32 The New York Review
Pindar, which he embraced as in some
ways exemplary, was “not a statue but
a mosaic.” Both the openness and what
sometimes even feels like the messiness
of Duncan’s poems and the collages
that Jess referred to as his “paste-ups”
grew out of a conviction that artistic
form was less a matter of long-sought
resolution than perpetual evolution.
When they met in 1949, Duncan was
thirty and Jess was twenty-six. Jess,
who had been born Burgess Collins,
had grown up in Southern California
and studied chemistry at the California
Institute of Technology. In the army,
he worked on the manufacture of plu-
tonium at Oak Ridge, the Manhat-
tan Project’s site in Tennessee. After
the war, he joined General Electric
Laboratories and was assigned to the
Hanford Atomic Energy Project in
Washington State, until he became
disillusioned with the government’s
nuclear programs and moved to the
Bay Area, where he began studying
painting at the California School of
Fine Arts. Jess first met Duncan when
he attended a reading the poet gave in
Berkeley. “Shy, willowy, and the epit-
ome of tall, dark, and handsome”—so
Lisa Jarnot describes Jess in her biog-
raphy of Duncan—he “attracted Dun-
can’s attention immediately.” Soon
enough, they were lovers. Duncan was
born in Northern California. When
his mother died shortly after his birth,
he was adopted by a family with theo-
sophical enthusiasms who saw the tim-
ing of the adoption as related to their
hermeticist interest in the alignment of
the stars; Duncan’s later mystical in-
clinations had deep roots. By the time
he met Jess, Duncan had studied at the
University of California at Berkeley,
lived on the East Coast, and estab-
lished himself as a poet of promise.
As early as 1944, in the essay “The
Homosexual in Society,” published
in Dwight Macdonald’s short-lived
and strikingly independent magazine
Politics, Duncan had made a bold ar-
gument for the relationship between
sexual and artistic freedom. “What
I think can be asserted as a starting
point,” he wrote, “is that only one de-
votion can be held by a human being
seeking a freedom, and that is a devo-
tion to human creative life and expres-
sion, toward the liberation of human
love, human conflicts, human aspira-
tions.” Seven years later, in 1951, he
and Jess embraced that “liberation of
human love” when they took what they
always described as “marriage vows,”
although as far as I know nobody has
described the content of that resolutely
unofficial ceremony. Duncan moved
into Jess’s studio, a renovated ballroom
with an improvised kitchen in a build-
ing known as the Ghost House; it was a
big old San Francisco Victorian wreck
of a place, where they shared a bath-
room with other artists and writers.
They embarked on their life as what
they referred to as “householders.”
“I’m a householder,” McDowell quotes
Duncan as explaining. “My whole idea
of being able to work was to have a
household.” While a gay household was
by no means a unique arrangement,
what was striking about theirs was the
insistence that the liberation of love
forged the conditions that made signifi-
cant creative work possible.
McDowell’s book is a quartet of es-
says in which she meditates on the
relationship between Duncan and
Jess and their art and the spaces they
shared, especially the Victorian house
at 3267 20th Street in San Francisco,
where they moved in the late 1960s
and remained until their deaths. She
quotes the painter R. B. Kitaj, a friend
of Duncan’s, as referring to their “safe-
household” and goes on to say that “this
curious neologism suggests a slight mu-
tation of the safe house, a refuge for
individuals in active conflict with the
state, or engaged in acts of espionage
or terrorism.” For them, the house,
she argues, was “a physical place,” “an
imaginary site,” and “the precondition
for artistic production for both men.”
They were deeply attached to their
possessions, which included a great
number of books and records as well as
antiques and curiosities picked up inex-pensively in Bay Area thrift shops and
junkshops. Duncan liked to work at the
kitchen table, while Jess was upstairs
in his studio with the magazines and
assorted books and ephemera that he
mined for his paste-ups. My only qualm
with McDowell’s emphasis on the un-
conventional charms of this domestic
arrangement is that she may underesti-
mate the extent to which many literary
and artistic bohemians, whether gay
or straight, have chosen to be home-
bodies. For every Rimbaud who can’t
settle down—and for many people that
remains the quintessential bohemian
type—there are many more artists and
writers who depend on the stability of a
home that can function as a reflection
or extension of their art and ideas. If
Kitaj understood his friend’s hunger
for a safe-household, it was in part be-
cause the homes he created for himself
in London and, later, Los Angeles also
functioned as creative cocoons.
Jess made lunch for me one day in the
kitchen on 20th Street in San Francisco,
after I’d written something about him
and we had corresponded a bit. Dun-
can, always known as the voluble one
in the couple, was no longer alive. Jess
was easy company, more matter-of-fact
and plainspoken than some friends had
led me to expect. The wild imaginings
were left for the work, at least at that
point when he was a relatively old man.
The house had its unusual and off-beat
elements, but not ostentatiously so, and
the overall sense was of a place much
lived in. The illumination over thetable in the kitchen came from a fixture
containing some old bulbs that had fila-
ments with elaborate, quirky designs.
Jess explained that years earlier he
and Duncan had scavenged them from
abandoned buildings in the city. Those
bulbs were strange and beautiful and
apparently made to last: they were still
shedding light in the 1990s.Like many commentators on Jess’s
work, McDowell is particularly fasci-
nated by Narkissos, a nearly mono-
chromatic composition in pencil and
gouache on cut and pasted paper,
which he worked on for a couple of
decades and left unfinished in 1991.
This nearly six-foot-high vision is a be-
wildering gathering of images derived
from sources as varied as classicalsculpture, George Herriman’s Krazy
Kat cartoons, and Physique Pictorial,
a midcentury health and fitness maga-
zine marketed to gay men. In a two-
hundred-page notebook, McDowell
explains, Jess gathered together quota-
tions and sources related to the myth of
Narcissus. There is a curatorial impulse
here that he shared with many figures
in the modern movement, from Ezra
Pound, with his gathering of far-flung
sources in the Cantos, to the “souvenir
boxes” that Joseph Cornell composed
of photographs and ephemera to honor
the ballerinas and movie actresses who
struck his fancy.
At the center of Narkissos is the
handsome young Narcissus, but in a
shift that reaffirms Duncan’s interest
in the intermingling of art and life, the
face that returns his gaze in a pond
crowded with waterlilies and occult
symbols is not his mirror image but
Brancusi’s sculpted head Le Narcisse.
Jess’s protagonist—whose downcast
gaze and lean, muscular physique are
derived from photographs—discovers
his dopplegänger in a simplified head
by the artist who by most reckonings
was the first modern sculptor. What
powers this strange work, which Mc-
Dowell justly characterizes as having a
“visual density bordering on vertigo,”
is Jess’s genius for knitting together fig-
ures, landscapes, and architectural ele-
ments of widely different sizes, scales,
and styles. This is a composition that
continually forces us off balance with
its spatial push and pull.While Ernst and Kurt Schwitters al-
most invariably juxtaposed variegated
elements in collage and collage-like
compositions that had an insistent,
overall frontality, Jess prefers spaces
that twist, buckle, and bend. In Narkis-
sos and in the many paste-ups he
did without recourse to pencil and
gouache, he brings together the far off
and the nearby. A nude boy featured in
Narkissos, based on a drawing by the
Mannerist painter Pontormo, proffers
an arm so dramatically foreshortened
as to foreclose any possibility of a lucid
spatial geometry. Jess’s compositions,
despite the plethora of classical refer-
ences, are insistently unclassical or
even anticlassical. He gives the spatial
surprises we know from everyday expe-
rience a discombobulating magic.
Around 1950, when Jess was attend-
ing the California School of Fine Arts
in San Francisco, the improvisatory and
experimental spirit of the Abstract Ex-
pressionists was still in the ascendance.
Both Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko
taught there for a time, and West Coast
painters, including Edward Corbett and
Hassel Smith, must have encouraged
an emphasis on moment-to- moment in-
tuitions that Jess embraced even as he
marshaled representational images in
his paste-ups and paintings. Although
the handling of figures and spaces in
his paintings occasionally strikes me
as inept rather than provocative, he has
a way of arriving at visions so strange
and unexpected that I’m left feeling
that no further justification is required.
A relatively large canvas, If All the
World Were Paper and All the Water
Sink (1962; see illustration on page 31),
with its circle of dancing children, con-
fetti drift of particolored rectangles,
and shadowy cardplayer watching the
unfolding action, is enjoyable and in-
explicable—at least until you discover
that it’s derived from a dream that
Duncan related in The H.D. Book. For
a series of works called Salvages, Jess
began with old paintings discovered in
junkshops or antique shops and used
what was already on the canvas as a
jumping-off point for his own visual ru-
minations. The results are Janus-faced,
with the found image and the invented
image locked together.
Perhaps the most striking of Jess’s
paintings are the Tra n s l a t i o n s; he
worked on the series from the late
1950s deep into the 1960s. Some Tra n s -
lations were derived from engravings in
old copies of Scientific American, oth-
ers from photographs that struck Jess’s
fancy. After precisely tracing the out-
lines of his chosen model onto a canvas,
he went his own way with colors and
surfaces. We watch as the dutiful em-
piricist becomes the shameless roman-
ticist. Some works in the series fall flat.
With Fig. 4 —Far and Few...: Transla-
tion #15, based on a photograph of the
Beatles standing up to their thighs in
water, Jess seems flummoxed by the
rather banal pop culture image. But a
couple of the Tra n s l a t i o n s that focus on
old experiments or apparatuses from
the pages of Scientific American yield
bemusedly lyrical salutes to the forever
receding dream of scientific certainty.
With the lushly ambiguous Montana
Xibalba: Translation #2, Jess turns a
black-and-white photograph of soccer
players into an exuberant eruption of
youthful bodies and fancy athletic garb,
all rendered in zany complementary
colors. On the back of each Tra n s l a t i o n,
Jess included an inscription. The oneJess: The Enamord Mage: Translation #6, 1965Jess Collins Trust