Mark Scroggins
“I am not an occultist”:Esotericism, Literary History, and Autobiography
in The H.D. Book
Charles Olson and Robert Duncan first met in in Berkeley in 1947, where the towering Melville scholar, out West to research a book on the Donner party, had looked up the younger poet on the strength of his Medieval Scenes (Jarnot 108-9). Their conversation on that occasion dwelt more on California history than on poetry, but over the next few years Olson increasingly came to see Duncan as a fellow-traveller in his own effort to forward the next “push” in American poetics. There is a rueful tone, then, to the monitory essay-letter “Against Wisdom as Such,” which Olson published in 1954 in the inaugural issue of Black Mountain Review, a warning against the pitfalls of “wisdom” – might we say “gnosis”? – arrived at from outside the poet. “I wanted even to say,” Olson writes in an aside, explicitly withdrawn, “that San Francisco seems to have become an école des Sages ou Mages as ominous as Ojai, L. A.” (Collected Prose 260).
Ojai, a Ventura County valley town, was perhaps best known in the early 1950s as the home of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who early in life had been groomed as something of a Theosophist “messiah”; Olson’s reference thereto must have struck Duncan as a gentle poke at his own Theosophist upbringing. The sentence seems to have still rankled Duncan some seven years later, after his stint of teaching with Olson at Black Mountain College, and after the publication of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry had given shape to something literary historians would call “Black Mountain Poetry,” for he quotes it in Part II of The H. D. Book, in a chapter dated 11 March, 1961. “There is something about looking behind things,” Duncan retorts; “There is the fact that I am not an occultist or a mystic but a poet, a maker-up-of things.” (278)
The poet, one fears, protests too much, or quibbles over terminology: for as “Beginnings,” the vast first section of The H. D. Book, a dazzling tour-de-force of scholarship, confession, and practical poetics, amply demonstrates, the terms “occultist,” “mystic,” and “poet” are consanguineous in Duncan’s imagination; indeed, his own conception of the poet’s calling is founded upon a reading of modernist literary history in which formal and stylistic innovation, the canonical hallmarks of modernism, are deeply bound up with the uncovering of esoteric knowledge. To be a “poet” of Duncan’s stripe is fundamentally to interest oneself in what is “occult,” hidden, or “mysterious”: if he rejects the terms “occultist” or “mystic,” he does so not on the basis of
denotation but of connotation.
The H. D. Book begins as autobiography, retailing – as do so many spiritual autobiographies, both ortho- and heterodox – an experience of conversion or vocation. “It is some afternoon in May,” Duncan writes, “twenty-five years ago as I write here – 1935 or 1936 – in a high school classroom. A young teacher is reading” (35). What that teacher (Miss Keough) is reading is H. D.’s poem “Heat,” first published in Ezra Pound’s anthology Some Imagist Poets in 1915. And what that first reading – or rather, that first audition – constitutes for the sixteen-year-old Robert Symmes, listening in the classroom, is a calling, a “vocation.” “Unconscious of the content that made for that imprint and awakened in me the sense of a self-revelation or life-revelation in the pursuit of Poetry, I was conscious only of my own excitement in the inspiration – the new breath in language – and of a vocation. Whatever my abilities, it was here that I had been called to work.” (53).
The conversion narrative by means of a text is a basic topos in Western culture. Perhaps the most famous example is that of St. Augustine’s Confessions, where the thirty-two-year-old Augustine, believing in the truth of the Christian revelation and convinced of his own sins, but still torn by the desires of the flesh, is walking in his garden in tearful internal debate; he hears the voice of a child: “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege,” it says – “Take it and read, take it and read.” (8.12, 177) Augustine seizes the nearest copy of scripture he can find – the Pauline epistles – and opens to just the passage that addresses his own plight: “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13.13-14). And his conversion is effected. In this case, a text already received as sacred speaks to the immediate spiritual situation of the its reader.
In other textual conversion narratives, a previously occult, unreadable text is made legible through the offices of an interpreter. The paradigmatic exampe is that of the Apostle Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Philip encounters the eunuch in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah: “He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and like a lamb dumb before the shearer, so opened he not his mouth” (Acts 8.32, quoting Isaiah 53.7). “Understandest thou what thou readest?” asks Philip; “How can I, except some man should guide me?” The apostle proceeds to open to him the occluded, typological meaning of the passage – it prefigures Christ, of course – and the eunuch is converted, forthwith initiated into this new fellowship by the rite of baptism.
One can multiply examples, both sacred and secular, of the vocation-through-text, up to the very present. I’m reminded of Guy Davenport’s childhood encounter with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, of John Matthias’s mother reading to him from Stevenson’s Kidnapped, or the thirteen-year-old John Ruskin’s present of Samuel Rogers’s topographical poem Italy, with illustrations by J. M. W. Turner – a book, he would later recall in his autobiography Praeterita, which determined “the entire direction of my life’s energies” (20). But Ruskin’s next sentence is crucial: “it is the error of thoughtless biographers to attribute to the accident which introduces some new phase of character, all the circumstances of character which gave the accident importance. The essential point to be noted, and accounted for, was that I could understand Turner’s work, when I saw it; – not by what chance, or in what year, it was seen.” In order for the reader/auditor to be called by the text, that is, he must be prepared to receive that call – Augustine through his years of scriptural study and spiritual struggle, the Ethiopian eunuch through his devotion to Hebrew scripture, the young Ruskin through his annual tours of the landscapes and private picture galleries of England. And Duncan, as the brilliantly unwinding layers of “Beginnings” will demonstrate, has been prepared to received H. D. and the whole discourse of poetic modernism – a very specific version of modernism, that is – precisely by his early immersion in the culture of Theosophy, astrology, and hidden spiritual wisdoms.
There are two threads to be traced here: on the one hand, there is the outline of modernist poetry, and of the poetic vocation, that Duncan delineates in Part I of The H. D. Book; and on the other, there is his manner of presentation, the way he unfolds the “secret history” of modernism in this strange, branching text. I can only gesture towards the latter, charging you to see for yourself – “tolle, lege.” Suffice it to say that these chapters cunningly intersperse Duncan’s narrative of his conversion to poetry, his vocation, with what begins as a straightforward literary history of Imagism, the literary “movement” within which “Heat” was produced. But only begins, for immediately Duncan shifts his focus to aspects of modernism which the literary historians of his day were far less anxious to emphasize.
Led by Pound’s own rhetoric in his various Imagist “manifestos,” literary history at least through the 1960s has interpreted the primary injunctions of the Imagist movement – as Duncan sums them up, “image, composition by musical phrase, and verbal economy” (46) as a set of hygienic measures aimed at the otiose Georgian lyric, measures that could easily degenerate into the “Amygist” principles of “impressionism, vers libre, and everyday speech.” But the roots of the modernist revolution are far more complex than a mere reaction against post-Victorian letters – and, for the secular reader, perhaps far more suspicious: they include Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophy; the nineteenth-century traditions of automatic writing and mediumistic séances; the anthropological investigations in comparative religion of J. G. Frazer and Jessie Weston.
Imagism in particular, Duncan argues, when read within the context of the esoteric tradition evoked in The Spirit of Romance, the published version of Pound’s early extension lectures on pre-Renaissance European poetry, is something far deeper than a tightening up of the poetic vocabulary. “An ‘Image’” (capital I, in quotes), we recall from Pound’s 1913 “A Few Don’ts,” “is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Literary Essays 4). Pound would have us read “complex” in “the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists”: but what it suggests more immediately for Duncan is the psychology – the science of the psyche – of the Neo-Platonist Porphyry (which is who Duncan means when he writes “Psellos” on 48), or of Dante, or of the Troubadours, who might have evolved, out of “half memories of Hellenistic mysteries, a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the celibate sacetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul…” (48, quoting Spirit of Romance 90). “Complex,” then, as Pound uses it, is according to Duncan
a node involving not only the psyche, as that term used by modern psychologists, but the soul, as that term is used by
esoteric schools. So too, the quotation marks and the capitalization, setting the word “Image” apart, carried for the knowing
reader the sense that the word had a special meaning beyond the apparent. “Image” and “Intellect” in the framework of
Gnostic and neo-Platonic doctrines that haunt Pound’s cantos to the last are terms of a Reality that is cosmic and spiritual;
they are terms of a visionary realism. (48)
A “visionary realism”: Duncan tips his hand in that portentous term. For him, modernism is something much larger than a literary or expressive revolution; it is a new vision of the cosmic interrelatedness of all reality, a rebirth, in the crucible of twentieth-century technologies and twentieth-century intellectual upheavals, of secret knowledge that has been handed down, buried, and repeatedly rediscovered since pre-classical Greece.
And from here on in “Beginnings” Duncan is on fire, interweaving his account of his own awakening to poetry with that of a secret history of early modernism, a secret history, he notes, which has been wholly obscured by the critical and poetic hegemony of the mature, Christian T. S. Eliot, and the New Criticism that followed in his wake. This is modernism not as formal disruption, nor as youthful reaction against enervated post-Victorian poetics, nor even as a disciplinary tightening-up of poetry in the face of an increasingly bureaucratized society; rather, Duncan’s account is of a modernism which is above all else a resurgence of ancient, occluded wisdom. “I believe,” Pound answered in 1930, replying to Eliot’s question “What does Mr. Pound
believe,” “that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy” (Selected Prose 53).
The historicial accuracy of Pound’s “light from Eleusis,” the theory that elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries survived into the middle ages in southern Europe, decisively influencing the culture of courtly love, the growth of Provençal lyric, and thereby early modern European poetry in general – or what I prefer to call the “Da Vinci Code” theory of poetry – is not the issue. (For the record, Pound seems to have derived it for the most part from two long-discredited books, Gabriele Rossetti’s Il mistero dell’ amor platonico del medio evo [1840] and Joseph Péladan’s Le secret des troubadours [1906] [Miyake 1-7].) What is interesting, in the context of Duncan’s reading of modernism, and his call to poetry, is the structure of Pound’s writing as an uncovering of esoteric knowledge. For Duncan, the “secret history” of modernism cannot be separated from modernist innovation; indeed, such innovation as the palimpsestic forms of H. D.’s novels and long poems and the ideogrammic structure of Pound’s Cantos are precisely manifestations of the esoteric or occluded webs of spiritual knowledge that underwrite poetry as a human practice of making. In the deft and burgeoning weave of “Beginnings,” Duncan traces a secret history and, through his autobiographical narration, inserts himself into an hitherto hidden order of poetry that is revealed by the high modernists, but which contains modernism itself.
Works Cited
Saint Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1961.
Duncan, Robert. The H. D. Book. Ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011.
Jarnot, Lisa. Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012.
Miyake, Akiko. Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for The Cantos. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.
Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968.
_____. Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.
_____. The Spirit of Romance. 1952. New York: New Directions, 1968.
Ruskin, John. Praeterita. Introd. Kenneth Clark. 1949. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.
“I am not an occultist”:Esotericism, Literary History, and Autobiography
in The H.D. Book
Charles Olson and Robert Duncan first met in in Berkeley in 1947, where the towering Melville scholar, out West to research a book on the Donner party, had looked up the younger poet on the strength of his Medieval Scenes (Jarnot 108-9). Their conversation on that occasion dwelt more on California history than on poetry, but over the next few years Olson increasingly came to see Duncan as a fellow-traveller in his own effort to forward the next “push” in American poetics. There is a rueful tone, then, to the monitory essay-letter “Against Wisdom as Such,” which Olson published in 1954 in the inaugural issue of Black Mountain Review, a warning against the pitfalls of “wisdom” – might we say “gnosis”? – arrived at from outside the poet. “I wanted even to say,” Olson writes in an aside, explicitly withdrawn, “that San Francisco seems to have become an école des Sages ou Mages as ominous as Ojai, L. A.” (Collected Prose 260).
Ojai, a Ventura County valley town, was perhaps best known in the early 1950s as the home of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who early in life had been groomed as something of a Theosophist “messiah”; Olson’s reference thereto must have struck Duncan as a gentle poke at his own Theosophist upbringing. The sentence seems to have still rankled Duncan some seven years later, after his stint of teaching with Olson at Black Mountain College, and after the publication of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry had given shape to something literary historians would call “Black Mountain Poetry,” for he quotes it in Part II of The H. D. Book, in a chapter dated 11 March, 1961. “There is something about looking behind things,” Duncan retorts; “There is the fact that I am not an occultist or a mystic but a poet, a maker-up-of things.” (278)
The poet, one fears, protests too much, or quibbles over terminology: for as “Beginnings,” the vast first section of The H. D. Book, a dazzling tour-de-force of scholarship, confession, and practical poetics, amply demonstrates, the terms “occultist,” “mystic,” and “poet” are consanguineous in Duncan’s imagination; indeed, his own conception of the poet’s calling is founded upon a reading of modernist literary history in which formal and stylistic innovation, the canonical hallmarks of modernism, are deeply bound up with the uncovering of esoteric knowledge. To be a “poet” of Duncan’s stripe is fundamentally to interest oneself in what is “occult,” hidden, or “mysterious”: if he rejects the terms “occultist” or “mystic,” he does so not on the basis of
denotation but of connotation.
The H. D. Book begins as autobiography, retailing – as do so many spiritual autobiographies, both ortho- and heterodox – an experience of conversion or vocation. “It is some afternoon in May,” Duncan writes, “twenty-five years ago as I write here – 1935 or 1936 – in a high school classroom. A young teacher is reading” (35). What that teacher (Miss Keough) is reading is H. D.’s poem “Heat,” first published in Ezra Pound’s anthology Some Imagist Poets in 1915. And what that first reading – or rather, that first audition – constitutes for the sixteen-year-old Robert Symmes, listening in the classroom, is a calling, a “vocation.” “Unconscious of the content that made for that imprint and awakened in me the sense of a self-revelation or life-revelation in the pursuit of Poetry, I was conscious only of my own excitement in the inspiration – the new breath in language – and of a vocation. Whatever my abilities, it was here that I had been called to work.” (53).
The conversion narrative by means of a text is a basic topos in Western culture. Perhaps the most famous example is that of St. Augustine’s Confessions, where the thirty-two-year-old Augustine, believing in the truth of the Christian revelation and convinced of his own sins, but still torn by the desires of the flesh, is walking in his garden in tearful internal debate; he hears the voice of a child: “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege,” it says – “Take it and read, take it and read.” (8.12, 177) Augustine seizes the nearest copy of scripture he can find – the Pauline epistles – and opens to just the passage that addresses his own plight: “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13.13-14). And his conversion is effected. In this case, a text already received as sacred speaks to the immediate spiritual situation of the its reader.
In other textual conversion narratives, a previously occult, unreadable text is made legible through the offices of an interpreter. The paradigmatic exampe is that of the Apostle Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Philip encounters the eunuch in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah: “He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and like a lamb dumb before the shearer, so opened he not his mouth” (Acts 8.32, quoting Isaiah 53.7). “Understandest thou what thou readest?” asks Philip; “How can I, except some man should guide me?” The apostle proceeds to open to him the occluded, typological meaning of the passage – it prefigures Christ, of course – and the eunuch is converted, forthwith initiated into this new fellowship by the rite of baptism.
One can multiply examples, both sacred and secular, of the vocation-through-text, up to the very present. I’m reminded of Guy Davenport’s childhood encounter with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, of John Matthias’s mother reading to him from Stevenson’s Kidnapped, or the thirteen-year-old John Ruskin’s present of Samuel Rogers’s topographical poem Italy, with illustrations by J. M. W. Turner – a book, he would later recall in his autobiography Praeterita, which determined “the entire direction of my life’s energies” (20). But Ruskin’s next sentence is crucial: “it is the error of thoughtless biographers to attribute to the accident which introduces some new phase of character, all the circumstances of character which gave the accident importance. The essential point to be noted, and accounted for, was that I could understand Turner’s work, when I saw it; – not by what chance, or in what year, it was seen.” In order for the reader/auditor to be called by the text, that is, he must be prepared to receive that call – Augustine through his years of scriptural study and spiritual struggle, the Ethiopian eunuch through his devotion to Hebrew scripture, the young Ruskin through his annual tours of the landscapes and private picture galleries of England. And Duncan, as the brilliantly unwinding layers of “Beginnings” will demonstrate, has been prepared to received H. D. and the whole discourse of poetic modernism – a very specific version of modernism, that is – precisely by his early immersion in the culture of Theosophy, astrology, and hidden spiritual wisdoms.
There are two threads to be traced here: on the one hand, there is the outline of modernist poetry, and of the poetic vocation, that Duncan delineates in Part I of The H. D. Book; and on the other, there is his manner of presentation, the way he unfolds the “secret history” of modernism in this strange, branching text. I can only gesture towards the latter, charging you to see for yourself – “tolle, lege.” Suffice it to say that these chapters cunningly intersperse Duncan’s narrative of his conversion to poetry, his vocation, with what begins as a straightforward literary history of Imagism, the literary “movement” within which “Heat” was produced. But only begins, for immediately Duncan shifts his focus to aspects of modernism which the literary historians of his day were far less anxious to emphasize.
Led by Pound’s own rhetoric in his various Imagist “manifestos,” literary history at least through the 1960s has interpreted the primary injunctions of the Imagist movement – as Duncan sums them up, “image, composition by musical phrase, and verbal economy” (46) as a set of hygienic measures aimed at the otiose Georgian lyric, measures that could easily degenerate into the “Amygist” principles of “impressionism, vers libre, and everyday speech.” But the roots of the modernist revolution are far more complex than a mere reaction against post-Victorian letters – and, for the secular reader, perhaps far more suspicious: they include Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophy; the nineteenth-century traditions of automatic writing and mediumistic séances; the anthropological investigations in comparative religion of J. G. Frazer and Jessie Weston.
Imagism in particular, Duncan argues, when read within the context of the esoteric tradition evoked in The Spirit of Romance, the published version of Pound’s early extension lectures on pre-Renaissance European poetry, is something far deeper than a tightening up of the poetic vocabulary. “An ‘Image’” (capital I, in quotes), we recall from Pound’s 1913 “A Few Don’ts,” “is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Literary Essays 4). Pound would have us read “complex” in “the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists”: but what it suggests more immediately for Duncan is the psychology – the science of the psyche – of the Neo-Platonist Porphyry (which is who Duncan means when he writes “Psellos” on 48), or of Dante, or of the Troubadours, who might have evolved, out of “half memories of Hellenistic mysteries, a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the celibate sacetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul…” (48, quoting Spirit of Romance 90). “Complex,” then, as Pound uses it, is according to Duncan
a node involving not only the psyche, as that term used by modern psychologists, but the soul, as that term is used by
esoteric schools. So too, the quotation marks and the capitalization, setting the word “Image” apart, carried for the knowing
reader the sense that the word had a special meaning beyond the apparent. “Image” and “Intellect” in the framework of
Gnostic and neo-Platonic doctrines that haunt Pound’s cantos to the last are terms of a Reality that is cosmic and spiritual;
they are terms of a visionary realism. (48)
A “visionary realism”: Duncan tips his hand in that portentous term. For him, modernism is something much larger than a literary or expressive revolution; it is a new vision of the cosmic interrelatedness of all reality, a rebirth, in the crucible of twentieth-century technologies and twentieth-century intellectual upheavals, of secret knowledge that has been handed down, buried, and repeatedly rediscovered since pre-classical Greece.
And from here on in “Beginnings” Duncan is on fire, interweaving his account of his own awakening to poetry with that of a secret history of early modernism, a secret history, he notes, which has been wholly obscured by the critical and poetic hegemony of the mature, Christian T. S. Eliot, and the New Criticism that followed in his wake. This is modernism not as formal disruption, nor as youthful reaction against enervated post-Victorian poetics, nor even as a disciplinary tightening-up of poetry in the face of an increasingly bureaucratized society; rather, Duncan’s account is of a modernism which is above all else a resurgence of ancient, occluded wisdom. “I believe,” Pound answered in 1930, replying to Eliot’s question “What does Mr. Pound
believe,” “that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy” (Selected Prose 53).
The historicial accuracy of Pound’s “light from Eleusis,” the theory that elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries survived into the middle ages in southern Europe, decisively influencing the culture of courtly love, the growth of Provençal lyric, and thereby early modern European poetry in general – or what I prefer to call the “Da Vinci Code” theory of poetry – is not the issue. (For the record, Pound seems to have derived it for the most part from two long-discredited books, Gabriele Rossetti’s Il mistero dell’ amor platonico del medio evo [1840] and Joseph Péladan’s Le secret des troubadours [1906] [Miyake 1-7].) What is interesting, in the context of Duncan’s reading of modernism, and his call to poetry, is the structure of Pound’s writing as an uncovering of esoteric knowledge. For Duncan, the “secret history” of modernism cannot be separated from modernist innovation; indeed, such innovation as the palimpsestic forms of H. D.’s novels and long poems and the ideogrammic structure of Pound’s Cantos are precisely manifestations of the esoteric or occluded webs of spiritual knowledge that underwrite poetry as a human practice of making. In the deft and burgeoning weave of “Beginnings,” Duncan traces a secret history and, through his autobiographical narration, inserts himself into an hitherto hidden order of poetry that is revealed by the high modernists, but which contains modernism itself.
Works Cited
Saint Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1961.
Duncan, Robert. The H. D. Book. Ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011.
Jarnot, Lisa. Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012.
Miyake, Akiko. Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for The Cantos. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.
Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968.
_____. Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.
_____. The Spirit of Romance. 1952. New York: New Directions, 1968.
Ruskin, John. Praeterita. Introd. Kenneth Clark. 1949. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.