The Thrill of the Chase.
Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came to Be

I began working on the life of Jack Spicer during the summer of 1990, when my friend Lewis Ellingham of San Francisco invited me to join him in his ongoing Spicer biography, which he had begun in 1982. Our book has just been published: Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press/University Presses of New England, 1998).

The poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) was born in Hollywood. After two years at the University of Redlands in Southern California, he transferred to UC Berkeley in 1945, receiving a BA in English in 1947 and attending graduate school at Berkeley until 1950. His promising academic career came to an end with his refusal to sign the now infamous loyalty oath.

With two young Berkeley friends, poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, Spicer forged a “magical” school of poetry, which the three jokingly dubbed the “Berkeley Renaissance.” Spicer described his happy years at Berkeley as “wandering around in a vast library which contained all the secrets (and described all the pleasures) of the visible and invisible worlds.”

As a T.A. (teaching assistant) to two of his English professors, Mark Schorer and Roy Harvey Pearce, Spicer did research at The Bancroft Library. Thus it seemed poetic justice when I began stalking him through the halls of Bancroft, where he had dreamed of a new post-modern writing that would give him eternal fame.

The minute I stepped over the threshold of Bancroft, I felt that something was wrong. The clerk was pleasant — unnaturally so, I thought, pointing out the lockers where I was to leave my bag. “Have you been here before?” he asked. When I said no, he had me fill out a card and, with the most perfunctory examination of my driver’s license, let me pass. Even gave me a pencil. “Hold on to this pencil,” he advised. “You’ll need it where you’re going.”

Couldn’t he see that I was a beginner? Or were these clerks trained in counterintelligence like characters from Graham Greene’s middle period? Were the librarians going to watch me through hidden cameras and then have me arrested and hauled away?

Jack Spicer at the opening of the 6 Gallery in San Francisco, 1954.

For I was a fraud, in a sense — a poet with no academic qualifications whatsoever, a nobody who nonetheless sailed into the library and commanded the rarest materials on the flimsiest of pretexts: I was “writing a book.”

That was my cover story. It had the added benefit of being true, but how were they to know that? With trepidation, I entered the big room and quietly found a seat. I sat there for about 10 minutes, knees quaking, fearing exposure, and then, like everyone else, made my quiet way to the card catalogue.

There I discovered that a great mass of research material was mine to pick through. Bancroft’s Spicer material is plentiful indeed, built upon its acquisition in the late 1960s of Robin Blaser’s papers. In this collection I found drafts for hundreds of Blaser’s poems, as well as many poems by Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer from the period 1945-1968.

And then there were the letters — dozens of them — so that it became possible to reconstruct where my three principals were at any given week or month: what they were reading, who they were seeing, what they were writing. Bancroft also has several important runs of Spicer letters, including his letters to the poet James Alexander and the printer Graham Mackintosh.

Last year Bancroft acquired the holograph manuscript of Spicer’s 1962 masterpiece, The Holy Grail, along with an unpublished and hitherto unknown sequence of Spicer poems from the same year, from the archive of San Francisco painter Fran Herndon.

Contextualizing this offbeat strain of American poetry was made easier by reference to other important archives, which I discovered with the help of Anthony Bliss, Curator of Rare Books and Literary Manuscripts. Bliss was usually present on Saturdays, the only day I could get away from my full-time office job in San Francisco. He showed me the business papers of San Francisco publisher and bookseller City Lights, and I began to understand how the poets of the Berkeley group interacted with their contemporaries in the Beat movement.

The files of San Francisco’s Auerhahn Press revealed Spicer’s contentious relationship with copyright and publication. I read through boxes and boxes of the papers of Ruth Witt-Diamant, who directed the Poetry Center at San Francisco State and who single-handedly institutionalized the poetry reading and made it an art form in California.

These collections proved invaluable to me, and Saturday after Saturday I’d make the trip on BART to Berkeley, walk through the campus rain and shine, and wind up at Bancroft’s door exactly five minutes before it opened. I’m happy to say that I was able to assist the librarians, too, in discovering and identifying the authors of many an anonymous manuscript, including many unpublished and unremarked poems by Jack Spicer.

During my years of weekly visits to the library, new acquisitions arrived periodically. The Richard Brautigan papers came and I got first on line to view them. A rare book dealer sold Bancroft Spicer’s letters to Myrsam Wixman and John Allen Ryan. I nabbed copies of them as soon as they became available. Often I’d lean over the counter and beg Bliss, “Please, please, I know X and Y are still on Dr. Hardwick’s desk, please, please can you just give me a peek?” (He never would.)

For years, whenever I had a week’s vacation from my job, I’d travel to research libraries in other cities to look at Spicer materials — to the Hay Library at Brown, to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, to the august Berg Collection at the New York Public, to the modernistic Archive for New Poetry in San Diego. But always I came back to Bancroft, to pore through files and folders and unclassifiable documents, for it was at Bancroft that I first felt the thrill of the chase.

I had one bad scare. It was on a Tuesday at my office. The phone rang. It was Dr. Bonnie Hardwick herself. A scholar was looking for a particular document by Jack Spicer and its folder had been found empty. Apparently I was the last person to have examined it. Did I know where it could be?

I sat frozen in my seat, staring at the phone, in utter terror. “I didn’t take it!” I babbled. “I’m innocent!”

Eventually the library called again, explaining that the researcher had overlooked an oversized file where the document had lain all along. I had escaped the wrath of Dr. Hardwick - whom I never did meet. I understand that she is a pleasant and mortal person.

Kevin Killianis a secretary at Able Building
Maintenance Co. in San Francisco.

Volume 114
Spring 1999

Table of Contents

Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13

From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?

The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it

The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be

“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive

The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections

Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon

Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?

1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s

Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate

Desiderata