The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess

by Tara McDowell

How the poet Robert Duncan and the artist Jess made the household part of their separate and collaborative creative practice. “I'm a householder,” the poet Robert Duncan once explained. “My whole idea of being able to work was to have a household.” In this book, Tara McDowell examines the household (physical and conceptual) that Duncan established with the artist Jess, beginning in 1951 when the two men exchanged marriage vows, and ending with Duncan's death in 1988. For Duncan and Jess, the household—rather than the studio, gallery, or collective—provided the support structure for their art. Indeed, McDowell argues convincingly, their work was coextensive with their household. The material surroundings of their house in San Francisco and the daily rhythms of their domestic lives became part of their creative practice. Duncan wrote poetry that is romantic, ornate, and obscure; Jess (born Burgess Franklin Collins) created multi-imaged, complex collages and assemblages. McDowell explores their life and work—reading Duncan and Jess with and against each other, in alignment and misalignment. She examines their illustrated book Caesar's Gate , a collaborative effort that led them to reject collaboration; considers each man's lifelong preoccupation with an unfinished project, Jess's Narkissos and Duncan's The H.D. Book ; and discusses their “origin myths” and self-made genealogies, describing them as a form of witness in the face of the calamities of the twentieth century. Duncan and Jess made the household a necessary precondition for their art making. Doing so, they reclaimed and rehabilitated the domestic—from which gay couples were traditionally excluded—for their own uses. The household permitted them to reimagine the world. McDowell's portrait of a couple expands to encompass broader issues, urgent in midcentury America and still resonant belonging and kinship, alienation, and catastrophe.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published September 24, 2019

Reviews

[Matt Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book examines the lives and works of Duncan, a poet, and his partner Jess, an artist, and their cohabitation of life and work in the same domestic space in the 1950s and onward. It felt an appropriate read during this time of stay-at-homeness, where my own household is increasingly becoming a blend of life, work, and creativity.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although there's a thread of biography about a very interesting couple in this work, it's mostly lit-crit and art history.