In the following essay, Jaas discusses Nin's influence on the poetic and personal explorations of the poet Robert Duncan, particularly in light of their respective diary-writing.
Anaïs Nin and The Poet Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan, 1950s. Anaïs Nin, 1920s
(essay date Winter 1978)
His portrait in the Photographic Supplement to The Diary of Anais Nin, [sup.1] Robert Duncan remarked, shows him "posed with [his] eyes cast down in a reverie with heavy eyelids and [his] mouth closed in some secret thought or dream." [sup.2] There is an almost identical pose in an Anais Nin portrait from the same period--her eyes, again in Duncan's words, "cast down in a reverie, her eyelids heavy as if in dream . . . her mouth at once sweet and reserved" (Caesar's Gate, p. xxx). The similarity between the two poses, however, is as striking as the contrast between the photograph of Duncan in question and the verbal portrait of him which Nin provided in the Diary itself: "Robert, l'enfant terrible, perverse and knowing. . . . His eyes are too widely opened, like a medium in a trance" (III. 170).
This description of Duncan, which he quotes and discusses in his introduction to a 1972 reprint of Caesar's Gate, occurs in Nin 's journal notes for November, 1941, when, according to Duncan, she "had come to a revolting vision" of her previous friend. "Writing in her diary," Duncan comments, "she sees my sensuality as 'exasperated'. . . . Then there follows, as she writes to rid herself of the oppressive attendant I had become for her, even a vice, a vision of me as a whorish caricature of a possibility"; and he goes on to quote Nin: His face became that of the coquette, receiving flowers with a flutter of the eyelashes, oblique glances like the up-turned corner of a coverlet . . . the stage bird's sharp turn of the head, the little dance of alertness, the petulance of the mouth pursed for small kisses that do not shatter the being, the flutter and perk of femininity, all adornment and change, a mockery of the evanescent, mysterious fluidities of woman, a mockery of her invitations, a burlesque of her gestures of alarm or promise. (Caesar's Gate, p. xxx; cf. Diary III, 92) Duncan's quotations from Nin's Diary are as accurate as Nin 's quotations from his unpublished journal often are not. But Duncan errs in claiming that Nin's description of him follows her other comment on his "exasperated" sensuality. Actually, the "coquette" passage appears in Nin's notes for January, 1941: that is, almost a year before the final break which supposedly led to her "revolting vision" of Duncan.
And though it may well have helped Nin to rid herself of her "oppressive attendant," such exorcism is more likely to have taken place when she prepared her diary for publication, rather than in January, 1941. What then could have motivated Nin to immortalize Duncan in a photograph so unlike the "whorish caricature" she describes and so like the portrait she included of herself? Was it by way of paying final tribute to a spiritual kinship with a friend who at one point in her life had stood "nearest" and "clearest" to her above all others? (Diary III, 82). Duncan's own suggestion--that in the photographic resemblance he "may be her ape" (Caesar's Gate, p. xxx)--seems to add to the mystery of their "barbaric friendship" (Diary III. 187) rather than to provide us with the answer. Although he accuses Nin of "smalltown bigotry," his own interpretation of his relationship with the older woman hardly gives us a more flattering portrait of his former self than that contained in Nin's Diary: I was, then, one of your maricas, Garcia Lorca, one of those "esclavos de la mujer" . . . ten years after your season in that city as hell, I sought to infect myself with the Fall itself. . . . In the New York of 1940 I roamed the streets and made the round of bars, like a soul making a round of lives, to find some adventure of love; but it was also nightly to find a place to sleep, for I was no more than a loiterer in the entourage of an obscurely celebrated would-be star, a kept ape, but for no more than the board--a hustler then, of a pariah sort, transient in my passions, seeking to take hold among more fortunate drifters. (Caesar's Gate, p. xxix, xxxii) Duncan's unpublished notebooks, the letters he received from Nin, and my own extensive conversations with the poet have revealed yet another image of his youthful self which, beyond a few basic traits, has little in common with either Nin's or Duncan's own. They also disclosed a process of writing and rewriting, interpretation and reinterpretation, which has obscured the story of their relationship under several graphs of fictionalization. To be sure, even an attempt to decipher the earliest traces of this palimpsest cannot touch the original facts of bodies and emotions, conversations, gestures and silences. All that survives, apart from a few photographs and drawings, are once more words on paper, most of them in diaries written for open display amongst friends and with the ineluctable portion of unconscious or even deliberate self-dramatization that Duncan's journals display throughout.
What may emerge, then, in the following collage of quotations,[sup.3] pieced together from the earliest versions of these legends, is but one more life-graph or bio-graph, itself to be superseded by yet another, in the form of a portrait of Anais Nin which Duncan, as he told me, plans to include in a yet to be written section of his H.D. Book. When I first met Duncan in the summer of 1973, there was little in his commanding but rather remote and austere presence to prepare one for the subsequent disclosure of his youthful personality in the words of the poet himself, or Anais Nin, and others I have interviewed since then. Here is Nin's portrait of the young poet after their first meeting in Woodstock late in 1939: "a strikingly beautiful boy, who looked about seventeen, with regular features, abundant hair, a furnish expression" (Diary III, 16). The site of the meeting was a log cabin inhabited by James and Blanche Cooney who were the first in America to show interest in Nin's work and to publish some of her stories in the magazine Phoenix. As Nin remembers, Duncan read one of his poems, perhaps "Toward the Shaman," and "talked obsessionally, overintently, overwillfully, as if he wanted to hypnotize me" (Diary III, 159).
Duncan must have anticipated the encounter with some eagerness, for even before it took place Anais Nin had come to play an influential role in his life. As he mentioned to a friend in January, 1940, his feeling that there were "the same dynamics of love" in Nin's story "Birth" as in D. H. Lawrence's work had led him "to read more Anais Nin and then to discover in search for more Nin, Phoenix and Jimmy Cooney and Miller." The results were crucial ones in the poet's life. The Phoenix became the first magazine to publish Duncan outside the college journals, while his subsequent review of Tropic of Capricorn, in his own Experimental Review (November, 1940), won Miller's enthusiastic approval as the best criticism of his work published till then. It comes closer than any other, Miller wrote Duncan, "to expressing what I feel about my work myself. It puts you immeasurably above all American critics and also above such nincompoops as Eliot and Pound and Huxley et alia" (Unpublished letter of 26 Dec. 1940). Moreover, Nin's work had a more direct though problematic influence on the poet's. According to the Diary, House of Incest inspired Duncan "to state the visionary experience of the poet, his sense of ritual" and made him write "Arctics" after reading Nin's prose poem in the fall of 1939 (III, 18). As Duncan himself wrote to Nin in December, 1940, House of Incest also inspired "Toward the Shaman," a poem he had already come to see as "very limited" in its "range of perceptions": "My Shaman is an emanation of a cosmic myth world awakened by your House of Incest--it is my journey in the territories of the Saint of Persia . . . illuminated by the ways of consciousness made articulate through your work." Then, of course, there was also the venture into "erotic" writing.
After finding an old and wealthy client for her erotica in December, 1940, Nin instigated a veritable epidemic of "erotic journals" amongst her friends: "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," Those written by Duncan, who also offered "to test [their] inventions" (Diary III, 70), must have been of particular appeal, although not to the poet himself. When Nin, in the summer of 1941, had Virginia Admiral make a separate copy of Duncan's Erotica, the poet wondered "what sort of thing you can really make of it" given the fact that his "scenes have no real continuity." It was quite a different matter with the journals proper, a literary pursuit which determined Duncan's creativity for several years. Although full of brilliant forays into diverse literary modes, they ultimately tell the story of an artistic impasse. Yet to their initiator they promised the very opposite. "I fell in love with the pages from the Journal," Anais wrote to Robert in December, 1940 (Unpublished undated letter). And even their first major quarrel, caused by Nin's rejection of Patchen, only seems to have enhanced this enthusiasm. "I am suffering, because you are afraid of Kenneth Patchen" (cf. Diary III, 81). Duncan shortly afterwards wrote to Nin, exhorting her to follow his example: "I am beginning to write more like Patchen . . . I am beginning to talk directly, brutally. . . . But I fear and hate you when I think that you have resolved to stay in the House of Incest . . . . YOU HAVE NEVER ESCAPED--together shall we destroy this bondage in this book? Every day I shall gain power because I have to discover for you a new door." After jotting them down in a feverish outburst of despair, Duncan hurried to hand his effusions to Nin who sent him the following reply: Robert, all you desired came true. "Every day I shall gain power because I have to discover for you a new door." You have done this. You have freed me. You stand nearest and clearest. The miracle came with your diary. It was a complete emotional revelation, and as such a gift of the self. . . . I began to omit, retract, vanish. So I begin again. . . . Robert conquered me. He came first as a child--Enfant Terrible, perverse and knowing. But suddenly he grew large, strong, firm. . . . We never touch physically but I am under his spell. . . . Robert creates the enchantment in which I alone can live. . . . I think it is that I love him completely, whatever the form he takes.
The part of him that is a woman I feel but as a double. I feel always the strength. Our complete knowledge of each other is so strong that we are beyond judgment, reservations and absolutions. We have penetrated each other. . . . I am out of the house of death. Robert saved me. (Unpublished undated letter) In contrast to Nin, Duncan never recovered the enthusiasm he had felt for his friend before this first quarrel. By mid-January, 1941, a sense of unreality began to surround his memory of their earlier relationship--"how we met always like figures on a stage--the touching was not real touching, the speeches were not real talking." And on January 23, he announced "the end of volume one of the Journal called chez Anais": the spectral lovers are all gone and the volume closes the House of Anais. During the same period he stopped reading Nin's diaries (see Diary III, 92) and decided against publishing his own--"at least not in the Experimental Review." But his subsequent announcement of the "END OF THE JOURNAL" and of "the return of the poem" from the beginning of February, 1941, proved to be self-deceptive. True enough, there are the first poetic traces of an impulse that some years later was to engender "An African Elegy." And, suddenly emerging from the prose, there are several pages of Whitmanesque rhythms anticipating the revolutionary thrust that was to erupt in Howl: America, America--what a nest of old teeth, spectacle ruins, glasses without bottoms--the great dump yard--only the dump yards here have a soul. . . . And the great body of this nation stuffed with straw. . . . Everyone here is stillborn. The women aren't fucked well enough. Our mothers are of a race that killed. . . . This nation without love, without hate--only greed. Greed, it has been written upon the brow of America, it is written indelibly upon the lips, the breasts, the cunt, the ass. . . . This is the insane idiotic dance of America--this is the song of the completely slap-happy. I'M HAPPY AMERICA! the crosseyed eagle with nuts like a bull in July.
This impulse, prompted by the anxieties of his pre-draft period, seems to have been stifled during his actual three months stay in the army. And before Duncan managed to obtain a discharge for homosexuality in the summer of 1941, the old specter of the journal had recaptured his imagination in the guise of a new plan. As he announced to his painter friend, Virginia Admiral (and subsequently to Anais Nin), he now wanted to write a novel--"a sort of copulation of the Anatomy of Melancholy--Max Ernst and Boris Karloff, Cummings and the Commedia dell' Arte, The House of Incest and the Arabian Nights with the base line of the Journal." More than anything else, the plan had the effect of launching him into a period of voracious novel reading, during which Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James and others gradually superseded Anais Nin as Duncan's literary models. Although the poet set about writing and partly rewriting pieces about his childhood, the Anais Nin period, or his subsequent marriage, the novel as a whole, originally planned for completion by the end of 1941, never developed beyond its initial conception. Even as late as August 28, 1946, however, telling a friend about his "years with Anais Nin and vividly recalling the turbulent display of these early journals," Duncan tried to map "the context in which [he] turn[ed] again to a journal." Yet by now his sense of a diary as fiction had reached an intensity strong enough to smother the autobiographical impulse in its own reductio ad absurdum, and there are few pages of such writing in the unpublished notebooks beyond the following statement: "This is the journal then of a young man . . . who concedes no order and consequently can make bold to create his 'order' [and] who conceives of himself as his own fiction." It is tantalizing to speculate about the possible results had Duncan 's plan to write a novel been realized.
There is a lot in the notebooks that is derivative of Miller or James. There is more that is original to the extent of anticipating such writers as Jack Kerouac or Frank O'Hara. But nowhere, even at his most exhibitionist-- As I passed down the bar parading like a sexual pigeon--Someone said--Hi-- --does the narrator's tough-minded candor and ironical self-detachment allow one to react with the revulsion that Anais Nin and, to a lesser extent, Robert Duncan himself came to feel towards his young self. Pauline Kael's marginal comments in the notebooks are an infallible guide to the best, and her enthusiasm about two such pages as the following, which she annotated as "wonderful," is well-founded: Then I was standing alone on the empty street at five in the morning with my little bag in hand. --I bet you got plenty of women--the fat man said--The folds of flesh hung from his pig-face. His eyes rolled stupidly under the fat lids. The soft flesh pushed out into a red deformity under his nose. . . . --I bet you get hard just to talk about it--he said looking at me out of the corners of his eyes. --I said nothing. I became frigid, ruthless. I was angry. --I bet you wake up in the morning with it hard--he said looking; I sat far over by the window. If he touches me I thought, I'll punch his flabby face in, like a puff-ball, like a soft blubber-puss. --I bet you get hard just with my talking--he leered hopefully. Peering to see if he might put his hand over a hard penis. --I bet if I keep talking you'll get hard. I'd better stop talking or you'll get hard.-- --I don't get hard from talking about it--I said stonily. --I got a piss-hard-on--the monster bloated.--Guess I'd better piss and get over it. --I bet you got seven inches to show--he said after a silence. --The man is crazy, I thought--he kept going on in a hopeful way--every word seemed as if he were about to drag his pudgy cock out and slap it into my face. He had no energy--it was an impotent, unbearable affront as if he sat masturbating. I expected him to drag it out and jack away.-- --How far are you going?--I said nervously. I stood on the open road in the morning and watched his car roar on toward my destination.
The clear air lifted my head and my heart. The cold ground was hard and firm under my feet. I leaped into the air, I ran across the field. Although Duncan never completed his own Malte Laurids Brigge, the journal--however much of an impasse in itself--played a role in his life similar to that of this novel in Rilke's. While writing it, Rilke realized that he could "go on only through" his semi-autobiographical protagonist.[sup.4] Yet once Malte's portrait "made out of [the poet's] dangers" (Letters, II, 32) was complete, it filled Rilke with something of the dread Duncan has apparently come to feel towards his own former self. In the words of the German poet: "I shudder a little when I think of all the violence I put through in Malte Laurids, how I landed him back of everything in consistent despair, back of death in a way, so that nothing more was possible, not even dying" (Letters, II, 17). In all this, both poets were driven by the attempt to make the horrible and repulsive a valid part of the poet's vision (cf. Letters, I, 314-15), a quest which finally turned out to be "not so much . . . a going under, rather [than] a singularly dark ascension into a remote neglected part of heaven" (Letters, II, 33) after which "almost all songs are possible" (Letters, I, 361). "I will work on a book out of the journal," Duncan wrote to Nin shortly before his discharge from the army: "I mean to whip the whole work into . . . a sort of a death of the soul, Bardo states--'for one lost it is, the writing of a map but of a country which is never located, which falls to pieces continually. ' I am tired of my hell, I am destroying it." Like another predecessor in this inferno, Duncan was to make himself a seer by "a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses," resulting in a total transformation of his self. "It is wrong to say: I think," Rimbaud had written. "One ought to say: people think me . . . For I is someone else, ['Car JE est un autre.'] If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault . . . I am present at the birth of my thought; I watch it and listen to it."[sup.5] Like Rilke, Rimbaud also seems to anticipate Duncan in the way he turned against his former ego as soon as this shamanistic quest for a new self was accomplished. In fact, the same attitude of shuddering incredulity towards their previous lives must be shared by many of the original shamans. For their initiation--"a symbolic return to Chaos . . . preparing a new Creation," often heralded by dance and song[sup.6]--frequently leads through "complete disintegration of the personality and . . . madness."
Yet however frightening in itself, this "psychic Chaos" is a clear sign "that the profane man," as Mircea Eliade puts it, "is being 'dissolved' and a new personality being prepared for birth."[sup.7] Eliade's research freed such symptoms from the psychopathological labels attached to them by anthropologists working under the influence of early psychiatry. Present-day anti-psychiatry, by reinterpreting mental disturbances as a potential "initiation ceremonial" through self-distintegration towards "a new ego,"[sup.8] now seems to point out the contemporary analogue of the shamanistic ritual, especially when applied to many modern artists. According to Laing, such a healing journey "entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the 'inner' archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer" (p. 119). With her hyper-sensitive responsiveness to the young poet, Anais Nin had been quick to notice the direction this "initiation ceremonial" was going to take in Duncan's life. "I must somehow get you the Book of the Dead, the Thibetan one," she wrote Duncan early in their friendship, "for very often it is those regions you are traversing" (Unpublished undated letter). Yet although she acted as his initiator, Nin was not to follow her friend on the actual journey herself. From early on she was repelled by some of Duncan's poems: There are parts which I like honestly for their direct thrust and naked utterance, some passages I like less because they are not naked but ugly as America is ugly, without the transformation. Nakedness is marvellous and part of the ritual you achieve so many times, but certain lines are ugly without the strength that is at times in ugliness and monstrosity. The poet you are has a greater struggle here. . . . as in "I see my mother too clearly" he touches concrete and clinical or that untransferred language which kills life. (Unpublished undated letter)
Such criticism, however, only confirmed Duncan in his "DESIRE TO INCLUDE EVERYTHING." And it was Nin, as we have seen, who for a while seemed ready to follow the poet's advice in trying to break out of the self-protective "House of Incest" in which Duncan saw her enclosed: "My poor Anais who stares out from her intricate prisons with wide eyes; they open wider--they are startled the soul inside is a child weeping because it is so helpless to love--her anguish because she cannot become real, free without destroying, without murdering." Yet Nin was an unlikely person to share in Duncan's "anarchist 'experiments'" of trying to remove "the ego-personality barrier" or "perspective disease of personality." A diary entry of December 12, 1940, reports one of the "interlude[s] of terror" the poet and some of his other friends were staging at the time: After descending from a session in the attic in which Sanders, Jeff, Margaret, Alvin 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 on the door and I don't mean that door--I said pointing to the front door--I mean that one--pointing to the attic trap door. At that there was a loud knock (as if the attic door had been lifted and dropped)--Alvin was so terrified that his face actually turned white--and his heart was beating rapidly. Sanders and I immediately ascended to the attic again--the others followed--while we were quiet, waiting, and observing--waiting. But then after ten moments or so we relaxed and as we laughed and talked--I lay back on the floor--a growing presence came over us--As it reached a speedy peak--Margaret remarked on the change--everyone felt it--and Jeff, Margaret 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. Duncan describes the purpose of these sessions in the well-known terms of Rilke, whose Duino Elegies, in "that early edition" with "the wonderful notes and letters at the back,"[sup.9] he had read sometime in 1938 or 1939: "to face our angels . . . just as we must face the monsters of our inner worlds and the monsters of the inner world of all mankind." Like Rilke, Duncan found psychoanalysis to be of little avail in this pursuit. In response to his wife Clara, who charged him with being afraid of it, the German poet concluded that psychoanalysis was really "too basic a help for [him]": "I rather shun this getting cleared out. . . . Something like a disinfected soul results from it, a monstrosity, alive, corrected in red like the page of a school notebook." What's more, "if one were to drive out [his] devils," Rilke felt, his "angels by some chance [might] leave as well" and destroy his work as a poet which was "really nothing but a self-treatment of the same sort" (Letters, II, 34-51).
Unlike Rilke, Duncan did not escape analysis, although he had similar misgivings about it. "The psychologist wants to erase the sado-masochistic cycle of Virginia's love life," he remarked in December, 1940. "yet that is the pure thing, the destructive and the creative thing. How little they understand what is going on in the soul--like the Marxists they want to render it neutral." At about the same time, however, Anais Nin introduced Duncan to a rich cousin who not only offered the young poet "a beach where they could . . . embrace day and night, a paradise of caresses" (Diary III, 170), but who also volunteered to finance his lover's psychoanalysis, believing that the latter's preference for a younger competitor was a "mere phantom." Yet little did result from it, for from the very first day of treatment Duncan somehow managed to invert the patient-analyst relationship. "Why are you looking at me like that?" The analyst said--"do you look at everyone like that?"--his voice had been going on and on like a dull lecture on and on about money and I had been staring at his face--at him--He was moving further away--his face receding and going flat--losing dimension--I was making him inhuman in an effort to search him out back to the human--you have prejudices--my mind was going on--like all the others. Subsequent sessions followed the same pattern. After a fruitless attempt to make the analyst talk to him about magic ("the doctor did not understand about . . . the mechanism of it in the dream"), Duncan decided to switch to the subject of fear in the creative process, until on February 6, 1941, he was dismissed for not being unhappy enough to deserve analysis. The poor doctor had apparently learned his lesson: "You don't live--he said. Everything goes into the book. You are here not to tear yourself to pieces but to observe yourself torn to pieces. The artist thinks of I as a he, he says I and he is observing himself as a character in the drama of life. . . . He had discovered my secret--I kept thinking as I walked away." If psychoanalysis had an effect on Duncan, it was mainly in making him recognize his vision as "the split vision of the paranoic."
Yet such insight was reached with the pre-Laingian aplomb of someone who had come to see his madness as sanity by comparison with the "machinery for insanities which is called civilizations": "So it is that I live here--in this Journal which is my private Asylum--all the madness is a ruthless sanity. Outside I tell you there is real lunacy--the homicides hunt men like dogs in the street standing in the shadow, planning our final destruction, all our defeats, our tortures, our inquisitions." Psychoanalysis also resulted in a further estrangement from those who had tried to inflict it upon him. When Duncan, as Nin puts it, finally "broke away with cruelty" from the cousin, to go off and make love "to a girl" (Diary, III, 91-92)--who, incidentally, became his future wife--Duncan himself knew he had torn open a "wound in the body between Anais and [himself]." Yet Nin again hastened to send him assurances to the contrary: Robert there was no judgment or wound for the cruelty. When I acted for [my cousin] what you were unable to act. I knew then that your cruelty was an act of honesty. You acted more nakedly and naturally and deep down I loved this because it is the sign of the creator. I knew it is inhuman, but I knew it is an act of courage. I realized then my capacity for cruelty was my weakness and that in this you were the male tonic. And then I was glad that you were not going to live my life but that I failed to live in my life. (Unpublished undated letter) Besides genuine good will, the letter also shows the author's awareness of an irremediable rift which, according to all original evidence, was thus widened, not by Nin's "revolting vision of [Duncan's] character" following a sudden "revolution of her love" (Caesar's Gate, p. xxx), but rather by "the strain incurred by her devotions" which Duncan noted as early as February 16, 1941. As Duncan began to withdraw from an active relationship with his friend, their former quarrels found a new battleground in the poet 's unconscious. The following is one of several surrealist portraits which began to emerge in Duncan's journal while he was undergoing analysis: ANAIS. My hands are covered with hair. The fingers grow like white tubers into her vagina. A mouth without lips has closed over my penis. I am attempting to turn her inside out. The image seems like an unconscious projection of the poet's shamanistic "search for the self" beyond "the perspective disease of . . . personality." "[W]hen it is done," Duncan wrote a few weeks later, "the identity will be turned inside out--it will no longer stare inward but the eyes will be slipped to the surface of the world." Duncan's full poetic stance did not mature till after he had met Charles Olson. But there are several notions--the outcome of this prior quest--which anticipate the new open form aesthetics that began to evolve after mid-century, led by such pioneers as Cage, Pollock, Olson and Duncan himself. Implicit in Duncan's early notion of the poet turning his identity "inside out" while conceiving "of himself as his own fiction," for instance, seems to be what Olson--paralleling Robbe-Grillet's "SUBJECTIVE TOTALE" of the narrator[sup.10]--describes as the ultimate coincidentia oppositorum of the total narrator "IN" with the total narrator "OUT"--the narrator being "still, no more than--but just as much as--another 'thing, ' and as such . . . in, inside or out."[sup.11]
Duncan also anticipated nouveau roman theorizing by insisting upon a self-reduction of the creative ego to the point where a narrator, for example, will turn himself into a mere medium, letting nature's cycles of creation and destruction reenact themselves through him in a "double movement de creation et de gommage."[sup.12] According to Robbe-Grillet, a description, for instance, should leave no traces, so that when it ends "one realizes that it has left nothing behind itself still standing up: it has reified itself in a double movement of creation and erasure" (p. 160). Or as Duncan put it many years earlier: "Everything is completed in the Journal and destroyed," the writing of it being like "the writing of a map but of a country which is never located but which falls to pieces continually." In an attempt to locate these "dynamics of . . . destruction and creation" in the creative act itself, Duncan again anticipated Olson, who, a professionally trained dancer himself, was to recognize "the kinetic as the end of life"[sup.13] and dance as the essence of a new art no longer of "mimesis but [of] kinesis."[sup.14] Ionisation (1931), by Edgar Varese, a member of Nin's circle, provided Duncan with the music to realize such aesthetic principles in the dancing he loved to perform in front of others. Anais Nin gives a vivid account of such a performance in the Diary: "Robert came with a recording by Edgar Varese. 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 Varese. His face was like a mask" (III, 85). The dancer himself praised Varese 's "terrifying sounds beyond the human-movements that tear the body, that set the centers of the body into motion." But the final revelation came with the discovery of primitive music, through which Duncan reached what Olson, in a crucial programmatic formula, later called "the replacement of the Classical-representational by the primitive-abstract."[sup.15]
Swahili dance, in contrast to the "superficial disintegration" of Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat, Duncan found, "destroys the dancer completely": "There is only a body gone insane with it, crawling, jerking its head, shoulders, the whole body twitching back into the beginning Lemurian frenzy . . . My arms seemed to spring loose from their sockets, the beast and the shaman had reclaimed the human being." Although Nin with her House of Incest had prompted Duncan to take his first steps "Toward the Shaman," his actual journey through the Bardo states of a self-destructive exposure to the horrific made him assume a stance that clearly passes beyond the reach of his previous initiator. An unusually comprehensive statement of poetics from the same period, although directed against a certain type of poetry lover to whom beauty is "a tasteless misty essence derived from the music of words and scorning the revelation of the phrase," may very well have been written with Anais Nin in mind: "There is in such followers no capacity for what the great artist does, for Rilke's corrosion of reality and the invasion of death. . . . This 'lover of poetry ' feels that experience should be evaded, made 'dreamlike ' at a time when we are trying to make even the dream unavoidable as experience." But this theoretical stance, partly an outgrowth of Duncan's "barbaric friendship" with Anais Nin, was not to turn into a major creative force till after World War II when, with the disappearance of the journal, Nin ceased to exert her in some ways deleterious but ultimately beneficial influence on the poet's development.
Notes
1. A Photographic Supplement to The Diary of Anais Nin (New York and London, 1974). 2. Robert Duncan, Caesar's Gate (San Francisco, 1972), p. xxx: hereafter cited in the text as Caesar's Gate. 3. All quotations, if not otherwise identified, are from Robert Duncan 's notebooks and other unpublished material housed in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Unpublished letters are identified as such within the text. 4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters, trans. J. B. Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, 2 vols. (New York, 1969), I, 337; hereafter cited in the text as Letters. 5. Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, ed. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago, 1966), pp. 303-07. 6. See Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Bollingen Series LXXVI (Princeton, 1972), pp. 27-28: "The famous Yakut shaman Tusput (that is, 'fallen from the sky') had been ill at the age of twenty; he began to sing, and felt better. When Sieroszewski met him, he was sixty and displayed tireless energy. 'If necessary, he can drum, dance, jump all night.'"
Further examples are to be found throughout the book; see also Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania, ed. J. Rothenberg (Garden City, N.Y., 1968). 7. Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (New York, 1965), p. 89. 8. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 106. 9. See "An Interview," by George Bowering and Robert Hogg (Toronto, 1971), n.p. 10. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris, 1963), p. 148. 11. Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. D. Allen (New York, 1967), pp. 127-28. 12. Robbe-Grillet, p. 160. 13. "A Syllabary for a Dancer" (Featuring Charles Olson), Maps, 4 (1971), 12. 14. Charles Olson, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York, 1966), p. 148. 15. Olson, Selected Writings, p. 28. Source: Ekbert Jaas, "'The Barbaric Friendship with Robert': A Biographical Palimpsest," in Mosaic, Vol. 11, No. 2, Winter 1978, pp. 141-52. Reproduced by permission.
