March 26, 2020 31
Spirits of San Francisco
Jed Perl
The Householders:
Robert Duncan and Jess
by Tara McDowell.
MIT Press, 232 pp., $29.95
The oil paint is laid on thick, like the
most scrumptious cake frosting imagin-
able, in the portrait of the poet Robert
Duncan that his life partner, the artist
known as Jess, made in 1965. Duncan,
his almond-shaped eyes wide open but
looking not so much at us as beyond us,
is nearly overwhelmed by the bohemian
excess of the home on Stinson Beach,
near San Francisco, where he and Jess
lived together for a time in the 1950s.
Among their possessions, as chroni-
cled in this voluptuous little canvas,
are volumes of esoteric literature (The
Zohar and Thrice Greatest Hermes),
flourishing houseplants, a phantasma-
gorical candle holder with a lit candle,
and other fin-de-siècle bibelots. An art
nouveau hanging lamp, with leaves and
berries in pungent greens and reds, sets
the hyperbolic mood. Every nook and
cranny of the painting bursts with un-
expected color combinations. Jess cel-
ebrates the high-minded hedonism of
the mid-twentieth-century San Fran-
cisco Bay Area avant-garde with a can-
vas that rivals the enameled richness of
a medieval altarpiece.
Jess’s portrait of Duncan, part of a
series of paintings he called Tra n s l a -
tions, has an enigmatic title, The Enam-
ord Mage, which was adapted from one
of Duncan’s poems (see illustration on
page 32). If this title, with its archaic
wording, identifies Duncan as a beloved
and charismatic magician, he was also
a thoroughly modern one, who along
with Jess saw the liberating power of
certain esoteric and occult ideas. Dun-
can and Jess believed that the social,
sexual, and artistic choices they made
in their own lives, although they might
strike some as revolutionary, were
among many other things a celebration
of older modes of thought and feeling.
These men felt an affinity with dis-
sident spirits from many times and
places: the unconventional Victorians
and Edwardians who let their imagina-
tions run wild when they wrote books
for children; the Symbolists who trans-
formed French art and literature in
the late nineteenth century; the early-
twentieth-century experimentalists, es-
pecially James Joyce and Max Ernst,
who reshaped verbal and visual syntax;
and the filmmakers among their Bay
Area cohort who broke all the rules
of naturalistic storytelling and narra-
tive coherence. They admired ancient
Greek literature and the paintings ofthe Old Masters, but also took an inter-
est in L. Frank Baum’s Oz books and
the brash, full-color advertisements
in Life magazine. The archaeologi-
cal, antiquarian, and archival aspects
of their avant-gardism are worth con-
templating now, when the swagger and
free- spiritedness of the old West Coast
bohemia have been buried beneath
a tech-savvy San Francisco that they
would find unrecognizable.Duncan and Jess have in recent
years inspired a considerable number
of books and exhibitions. Tara Mc-
Dowell’s The Householders: Robert
Duncan and Jess is the most recent ef-fort to excavate the works and lives of
Duncan, who was sixty-nine when he
died in 1988, and Jess, who died six-
teen years later at the age of eighty. A
biography by Lisa Jarnot, Robert Dun-
can : The Ambassador from Venus, was
published in 2012. The University of
California Press has brought out Dun-
can’s collected writings in four stout
volumes, one devoted to The H.D.
Book, a work of over six hundred pages
that began as a salute to the poet who
was born Hilda Doolittle and morphed
into a wide-ranging meditation on the
nature of art in the modern world; only
parts of it were published during Dun-
can’s lifetime.
More than twenty-five years ago,
Jess was the subject of “Jess: A Grand
Collage, 1951–1993,” a retrospective at
the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buf-
falo that traveled to major museums in
Minneapolis, San Francisco, Boston,
and New York. Since then, there has
been a steady stream of engaging books
and exhibitions. “An Opening of the
Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their
Circle,” which toured in 2013–2015
and was accompanied by a valuable
catalog, was perhaps the boldest at-
tempt yet to set Jess and Duncan at the
center of San Francisco’s avant-garde
heyday. The San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art (SFMoMA) explored
similar themes in last year’s “Mythos,
Psyche, Eros: Jess and California.” The
men and women who were part of their
circle included many of the significant
writers, artists, and filmmakers who
at one time or another made Northern
California their base of operation. Al-
though some of their friends, like the
poet Helen Adam, are little known,
others, like Pauline Kael, who in the
1950s lived in a house in Berkeley full
of murals painted by her good friend
Jess, need no introduction.
We now have, close at hand, not only
much of the work that Jess and Duncan
created but also a significant amount of
archival material relating to them and
their circle. (The SFMoMA show in-
cluded some of the collections of clip-
pings from books and magazines that
Jess stored in his studio.) What may
still be lacking are the analytical tools
necessary to describe and define their
visual and literary worlds. Both men
were formalists; they believed in the
freestanding meaning, integrity, and
value of a work of art or literature. But
their formalism involved a vehement
rejection of what Duncan saw as the
impersonal and maybe even mechanis-
tic view of tradition that writers from
T. S. Eliot to Clement Greenberg asso-
ciated with the creative act.
Duncan believed that the forms of
art and the forms of life were forever in-
tertwined—wonderfully, mysteriously,
miraculously. In “Pages from a Note-
book,” first published in 1953, he wrote
of wanting “to live in the swarm of
human speech. This is not to seek per-
fection but to draw honey or poetry
out of all things.” A little later in these
notes he praised the importance of the
unplanned as a key to emotional au-
thenticity: “A longing grows to return
to the open composition in which the
accidents and imperfections of speech
might awake intimations of human
being.” Duncan said the poetry ofRobert Duncan :
The Ambassador from Venus
by Lisa Jarnot, with a foreword
by Michael Davidson.
University of California Press,
526 pp., $39.95Collected Essays
and Other Prose
by Robert Duncan,
edited and with an introduction
by James Maynard.
University of California Press,
541 pp., $60.00; $29.95 (paper)The Collected Early
Poems and Plays
by Robert Duncan,
edited and with an introduction
by Peter Quartermain.
University of California Press,
822 pp., $49.95; $29.95 (paper)The Collected Later
Poems and Plays
by Robert Duncan,
edited and with an introduction by
Peter Quartermain.
University of California Press,
869 pp., $49.95; $29.95 (paper)The H. D. Book
by Robert Duncan,
edited and with an introduction by
Michael Boughn
and Victor Coleman.
University of California Press,
678 pp., $36.95 (paper)An Opening of the Field:
Jess, Robert Duncan,
and Their Circle
by Michael Duncan and
Christopher Wagstaff.
Pomegranate, 288 pp., $65.00OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLEJess: If All the World Were Paper and All the Water Sink, 1962Jess Collins Trust