The H.D. Book (4 page)

Duncan then began to type Book 1 yet again. His goal this time through was to produce a typescript that would serve as the typeset copy for the Black Sparrow edition. It has a very particular look. It is typed on an IBM Selectric using an elite typeface so that he could make actual italics. It is also done on typesetting paper, unlike anything else in the files. Once again, though, he added significant material as he worked through the text. This was particularly so in Chapter 1, the earliest work in the book, where he added several pages of text, mostly having to do with developing his thinking about the “image” and
H.D.’s identity as “Imagist.” The relation with John Martin, however, soured when Duncan was working on Chapter 5, and the publication deal fell through. Duncan finished retyping more than half of Chapter 5 before dropping the project. He apparently continued to make small changes to existing copies of the manuscript after that. He also apparently skipped ahead to retype/rewrite parts of Book 2, Chapter 5 in the same format with the same Selectric typewriter.

So, for Book 1, Chapters 1 to halfway through 5, we have Duncan’s final revisions before what he thought was going to be publication, including a typeset typescript of the title page and the copyright page. For Chapter 6 we have the stage before that—a retyped manuscript with many holograph revisions on different manuscripts. The same typescript done on the same typewriter exists for the rest of the chapters, although there are fewer holograph revisions, with the exceptions of Book 2, Chapters 4, 5, and 6. There are also, as noted, a few diction, punctuation, and grammatical changes in Chapters 1–3, and almost none in Chapters 7–11.

Our goal was to arrive at a manuscript that was as close as possible to the state it was in when Duncan stopped working on it. Our procedure was to begin with the magazine publication as the basic copy text for all chapters, knowing that Duncan had prepared those early texts, then to interpolate
all
changes that were made after that on all available manuscripts. Duncan seems to have been somewhat indiscriminate about which pieces of paper he made his changes on. Since there were in most cases multiple copies of each chapter in a file, all undated, there’s no way to identify when the changes were made. If it’s clear that the changes were made after the magazine publication, we included them regardless of which manuscript they were on. If there was a conflict, we tried to identify the last change by looking at the process of Duncan’s thought, and finally by applying the rule, “in the last resort go for the change that is most condensed and elegant,” since that was his general mode of revision.

Only once did we have to actually collate two different manuscripts. In Book 2, Chapter 5 there are four separate manuscript versions that include three separate versions of the beginning of part 2, done on three different typewriters. Manuscript A is from the primary typescript for Book 2, Chapters 1–4 and into Chapter 5, done on the same typewriter with the Courier face that Duncan usually used. It has the large decorative chapter number done in Duncan’s hand that the rest of the typescript has for each chapter. In the upper right hand corner is the identifier, “II-5-1” (for Book 2, Chapter 5, page 1) with subsequent page numbers following after that. At “II-5-16” Duncan begins using a new typewriter, double-spaced in a new typeface. This is manuscript B, which goes through “II-5-19,” then stops. II-5-19 contains the opening paragraphs of part 2 of Chapter 5. A new manuscript follows, done on the same typewriter as Manuscript A, but with the simple page number in the upper left hand corner beginning at “173,” suggesting it was part of a different retyping of the entire book paginated from the beginning of Book 2. This is Manuscript C. It too begins at the opening of part 2 (marked with the roman numeral II and without the immediate subdivision in our final version). There is a further one-page manuscript done on the typewriter and typesetting paper and in the style of the first five chapters of Book 1 that Duncan did for Black Sparrow. This is Manuscript D (which begins the section with a roman numeral I). Each of these texts differs significantly from the others.

A page (173) from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript C) showing Duncan’s early wording
.

Photo courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust.

A page (174) from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript C) showing Duncan’s holograph revisions
.

Photo courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust.

Our analysis is that manuscripts A and B were done at the same time. They are identical to the magazine publication of part 1 and are continuous. Why Duncan changed machines in the middle of retyping the manuscript is a mystery. Perhaps he had a different machine at the house in Stinson Beach north of San Francisco where he and his partner, Jess Collins, often stayed (he sometimes refers to hearing the sea as he writes) and worked on the manuscript during a stay there. In any case, there are holograph changes to the manuscript that post-date magazine publication. In the first paragraph of the chapter, “usurious standards” (which appears in the magazine version) is changed to “usurious system.” Part 2 seems to have been started later and went through several versions after it was published as a fragment in 1975. Manuscripts B, C, and D all revise the opening paragraph, reducing it from 110 words as it appeared in
Stony Brook,
to 27 (B), 28 (C), and 30 (D). The moves are all toward a more concise and elegant statement. Similar changes were made in the second paragraph. The
Stony Brook
publication reads at one
point: “As I begin to see in terms of William James’s pluralistic proposition of reality.” B reads “ . . . William James’s pluralistic projection of realms of reality.” C and D both have “ . . . William James’s pluralistic reality.” Given Duncan’s push toward concision and elegance, C and D would seem to be the later versions, a judgment upheld by other evidence.

The real problem comes up in the third paragraph, which begins, “All through the body of our nation. . . . ” In his discussion of Dante’s concept of “Prowess,” Manuscript C is rewritten with reference to the then current civil rights and black power movements. Duncan had originally typed “where men are fighting for the realization of all the potentialities of the human mind, against exploitation and discrimination, for the potentialities that have been denied negroes and for our own potentialities of community with negroes, of brotherhood . . . ”; he then crossed out “negroes” in both places and wrote in “blacks” by hand. In Manuscript D he has further changed the text to read, “ . . . against exploitation and discrimination, for the potentialities that have been denied blacks, women, xicanos—but we are more and more aware of how many subservient groups have been defined by the establishment of society based on the supremacy of[.]” He breaks off there, unable to follow through with that particular rhetoric.

Clearly Manuscript D is the last version of the opening of part 2 of Chapter 5. All the changes indicate that, as does the appearance of the text, which was evidently done at the same time as the typeset version of Book 1, Chapters 1–5. The problem is that the text is incomplete, and Duncan was apparently uncomfortable with where the passage was going. In this case, we have chosen to integrate the two latest manuscripts (C and D), recognizing the direction of Duncan’s thought, while trying to maintain textual continuity. Our edited version reads: “against exploitation and discrimination, for the potentialities that have been denied blacks, women, xicanos, and for our own potentialities of community, of brotherhood.”

Other than that, our only changes have been formal. In general we have followed and made consistent Duncan’s predominant styles in spelling and punctuation and in formatting of text. Duncan’s early manuscript italicized all quotations. He changed that in his version for Black Sparrow, and where he did not complete those changes, we did, although quotations in languages other than English are in italics. We have also regularized capitalizations and spellings that were not important to Duncan’s style: neo-Platonist for neo-platonist, Gnostic for gnostic, etc. Titles of works are given in their standard bibliographic form, using italics or quotation marks as appropriate. When
Cantos
refers to Pound’s book, we have italicized it; when it refers to individual poems, we have followed Duncan and not italicized it. Duncan, who coined the term “The War Trilogy” to refer to the three long poems of H.D.’s World War II epic (
The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels,
and
The Flowering of the Rod
), sometimes italicized it, and sometimes did not. We have kept the capitalization, but eliminated the italics throughout. Occasional misspellings and typos have been corrected.

A page from Book 2, Chapter 5 (Manuscript D) showing Duncan’s revisions to the paragraph beginning “All thru” compared to Manuscript C. Note that this version is typed on typesetting paper
.

Photo courtesy of the Poetry / Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Reproduced by permission of the Jess Collins Trust.

Three other issues require some explanation. The first has to do with a parallel text derived from
The H.D. Book.
In 1960, Duncan proposed to Cid Corman to excerpt sections of Book 2 for publication in
Origin.
Duncan sent Corman an initial selection in January 1961, which Corman edited and sent back to Duncan. Duncan then continued to work on it, typing and retyping, adding and deleting selections, and even expanding and rewriting passages. The result was published in 1963 in
Origin
10 (Second Series) as
The Little Day Book.
Although closely related to
The H.D. Book, The Little Day Book
is a separate text. There is no indication that Duncan ever envisioned them being published together, and we have elected not to include it in this edition.

The second issue has to do with Book 3, Duncan’s reading of
Helen in Egypt.
All that exists is a notebook filled with initial observations made during 1961. It is difficult to say what Book 3 would eventually have looked like. Duncan was literally only in the first stages of working on it, and given the transformations that took place to the other two books, there’s no doubt that the early notebook version would have become something radically different. For this reason, we have included it as an appendix rather than as a part of the body of the main book.

The third issue is the question of whether or not to provide an apparatus to locate and explain Duncan’s references. Deeply learned and widely read, often in texts that are off the beaten path for most people, Duncan moved freely from the pre-Socratics to Renaissance Hermeticists to quantum physicists, from Medieval Church polemicists to modern poetic polemicists to nineteenth-century spiritualists. He was at home among them all and carried on a conversation with them all. Some readers have suggested that this material needs to be identified and explained in order to help the “uninitiated” into the text. We have opted not to do so for a couple of reasons. We feel strongly that the book Robert Duncan wanted was one designed to be read without the interruption of footnotes and various other scholarly apparatuses. Duncan was clear that he was not a literary scholar, nor was he trying to produce a work of literary scholarship. “For I am not a literary scholar nor an historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions nor an occultist,” he wrote in
The H.D. Book
(2.4). “I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics.”