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Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet As Homosexual in Society
Robert Duncan was the heart of the San Francisco Renaissance ― the literary and countercultural movement that prefigured Black Mountain, the Beats, and the hippies. Duncan functioned as shaman of an emerging aesthetic grounded in magic, polytheism, and sexual freedom, a role that he cultivated in weekly Berkeley literary salons. For his biographer, Ekbert Faas, the mystic-poet Duncan was a harbinger of the coming cultural revolution, the iconic “guru” figure who, in the late 1940s, pried opened the door to the late 1960s.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1983
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July 30, 2018
To write a biography of a poet when the poet is alive is to make a curious kind of bargain. On the reading circuit in the Seventies, Duncan met Faas, the latter secured an interview, the interview went well enough that Faas proposed a biography; Duncan knew he had a juicy story to tell. Ten years earlier Duncan had written the major essay, The Truth & Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography, that incredible precis on the role of myth in contemporary autobiography, and several years before that, a summer 1964 letter to Olson informs of a Scribner option on H.D. Book, which Scribner had been interested in as an autobiography. Now Faas proposed hearing Duncan out for another round of interviews, while capitalizing on the access Duncan offered to his wide circle of friends. Duncan knew everyone from Lowell, Ashbery and Bishop to Anais Nin to Jackson Mac Low, Kenneth Anger, Dean Stockwell, R.B. Kitaj, Pauline Kael and on and on. It was endless, and not to be turned down. Why did Duncan do it? He put an awful lot of faith in Faas as a medium, thinking that the elements of the story were themselves a form that could carry his meaning.
He was not entirely wrong, but he overestimated Faas. Faas doesn't write characters, so all the people Duncan loved, who were part of his development -- oh, let's just start with Nin and Kael, two significant post-Second World War journalists -- they're flat on the page, Faas merely makes their writing sign itself. Contemporary theory would be impoverished without Duncan's Berkeley professor, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, but Faas says not a word about Kantorowicz's ideas. That said, Faas -- a Canadian academic -- is not parochial. He turns it loose -- "it," here, is all those voices who have had some truck with the early Duncan. Whole years (1942) are a mess, but it's actually a far more interesting book than its sequel, Lisa Jarnot's Ambassador of Venus -- though Jarnot is the more circumspect, the more genteel study. For example, let's take the year 1940. In Faas' account, which he mostly gets from Duncan, Duncan would stay at Nin's, journaling, until midnight, then out the door -- cruising the NYC demimonde, learning all about how queer life in the city worked. In Jarnot's account . . . but here Jarnot relies on an interview she did with the painter Virginia Admiral, Robert DeNiro's lover (she shared DeNiro with Robert Symmes for a time), and Admiral claims that the poet lived with her, and was not homeless, as Nin feared and Duncan confirms to Faas. The reason I call Jarnot genteel is that she could have gone back to Faas; or returned to his notes, his transcripts, sought out Deidre Bair (Nin's biographer) -- there were a number of options. To a certain kind of dry skeptic, I suppose Admiral is the more credible source, but which account better helps us understand how Duncan came to wish to expose the "tone, loaded with contempt for the human," which -- in its first American usage -- Duncan calls "the camp"? 1940 is the material that gives us the 1944 essay on the camp.
The point, finally, isn't which source is the more credible; Jarnot did the right thing to interview Admiral, though her technique throughout is to wave off Faas' study as "something you can go read about over there, if that kind of thing interests you." In other words, it's not useful to her purposes. "The Camp," specifically, is not a topic she pursues. However, Duncan pursued it, and he wanted Faas to know about it. So Jarnot is right -- that kind of thing does interest a reader. Faas' book is full of this kind of interest.
He was not entirely wrong, but he overestimated Faas. Faas doesn't write characters, so all the people Duncan loved, who were part of his development -- oh, let's just start with Nin and Kael, two significant post-Second World War journalists -- they're flat on the page, Faas merely makes their writing sign itself. Contemporary theory would be impoverished without Duncan's Berkeley professor, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, but Faas says not a word about Kantorowicz's ideas. That said, Faas -- a Canadian academic -- is not parochial. He turns it loose -- "it," here, is all those voices who have had some truck with the early Duncan. Whole years (1942) are a mess, but it's actually a far more interesting book than its sequel, Lisa Jarnot's Ambassador of Venus -- though Jarnot is the more circumspect, the more genteel study. For example, let's take the year 1940. In Faas' account, which he mostly gets from Duncan, Duncan would stay at Nin's, journaling, until midnight, then out the door -- cruising the NYC demimonde, learning all about how queer life in the city worked. In Jarnot's account . . . but here Jarnot relies on an interview she did with the painter Virginia Admiral, Robert DeNiro's lover (she shared DeNiro with Robert Symmes for a time), and Admiral claims that the poet lived with her, and was not homeless, as Nin feared and Duncan confirms to Faas. The reason I call Jarnot genteel is that she could have gone back to Faas; or returned to his notes, his transcripts, sought out Deidre Bair (Nin's biographer) -- there were a number of options. To a certain kind of dry skeptic, I suppose Admiral is the more credible source, but which account better helps us understand how Duncan came to wish to expose the "tone, loaded with contempt for the human," which -- in its first American usage -- Duncan calls "the camp"? 1940 is the material that gives us the 1944 essay on the camp.
The point, finally, isn't which source is the more credible; Jarnot did the right thing to interview Admiral, though her technique throughout is to wave off Faas' study as "something you can go read about over there, if that kind of thing interests you." In other words, it's not useful to her purposes. "The Camp," specifically, is not a topic she pursues. However, Duncan pursued it, and he wanted Faas to know about it. So Jarnot is right -- that kind of thing does interest a reader. Faas' book is full of this kind of interest.
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