Essay, Research Paper
Lisa Jarnot
from Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus
"At dawn in Oakland in the cold of the year I was
born, January 7th, with the sun before rising or just below the horizon in the false dawn
and Saturn in his own house, in Capricorn. But that is according to the old astrological
convention. Actually, the sun has advanced; the winter solstice has progresst to the sign
of Sagittarius. I was born in the head of the archer."
–Robert Duncan, "A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s
Birthday"
Robert Duncan knew the story of his adoption. Before his birth, his
step-parents had become involved in a theosophical group in the Bay Area, a hermetic
brotherhood modelled after late-nineteen-century occult groups such as London’s Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society of New York and
India. The Symmeses had discovered Robert Duncan, or more accurately, he had been sent to
them. By the reckoning of their religion, his astrological chart indicated that he
had, in a past life, lived on the mythological continent of Atlantis as one of its great
innovators. He was of the ancient generation that had turned their knowledge to ill-means
and subsequently destroyed their own world. Born under the sign of Capricorn, with the
moon in the sign of Pisces, his ascendant sign was in Sagittarius, and the presence of
Gemini in his sixth house suggested that he had acted as a messenger in a previous
incarnation.[19] According to hermetic doctrine, his mother Marguerite Duncan’s role had
been simply that of a "vehicle" of his birth. She was an agent of his
reincarnation and she had died so that he might be handed over to his rightful parents.
The preparation for the child’s arrival began some time before 1919. For the Symmeses the
terms of the adoption were threefold. The baby would be born at the time and place
appointed by the astrologers, the natural mother would die shortly thereafter, and
the child would be of Anglo-Saxon protestant descent. [20]
In Celtic tradition, August 1 marks the Lammas Tide, a
celebration of the first harvest of the autumn. It was a date that fascinated Robert
Duncan, and a date that appeared in more than one of his poems.[21] It had been on August
1, 1919 that Fayetta Philip told her sister Minnehaha Symmes of the conversation that had
transpired in the Philip & Philip pharmacy on that day. The following day the Symmeses
made arrangements to see the Duncan child for the first time, and on August 4,
six-month-old Edward Howe Duncan was placed in the custody of Minnehaha and Edwin Symmes
through an arrangement with Edward Duncan, Sr. and the Native Sons and Daughters Central
Committee on Homeless Children of San Francisco. Minnehaha and Edwin took the baby home to
their apartment in Oakland, at 914 Taylor Avenue and he was soon renamed Robert Edward
Symmes, apparently after a friend of his stepfather.[22] Seven months later, on March 10,
1920, the Superior Court of the State of California named the Symmeses the child’s legal
parents. During October, 1920, they adopted a baby girl and named her Barbara Eleanor
Symmes. She had been born in Oakland almost exactly a year after Robert, on the
evening of January 6, 1920. A reading of her astrological chart also played into her
adoption. She was to introduce "good karma" into the household; she was to be
her brother Robert’s better half.
The Symmeses, aside from their interests in the occult,
were in many ways a typical middle-class couple, conservative in their political views,
and seriously invested in projecting an image of the all-American family. Both Edwin
and Minnehaha would be remembered as upstanding California citizens–he, as a prominent
public works architect and she as a busy socialite who served on committees, chaired
community council meetings, and volunteered her time to a range of organizations, from the
Children’s Home Society of California to the Kern County Council of Campfire Girls.[23]
Writing of his stepfather’s family, the Symmeses, in The
HD Book, Robert Duncan reported that they "had moved West?first into Ohio at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, and then on, at the frontier or beyond the frontier
of America, into California."[24] Symmes, and its variation Semmes are Anglo-Saxon
names; several members of the clan descended upon the American colonies from England
during the mid-1600s. Duncan’s tale of the family’s trek through Ohio seems fairly
accurate. The migration of one branch of the Symmeses began in St. George’s, Maryland
during the mid-seventeenth century, continued into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Short Creek,
West Virginia; and finally into Ohio. There were a large number of Symmeses in East
Liverpool, Ohio as of the early 1800s. Those who settled in that part of the country were
potters and farmers, and descendants of the lineage still exist there today.[25] What
seems less accurate is Robert Duncan’s wish to merge the Symmeses of Ohio with yet another
branch of the family who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the early 1600s and
slowly migrated West from there. In what could very well be an embellishment of his
adoptive father’s lineage, Duncan once wrote in a journal entry:
In my father’s line American origins went back to the
Calvinism of the Massachusetts Colony where the ancestral patriarch oldest son to oldest
son to my adoptive father had been Reverend Zackariah Symmes.[26]
If this version of the story is true, then Edwin Symmes’s
ancestors were not at all linked to the Symmeses of Maryland and Ohio. Instead, they had
arrived in America on a ship called the Griffin on September 18, 1634, disembarking in
Boston. The ship’s passenger list includes not only the Reverend Zackariah Symmes, but
also the religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson.[27] Symmes, upon arriving in the colonies,
would make a name for himself as one of the patriarchs who testified against Hutchinson in
her trials for sedition and heresy.[28] Regardless of whether or not Robert Duncan’s
stepfather was a direct descendant of the Reverend Symmes, Duncan had enough interest in
the story to incorporate it into his early sketches toward an autobiographical novel
composed during 1941:
We are descended from witches and burners of witches. How
my ancestors gave witness that she, Anne Hutchinson, had talked on deck at night with a
Dark Stranger who had a covenant between them, and by the Governor of Massachusetts given
birth of two monsters out of wedlock.[29]
Edwin Symmes was a frail and studious man. What he lacked
in the adventurousness of his ancestors, he made up for with an obsessive Protestant work
ethic. By middle age he was wiry, nervous, and chronically ill, chain-smoking cigarettes
and spending long days in the offices of Symmes and Willard, Architects. He had been
born on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1883, in Livermore, California to Charles O.
Symmes and Elizabeth Johnson. Edwin probably spent part of his youth in Oakland,
where his father was employed as a railroad engineer on the Southern Pacific line during
the 1890s. Coincidentally, both Robert Duncan’s biological father Edward and his
grandfather George Duncan worked as brakemen and conductors for the Central and Southern
Pacific lines during the same time period that Charles O. Symmes was employed there.
Edwin Symmes’s later battles with ill health were
foreshadowed on more than one occasion during his youth–his education being interrupted
first by an injury to his foot, and later by unspecified illnesses in 1904 and 1905.[30]
It was around 1904 that he met his future wife, Minnehaha Harris, during the year before
he began college. And in 1905 at the age of twenty-two he registered as an undergraduate
student at the University of California at Berkeley. Symmes completed his studies there in
May of 1909, having earned a degree in architecture and engineering. He soon found
work in San Francisco as a draftsman, and beginning in January of 1913 contributed to the
construction of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts under the direction of the master
architect Bernard Maybeck. The Palace of Fine Arts would be one of the wonders of San
Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition which opened on February 20, 1915. It
was Edwin Symmes’s first real acknowledgement in his field, for which he received public
honors that year.[31]
Edwin Symmes and Minnehaha Harris were married on the
evening of July 9, 1913, in Oakland, some nine years after their first meeting and some
four months after their engagement. It would never be a difficult partnership, but
it would not be extraordinary either, despite the fact that they had been careful to
arrange the date, time, and latitude of their union on a favorable astrological
alignment.[32] Their lengthy pre-marriage flirtations had been interrupted on several
occasions, such as in 1906 when Minnehaha moved to Oregon to teach in a one-room
schoolhouse in the wake of that spring’s earthquake in San Francisco. During that time she
wrote extensively in journals, and like her sister Fayetta, developed a curious
autobiographical writing style which bears parallels to Robert Duncan’s later writing in
The H.D. Book and elsewhere. In one such entry, she recalled the events of her
nineteenth year:
I was torn from my city life, my companions, my
studies…. I watched the autumn colorings come and go, but the rains, cold and bleak beat
upon the roof and the wind thru the trees sighed and moaned, sometimes almost shrieked in
its impotency to change the conditions….The birds had flown–yet still I stayed and time
went on.[33]
She was a thin woman; some described her as resembling a
sparrow. Her stepson Robert would write of her:
She was a beautiful woman I suppose. She had black hair
that was wild and naturally waving about her head and a fine delicate nose, nostrilled
like a nervous horse…but we could see her irrational angers in those eyes…. She was
perhaps in this even a magnificent creature, tyrannical with the beauty of will that the
tyrant has.[34]
Duncan’s ambivalence toward her, and his fascination with
her authority would surface in the poetry that he wrote as an adult. But part of what he
perceived as the oppressiveness of his stepmother’s personality certainly came as a result
of her own upbringing. Abandoned by her father at the age of two, and raised in the
company of several strong-minded women, Minnehaha Harris, by early adulthood, was willful,
controlling, and never without resource. The youngest of three daughters, she often found
herself playing the role of a peacemaker between her equally willful older sisters Dee and
Fayetta. When she met Edwin Symmes in 1904 she was attracted to his shy manner and to his
professional ambitions–he was a resource she could depend on. In photographs he posed
with the rigid stance of a prep school cadet, but his lanky awkward figure and his boyish
face betrayed his resolve to appear stern. There was a basic gentleness about him,
reflected also in the inscriptions he left in the Symmes family children’s books,
some including short rhymed couplets penned by Edwin Symmes for his wife and "the
kiddies."[35]
Between their marriage in 1913, and the adoption of Robert
in 1919, Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes lived variously in San Francisco, Oakland, Yosemite,
and Alameda, California. They stayed close to relatives on both sides of the
family–to Edwin’s siblings Charles and Alvie Symmes who lived in Oakland, and to
Minnehaha’s mother and sister Fayetta, who lived in Berkeley and Fruitvale, respectively.
It was during the early 1920s that the Symmeses settled in Alameda, the place that would
be Robert Duncan’s home for the first seven years of his life. Alameda was then, as it is
today, a sleepy island town appended to the southernmost part of the city of Oakland.
Originally a peninsula of the city, later separated by a man-made estuary, Alameda in its
early days had been a peach orchard settled by the Spanish. The house that Edwin Symmes
designed and saw built there in 1922 was at 1700 Pearl Street, some blocks away from a
narrow sandy beach with a view of the San Francisco skyline across the bay. A typical
Northern California town, Alameda was marked by mild coastal weather and a foliage which
changed very little seasonally–palm and fruit trees yellowed during the summer droughts
and blossomed into deep shades of green during the winter rains. The blocks of pink and
beige adobe houses landscaped with lemon trees and several varieties of flowering plants
contributed to Alameda’s orderly suburban atmosphere.
Please refer to Chicago Review 45:2 (1999) for note
references. Online Source
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