s was to shock the young pledges or to encourage a lifestyle, there was a quiet acceptance of homosexuality among the men. Duncan said years later, “I remember the sophistication of the frat house ’cause they said: ‘Well, we know why that guy’s taking you to the opera all the time and when he stops taking you to the opera we’ll know ya came across...’”[46]

It was during his second year at Berkeley, during the spring of 1938, that Duncan met a graduate student named Ned Fahs, with whom he was quickly smitten. Their first encounter came at a dance on campus, and before long they were dating. A PhD candidate in Romance Philology, Fahs charmed Duncan with both his looks and his erudition. Virginia Admiral remembered that of the men Duncan met in Berkeley, “Ned was the only important one.”[47] Over the course of Duncan’s life, when he reflected on a force he called the Eros, he returned to his relationship with Fahs as its cardinal example. A symbol of desire, Fahs entered into Duncan’s poems some twenty years after the end of their relationship. In “The Structure of Rime XI”, Fahs was invoked as a ghost who stood at the advent of Duncan’s creative life:

 

There are memories everywhere then. Rememberd, we go out, as in the first poem, upon the sea at night—to the drifting.

 

Of my first lover there is a boat drifting. The oars have been cast down into the shell. As if this were no water but a wall, there is a repeated knock as of hollow against hollow, wood against wood. Stooping to knock on wood against the traps of the nightfishers, I hear before my knocking the sound of a knock drifting.[48]

 

The relationship with Fahs was from its beginning tied to Duncan’s childhood fantasies, and it allowed him to identify further with Minnehaha who was still his closest confidant during his late teens:

 

My ideal, my strong picture like with N., with whom I did fall in love, was of someone ten years older than me. In that way I think I was replicating my mother’s and father’s relationship in which I was my mother falling in love with my father….So I set my cap for N. who was a wolf playing the scene. I hadn’t met him but had heard about him first and then snared him and so on. It was Jane Austen all over again, getting my man like I saw it in the movies.[49]

 

Duncan found himself at the beginning of an adventure that would take him away from his comrades in Berkeley. Fahs, near the completion of his studies, was soon to move to Delaware where he had secured a teaching job as an instructor of French.

Meanwhile, Duncan finished his sophomore year of college in May of 1938, and enrolled in two summer classes, zoology and English. When not engaged in his studies or with Ned, Duncan made himself at home with his old circle of friends. The Fabilli sisters and Virginia Admiral were at the time sharing a cottage in Berkeley owned by a friend named Ida Bear. Admiral remembered the season as a turning point:

 

In Berkeley that summer at Ida’s we would talk about coming to New York. We felt an exile for New York or Paris or London or someplace, so that I think Robert and I and…Janet [Thurman] were all convinced that we had to go to New York. It was just a question of when.[50]

 

As the summer came to an end, it became clear that Duncan would be the first to leave for the East Coast. During the first week of September Ned Fahs completed his PhD examinations and celebrated with Duncan and other friends before leaving to begin his new job. Duncan reported to his mother that their parting had been difficult:

 

Miss Rosenberry (a friend of Ned’s) drove us to the station. Then he was gone; I knew that I should have been going with him. All the things I was staying for seemd so very small when weighed against the emptiness of that moment. Rosie (Miss Rosenberry) lent me a handkerchief, there could be no pretense at that moment, it was too real; and then we went and had a beer and some steamed clams and then she took me home.[51]

 

Having said their goodbyes, Fahs traveled east and Duncan moved back to his old fraternity house at 2340 Piedmont Avenue, bringing with him a dog named Haille. Heartsick for his lover, he fell back upon the comforts of family, spending time in Oakland with his Aunt Faye, and with his father’s sister Alvie Brumm. On September 11, 1938, he penned a note to his mother, congratulating her on her recent marriage to an old family friend, Lewis Andrew Burtch.    

Meanwhile, Duncan made a vague attempt to return to his studies. He enrolled in three English classes and an introductory French course that fall, ending the semester with a string of C’s. While he had also hoped to team up with Virginia Admiral to edit a second issue of Epitaph, their plans fell short of completion. The nineteen-year-old Duncan struggled to finish his academic work and made plans to travel east that December to visit Fahs. He wrote to his mother of his loneliness, and he also shared the details of his emotional state with a new friend named Sanders Russell, a young poet he had met through Fahs. In an October 5, 1938 letter to Russell, Duncan confessed:

 

I’m all illogical and impractical about it but I’m in love and there’s little to remedy that now—no I haven’t started writing again, I’m trying frantically to crawl thru this semester—my mind has become less acute, less habited in misuse.[52]

 

When Duncan left Berkeley at the end of that year, his future in academia was in question, and his transcripts showed below average grades. It would be nine years before he returned to the University of California at Berkeley, not to complete his undergraduate degree, but to study medieval history with scholar Ernst Kantorowicz.

 

During the course of the Second World War, Duncan hopscotched back and forth between the West Coast and New York, making stops in Chicago, Provincetown, Boston, Kansas City, and parts of the Deep South. His intimate relationships during that time period were as complicated as his travel routes, and his early and mid-twenties marked transitions in and out of experiments with heterosexuality, marriage, and prostitution. As the United States made its way into the Second World War, Duncan made his way into an emotional war—a quest to find his adult identity, via shamanistic rituals and makeshift Freudian self-analysis. While in his later life he rejected the emotional disturbances stereotypically associated with creativity, as a young writer he indulged in drama. He claimed that during his mid-twenties he had twice tried to kill himself, and it was clear that he had faced many relationship crises on the route to a life of semi-monogamous domesticity and calm.[53] 

Leaving Berkeley in December of 1938, he returned to Bakersfield briefly to spend the holidays with his mother, who agreed to send him one hundred dollars a month on the condition that he finish his education by December of 1941.[54] Duncan at times expressed an awareness of the special privilege of his mother’s support as he watched his friends in Berkeley scramble to make ends meet. Virginia Admiral found employment as a senior artist with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and Mary and Lili Fabilli also registered to work for the WPA in Oakland with the help of an art professor from Berkeley.[55] Duncan confided to his friend Sanders Russell that he found himself resistant to such a commitment:

 

I recognize only too well that I hate the bourgeois class and at the same time that I am limited by being a member of that class. Now I am inclined to believe that my rebellion is no proletariat consciousness, but a rebellion of any worker in art, a sort of furious snobbery….At the same time I believe blindly that the overthrowing of the bourgeois class and the epic of proletariat civilization is the life of the movement today, that the glorious bourgeois are indeed the hollow men, the stuffed men.[56]

 

With a financial advance from his mother, Duncan made his way toward Philadelphia where he was reunited with Ned Fahs in an apartment at 4521 Chester Avenue. As part of a vague plan to continue college, he arranged for his high school and college transcripts to be transferred to Philadelphia’s Temple University.[57] More keenly on his mind was the short distance between Philadelphia and Manhattan, where he could test the waters of an unfamiliar artistic and political community. At the age of twenty and far from home, he expressed hesitations about the venture of life in a new metropolis:

 

I must tho try and break in—I am stamped—the social registar [sic] does me no good— any cities [sic] social registar [sic] has a minus percent of the people I want to know—I thot of going to the socialist headquarters—but I have been too timid so far—as I am not a party member and I don’t know too much about the organization of the party…”[58]

 

New York was a noisy city, busy with activity beyond Duncan’s expectations. His timidity about breaking into East Coast circles was not simply a byproduct of his inexperience. Similar feelings about New York were reflected in the journals of another fellow writer, Anais Nin. Upon returning to the United States from Paris in 1939, she wrote:

 

In Paris, when entering a room, everyone pays attention, seeks to make you feel welcome, to enter into conversation, is curious, responsive. Here it seems everyone is pretending not to see, hear, or look too intently. The faces reveal no interest, no responsiveness.[59]

 

The cross-country move left Duncan both disoriented and excited. He longed for the companions he had left in Berkeley, sending them missives throughout the early part of the year:

 

My Lili — I want so to come back—it is only the prospect of New York that keeps me here and this summer with Ned—I love him if possible even more—but I love you too and when you write why aren’t you here—and when Virginia writes— I am so homesick—I want to jump the next train and come back.[60]

 

In the midst of his feelings of dislocation, Duncan began to explore the culture of New York. The advent of the 1940s marked a turn in the social fabric of the city. As the Second World War forced artists out of Europe, Manhattan became a haven for exiles. Duncan again reported to Lili Fabilli during his first months there:

 

...I saw a rug by Joan Miro and another rug by Hans Arp and one by Kandinsky and I saw little tea trays by Paul Klee and I went to the Dali show and in the window of one of the galleries was a wonderful Rouault...and then Ned and I went to a Russian Tea Room like the one in San Francisco and there in a front booth was Salvador Dali that strange beautiful little man with the huge sick eyes like a child’s...[61]

 

Duncan had arrived in Manhattan in time to be immersed in the tail end of the Surrealist Movement that had begun with Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, and that had splintered and matured in its new American habitat. At the Julien Levy Gallery on East 57th Street, the works of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali were being shown regularly throughout the early 1940s. In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art, established a decade earlier, found its permanent home in mid-town Manhattan. Those influences came into Duncan’s early writing, and also inspired him toward experiments with visual works. His sketches in notebooks showed an attention to Cocteau's sensuous lines and there were also elements of the styles of Kandinsky and Miro in his early drawings. In a letter to friends in Berkeley, Duncan made a catalogue of the works that graced his walls, mostly “cut out from magazines”, and including Rouault, Matisse, Picasso, Admiral, Dufy, Kandinsky, Miro, Symmes, Rousseau, Giotto, and Braque.[62] 

The poetry scene in Manhattan was equally in a state of renaissance during the war years. 1936 saw the beginning of James Laughlin's New Directions magazine, and the following year the Partisan Review was established. New Directions in Prose and Poetry’s first issue included works by Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, and other luminous figures of the Modernist movement. Laughlin wrote in his introduction to the first volume of the project, “experimental writing has a real social value, apart from any other. And it is with this in mind that this collection is published at this time.”[63] In 1940, a major surrealist-influenced publication surfaced in New York. Titled View, and edited by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, it provided Duncan another literary landscape to consider. When Andre Breton arrived in New York the following year, he brought European Surrealism to the doorstep of the American avant-garde with a magazine called VVV, edited with the help of Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. [64]

 

After nearly six months of domestic life with Fahs and a few expeditions to New York, Duncan traveled to the West Coast briefly to visit the Fabilli sisters and Virginia Admiral. In September, he again returned east, boarding a cross-country train and taking delight in the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest. It was his first chance to survey the middle of the country at a leisurely pace and he recorded his initial views with naïve excitement:

 

The mountains are really thrilling and then the little towns and lakes in the green wooded valley below….The Cumberland with the winding green clear river and the forests covering the hills as we traveled from Chicago to Baltimore. As we pass I populate the woods with Cooper Indians, and around Baltimore there are many little woods of sunlight and green and dark shadows where Indians lurk too constantly.[65]

 

 

The new season offered some clarity and optimism. He looked forward to moving into a new apartment with Ned, this time at 239 Prince George Street in Annapolis, Maryland. Fahs had accepted a teaching job in the Foreign Languages Department at the Naval Academy there, and Duncan himself had a new educational proposition on the table. He had applied to an experimental arts school in North Carolina—Black Mountain College—and had been offered a scholarship to study there.[66] When he arrived at Black Mountain that September, he was interviewed by the faculty and was immediately turned away. Duncan recorded his humiliation in a letter to his mother, written upon returning to Annapolis: 

 

I want to say again that altho [sic] the college would not say why they decided against me—they did say that they were not influenced by the financial statement. You and Ned and Aunt Faye all of you want to pretend that finances had something to do with it and not that they didn’t believe in me…[67] 

 

Duncan later told variant stories about what had happened during his visit to Black Mountain, sometimes saying that his anarchist ideas had caused a difficulty, other times saying that he had been rejected because of questions about his mental state. In either case, he quickly regrouped and found himself busy with two new ventures. The first was a novel, and the second, a new magazine project called Ritual. The novel, never completed, occupied him throughout his early career as a writer. As he reported to his mother in one of his weekly letters to her,

 

…I am starting work on a new opus…a try at prose I think it will have to be for what I want to do. It may be that I will not be able to work it out for I find that writing prose for me is very often like trying to carve marble with a butcher knife.[68] 

 

In the end, the novel was variously titled The Shaman, Toward the Shaman and The Shaman as Priest and Prophet. The venture took the form of a dreamscape of self-reflective journal entries, most of which never appeared in print but which came to fill several of his early notebooks. 

Still disappointed with his rejection from Black Mountain College, Duncan made preliminary plans to continue his education elsewhere, at New York University or at a Baltimore area school. He also made an unexpected move that fall, temporarily retreating from his relationship with Fahs to seek some emotional and financial independence. From some point in late September of 1939 through the end of the year, Duncan lived with friends named Jeff and Connie Rall in New York City, at 75 Bedford Street and at 35 Ridge Street on the Lower East Side. Again confiding in his mother, he offered an analysis of the thoughts behind the move. Telling her that he hoped to get a job rather than be supported by her or Ned, he also began to reflect upon his passage into adulthood:

 

At first in Berkeley I realized that the drive to write came into conflict with my university career (not you notice with study at the university—but with a career at the university) I began to realize that I wanted achievement rather than success. Then I met Ned and he is all mixed up with my being in life and I realized that there are responsibilities in loving—that one does not just love but one must solve all those responsibilities of understanding and believing and sacrificing that are part of love…[69]

 

Duncan’s temporary exile to the Lower East Side of Manhattan offered a number of diversions to sidetrack his job search:

 

That part of New York is a foreign world running east of the Bowery and south of Delancey and the bridge sticking out into the dark and disappearing. England disappears entirely and Roumania, Poland & Russia have complete control. Everything for blocks and blocks is kosher, knishes & borscht….Delancey Street as night comes on is a wonderful street with vendors of sweet potatoes, chestnuts, halvah, imported halvah from Turkey, from Russia, from Brooklyn, vendors of ties and handkerchiefs, of clothespins and little white dishes, hags selling papers, old men sitting like Rabbis talking in circles about problems of metaphysics…[70]

 

His host Jeff Rall also provided inspiration toward a bohemian lifestyle. Duncan recorded notes about the new friendship in a letter to Pauline Kael,

 

Jeff was a theater usher—about twenty-five or six—His father was a big boy in the I.W.W. and Jeff at 15 left home—gone on the bum—at 16 was a Communist—joined the Trotskyist group way back when….on top of this he knew his left movement inside out—outside of Hal Draper’s library—I haven’t seen a better one than his….also Jeff paints—he began the week I came—in earnest—(I am amazed at the way some of these people blossom under a little encouragement) He is one of the boldest people in his use of color and form that I have yet met…[71]

 

Casting aside his ambitions toward economic self-reliance, throughout the fall, Duncan made frequent visits to the Museum of Modern Art and its library, where he engaged in a rigorous study program of his own design and began “working on an essay on modern art…typified by [the] surrealism of Dali, Tchelitchew and the decadent American school of Benton and Wood.”[72] He mailed reports home to his mother to remind her that he was still looking for a job, occasionally also outlining fantastic plans to apply to a number of colleges in the East. 

 

Four: From Romance to Ritual

 

 

Duncan's relationship with Ned Fahs continued from a distance throughout the fall of 1939, with Fahs making a trip to New York in October of the year. He and Duncan spent a weekend together, attending the Ballet Russes and strolling through the Museum of Modern Art. Over Christmas weekend, Fahs again came to the city to view a Picasso show and to share a late night pre-holiday celebration with Duncan and Jeff and Connie Rall. It was Duncan’s first Christmas away from home, a fact that he made note of wistfully in a letter to his mother. But his anxiety about being on the East Coast during the holidays was pacified by the events of a Christmas spent in Woodstock, New York. Early in the morning of December 24, Duncan and Fahs traveled by train up the Hudson Valley to visit Phoenix Press editors James and Blanche Cooney. 

            Duncan had first announced himself to the Cooneys’ community during the spring of 1939, writing a letter to the couple in which he explained, with some flourish, his relation to the craft of poetry:

 

...all my current works are narratives and prophecies—all that I aspire to do is communicate somehow my psychic experiences as the poets of the pre-moralist age—as the young druid poets and those who wore the cloak of blue feathers in Ireland and as all poets must do to some extent—speak not the conscious but the subterranean contact with elemental forces.[73]

 

In Woodstock, the Cooneys were at the center of the Maverick Artists Colony, editing a magazine called the Phoenix and running the Phoenix Press. The Colony, founded in 1904 by writer Hervey White, was an offshoot of Woodstock’s original artists’ commune, Byrdcliffe, which had been established at the turn of the century. Hosting artisans and musicians throughout the summer months, the Byrdcliffe site was made up of studios dotting the Catskill Mountains. Hervey White’s dedication to music, and the part he played in the construction of a concert hall and theater, brought musicians to the site from around the world. The Cooneys had opened their print shop with White’s help, and had begun publishing the works of internationally known poets and novelists such as Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller. Nin, a correspondent and occasional visitor to the Cooneys’ home, described the tenor of the place in her diaries:

 

James Cooney, red-haired, Irish, with his hair falling over ingenuous green eyes, humorous and romantic, emotional and generous. They live in a log cabin in the woods. They wanted to go back to the earth, to live a Lawrencian life, but a community one, gathering together people with the same interests.[74]

 

 

It was during Duncan and Fahs’s Christmas visit of 1939 that the two were introduced to Anais Nin. For Duncan, the significance of the meeting was clear. He found himself fascinated with Nin, a petite woman with fine features and dark hair and eyes like his adoptive mother. He reported home to Bakersfield:

 

…she [Nin] was just over from France—a refugee from the war dictatorship—Her writings with those of such people as Charles Henri Ford and Lawrence Durrell (The English Book of the Dead) are among the most important in the international advance-guard…[75]

 

 

Nin, though still shell-shocked in the wake of her recent return to the United States from Paris, also ascribed an importance to the meeting. After a meal in front of the fireplace, Duncan read a poem to the group, and those gathered were given a tour of the Phoenix’s printing press and workshop. Nin recorded the events of the evening in her diaries, giving a customary description of Duncan as “a strikingly beautiful boy…with…a faunish expression and a slight deviation in one eye, which made him seem to be looking always beyond and around you...”.[76] She also made note of another peculiarity that drew her attention, the fact that he “talked obsessionally, overintently, overwillfully,” and that it seemed in his nature to “maintain a monologue, not a dialogue.”[77]

 

Returning to Annapolis with Fahs after the holiday, the couple resumed their life together, welcoming a puppy into the household and naming it Admiral Togo. While Fahs continued teaching at the Naval Academy, Duncan celebrated his twenty-first birthday and started work on Ritual magazine. News came that January of Virginia Admiral’s decision to move to the East Coast, and a reunion of the Berkeley circle seemed in the offing. Another friend, Janet Thurman, arrived from California soon after, and the convergence gave Duncan more reason to make hitchhiking forays from Annapolis to New York. Admiral’s first abode in the city was a loft at 30 East 14th Street overlooking Union Square. Duncan turned it into a home away from home, and other visitors included Anais Nin, who described the place in her diaries:

 

The first floor houses a shop, a hamburger bar, a shoe shop and a synthetic orange juice bar… The place is cold, but the hallways and lofts are big and high-ceilinged and the only place possible and available to a painter….The enormous windows which give on the deafening traffic noise of Fourteenth Street have to be kept closed. There are nails on the walls for clothes, a sterno burner for making coffee. We drink sour wine out of paper cups. There Virginia and Janet  [Thurman] paint, study acting and dancing, type when they need money.[78]

 

Once settled in the city, Admiral worked toward establishing a career for herself, during the early 1940s beginning studies with painter Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League.[79] Admiral also kept a foothold in the literary community, acting as a co-editor to Ritual magazine. One of the first orders of business was to solicit work from Anais Nin. Duncan and Admiral showed up on her doorstep at the George Washington Hotel in Greenwich Village, another event Nin wrote of in her diaries:

 

He is shy. He enters obliquely, as if to avoid collision. He talks as if under hypnosis. He invites me to contribute to a magazine called Ritual....They are both children out of Les Enfants Terribles. But they are children...[80]

 

Duncan wasted little time getting to know Nin better, and despite her initially ambivalent feelings toward him, she was drawn into the relationship as well. The two were dangerously matched: Nin with her interest in sexual intrigue and the romance of creative life, fed Duncan's already narcissistic vision of himself as a lover and writer. Offering each other a private readership for new projects, and jointly exploring Freudian and Surrealist theories of the psyche, Nin and Duncan found themselves inseparable. Nin became a mentor and a critical reader of Duncan’s poetry as well as a clever, if not entirely conventional, analyst. Born in 1903 in Paris, she had spent her childhood battered by the whims of her creative parents. In Europe before the war, she began her Diaries, recording with pride a number of affairs she carried out under the nose of her husband, a wealthy banker named Hugh Guiler. Beyond the enticement of such dramas, Duncan was drawn to the sensuous dreamlike images in Nin’s writing. Her House of Incest, published in 1936, opened his imagination to the possibilities of a new direction for his own work, and inspired him to return to his novel-in-progress Toward the Shaman.

Duncan also began his career as a published poet in earnest during 1940 when his work appeared in James and Blanche Cooney’s Phoenix magazine. The Easter 1940 issue included two of his poems, "We Have Forgotten Venus" and "Persephone," his first publications in a literary magazine "off-campus." There was still a hint of Eliot in Duncan’s early writing, and an ongoing preoccupation with the war in Europe. He closed the poem “Persephone” with the stanza:

 

We remember in symbols such violence:

the splintering of rock, the shock of the trauma,

in which she was taken from us.  Shade

falls under the shadow…shade upon shade.

Spotted with bonewhite, splinter of driftwood,

the bark wet with terror, no sleep,

only waiting.  Only we wait, our wounds barely heald

for the counterattack before sunrise.[81]

 

 

Duncan pointed out in a letter to his mother that an interest in ritual and shamanism had made its way into the poems, and that “Persephone,” was tied to his novel, as “a fragment of the movement of simulations and prayers and visions—the Shaman as Priest and Prophet.”[82] To his friend Pauline Kael he noted another influence:

 

After several severe doses of Joyce’s latest opus I have deserted the phrase and turned my attention upon the individual word—yet in a poem such as PERSEPHONE or in the short lyric “Birds drifting thru the haze of soot—” where I was working…quite painstakingly on word transitions—the phrasing stands up— I feel confident of that now.[83] 

 

His attention to the melodies of language had been pushed forward by his reading of Finnegans Wake, but the characteristic interchange between poetry and music in his work also had its antecedents in his studies of Pound and Stravinsky. He explained in his notes to Pauline Kael that his composition process had begun to evolve to account for intrinsic melodies in language: “The poem “Birds drifting thru the haze of soot” etc. is—at least in the first part built around word sounds. Birds to Brides, haze to tryst, soot to set, haze to wait—roof to reef…”.[84] 

Meanwhile, work on Ritual Magazine continued and the first issue was published during the spring of 1940 with its masthead listing two editors, Virginia Admiral in New York, and Robert Symmes in Annapolis, Maryland.[85] From the earliest stages of the project, Duncan made it clear that the writers he wished to publish were primarily old friends from Berkeley:

 

There will be so much to print—work by Ida Bear—her sharp, clinical prose uncovering the ritual of the daily act—the divinity of the commonplace—and Mary Fabilli weaving death and the collapse of this civilization that has destroyed in life & death so many souls—into wreaths of flowers—ploughing the clean earth over it all—restoring the world to youth and wandering rabbit—and Lillian and myself and Sanders Russell moving within the circles of the new sainthead…[86]

 

Ritual reconvened the contributors from the first and only issue of Epitaph that had been produced by Duncan and Admiral during the spring of 1938. It also added two new contributors, Sanders Russell and Anais Nin. Duncan published his own “Passage Over Water,” as well as a piece called “Hamlet: A Draft of the Prologue”, an excerpt of a play. Sanders Russell’s “Ten Poems,” were present, as was a prose piece by Ida Bear, a poem called “Cecily” by Mary Fabilli, an excerpt of Anais Nin’s The House of Incest, and a prose piece called “Dreams” by Virginia Admiral. As Ritual was being completed, Duncan continued moving back and forth between Annapolis and New York, visiting Anais Nin and Virginia Admiral, and at some point during that spring, seeing Stravinsky perform “his double piano concerto and a premier of a new piano concerto in one afternoon…” as well as a premier of a Prokofiev cello concerto.[87]

The war in Europe had taken a grim turn during the early part of 1940, with the German army invading Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and on the heels of the first and only issue of Ritual came a personal crisis for Duncan. By May of 1940, his relationship with Ned Fahs was drawing to a close. Duncan’s “Passage Over Water,” written during the early spring of that year, commented on the deterioration of the relationship:

 

Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time

our love like a knife between us

defining the boundaries that we can never cross

nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,

cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths

and the dark wound closed in behind us.[88]

 

A number of problems had arisen between the two men, and as Duncan confessed to his mother,

 

I have ended it with Ned. It was not a quarrel at all but just that at this time of separation I felt that it was not right to plan or think of coming together again. His mother coming East furnished the immediate cause; but it has been clear to me for a long time that the action, the direction that seems to be open for me is one which would only confuse him.[89]

 

Fah’s desire to continue a career at the Naval Academy had contributed to the split, as had a family crisis. That spring, his mother had suffered a nervous breakdown, and Fahs volunteered to take her in, leaving little room for him to continue an intimacy with another man. Duncan also recognized his own role in ending the relationship:

 

...love for me paranoic, devouring, always to be torn with disbelief that it would continue, driven at last in my fear to read his letters, to listen, to find in every attention he gave to anyone a desertion, a sudden loss of love...[90]

 

Too, Duncan recognized the ways in which Fahs had satisfied his need to revisit a drama from his childhood, noting in a journal entry,

 

When I talk about Ned—it is easily apparent to me the way that in many ways he is my father—the burdens Ned seemd to bear, the way he was so tired with them, the guilts over money owed, the consuming myth of the debt he had to pay—and his body itself—then when I come to this—to my father and I realize that I am conscious of living out all he rejected—for I have the feeling that he refused to love, [that he refused] to become the artist rather than the success.[91]

 

During the first months of their estrangement, Duncan found comfort in New York with Virginia Admiral, Anais Nin, and two new friends, the poet and novelist Kenneth Patchen and his wife Miriam. The Patchens had moved to Greenwich Village during January of 1940, and through his meeting with them, Duncan again found an opportunity to think of his career, telling Sanders Russell:

 

…we (V[irginia] and I) visited with Anais and spent three of the evenings with Kenneth Patchen (First Will and Testament) and his wife. He liked the first section of Shaman very much…and he is going to try to get it in New Directions 1940.[92]

 

That summer, Duncan continued to seek solace with friends, this time in the Cooney household on Maverick Road. There he found himself as concerned with the war in Europe as he was with the loss of Ned. On June 14, 1940, Nazi forces had taken Paris and Duncan found that he wanted to be on his way out of the United States entirely. From the safety of the Woodstock literary community he reported to Sanders Russell:

 

We sit here, Jimmy and Blanche and the children and I—planning the time of migrations; Mexico, some far place, some refuge beyond this hysteria for there is work to be done in a quiet time. We set type, pump water, empty the buckets, sit in the outhouse at night hearing the frogs sing and the late spring rains run from the shingled roof. Or during the day we dig in the garden, stir roots, and pile a little wall of stones between pine trunks. Knowing that these flowers must be left behind, that walls will be broken thru and the quiet grass spring up behind us.[93]

 

 

Through his friendship with the Cooneys, Duncan came into a new experience of the familial, and by the middle of 1940, he was a full-time resident of the Maverick Colony. His relationship with Blanche Cooney provided him with the comforts of female companionship that had been so much at the center of his Berkeley life. Cooney remembered her own deep attachment to Duncan:

 

Robert was in my real life. My androgynous friend. Jimmy and I both loved him but he was my pal, my constant companion. Hanging diapers on the clothesline, getting a meal for a crowd…he was there for me, dependably helpful, and dependably crazy. We were twenty-one, twenty-two years old, on the same wave length, struck at the same time by the risible, the ridiculous. Dark, slim, his right eye off center did not detract from his beautiful faun look; it kept him surprising.[94]

 

From the haven of Woodstock, Duncan wrote to his mother during August of 1940 that he had taken to herb gardening and was “drinking a quart of milk a day, eating two well rounded meals.” He also added a more detailed psychodramatic report for her approval:

 

I weigh around 145, do not smoke, drink a beer occasionally, at times eat immoderately, but I can still fast. I am given to mumbling my words so that no one can hear them; I am quiet in my movements. At the present time I am bearded— I will send you a photograph one of these days when one is taken. Teeth are bad, eyes give no trouble tho at times vision at a distance is blurred, ears are all right tho its (sic) a wonder since they never seem to get washed.[95]

 

Duncan also began another ambitious project while living on Maverick Road, a “reading series” of sorts, for which he wrote “sermons” to deliver to the Woodstock community. Blanche Cooney remembered that

 

Robert at twenty-one had the audacity to ask Hervey for the use of the Maverick Concert Hall on Sunday morning, before the chamber music recital. He wished to deliver a sermon. Not as a priest, minister, guru, but as a Shaman, in touch with the unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits. Hervey said yes. He couldn’t resist audacity. Robert stood at the lectern, an Indian poncho over his clean shirt and jeans, and with perfect composure spoke to the assembled group.[96]

 

 

The first sermon, entitled “Where this is veneration even a dog’s tooth emits light” was infused with an ambitious idealism characteristic of Duncan’s early prose work:

 

I feel that this return to speaking aloud among you is significant. Poetry has strayed far from its origins in time and now to gain strength, to know what it is all for, we must go back. It is because of this that speeches, Vanzetti’s speech in court is what comes to my mind, are greater, more real poetry than the poetry written, than the centuries of Keatses and Shelleys we have passed thru whispering their poetry in corners. It is a good thing to speak of love; I do not frown upon them, upon the Keatses and Shelleys, for there is no pettiness in their dark groves, there is no hate among their fauns. But this is a slight thing. Today we cannot be slight—and needing to encompass more, sensing the duty and responsibility of our work, there comes a need to speak and it is natural that the love poem becomes the epic conception and that the epic conception establishes certain compulsions that must be actualized and then the form of the sermon is used.[97]

 

The “audacity” that Blanche Cooney located in Duncan’s sermon project seemed partly the byproduct of the privilege he had enjoyed during his childhood as a messenger from another world. His Aunt Faye too had set an example. Her own theosophical essays were almost certainly a model for Duncan’s prose, as were Anais Nin’s sweepingly psychodramatic journals and fiction.

But as the summer of 1940 drew to a close, Duncan was faced with more serious questions about his future. In mid-October, he made a decision to register for the draft. Fearing that he’d be imprisoned if he disregarded the mandatory registration process, he made a compromise, explaining to Minnehaha, “…I will make the second best—that is protest against the service itself—that it is a human indignity that is too great to bear.” [98] Increasingly, Duncan’s letters to his mother seemed aimed as much at antagonizing her as rehearsing his political stances:

 

If my conscientious objection to the draft is recognized I will next year probably save money to go either 1) to the West Indies or 2) to India….In the meantime I worry a lot about you, my chere mama, how you rationalize this man-killing machinery, and defending oneself and lastly no longer a simple psychic question but one of good taste—voting for President.  Your focus and mine are so vastly different…[99]

 

 

His communications with the local draft board were equally provocative. Using a collage of lingo from his readings of eastern religion and Freudian psychoanalysis, Duncan argued against participating in the war. Replying to a draft survey question “On what grounds do you object to military service?”, he wrote:

 

The illusion of possession is a manifestation of the ego. Possession of a body, a name, an honor, a person, an object, a country, a law. In so far as we defend or seek to secure these, then we yield to this illusion, we dwell in the ego separation and we are at error.[100]

 

In responding to a further question as to the source of his beliefs, Duncan replied:

It is only in our own direct contact with reality, with a human being, a tree, a river, a mountain, with movement through space and time, only within ourselves, in our own revelation that we may discover the essential, the meaning and the way of our own life.[101]

 

In the end, his maneuvers were not convincing to the United States Army, and by the following spring he was called to report for service. 


Five: Toward the Shaman

 

 

During the fall and winter of 1940, Duncan remained in Woodstock and worked to finish the second issue of Ritual, now titled the Experimental Review. Meanwhile, he found himself at the helm of the Phoenix Press when the Cooneys, with the promise of a new farming venture in Georgia, briefly left Woodstock. The work related to the press, painstaking and time-consuming, was described by Blanche Cooney in her autobiography:

 

Only the press was powered, and only Jimmy ran it. All the work in the print shop that led to the climax of the press run was manual, handmaidenly labor; each step important but without the tension and triumph of the crucial process…. The print shop was a gathering place, a club house, a forum….friends appear in the afternoon, a weekend; poets, short story writers: contributors eager to see the source of their first published work. It’s so enticing, almost everyone asks “Can I help?” There’s the smell of ink, coffee’s always on, soup simmers on a hot plate...[102]

 

 

Faced with the added responsibility of providing for himself emotionally and financially through a cold Catskills winter, Duncan recruited a group of younger writers and artists to the Maverick Road Colony. Alvin and Marguerite Schwartz, Jack Johnson, and New York comrade Jeff Rall convened there during the fall and winter of 1940. During September of that year, another kindred spirit, Sanders Russell, arrived.[103] Duncan, a follower of Russell’s poetry, had encouraged the decidedly intriguing writer to live with him that winter. The two had first encountered each other in Berkeley through Ned Fahs, and as Duncan wrote of his new mentor:

 

Sanders was, when I met him, sometime in 1938 or 1939, already a mature poet. In the small company of poets I have known who have been and remain for me real poets, he was the first one. He had his own language, derived from Jeffers and from Eliot and Auden along another line but having undergone a creative change in Sanders’ intense meditation and speculations upon the nature of consciousness and the landscape as an object and mirror of being...[104]

 

Russell’s somewhat eccentric interests in Native American shamanistic practices, eastern religions, and yoga sparked the interests of the small Woodstock community. One observer, Alvin Schwartz, a fledgling playwright and future creator of the comic book hero Superman, remembered that Russell seemed particularly sophisticated to the younger writers gathered around the Cooney homestead. Schwartz recalled on one occasion watching the newcomer practice yogic breathing seated outdoors in a field and melting a patch of snow around his body.[105] Duncan found himself equally attracted to Russell whom he described as “a mature idol” with

 

deep set luminous eyes and the figure, nose and the mouth chiseled after a Greek mode in the material of a certain kind of Irish stock—not red haird, not small and dark, but impassive, white fleshd and tall.[106]

 

While Sanders Russell shared Duncan’s preference for men, the two seemed not to be fated to enter into a sexual relationship. Duncan felt compelled to explain the nature of this new friendship to his mother, perhaps masking his own disappointment in Russell’s inattention to his advances:

 

We are both Shaman, conscious of the powers our sexual nature endows us with—I do not know yet if two of equal powers can exist together so. But the most important added fact is that the, shall we say, karma laws of the SHAMAN—tend to produce a noli me tangere—a necessity of isolation even in sex which I have transgresst against. It is a law which I respect now tho—and I fear that if it were forgotten evolution would run off into a swamp…[107]

 

Russell’s passion for the spiritual was contagious, and it inspired Duncan to engage in improvised magic practices, spending evenings with friends in Woodstock playing surrealist games, and conducting séances. He had arrived back into his parents’ hermeticism, in one journal entry describing a gathering that took the form of a conjuring party:

 

Last night was another interlude of terror. After descending from a session in the attic in which Sanders [Russell], Jeff [Rall], Margaret [sic] [Schwartz], Alvin [Schwartz] and I tried once more to open the doors of fear—we have a desire to go into the world on the other side of those doors—I said; “I wish there would be a knocking at the door—and I don’t mean that door,” I said pointing to the front door. “I mean that one.” pointing to the attic trapdoor. At that moment there was a loud knock (as if the attic door had actually been lifted and dropped). Alvin was so terrified that his face actually turned white. Sanders and I immediately ascended to the attic again—the others followed. While we were quiet, waiting and observing,—nothing.  But then after ten minutes or so we relaxed—as we laughed and talked—I lay back on the floor—a growing presence came over us. As it reached a speedy peak Margaret [sic] remarked on this change. Everyone had felt it—and Jeff, Margaret [sic] and Alvin went downstairs. Sanders and I stayed. There was another minor crest of fear which those downstairs felt also—but it passed and left us quite dispossessed.[108]

 

With a meditative attentiveness to his surroundings, Duncan began to approach poetry as a recording place of physical and physiological phenomena. Sanders Russell’s contribution to his writing loomed large; it was through Russell that Duncan learned to “tune up” into a poem, to begin writing in moments of heightened sensory stimulation. His early training in that method of composition was hinted at in his Woodstock notebooks. During late November of 1940 Duncan wrote: 

 

...in the middle of the night both Billy [Wright] and I awoke.  The snow was evidently melting from the roof in some odd way—there was the terrible sense we have had in this house of being surrounded—the hostile one walking—this time up and down the back porch. I got up and had a sense of someone crouching at the back window—someone running off the porch across the snow. I called for Sanders—to have the reassurance that he was there—talking between rooms in the dark we decided it had been the snow dropping.[109]

 

When, on the following day, Russell wrote a poem with the line “invisible footfalls/surround us”, Duncan committed the image to memory. Nearly twenty years later, he resuscitated it in “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar”:

 

Oh yes!          Bless the footfall where

step by step                        the boundary walker

(in Maverick Road                        the snow

thud by thud                       from the roof

circling the house—another tread)[110]

 

 

 

In between rituals such as “sitting naked all night in the late autumn…on a rock” and “trying to talk to trees,”[111] Duncan made time to see the Experimental Review into completion. On December 1, 1940, he assembled and bound copies of the new issue with the help of friends Fanny Secord, Sanders Russell, and Marguerite Schwartz.[112] The new publication named two associate editors—Russell and Admiral, and its gray cover was graced with a drawing by Duncan called “Improvisation on the method of Miro.” The magazine included reviews of Henry Miller, Franz Kafka, and Dylan Thomas, as well as excerpts of Duncan's "Toward the Shaman,” and excerpts of Anais Nin’s House of Incest. Other early contributors to the magazine included Lawrence Durrell, Thomas Merton, Harvey Breit and Jack Johnson, and its editorial statement read:

 

The experiment is not to foster an eccentricity or a novelty of language, nor to create a new literature:  it is to extend the understanding, to bring everything into consciousness, to develop the artist’s awareness in the field of observation—  in the world of objects, values, dreams, in tensions within the social and economic order as well as in more involved states of consciousness—  the way of the primitive, the saint, or the mystic.[113]

 

Excited to be at the completion of the publishing project, and eager to be the center of attention, Duncan turned the floor of the December 1st sewing party into a stage. He recorded one event of the evening with some pride:

 

We put on the Swahili female dance. I danced— the music let me cut loose forget every thing in the room, become the idiot—I found myself crawling jerking my head, shoulders—the whole body twitching, making faces, dancing on my shoulders.…this is part of the awakening possibilities of the SHAMAN…[114]

 

 

With his eye on a teenaged sculptor named Nicholas De Vol, Duncan gave in to temptation, using his newfound shamanistic powers as a tool of seduction. Despite the vow of chastity he had taken in early autumn, that winter he would begin a number of brief affairs, one of which propelled him away from the Woodstock community. At some point early in 1940, Ducan had begun a relationship with Anais Nin’s cousin Eduardo Sanchez. The two had been apart through the autumn, but on December 3, Duncan received an invitation to visit Sanchez to North Carolina:

 

Why do I want you here? Obviously because as a lover I want you. But if this were all, I would have you stay in Woodstock, and I would curb my impatience for one month, and then come to you for a week in January. But there is the father in me too, who wants to be satisfied. He wants you and Virginia [Admiral] to have a change, rest, not to have to worry about food, cleaning, etc.; to have plenty of time and plenty of room to work…[115]

 

Duncan described his new lover in a letter to Blanche Cooney as “a pleasantly handsome blond Spanish mildish man in appearance—with nice exotic eyes (like little almonds)…given to biting, buggering, and being over enthusiastic.”[116] Sanchez, then staying in Asheville, North Carolina with his sister and her two young children, was renaissance man of sorts—an astrologer and writer who had lived in Florence during the 1930s and had published a book called The Round under the name Eduardo Santiago. Anais Nin had experienced her own teenaged crush on her cousin, whose Spanish blood and Harvard education had made him a captivating visitor to her childhood household.

Boarding a bus from New York City on December 23, Duncan took Virginia Admiral with him on the trek south. While Admiral slept through most of the thirty-six hour journey, Duncan sat at her side scrawling notes with a new fountain pen, a gift from Anais Nin. Arriving in Asheville on Christmas Eve, he found himself eager to engage with Sanchez, noting however an anxiety regarding the physical relationship: “He slides toward some terrible sadism in his sex—the original biting becomes a biting that stands like a fragile door to tearing the body to pieces furiously.”[117] Duncan also found himself apprehensive about the relationship for another reason: the wealthy Sanchez had made an offer to provide for him financially, and suggested that Duncan begin psychoanalysis upon his return to New York. For Duncan, the proposition was overwhelming, and he mused during the long bus ride back to New York, “I want to be untouched—every time my life is tied to anything—the press, these people, I want to rebel, to get loose.”[118]

 

Six:  Queen of the Whores

 

To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that’s the point. 

 

                                           —Arthur Rimbaud

 

After the Christmas holiday in Asheville and a bleak New Years bus ride north, Duncan arrived in Manhattan with a change of plans. Abandoning Woodstock and the Phoenix Press, he accepted Eduardo Sanchez’s offer to fund his psychoanalytic treatment. Virginia Admiral recalled that she helped Duncan along in the decision:

 

My psychoanalyst at that time was Dr. Ernest Schweitzer. I had sent all my friends to him. He was caught in England during the war and came over here without his family. And then had to intern at Bellevue free for a year before he could practice here. So he took us, for a dollar, two dollars, whatever we could afford to pay. And we’d go up five flights to this little room, midtown. I sent Robert to him, and he turned him down. He said there’s no reason for him to be psychoanalyzed. He doesn’t want to be different than he is… [119]

 

Duncan in fact held out for four weeks, beginning sessions with Schweitzer on January 3rd, 1941. On February 6th, the sessions were terminated. While his friends recalled various reasons for the short-lived analysis, Duncan recorded in his notebook the interaction he had with Schweitzer during their final session: “‘You are not unhappy’—he said. ‘Only when one is unhappy is one willing to go thru the death that is necessary here for rebirth.’”[120]

            There were however, reasons for Duncan to be unhappy during the beginning of 1941. The unfinished business of the draft loomed in his mind, and Ned Fahs returned to his thoughts as well. Duncan tried to contact Fahs more than once during the early part of the year, though the phone calls he made were intercepted by Fah’s mother. Perhaps out of those confusions, Duncan considered returning to college, and returning to the Bay Area. He confided in Minnehaha Symmes that he hoped to finally achieve some financial independence, and he closed a 1941 New Year letter to her with the observation:

 

Everyone has been saying for centuries that the artist must suffer but I am going to try in this coming year to get to a place where my suffering can go on at a little different level from that of just not eating, of being cold and eating just off and on.[121]

 

Short on money, Duncan frequented Anais Nin's apartment, bringing his journals for her to read, and seeking free meals from her kitchen. The center of an active literary scene, Nin’s West Village quarters drew the likes of the Patchens, Louise and Edgar Varèse, George Barker, and Henry Miller.[122] When not there, Duncan made his home with Virginia Admiral, gazing out the loft’s windows toward the midtown skyline and continuing the narrative of his novel:

 

I sit in an island of a lamp in this great studio of Virginia’s. A car outside pulls away from the curb, sirens—the lost floating sounds in the streets that lead so far away. I sit in the huge city, in an island of light, small, infinitesimal. Look down from a great height, move down into the canyons of the city.  In one window, I sit bent over this book of my life. Tonight I am the magician, the priest.[123]

 

That winter, Duncan made his rounds of Manhattan, roaming the neighborhood south of Union Square. Anais Nin preserved her memories of the Greenwich Village landscape in her Diary:

 

The houses are old, the shops small. In [Washington] Square old Italians play chess on stone tables. There are trees, patios, back yards. It has a history. The university was built by the Dutch. I love the gingko trees, the studio windows, the small theaters, Bleecker Street with its vegetable carts, fish shops, cheese shops. It is human. People stroll about. They sit in the park.[124]

 

Duncan’s own impressions of the neighborhood filled his journals alongside writings of a more pornographic nature. Under the category of "whoring stories," he began a series of narratives that opened with statements such as "I walked into McDougal's Saturday night like the Queen of the Whores." Recording encounters with businessmen, transvestites and cripples, Duncan tried his hand at a permutation of his Toward the Shaman novel:

 

From the dark, forbidden, lower center of him, from the pit below his belly where the tabooed legs twisted came the penis that belonged to his magnificent body, a cock like a God’s. I felt with my hand around its base then knowing the strength and fullness of the penis and we entered the subterranean blind male-male copulation of the Lemurian world, turning upon each other, like plants, like mammoth early animals coming together with two penises between them…[125]

 

The stories, true or imagined, were inspired by Anais Nin, who, alongside Henry Miller, had been commissioned to write obscene narratives for a wealthy patron. Duncan acquired some of the work, as did other friends, and Nin made record of the group’s activities:

 

Everyone is writing up their sexual experiences. Invented, overheard, researched from Krafft-Ebbing and medical books. We have comical conversations. We tell a story and the rest of us have to decide whether it is true or false. Or plausible. Is this plausible? Robert would offer to experiment, to test our inventions, to confirm or negate our fantasies.

    All of us need money, so we pool our stories. I could not turn them out fast enough, so I inserted some of Robert's, some of Virginia's, some of George Barker's.[126]

 

Duncan enjoyed recalling such moments of sexual prowess later in life, in 1976 telling a younger friend named Chris Edwards about his exploits. According to Edwards, Duncan

 

mentioned that a group of them used to meet with Anais Nin to tell stories and guess which were true or not (he figured they'd never believe he'd actually found a one-legged dwarf, let alone seduced him in a stairwell)….At the time, I took the dwarf story with a grain of salt, as a signifier of extreme behavior, not a recounting of literal fact. There was no such qualification in the way it was told, however. I do remember RD saying that his main job, as A[nais] N[in]'s “secretary” or “assistant”, was to get the 3pm lover down the back stairs before the 4pm lover came up the front.[127]

 

Throughout the winter and spring of 1941, Duncan followed Nin’s example, stumbling into a number of confusing intimate relationships. Carrying on his long-distance love affair with Eduardo Sanchez, he also briefly found himself enamored of another acquaintance of Nin’s, Nicolas Calas, a recent arrival to New York from Paris’s Surrealist circles.[128] An even more significant drama was brewing in his friendship with Virginia Admiral. Mary Fabilli’s recent marriage to a Berkeley local named Griff Borgeson put the idea of matrimony into Duncan’s head,[129] and Virginia Admiral became a plausible candidate for the partnership. To complicate the matter, Admiral was joined in New York that winter by Marjorie McKee, a painter who had been her roommate in Chicago. McKee, a diminutive enthusiastic thirty-year-old, crossed paths with Duncan for the first time that winter. Virginia Admiral remembered that

 

[i]t wasn’t a question of introducing [them]. It was when everything was in and out around … I’d be crashing at Margie’s and he’d need a place, so he’d be crashing there. Our lives were intertwined. And whoever was intertwined with me would be intertwined with Robert and whoever else was around that we were involved with.[130]

 

 

Duncan jumped at the opportunity to call upon McKee when he was in need of housing, and he made a place for her in his journal entries, noting in mid-January of 1941, “Now I am staying at Marjorie’s—we slept together last night like babes in the wood and talked about life and love problems…”[131]

Anais Nin’s published Diary from the period also pointed to an ongoing flirtation she had with Duncan. Throughout January and February, he was a frequent visitor to her apartment, collaborating with her in journal writing marathons. Duncan’s Toward the Shaman now filled the pages of his notebooks, and Nin scrawled her own comments into the margins of the work.[132] It was in these journals that Duncan left the most substantial traces of his feelings about his relationships with his parents, with Ned Fahs, and with the young women central to his early life. The language of the notebooks, often candid, detached, and analytical, gave a perspective on Duncan’s grasp of psychoanalysis. At the same time, he possessed an untamed energy and Anais Nin found it easy to compare him to a pet monkey she had brought home that winter. She wrote in February of 1941:

 

Robert is emerging as a poet. His talks are like bonfires. His hair falls over his eyes as he writes as if he were an eager child drawing. His fingers are always stained with carbon paper or typewriter ribbon and he leaves his fingertips on my pages, as the monkey left paw marks on my bathroom walls.[133]

 

Amused and repulsed by Duncan’s energy, Nin included several sketches of him in her ongoing diary project:

 

Robert came with a recording by Edgar Varèse. He danced for us. It was a creation. He invented a nonhuman, abstract dance, a war of elements, torn, resoldered, percussion gestures to the percussion sounds of Varèse. His face was like a mask. He was removed and stylized.

I love his humor, his trickeries, and language. It is the fecund labyrinth again, with so many rooms, cells, vibrations, percussions, repercussions….Even when he dances and his eyes are glazed, expressionless, as in an Egyptian fresco, or even when he plays the idiot and no longer recognizes me, or the beast towering over me with grimaces and lines out of Saint-John Perse, or Cocteau, we laugh.[134]

 

            On February 19th, 1941, Duncan’s bohemian reveries were cut short when he received a letter from the local draft board rejecting his request for conscientious objector status. In a panic, he withdrew from the romantic entanglements of New York, fleeing south to visit Jeff Rall in his hometown of Kansas City. Variously traveling by bus and hitchhiking, Duncan spent part of February and March on the road in search of some reprieve from the anxiety of conscription. Met instead by the added burden of snowy weather and a shortage of cash, Duncan was quick to turn back. On the return trip of his “insane journey” he found himself spending an “early morning unloading pork in South Chicago” and near Pittsburgh waiting for a ride “in the cold wind at a rubbish heap called Breezewood.”[135] Back in New York by the middle of March, he sought some temporary refuge with his new friend Marjorie McKee.

           


Seven:  Enlisted

 

                       We are strangely

innocent killers.  Gonzales,

Daniel Garcia and I talk idly, lying on our bunks

before mess-call.  We say that in September

there will be fiestas and dances in the bordertowns.

We do not talk of killing….

 

                   —Robert Duncan, “A Spring Memorandum: Fort Knox”

 

 

On March 26, 1941, Duncan began his compulsory enlistment in the United States Army. While the country had not yet become directly involved in the conflict, its armed forces were mobilizing toward action. He was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky for training and became a member of Company C of the 8th Battalion, AMRTC. Duncan later said that he had been offered a career as an officer and refused it, abiding by a Taoist ideal that one should “go to the bottom.”[136] He recorded his first impressions of army life in a letter to Blanche and James Cooney:

 

We have been consigned to the Armored Force Replacement Center which is tanks and motorcycles. In six weeks we will be drivers of tanks and motorcycles. There is a death a day by accident here at the fort we were told. I wonder sometimes now where the pin dropped out from under my world—how I have landed here in this bog.[137]

 

 

Two mentors in New York, Anais Nin and Kenneth Patchen, played their parts in encouraging Duncan to leave the army. Patchen’s biographer Larry Smith documents that Patchen and his wife Miriam solicited a lawyer named Morris Ernst to assist Duncan in his severance from the military.[138] But it may have been the direct influence of Anais Nin that led Duncan to excuse himself from boot camp. In her Diary she recorded a letter she wrote to him while he was stationed in Kentucky:

 

You refuse to free yourself from serving in the Army by declaring your homosexuality. And by this you will live a double lie, for you are also against war….If you run away from it without conquering it (I say accept the homosexuality, live it out proudly, declare it), then you will remain asleep and enchanted in a lifeless neurosis.[139]

 

Perhaps heeding Nin’s advice, or perhaps frightened at the prospect of jumping off a moving truck, after three weeks at Fort Knox, Duncan told his commanding officer that he was gay. He related the details of the scene in a letter to Lili Fabilli:

 

I walked up and out into the captain’s office (young, with eyes way back in his head that were perhaps gentle, certainly looking not at his men but into somewhere else) and said I want a psychological examination for a medical discharge sir or some impossible first sentence like that and he says...what is the matter, don’t you get along? No sir, I say. I’m homosexual.[140]

 

Duncan was transferred to a military psychiatric ward and later, in his own words, released as a “sexual psychopath.” On June 25, 1941 he was granted a dishonorable discharge. During his few weeks of life as serial number 32045273, Private Robert E. Symmes, he wrote the poem originally called “Spring 1941”, later titled “A Spring Memorandum: Fort Knox.” The poem commented on larger issues of conflict, but it also gave a curious glance into Duncan’s experience in the army:

 

…We are weary with marching.

Slow and deliberate, the last shelter lifts

from the killing

and we stand at attention in the mechanized day.

 

The eye and the hand which trembled

when it first took the pistol grow steady

and directed to murder. In his two dimensions

the flat man is easily shot.

 

He might have been loved.

It would have been harder. We conceive

a small triangle with bullets

over his heart.[141]

 

While detained in the psychiatric unit at Fort Knox, Duncan had an opportunity to further hone his mistrust of authority. He again wrote to Lili Fabilli:

 

The eternal politicos, they are always there in the Paris commune, in the Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce, in Hitler’s home town troops, in the armies and the governments and the industries of the world:  this race sitting smugly, having its stupid virtue, an inward joy in ordering others, in being president, or vice-president or head-sherrif [sic]….at every chance showing that they have the sacred right and duty to shove the others around: in the name of Democracy, in the name of Lenin, in the name of Liberté, in the name of God….[142]

 

It was one of his most articulate early statements of his politics, an affirmation of the anarchist principles that pervaded his life’s work. Later during the Viet Nam war, Duncan again called upon his readers to understand his doubts about man-made law, writing in Passages 21 “The Multiversity”:

 

In this scene                        absolute authority

     the great dragon himself so confronted

     whose scales are men officized — ossified— conscience

              no longer alive in them,

                              the inner law silenced,          now

                  they call out their cops, police law,

                     the club, the gun, the strong arm,

                      gang-law of the state,

                        hired sadists of installd mediocrities.[143]

 

 

Duncan’s return to New York that summer came without any warm welcome home. He made appearances at his old haunts, though some of his most intimate relationships were strained beyond repair. Virginia Admiral that year had met another student of Hans Hofmann’s named Robert De Niro and the two had begun dating.[144] Duncan, already deeply emotionally involved with Admiral, had slept with her new boyfriend during the spring before he left for boot camp. While Duncan was at Fort Knox, De Niro confessed the details of the affair to Admiral. Anais Nin noted in her Diaries that Duncan

 

escaped serving in the Army; he came back to New York seeking a nest. There was no room for him at Virginia’s because he had made love to her Bob. No room in my studio for him. He ended up at Marjorie’s, who had an extra room.[145] 

 

Nin also wrote of her disappointment in Duncan, acknowledging for the first time the narcissism that drove him: “Either the experience had been a shock, or I had not noticed before that he does not feel for or with others.”[146] For Admiral, while the news of the affair was hurtful, it was not entirely a surprise. She had seen Duncan attempt to wedge himself between other friends, and had shared her bed with him on many occasions. Years later she mused philosophically, “Robert always had to sleep in the middle.”[147]

When Admiral and De Niro moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts that summer to continue studies with Hans Hofmann, Duncan followed, again receiving a cold reception. A poem written during that season called “The Encounter”, likely addressed the fallout from the love triangle he had created:

 

His eyes are like mine so that I realize

his brain is much too bright with this, and when I move

about the room or sit as I sit now

listening while they talk, I remark

how he follows every movement…

 

The room has been disturbed by this violence

in its dimensions, and I feel, sitting apart from it,

the giddy recurrence of the speaker’s distortions.

Barely listening, I see reed mats upon the floor

lean back into an inner room, into contortions

of an unseen space as mystery.  I have

a private twist of the disease that lies

inside these others…[148]

 

 

Nin, also in Provincetown for the summer, reported to Henry Miller during July that “Robert came but he could not stay. Virginia threw him out, and as he had nowhere to sleep but a parked car and I could not take him in, he has returned to New York.”[149]

Rebuffed by Admiral and Nin, Duncan took up residence with Marjorie McKee at 526 Grand Street in lower Manhattan. With Virginia Admiral now seeking companionship elsewhere, Duncan transferred his own affections to McKee and discovered that she was an enchanting partner. Seven years older than Duncan, McKee had started her career in the Chicago theatre circuit of the early 1930s. When she moved to New York and was introduced to Hans Hofmann, she became one of his students beside Admiral and De Niro. McKee’s enthusiasm for life suited Duncan, and her close connection to Virginia Admiral reinforced a rivalrous drama that he found hard to resist. Admiral, who first met McKee in 1935 in Chicago, had also coveted her:

 

Marjorie was my introduction to Bohemia. My mother was very shocked when she’d come in and find us sitting around on the beds or on the floor. Marjorie didn’t have any chairs….at this point she was very busy carrying on with two different psychiatrists and working at the B&G coffee shop to supplement her eight dollar a week allowance from her mother, and I think taking some courses. She had dropped out of school and come to New York to be in the Yiddish theatre, although she wasn’t Jewish, she could pass for it.[150]

 

Duncan recorded his own fascination with McKee in his notebooks. At the time they met, McKee was living with her third husband, Melvin:

 

She was quick and clever. We sat in a kitchen which they [Melvin and Marjorie] shared with another apartment while Marjorie ironed some collars and the coffee was brewing. Out of all this unsettled thing she seemed settled—removed, ironing, such a bird in a way, from the gloom and disorder of the room itself—her little order, her little domestic gesture held captive in a sense…[151]

 

 

From the sanctuary of McKee’s apartment on Grand Street, Duncan turned again to literary pursuits. The September 1941 issue of the Experimental Review, edited by Sanders Russell, included three creative pieces by Duncan, "Concerning the Maze," "A History of My Family," and "Fragment from a Journal” as well as Duncan’s review of James Laughlin’s “New Directions 1940” which was negative throughout. Faulting Laughlin for poor editorial practices, Duncan further alienated himself from the New York literary community. Even Anais Nin’s studio was soon off limits to him. She wrote in her Diary during the late fall of 1941:

 

Because of my vision into the inner Robert I still refused to see how his behavior crystallized into coldness and selfishness. He always came in without a greeting. He went straight to the icebox. He was never concerned whether he finished the last carton of milk, or the last slice of bread…he never helped to put away the dishes. He served himself, no one else. He monologued without regard for others’ work or fatigue….

            When he rang the bell this morning I did not answer. I was in the kitchen when I heard him entering through the transom window.

I told him how I felt. He left angrily.[152]

 

In December, Duncan tried his luck with Blanche and James Cooney, then at the beginning a new farming project in Ashfield, Massachusetts. It was there that Duncan and the Cooneys received news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it was there that Duncan began writing poems with a renewed determination. He finished several pieces during the holidays, including “variations upon phrases from Milton’s The Reason of Church Government” (printed later in Contour), “Variations in Praise of Jesus Christ our Lord”, “Snow on Bug Hill”, “Witnesses” (published in Death magazine), and “From Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy…”. He also continued to make forays back to New York to spend time with Marjorie McKee, and after the New Year he celebrated his twenty-third birthday with friends, reporting to his mother:

 

On my birthday last night I made a chocolate cake. Marjorie had returned from Chicago and we had a little night’s party here. Pauline Kael and the poet Robert Horan came over, brought me a copy of Marianne Moore’s poetry and Marjorie brot [sic] Burgandy and anchovies.  We all sat around and by the light of the kerosene lamp celebrated.[153]

 

 

 

Eight: Marriage

 

 

Marjorie was always very impractical about who she married.

— Virginia Admiral

 

 

Having burned bridges on the East Coast, during the beginning of 1942 Duncan returned to Berkeley where he intended to register for classes at the University of California. Weary of depending on others for financial security, and emotionally drained from his skirmish with the army, he informed his mother that he had decided to become a teacher:

 

For some time I have been thinking about this course of action, seeking the advice of professors and considering all the factors involved. The fields in education which are most open; where there is at once the least competition and the best provisions for graduate scholarships and positions teaching—two possibilities remaind for me to choose between: theoretical math—and classical scholarship: latin and greek. It is the latter which I wish to study.[154]

 

 

 

Duncan was returning to old friends, including Mary Fabilli, now married to Griff Borgeson, as well as Cecily Kramer, who had, during Duncan’s time on the East Coast, received shock treatments in a Bay Area psychiatric hospital. At first living at Fabilli’s garden cottage, and then renting a room of his own, Duncan secured a job as a stockman at a Montgomery Ward mail order house in Oakland and also found work in the local shipyards. He remained in Berkeley for a little less than a year, quickly lost his drive to commit to work or studies, and again found himself in the familiar territory of depending upon others for shelter.

At some point that spring, he began living with a newlywed couple, Hamilton (Ham) and Mary Tyler. Of the beginning of their friendship, Ham Tyler wrote:

 

No one can now remember what the exact date was, or even which night of the week it may have been, but a month or so after our marriage I came down the usual midnight street after a shift in the shipyards to find Mary looking for me. She seemed in the best of spirits and ran down the outside stairway which led from our apartment above, greeting me with “Ham! What do you think? Robert has come to live with us!” I cocked my head back into the collar of my greasy tin-coat and looked up the wooden stairs. At the top in the lighted porch was a young man I had known slightly as Symmes.[155]

 

Duncan set up quarters on an enclosed porch of the apartment and began spending his evenings with the Tylers talking about politics, listening to Mozart, and writing poetry. Ham Tyler, born in Fresno, California in 1917, had also studied literature at Berkeley and had briefly served among Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. Duncan recognized that he had found a partner for his intellectual pursuits, and the new friendship flourished. Years later he recalled:

 

That summer, perhaps it was six month of 1942, I lived with Ham and Mary Tyler, the three of us working in the shipyards, and in all our social hours we read and talked about our reading.  The Tylers were enamored of the English poetic tradition; Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, John Milton—I think Ham identified with all three as heroes, and Mary with Raleigh’s and Donne’s wives. I could be a sort of Kit Marlowe (another poet of an irregular life) befriended by the noble and regular Raleigh.[156]

 

Unable or unwilling to register for classes because of his late arrival that semester, Duncan juggled a number of jobs, reporting to his mother,

 

I have had work to do—not only Aunt Fay’s giving me the gardening to do at her Forest St. place but I have worked several mornings other places trimming hedges and vines, etc., worked at the Unitarian Theological School putting up their library and in addition had several typing jobs.[157]

 

Part of Duncan’s enthusiasm for gainful employment came in his desire to establish himself as a provider for a family. Throughout that spring, he corresponded with Marjorie McKee in New York, and the two made plans to be wed. At first it seemed likely that McKee would join him in California, but her analyst’s disapproval struck a blow to that plan. Duncan nonetheless remained committed to the idea of marriage, perhaps partly in response to Virginia Admiral and Mary Fabilli’s moves in that direction. In a letter to his mother, Duncan described his soon-to-be wife and re-invented himself as a heterosexual:

 

Marjorie is petite—just five feet. Looks a little bit like Luise Rainer. Scotch on both sides and black haird with dark eyes. She makes me feel big with big hands and I like that. And she makes me feel as if I am really a responsible and capable man and I like that.[158]

 

Corresponding with McKee throughout their several months of separation, Duncan kept his eye on the relationship while at the same time moving forward with his career as a writer. He associated the period with his first meeting with poet Kenneth Rexroth. As he said of Rexroth in a 1980 interview,

 

It was that he had marvelous and very, very crotchety and funny letters that he sent into Partisan Review and View magazine and so forth, so that by the time I came out to San Francisco in 1942 I wanted very much to meet Kenneth Rexroth and…wrote to him beforehand and almost the first week I was here….It was a period of the incarceration of the Japanese in concentration camps and both Marie and Kenneth Rexroth were working sort of underground to get Japanese out of this area—east, where they could be free once you could get them across. And they were also working in the camps, volunteer working in the camps, taking messages back and forth. So the first Kenneth I met was in his 30’s, about 38, and he was a marvelous man.[159]

 

Rexroth, born in Indiana in 1905, had spent his early years in Chicago before moving to New York and then to California. His encyclopedic knowledge and political activism drew Duncan to him, and while their relationship later became thorny, in their early encounters Rexroth was an important mentor. In his loose memoir, An Autobiographical Novel, Rexroth gave an exaggerated and somewhat skewed account of Duncan’s history:

 

Robert Duncan was going to school in Berkeley, where he had organized around himself a circle of Trotskyite, surrealist young women, over whom he exercised a kind of Svengali influence….Duncan married one of these young women and shortly after was drafted. After a couple of months in the army, he wrote to her saying, “Marjorie, you’ve got to get me out of this. If you don’t, I’ll kill myself.”[160]

 

Despite Rexroth’s need to embellish Duncan’s resume, he did take the younger poet seriously, and welcomed him to his Portrero Hill home where other young writers and anti-war activists had begun to gather. During the early and mid 1940s, Rexroth’s circle— including Duncan, Philip Lamantia, and William Everson— set the stage for a blossoming of Bay Area poetry.

It was in also in Berkeley during that spring and summer that Duncan wrote "An African Elegy" and "The Years As Catches," two significant poems of his early career. Moving away from his efforts toward the “shaman” novel, Duncan incorporated in these poems traces of Nin’s influence, as well as echoes of the surrealist art and poetry he had been immersed in while in New York. In “An African Elegy,” he settled upon the geography of the colonized and romanticized continent of Africa as a metaphor for the surrealists’ attention to the unconscious, as well as for the taboos of homosexuality:

 

Negroes, Negroes, all those princes,

holding cups of rhinoceros bone, make

magic with my blood.  Where beautiful Marijuana

towers taller than the eucalyptus, turns

within the lips of night and falls,

falls downward, where as giant Kings we gatherd

and devourd her burning hands and feet, O Moonbar

there and Clarinet! Those talismans

that quickend in their sheltering leaves like thieves,

those Negroes, all those princes

holding to their mouths like Death

the cups of rhino bone,

were there to burn my hands and feet,

divine the limit of the bone and with their magic

tie and twist me like a rope. I know

no other continent of Africa more dark than this

dark continent of my breast.[161]

 

 That spring, another poem called "A Letter to Jack Johnson" was published in the February-March issue of Charles Henri Ford's View magazine, followed, in May, by his first publication in Poetry magazine out of Chicago, Illinois.[162] In August his review of Kenneth Patchen's The Dark Kingdom appeared in Accent magazine from Urbana, Illinois. Duncan had finally made a foray into the spotlight of a national poetry scene, partly with the help of Kenneth Rexroth, and alongside those early publications came his decision to use the name Robert Duncan when publishing his work.[163]      

 

During the fall of 1942 Duncan returned to the East Coast by train to be reunited with his fiancée. Before making his way to New York City to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with McKee and Pauline Kael, he again stayed with James and Blanche Cooney at their farm in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Still unhappy with his dependence on old friends, he confided to an acquaintance from Woodstock, Doris Townsend:

 

The Cooneys here are continuing their farm which supplies them with vegetables and milk.  They have a cow and three goats and the large farm house is furnished with a sort of simple comfort and order that is a long way from Woodstock days....The problem here is that I have no cash, nor means of making, earning cash and whatever work I may do on the farm counts as nothing to assuage the disgrace of that factor.[164]

 

One complication in the arrangement came in the fact that the operations of the Cooney farm were being funded with money from Duncan’s ex-lover, Eduardo Sanchez. Uncomfortable with the patronage, Duncan left the farm abruptly. He wrote to the Cooneys some months later, attempting to retrieve the possessions he had left behind, and admitting “My bad egg descent upon your household this last winter has embarrassed me so that I have not written.”[165] Marjorie McKee recalled that Duncan throughout the period had a difficult time maintaining an equilibrium with friends, partly because of his unrealistic ideas about money:

 

He wanted to write. He hadn’t been trained in any particular way to earn a living. A lot of times if people asked him to come to the country to visit, he’d just stay and visit until they’d finally practically ask him to leave….He could stand chaos better than anyone I knew. I think that he could have multiple feelings about people too. By the time he denounced someone there would be a lot of back and forth feelings.[166]

 

 

            In February of 1943, Duncan began a job for Dell Publishing as a traveling salesman. Reporting to their headquarters at 149 Madison Avenue, he was soon on the road, spending several weeks working in and around Boston. Two months into the job, he questioned whether he was suited for such labor, complaining to Pauline Kael on March 23rd:

 

I’m going quite crazy again. The minute I face this after-business report to write I feel like running away, jumping out of a window—only this one isn’t high enuf—god I feel ill—…I don’t know why I can’t just be calm about it and quit but I feel so damnd guilty—as if it were “failing someone”…[167]

 

The income from his job at Dell at least facilitated a goal he had set the previous year, of providing a stable income for his soon-to-be-wife. On a Saturday afternoon in May of 1943, Duncan and Marjorie McKee were married in New York City. Robert De Niro and a pregnant Virginia Admiral attended the wedding, McKee’s fourth.[168] The couple moved into an apartment at 114 West 11th Street[169] and began to piece together a life. Duncan again wrote to the Cooneys a week after the wedding not with a cheerful honeymooner’s tone, but with a cry of panic, “we are living on borrowed blankets and borrowed time—the down comforter of mine which you have is a necessity for us now. Can you send it to us c.o.d. as soon as possible?”[170]

The marriage was a short-lived fiasco. Later evidence of that came when Duncan, in preparing to travel to Europe in 1955, wrote in a discombobulated letter to Virginia Admiral:

 

In order to apply for a passport I have to answer the following questions I was married on don’t know to Marjorie McKee who was born at don’t know on don’t know who is an American citizen and who is now residing at don’t know. Our marriage was terminated by divorce on don’t know.[171]

 

While it was not entirely unusual for gay men in Duncan's circle to marry, neither McKee nor Duncan had the energy to sustain the relationship for very long. Duncan’s attempt to live within the confines of a heterosexual marriage was short-circuited by the emotional dynamics with his new wife. Virginia Admiral remembered:

 

[T]hey had a lot of fun together.  She found him a charming companion and really was crazy about him. And she was very nice. But once they got married it was scary for him. Margie has a side to her that would be bound to scare him, which is her mother speaking “well if you really loved me you’d take the garbage down. And the fact that you don’t take the garbage down means that you don’t love me.” And she’d only pull this when she felt sort of stressed herself…. Robert at that point was working very hard. He had a fulltime job in a publishing house and to be a good husband and potential father and all this, then she’d pull one of these things on him and spoil it.  So I don’t think the marriage lasted more than a few months.[172]

 

Duncan found himself faced with a partner who mirrored the role he himself had played in his relationship with Ned Fahs, that of the insecure clinging partner. His poem “Marriage” gave a stark view of his own reaction to the relationship:

 

When I love

hate burns my right side.

When I stop

hate stops.

 

Love and hate go back where you came from.

 

I loving, hate burning my right side,

who is the nothing on my left side

left to face when I stop and hate stops?[173]

 

He returned to his notebooks to reflect upon the crisis, writing during November of 1943:

 

Maggie's attachment to me has been, still is, a kind of necessity, still conceived of as an integral thing....It is an ALL or NOTHING necessity....so the image grows in her mind: as I remember the image growing in my own mind with Ned....love was not a torture it seemd to me finally, but the incapability to love was a torture—to be held to someone by one's very need, for protection, for affection that was a torture if one could not love that source of affection and protection.[174]

 

There was another circumstance that worked against them. The simple fact of Duncan’s interest in men also became a deciding element in the end of the relationship. The “figure” of a man as a sexual partner always returned to the forefront of Duncan’s imagination, and as he said during a poetry reading in 1971,  “In my twenties I was in a heterosexual marriage and the one thing that broke that was this figure always being there, so I was guilty before it.”[175]

McKee remembered that the less conflicted side of their relationship had made it difficult for the two to part. They spent their weekends visiting art galleries on 57th Street, and at home in Greenwich Village they met other artists and political activists:

 

I think that was a wonderful period altogether when I knew Robert. He had a recording of Stravinsky….I remember seeing him [Stravinsky] too.  And New York was an exciting place. I remember when New School opened and they had a big dance and so many of the Europeans were doing that two-step thing that they do….It was a mixture of all of the tension from the war, but still there were so many people from Europe who were coming over, settling in New York to be away from the war.  It was making New York a place it hadn’t been before. He [Duncan] was really interested in all that was going on.[176] 

 

McKee and Duncan’s circle of acquaintances included writer Jackson Mac Low, translator Charles Glenn Wallis, and a Joyce scholar named Seon Givens. It was Wallis who directed Duncan toward the work of Yeats, Cocteau, and Lautreamont, and Givens who introduced him to the writings of Mary Butts.[177] Mac Low became a peer of Duncan’s in the New York City anarchist movement the following year, but his first meeting with Duncan and McKee came on September 12, 1943, his twenty-first birthday. Newly arrived from his hometown of Chicago, Mac Low was escorted by a friend to Charles Glenn Wallis’s Bedford Street apartment. Duncan and McKee were also guests that night and Mac Low remembered that

 

Robert completely dominated the "conversation" —he monologized on everything under the sun, reading from his journal, telling obscure (to me then) dirty jokes, most of which seemed to end with his leaping into the air from his seat, holding his ass. He said things I thought incredible then but later found out to be true: the only one I can now bring to mind was that Robert Frost was a "fairybaiter" (Robert's term). I'd never seen or heard anyone like Robert before. Years later I came to believe that he'd been putting on a show for the hicks from Chicago, but now I don't really think so. He was just being Robert.[178]

 

Nine:  Divorce

 

 

By November of 1943, Duncan’s marriage was coming to a close and he found himself held in a deeply confusing deadlock:

 

I know that faced with either Maggie’s alternating declarations that she cannot live without me or that she cannot live with me—I do not feel much relation to these feelings. They seem to violate my person, to be emotions and needs transferrd from other people, other areas of conflict to me…[179]

 

In the push and pull of their final weeks together, Duncan found solace in his journals, washing his hands of a situation that he no longer had any control over, and reflecting upon the patterns that had emerged in his intimate relationships. He began to trace his own habits of emotional transference from his bond with Minnehaha Symmes to his various lovers:

 

My mother, Ned, Marjorie had all been jealous of the library; I had made a rival to each in my reading:  in my marriage with Marjorie—Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Laura Riding were raised as models not only for my own mind but in being Mistresses of my mind were mistresses, in turn, of my Household. Ned had been a French professor, Marjorie had been an actress—the special meaning of French, drawing me to translate as a form of conquering the text, then bound to meet its demands;—and the theater; having been, like my family's theosophy, lasting terms of my subject matter.[180]

 

It was at some point around the New Year of 1944 that Duncan made a break from McKee, moving out of their apartment and beginning a relationship with a painter named Leslie Sherman.[181] McKee, then pregnant with Duncan’s child, opted to return to Chicago to have an abortion. Duncan expressed disappointment with her decision, writing to his mother: 

 

…I had said that I would take care of a child— that was a point that I did not veer from tho I said too that a child would never be a bond between Marjorie and me—and faced with still another abortion Marjorie wanted to have the child but her mother declared she would cut her off entirely if she did such a thing…[182]

 

 

In the wake of their separation, Duncan traveled to Florida by train. As had become his pattern, he arrived without any real plans, half-heartedly sought employment, and again asked his mother for money. While the escape south had initially felt like an opportunity to recover from the traumas of the previous months, Duncan soon found that this was not the case. He wrote to Minnehaha on February 12,

 

I have been in four cities looking for work, restless and almost out of my mind staring at the fact that there is—except for the Millers with whom I am staying this weekend in Orlando before going back to Tampa—no one that I know in Florida.[183]

 

The multi-week sojourn to the south was later shrouded in myth. Duncan claimed that while there he found employment as a male escort, describing the adventure as another financial failure:

 

In the period when I was a gigolo in Florida, I was very much not myself; I was in a schizy state, but I could explore it providing I stuffed money back. I would be given $300 at the beginning of the evening and it was taken for granted that I would keep it, but she would be so drunk I’d stuff it back in her purse…. So that got me caught out in my wasp middle class hypocrisy, that while I could be in this play, even while it was in actual life, it wasn’t play money so. And yet I didn’t mind having clothes bought for me, that was that other one.  The pleasure boy of Ancient Greece was doing fine, but cash was something that blew that whole scene.”[184]

 

He also spoke of a pilgrimage to visit the poet Laura (Riding) Jackson. Jackson had moved to Wabasso, Florida with her husband during the previous year, and Duncan had written to her before his arrival. He had also spent a good deal of time studying her poetry in the months preceding his travels, and it is likely that he would have been eager to make such a connection. In his correspondence from the period, there is no mention of such a meeting, though he later made passing references to the encounter in interviews and lectures.[185]

In reality, Duncan’s stay in Florida was largely unremarkable. By late February, having traveled through Orlando, Vero, Palm Beach, and Tampa, he found a job in the restaurant of the Gulf Stream Hotel in Lake Worth. Maintaining correspondences with Leslie Sherman and Pauline Kael throughout the spring, Duncan tried to convince Sherman to join him, and gave Kael details of his daily activity. To Kael he wrote:

 

…I am a busboy with room and good board and a little over twenty five dollars coming in cash every two weeks—and a couple of dollars in tips a week. In the evening I sneak in for a show at the town movie palace or sit and talk with bell hops. I have from 2:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon to myself. I go to the library and read or to the beach which is only two blocks away.[186]

 

 

Almost immediately weary of the social isolation, Duncan returned to New York at the beginning of the summer. After a brief visit with Pauline Kael, he followed Leslie Sherman to Provincetown, Massachusetts where the couple found a cottage and Sherman settled into studies with Hans Hoffman. Duncan returned to more menial labor, in a letter to his mother reporting that he’d had a “vacation” in Provincetown working full-time as a dishwasher. His correspondence with friends was reserved for his lunch hour break, and he again designated Pauline Kael as his key confidante:

 

There will be a long period this afternoon (some two or three hours) when the dishes will fall off; the cook goes to sleep; Jennie who cuts the pies, ladles out the olives and tomato-juice, will sit down to chat with the cook’s boy; and I will have a thing or two to say about Read’s Cult of Leadership, Ciliga’s Russian Enigma, and some notes after reading this English pamphlet Trade Unionism or Syndicalism—notes suggested more by my own reflections than by those of the pamphlet which seems rather thin.[187]

 

His summer readings of anarchist and socialist tracts came alongside the composition of an essay on art, politics, and sexuality titled “The Homosexual in Society.” When the piece was accepted by Dwight Macdonald, editor of Politics magazine, Duncan, with Leslie Sherman and a new friend Norris Embry, visited Macdonald and his wife in Truro, Massachusetts. Of Duncan’s essay, Macdonald wrote: “You’ve written a really thoughtful and sincere piece here, and very well expressed (though your style is more rococo than my personal taste).”[188]

Duncan’s pleasure in the support from Macdonald and the promise of a $15 payment for his essay, spurred him to end his summer with another intellectual pursuit. From Provincetown, he traveled to North Hampton, Massachusetts where, he “held free discussions at Smith College…” for the female undergraduate students. He remarked to his mother that they seemed only vaguely interested in his ideas, and he soon returned to New York City: “I had hoped that in the process of the discussions I would get at least a spark of truth-sense out of them. I didn’t get anything at all worth my effort and the stay was a disappointment.”[189] Again short on money, Duncan shared an apartment with Leslie Sherman in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan and began work at a book export company called Stecharts. 

Another disappointment came that October, in the form of a letter from Kenyon Review editor John Crowe Ransom. Ransom, who had accepted Duncan’s poem “An African Elegy” for his magazine, upon reading "The Homosexual in Society" in the August 1944 issue of Politics, subsequently pulled Duncan’s poem. The two began a correspondence regarding their differing views of homosexuality, and as Duncan recalled in 1971, Ransom made it clear during the course of their banter that “he didn’t know what the law was, but he felt that homosexuals should be ‘altered’…to prevent breeding of that type.” As Duncan said later, his response to Ransom was simple, “I would willingly take a pledge that I’m not really going to breed this year, but just leave me with my equipment, could you?”[190]

“The Homosexual in Society,” a landmark document that led to a larger public recognition of the gay community in the American art world, had been inspired by a Partisan Review piece by James Agee titled “Pseudo-Folk.” Agee’s essay condemned the commodification of folk culture in America, and the complicity of black Americans in accepting stereotypes in order to entertain whites. Duncan in his own essay made the unexpected move of denouncing “the cult of the homosexual,” which he described as a clique that intentionally and unnecessarily alienated others. While expressing an ambivalence about the attitudes of the gay community, he also made it clear that he was a homosexual who was an active part of the literary world.[191]  The essay partly came in response to Duncan’s own experiences in New York City during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Having witnessed the exclusivity of the avant-garde community in New York, particularly in the circle around Charles Henri Ford, Duncan positioned himself in a stance against the authority of any group bound together by an exclusive social or cultural agenda.[192] His attraction to such anarchist ideals became clearer in the aftermath of the John Crowe Ransom incident. Toward the end of 1944, when Jackson Mac Low became involved in a pacifist anarchist group publishing the paper Why, and later, Resistance, Duncan followed along to “discussion meetings at the Spanish anarchists’ loft at 813 Broadway, between 11th and 12th Streets.”[193] Others involved in the collective included Paul Goodman, Julian Beck, and Judith Malina. Duncan later recalled:

 

There were six of us….Within four meetings, Paul Goodman and Jackson Mac Low, and a whole score of people were attending. Toward the end there were a hundred people or so. Actually, there were other anarchist circles, more than we ever knew. The toughness of the Second World War—these were people who were against the Second World War. Also, there were a great number of Jews against the war. Most people would think it’s impossible! It’s a war against Hitler.[194]

 

Duncan also continued to push forward his views in writing. In January of 1945, Politics magazine published a letter of his called “The Politics of the Unrejected” and that winter he published “Notes on Some Painters and Poets” in Holley Cantine’s Retort magazine. With the year drawing to a close and his life on the East Coast nearing an end, Duncan returned to another mode, penning a poem for his mother called “Christmas Letter 1944”:

 

Dear Mother, this by way of poem is little

more than Christmas greeting, by way of letter

sums more than a year, in and out, older

than not so long ago, but short

of the full greeting heart

might give had time not tampered...

 

This by way of Christmas greeting is little

less than poetry; by way of total

(the face, the photograph) is fair

I hope. Showing more of what is there

than others. It allows

a certain warmth to show, a pause,

a Christmas hiatus in the midst of battle.[195]

 


[1] Ekbert Faas in the Young Robert Duncan says that in February of 1937 Duncan moved out of the fraternity house, but this was actually the month that he was initiated.

 

[2] Steve Abbott and Aaron Shurin. “Interview: Robert Duncan”, Gay Sunshine, Summer/Fall 1979, No. 41-42: 4.

 

[3] Mentioned in passing to Helen Adam, 23 Jan. 1962.

 

[4] to Minnehaha Symmes, undated [spring 1937]. Duncan’s letters to his mother between 1937 and 1946 are documents revealing a deep emotional tie. As his college friend Virginia Admiral said, “I imagine that he and his mother had a great deal in common as he was growing up and that she must have spent a great deal of time with him for him to develop as he did and to be so precocious.”

 

[5] ibid. : “…valiant hopes for B in English (A?)— B in history (it will take a good final) C in Philosophy (after E cinch midterm— I will do my best to send you the report of an A final paper tho) C in geology (oddly enough Geology is no worse than last semester— a little more hopeful if anything.) (if your little boy tries very hard) a C in German…” Duncan actually earned A’s in German for the two semesters he was enrolled in the course.

 

[6] Ibid. Ella Young was a friend of Edna Keough’s. Born in Ireland in 1867, a political activist and history scholar, Young came to the United States in 1925 to teach Celtic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. A close friend to Maud Gonne, Young spent her youth in the company of William Butler Yeats. The Courvoisier Gallery of San Francisco specialized in fine arts until 1937 when it took on animation marketing for the Disney Corporation. Duncan’s intellectual curiosities also burgeoned into the field of psychoanalytic theory, a discipline that held sway over his poetic imagination throughout his career. Friends remembered his keen interest in Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic work with children, and Duncan sometimes reported in about such matters to his Aunt Faye who then lived in Oakland. She in turn reported back to her sister Minnehaha in March of 1938: “He had been here a couple of hours and had taken most of the time to read me Freud.”

 

[7]  The Years as Catches. Berkeley: Oyez, 1966: i.

 

[8] The Occident was discontinued during the following year and temporarily replaced by The Grizzly. Duncan served on the staff of The Grizzly in 1938.

 

[9] Robert Duncan. Lecture on Ezra Pound. Central Washington State University, 8 Oct.1969. While on the staff of Occident, Duncan also formed a friendship with writer and future film critic Pauline Kael, a fellow undergraduate student at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

[10] to Minnehaha Symmes, undated [1937]. Robert Haas (b. 1916), also known as Robert Bartlett Haas, went on to be a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and an editor of Gertrude Stein’s writings.

 

[11] Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book, http://onezerozero.net/books/index.html, 22, Duncan told this story again in an interview with Burton Hatlen and Michael Andre Bernstein, published in Sagetreib, Fall & Winter, 1985.

 

[12] Robert Duncan. Lecture on Ezra Pound. Central Washington State University, 8 Oct. 1969. A variation of this anecdote was also told at the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 5 Aug. 1963.

 

[13] Interview with Burton Hatlen and Michael Andre Bernstein, Sagetreib, Fall & Winter, 1985:101.

 

[14] Enclosed in letter to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. 1937.

 

[15] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. 1937. Duncan’s obsessive reading habits contributed to his inability to excel in the classroom. From the beginnings of his academic career, he found himself caught in a battle later described concisely by his college friend Hamilton Tyler:

 

Robert and I shared a common fault—if we had read an example of Milton’s prose, such as the assigned Areopagitica, why not then go on to find out what else he had to say on church and state, and then perhaps why? If that approach is multiplied by the number of important writers, past and present, it is easy to drop out of phase with requirements.” [Scales of the Marvelous. Ed. Robert Bertholf and Ian Reid. New York: New Directions, 1979: 4.]

 

[16] Robert Duncan, “The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound,” Agenda Vol. 4 No. 2, October-November 1965: 25.

 

[17] Ibid.

 

[18] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview, 8 April 1998.

 

[19] Robert Duncan. Classroom lecture: “Field Theory” at New College w/Michael Palmer, 13 Sept. 1983. Duncan’s mid-1940s “round table” poetry meetings with Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and others were similarly cultish.

 

[20]  Ibid., Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s death at the hands of  Nationalist soldiers in August of 1936 also would have been in Duncan’s consciousness at this point.

 

[21] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. 1937.

 

[22] Ibid.

 

[23] ibid., From 1937-1938 Duncan was the editor of the ASU’s bulletin.  In one issue he published a poem of his own, appropriately titled “Proletarian Song.”

 

[24] Thomas Thurston and Robert Cohen. The American Student Movement of the 1930s. http://newdeal.feri.org/students/index.htm. During the 1960s, Duncan also took great interest in the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus.

 

[25] Max Heirich The Beginning: Berkeley 1964. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971: 27.

 

[26] to Minnehaha Symmes, 4 Oct. 1937.

 

[27] The H.D. Book. http://onezerozero.net/books/index.html,17.

 

[28] Ibid., 19. According to his college transcripts, Duncan was suspended from the university on 17 March 1938 for his refusal to participate in military classes that spring, though his registration for two summer classes were later approved.

 

[29] Robert Duncan. “The Homosexual in Society.” Reproduced in Ekbert Faas. YRD, 322. The ideas of Fabilli sisters and Virginia Admiral echoed clearly in "The Homosexual in Society." When the author met with Lili Fabilli during October of 1998, she spoke of “the fellowship of mankind” in the same terms that Duncan had written about it during the 1940s. For Duncan, the ideas expressed in “The Homosexual in Society” led him toward a series of contradictions. While throughout his life he possessed an insatiable curiosity about humankind’s variousness and its socio-political evolution, he also sometimes lapsed into a petulance regarding those who built and participated in what he saw as “special interest groups.” He was quick to dismiss the efforts of the Black Nationalist movement of the 1960s as well as the gay rights movement of the 1970s.

 

[30] Mary Fabilli. Personal Interview. 12 Jan. 1998.

 

[31] Mary Fabilli, Unpublished manuscript, 1991. SUNYAB.

 

[32] That semester, Duncan was enrolled in German, an art class, two English classes and Philosophy 10A.

 

[33] Mary Fabilli. Aurora Bligh and Early Poems. Berkeley: Oyez, 1968: 3.

 

[34] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 Apr. 1998.

 

[35] Ibid.

 

[36] Ibid.

 

[37] RD. “Relativity, A Love Letter, And Relative To What; A Love Letter”. Epitaph, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Spring 1938.

 

[38] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 Apr. 1998.

 

[39] Christopher Wagstaff. Robert Duncan: Drawings and Decorated Books. Berkeley: Rose Books, 1992: 9.

 

[40] Mary Fabilli. Personal Interview. 12 Jan. 1998.

 

[41] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 April 1998.

 

[42] to Lili Fabilli, ND, ca. 1940.

 

[43] Mary Fabilli. Personal Interview.12 Jan. 1998. During the early 1940s, Anais Nin had a similar insight about Duncan: “My feminity annoys him. He loves me, but he would like me to be a boy.” [Diaries, 1939-1944, 170].

 

[44] Mary Fabilli recalled that Elgrin sent Duncan on his way when he came home one night to discover him picking crabs out of his public hair and burning them in a candle flame. Personal Interview.12 Jan. 1998.

 

[45] Steve Abbott and Aaron Shurin. “Interview: Robert Duncan”. Gay Sunshine, Summer/Fall 1979, No. 41-42: 4.

 

[46] Ibid.

 

[47] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 Apr. 1998. Ekbert Faas says that Duncan met Fahs in 1937. This is probably not correct.

 

[48] OF, 73.

 

[49] Steve Abbott and Aaron Shurin. “Interview: Robert Duncan”. Gay Sunshine, Summer/Fall 1979, No. 41-42: 3. Duncan and Fahs also had the shared experience of early losses. Fahs’s father suicided in 1930. Duncan alludes to this in the poem “Witnesses,” YAC: 29.

 

[50] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 Apr. 1998.

 

[51] to Minnehaha Symmes, 11 Sept. 1938. Fahs’ thesis was titled “The Image du Monde by Gossouin (AD 1246): Latin sources on geography, meteorology, and natural history.”

 

[52] to Sanders Russell, ND, ca. Oct. 1938, UCB.

 

[53] Ekbert Faas’s YRD gives a detailed account of the turbulence of Duncan’s life in New York City. Marjorie McKee, in conversation with the author, contested the idea that Duncan had ever attempted suicide. She felt that this was not at all in keeping with his emotional temperament.

 

[54] to Sanders Russell, ND, ca. Dec. 1938, UCB.

 

[55] The WPA, instituted by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, was one of the New Deal agencies that became a meeting ground for young politically-minded artists during the Second World War, and which provided educational programs as well as commissions for the creation of public art projects.

 

[56] to Sanders Russell, ND, ca. Dec. 1938, UCB.

 

[57] These transcripts were mailed to Philadelphia on January 18, 1939.

 

[58] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. Spring 1939.

 

[59] Anais Nin. The Diary of Anais Nin: 1939-1944. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969: 14. Virginia Admiral and Stan Brakhage in personal interviews also focused upon Duncan’s disappointment with the unyieldingness of New York gay community during the early 1940s.

 

[60] to Lili Fabilli, ND, ca. spring 1939.

 

[61] ibid.

 

[62] to Lili Fabilli and Cecily Kramer, ND, ca.1939.

 

[63] James Laughlin. New Directions in Prose and Poetry. Norfolk CT: New Directions, 1936. Preface.

 

[64] Breton’s presence in New York lured a teenaged protégé named Philip Lamantia from the West Coast in 1944. It’s not clear whether Duncan met Lamantia in New York at that time, or if their first contact came later in San Francisco.

 

[65] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. Sept. 1939.

 

[66] One of Duncan’s application recommendations came from Virginia Admiral.

 

[67] to Minnehaha Symmes, ca. Oct.1939. Duncan told various stories about his interview at Black Mountain College, in one making the assumption that he’d been rejected by the school after arguing with a teacher about the Spanish Civil War.

 

[68] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. Sept 1939.

 

[69] to Minnehaha Symmes, 16 Nov. 1939.

 

[70] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. Dec. 1939.

 

[71] to Pauline Kael, 3 Feb. 1940. Duncan’s letters to Kael, housed at the Bancroft Library are also a valuable source regarding Duncan’s thoughts on socialist politics in New York and Berkeley during the early 1940s. Jeff Rall was born in Canada in 1915 and spent part of his childhood in Kansas City, Missouri.

 

[72] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. Oct. 1939. Pavel Tchelitcheu, a Russian painter, had moved to New York in 1934 and later became romantically involved with Charles Henri Ford. Parts of Duncan’s research may have contributed to the essay “Notes on some Painters and Poets,” published in Retort magazine, Winter 1945.

 

[73] to James Cooney, 15 Apr. 1939. Duncan seems to have met the Cooneys briefly for the first time during the early summer of 1939.

 

[74] Nin. The Diary...,16.

 

[75] to Minnehaha Symmes and Lewis Burtch, ND, Dec. 1939 or Jan. 1940.  Deirdre Bair in Anais Nin: A Biography asserts that the first meeting with Duncan took place in February of 1940. This is incorrect.

 

[76] Nin. The Diary...,16.

 

[77] Nin. The Diary...,159.

 

[78] Nin. The Diary..., 72.  Admiral lived in the building through the 1950s. It was later torn down.

 

[79] Hofmann, a German immigrant, had moved to New York in 1932 to become one of the Abstract Expressionist Movement's central painters and teachers. Admiral and her soon-to-be-husband Robert De Niro both studied with Hoffman through the early 1940s.

 

[80] Nin. The Diary...,18.

 

[81] YAC 4.

 

[82] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, 1940.

 

[83] to Pauline Kael, 3 Feb. 1940.

 

[84] ibid.

 

[85] In its second issue, published late during the same year, it was renamed The Experiemental Review.

 

[86] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, 1939. One of the letters Duncan received about the issue came from his college friend Pauline Kael, then completing her undergraduate degree at the University of California with hopes of entering law school the following year. She argued against Duncan’s devotions to Freud and Henry Miller, and of Miller she wrote: “I am completely in the air about the reasons for his literary influence. There is occasionally a joyous, releasing abandon in his work—but often—...he writes rotten prose & talks the sheerest nonsense.” From Pauline Kael, ND, Spring 1940.

 

[87] to Pauline Kael, ND, Spring 1940.

 

[88] YAC, 5. The poem seems to have been an important one to Duncan. He made a studio recording of the piece in December of 1961, and he returned to the poem to make revisions in 1962, June of 1964, and 1965.

 

[89] to Minnehaha Symmes, 27 Aug. 1940. Duncan made note that in June of 1940, Fahs traveled by ship to South America. There is no immigration record of such a trip. Ned Fahs later cut off contact with Duncan. He was married in August of 1941 and had two children. He died in July of 1997.

 

[90] Ntbk 4, ND, ca. 1941, UCB.

 

[91] Ntbk 2, ND, ca. 1941: 109, UCB. In the aftermath of Ned Fahs’s relationship with Duncan, he chose a route very similar to Duncan’s father’s. He found success not only in his academic career, but also later as a Program Director for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. He never revealed his homosexuality to his family.

 

[92] to Sanders Russell, 13 June 1940.

 

[93] to Sanders Russell, ND, Summer 1940.

 

[94] Blanche Cooney. In My Own Sweet Time: An Autobiography, Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1993: 21.

 

[95] to Minnehaha Symmes, 27 Aug. 1940.

 

[96]  Ibid.

 

[97] Robert Duncan. Sermon. Unpublished manuscript. Enclosed in letter to Minnehaha Symmes, 21 Aug. 1940. 

 

[98] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, ca. Autumn 1940.

 

[99] Ibid. There is no record of Minnehaha Symmes’s stance regarding the draft. Duncan did however make note of a letter sent by his stepfather Lew Burch— “We are all wondering when your number is in the draft and when we can expect a fine soldier in the family!” [Ntbk. 2, 3 Dec. 1940, UCB].

 

[100] United States Army Draft Questionnaire. Folder 9, UCB. Filed by Duncan on 8 Dec. 1940.

 

[101] Ibid.

 

[102] Cooney. In My Own Sweet Time: 8.

 

[103] Alvin Schwartz later married Marjorie McKee and Marguerite Schwartz became romantically involved with poet Jackson Mac Low. Duncan in his notebooks mistakenly referred to Marguerite Schwartz as Margaret Schwartz.

 

[104] YAC, iv. Russell was born in 1913 in Southern California.

 

[105] Alvin Schwartz. Personal Interview. 16 Apr. 2006.

 

[106] Ntbk. B. 1944, UCB.

 

[107] to Minnehaha Symmes, 27 Aug. 1940.

 

[108] Ntbk. 2, 12 Dec. 1940, UCB. See note 101: Schwartz’s name was Marguerite.

 

[109] Ntbk. 2, early Dec. 1940, UCB.

 

[110] OF, 67.

 

[111] Robert Duncan, “A Life in Poetry,” The Vancouver Poetry Conference, 5 Aug. 1963.

 

[112] This publication was labeled “issue two” to account for its previous incarnation as Ritual magazine, and it included an insert copy of the first issue of its precursor Ritual.

 

[113] Experimental Review, November 1940. In January of 1941, an Experimental Review supplement was printed. Duncan included three poems of his own: "Poem," "An Ark for Lawrence Durrell", and "The Awakening Into Dream, Love There: Out of the Dream, and Our Beautiful Child,” alongside works by Virginia Admiral, Harvey Breit, Jack Johnson, and Sanders Russell.

 

[114] Ntbk. 2, 2 Dec. 1940, UCB. Duncan said in a lecture in 1963, “What I remember of dancing in the Catskills is very much what the poem became for me.” [“A Life in Poetry,” The Vancouver Poetry Conference, 5 Aug. 1963.]

 

[115] from Eduardo Sanchez, 3 Dec. 1940.

 

[116] to Blanche Cooney, ND, ca. Dec.1940.

 

[117] Ntbk 2, 26 Dec. 1940: 102, UCB.

 

[118] Ntbk. 2, 28 Dec. 1940: 109, UCB.

 

[119] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 Apr. 1998. Schweitzer arrived in New York during January of 1940 at the age of 51.

 

[120] Ntbk. 2, 9 Feb. 1941: 283, UCB. Virginia Admiral also conjectured that Duncan may have halted the treatment because Schweitzer asked him to stop writing in his journals during the course of the analysis.

 

[121] to Minnehaha Symmes, 1Jan. 1941.

 

[122] Duncan first met Miller in mid-February of 1941.

 

[123] Robert Duncan, Untitled typed mss. UCB.

 

[124] Nin. The Diary…, 34.

 

[125] Ntbk 3: 86, UCB.

 

[126] Nin. The Diary..., 70.

 

[127] Christopher Edwards to the author, email, 7 Feb. 2006.

 

[128] Anais Nin in her Diary also mentions Duncan’s relationship with an unidentified individual named Paul during the winter of 1941.

 

[129] Griffith Borgeson later made a name for himself as an automobile historian. Borgeson and Fabilli’s marriage came to an end in 1945.

 

[130] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 Apr. 1998.

 

[131] Ntbk. 2, 11 Jan. 1941, 166, UCB.

 

[132] These notebooks are now housed in the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

[133] Nin. The Diary…, 97.

 

[134] Nin. The Diary…, 85.

 

[135] Ntbk. 3, 8 March 1941, 59-62, UCB. It appears that Duncan upon arrival in Kansas City spent time with Jeff Rall’s brother Louis. It also appears that he avoided an actual meeting with Jeff Rall. Alvin Schwartz, in a conversation with the author during April of 2006, speculated that Duncan and Jeff Rall had been lovers.

 

[136]  The Originals: The Writer In America. PBS Documentary audio recording, 1974, SUNYAB.

 

[137] to James and Blanche Cooney, ND, April or May 1941. Duncan’s service records were destroyed in a fire in a United States Army archive building. One enrollment form still exists, listing his potential wartime contributions: “AIRPLANE ENGINE MECHANIC or FILM EDITOR, MOTION PICTURE (Motion picture cutter.) or PUBLIC RELATIONS MAN or PLAYWRIGHT (Motion picture writer.) or REPORTER.”

 

[138] Larry Smith. Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America. Bottom Dog Press, Huron, Ohio, 2000: 153. Ernst had defended James Joyce in his Ulysses censorship case. He was also instrumental in the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union. Duncan makes no mention of Ernst in his correspondence from the period.

 

[139] Nin. The Diary…, 115.

 

[140] to Lili Fabilli, ND, May/June 1941. 

 

[141] YAC, 17. This poem was first published in Poetry Magazine.

 

[142] to Lili Fabilli, May 1941.

 

[143]  BB 70.

 

[144] De Niro, born in Syracuse, New York in 1922, studied painting at Black Mountain College with Joseph Albers before moving to New York.

 

[145] Nin. The Diary…, 125.

 

[146] Ibid.

 

[147] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 17 July 1998.

 

[148] YAC 22.

 

[149] A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953. Ed. Gunther Stuhlmann. New York: Hartcourt, Brace, 1987: 337. In her Diary, Nin also recalled an odder event that took place in Provincetown that month: “Robert came and brought a friend. He tells me that this friend writes the most beautiful short stories. His name is Tennessee Williams. We sat under the overhanging fishing nets and I cooked lunch.” There are no other records of Duncan’s friendship with Williams.

 

[150] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 8 Apr. 1998.

 

[151] Ntbk B, 26 Dec. 1941, UCB.

 

[152] Nin. The Diary…,169. James Broughton in his memoir Coming Unbuttoned noted that Duncan was often too distracted by the workings of his own mind to greet people upon entering a room. Robert Gluck recalled that Duncan disposed of the customary “goodbye” at the end of phone calls, simply hanging up when he was done talking.

 

[153] to Minnehaha Symmes, 8 Jan. 1942.

 

[154] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, Dec 1941 or Jan 1942.

 

[155] SM, [page].

 

[156] Ntbk 27, SUNYAB, ND, ca.1950s.

 

[157] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, Spring 1942.

 

[158] to Minnehaha Symmes, 8 Jan. 1942.

 

[159] Colin Saunders. Robert Duncan Interview. Beat Scene. Summer 2005. 16. In February 1942, President Roosevelt had issued executive order 9066, allowing for the removal of Japanese-Americans from their homes to temporary detainment camps. By August the first refugees were being herded into camps throughout the Western United States.

 

[160] Kenneth Rexroth. An Autobiographical Novel. New York: New Directions, 1991: 509.

 

[161] YAC, 34. Duncan continued to allude to Africa through the end of his writing, in Ground Work II. This particular poem seems inflected by Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” as does Duncan’s “The Venice Poem.”

 

[162] “A Spring Memorandum” and “A Pair of Uranian Garters for Aurora Bligh appeared in the May 1942 issue. Duncan had a voluminous correspondence with the editors of Poetry magazine over the years, most centrally with Henry Rago. This correspondence is at SUNYAB, Duncan Papers, Business Files, Box 11.

 

[163] Duncan associated the name change with his “coming out” to the military. It wasn't until 1967 that he made the decision legal.

 

[164] to Doris Townsend, ND, Oct. 1942.

 

[165] to James and Blanche Cooney, ND, May 1943.

 

[166] Marjorie Mckee. Personal Interview. 23 Sept. 1998.

 

[167] to Pauline Kael, 23 March 1943.

 

[168] De Niro and McKee’s only child, Robert De Niro, Jr., was born in August of 1943.

 

[169] Ekbert Faas says that the newlyweds lived on West 13th Street, near University Avenue, not far from where Anais Nin lived. They seem to have moved from 11th Street to 13th Street at some point during the course of their marriage.

 

[170] to James and Blanche Cooney, ND, May 1943.

 

[171] to Virginia Admiral, ND, 1955.

 

[172] Virginia Admiral. Personal Interview. 17 July 1998.

 

[173] YAC, 47.

 

[174] Ntbk B. Nov. 1943, UCB.

 

[175] Robert Duncan. Gay Liberation Day Poetry Reading. San Francisco. 2 March 1971. SUNYAB.

 

[176] Marjorie McKee. Personal Interview. 23 Sept. 1998. Ekbert Faas in his YRD reported Duncan being suicidal during and after his relationship with McKee. McKee disagreed with this. Except for occasional lows of his final years brought on by physical illness, Duncan seemed untouched by depression. He could be intolerant of the emotional instability of others, particularly when that instability was accompanied by chemical addiction. As he wrote to James Broughton during the fall of 1952, “[w]hen one gradually more and more wholly sees life as an adventure; one’s sympathys [sic] die out tho ones [sic] interests may go on in people who see life as predicament.” [to James Broughton, ND, Autumn 1952, Kent State University.]

 

[177] The friendship with Wallis was brief. Wallis died early in 1944 after falling out of a window during a party at Seon Givens’s house on St. Luke’s Place. Duncan remained in contact with Givens through the 1960s, describing her as  “a friend and confidant, but more—and that in the midst of our Bohemian dedications—a spiritual mentor.” [Ntbk. 73, 3 Feb.1984: 40, SUNYAB]

 

[178] Jackson Mac Low, email to the author, 10 Feb. 1988.

 

[179] Ntbk B, 15 Nov. 1943, UCB.

 

[180] Ibid, ND,1943, UCB.

 

[181] Ekbert Faas in YRD records Leslie Sherman’s name as Leslie Herman.

 

[182] to Minnehaha Symmes,  3 Feb.1944.

 

[183] to Minnehaha Symmes, 12 Feb. 1943. Duncan may be referring to Henry Miller, though it’s likely that Miller was in California at the time.

 

[184] Steve Abbott and Aaron Shurin. “Interview: Robert Duncan”. Gay Sunshine, Summer/Fall 1979, No. 41-42: 5.

 

[185] Riding scholar Jeff Hamilton suspects that if the meeting took place, it may have been disappointing to Duncan.

 

[186] to Pauline Kael, 24 Feb. 1944.

 

[187] to Pauline Kael, 24 June 1944.

 

[188] qtd. in ibid.

 

[189] to Minnehaha Symmes, ND, Spring 1945.

 

[190] Robert Duncan. Gay Liberation Day Poetry Reading. San Francisco. 2 March 1971. SUNYAB. Jeff Hamilton writes of and quotes from Duncan’s correspondence with John Crowe Ransom in his essay “Wrath Moves in the Music: Robert Duncan, Laura Riding, Craft and Force in Cold War Poetics,” Jacket Magazine, #26, Oct. 2004, http://jacketmagazine.com/26/dunc-hami.html#fnB15.

 

[191] Unlike many of his homosexual peers, Duncan rarely spoke of being discriminated against as a homosexual, nor did he express anxieties regarding the way he was perceived. The reasonable fears that were associated with a homosexual lifestyle during the 1940s and 1950s seemed to be absent or deeply repressed for Duncan. Michael Rumaker wrote about gay life in San Francisco during the 1950s in his memoir Robert Duncan in San Francisco:

 

There was, in spite of the extraordinary quality of light over the city, a heavy climate of fear, not so much from the violence which occurred, although there was enough of that, but rather from the activities and presence of the police themselves….the Morals Squad was everywhere, and the entrapment of gay males in the streets, the parks and in numerous public places was a constant fear and common occurrence. [San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1996: 13.]

 

[192] Both Virginia Admiral and Stan Brakhage felt that Duncan’s early interactions with gay men in the New York art world had in some way shocked him or made him resentful of a less than warm welcome.

 

[193] Jacskon Mac Low, email to the author, 10 Feb. 1998.

 

[194] Colin Saunders. Robert Duncan Interview. Beat Scene, Summer 2005: 20.

 

[195] YAC, 54.