Happy Labor Day.
It has been warm this week in Carmel. Ninety degrees on our back porch which is hot enough for me, though I know that would seem cool to a lot of folks around the country.
I’ve been busy reading and making plans for Jan’s birthday in October.
I’ve been reading Robbinson Jeffers who is an important poet particularly in this part of the world.
A brief intro: Jeffers was born on the East Coast in 1887 and traveled all over the world in his youth. By the time he went to Occidental College he was fluent in English, French and German. He fell in love with a married woman who was older than he was and they finally married after a great scandal in 1904. They came to Carmel soon after and eventually bought some property near Point Lobos where Jeffers built a stone cottage and eventually a tower out of native stone. The house stands to this day under it’s original name of Tor House.
Jeffers was polific and wrote in a long narrative form. His longer poem read like short novels. He had a small loyal following thats to patrons who printed private editions of his work, but he was virtually shunned by the literary establishment. In the twenty’s and thirties his work gained popularity partly because his narrative style made his relatively easy to read compared to the other poets of the day such as the modernist T.S. Elliot or Ezra Pound. He was a nature poets nature poet and he cut a romantic figure spending all of his time in his stone house in the fog and traveling up and down the valleys into the Big Sur Country. He had a wonderful eye for details of this location. He had a deep feeling for what it meant to be Californian.
He was so intoxicated by the non human world that he called himself an Inhumanist Poet. One of his poems, the Roan Stallion had a tremendous effect on Jack Calvin, Ed Ricketts, Sasha Calvin and Joe Campbell. These four made a trip from Seattle to Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 1932 and on that trip they kept re reading “The Rhone Stallion”. Here Jeffers makes his argument for the transformational power of the non human world. He wrote:
“Humanity
is the start of the race I say.
Humanity is the mold to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to burst into fire,
the atom to be split.”
He wrote this poem early in his career and well before the atomic age of energy and before the holocausts of the second world war.
This notion of “breaking through” or away from the grip society or the world view that was shaped by human rationality was wildly exciting to the four intellectuals on a small boat heading up the inside passage. Calvin and Ricketts were working on a book that listed intertidal animals in relationship to where they occurred on the beach. Not by the traditional taxonomy of how they evolved. The animals themselves would tell the scientists how they were to be classified. Joseph Campbell was facing a similar problem with the classification of folk stories but in almost an opposite direction. Stories had been classified by culture and place. But Campbell was interested in the shared energy of the various themes that stories dealt with. All stories, Campbell later explained grew from the principles of human consciousness how human minds developed and this is how they should be understood, not solely the country of origin they sprang from. This idea of breaking through the crust of humanity, not simply accepting what came before as irrefutable truth, was an idea that came along at the right time for these intellectuals. It was a lively time on that little boat going up the inside passage in 1932.
But to me it seems the world through their free thinking impulses a curve. World War II was about to begin, becoming the most monumental killing event in history. Jeffers stuck to his guns, he did not support the war by doubling down on his loathing for humanity. Both sides in the conflict were equally to blame, in bloodthirstiness and moral bankruptcy in his eyes. But what did he offer his readers in exchange? “Give your heart to the falcon,” Which was a line in one of his latter poems. The Peregrine Falcon is powerful and beautiful true, but does it have any answer to the moral dilemma which faced human beings. While it knows it’s true nature, which is hunting, what does the bird of prey teach us about restraint or kindness for that matter. What does a falcon teach a person about the horror of war, as it consumes it’s prey?
In his latter book, Written between 1931-41 “Be Angry At The Sun” Jeffers wrote:
“God curse every man that makes war or plans it”…
“God curse every Congress man who voted it, God curse Wilson, his face like an axe.”
This is what troubles me about Jeffers. In the second world war he looked down from his tower and implored God to curse his enemies. All the while hundreds of millions of fellow human beings were murdered in the war. It bothered a lot of his readers who abandoned him. But what was to be done? I’m not saying he was wrong in his condemnation of war, but what did he offer the dead in exchange for their sacrifice? A curse.
He was replaced by Gary Snyder and Wallace Stevens , WS Merwin and Pattiann Rogers as America’s Nature poets, and Robert Hass as California’s Poet of place. Snyder is a Budhist in terms of his relationship with nature. Hass, Stevens and the others are/were consummate stylists. But there is no one left in the great stone house in the fog. No Gray Eminence in American poetry today.
World War II brought us our great moral delema from which there is no ignoring. William Stafford was a conscientious objector during the war and”an iciness into his heart.”But Jeffers was no C.O. he simply spewed bile… poetic bile to be sure… but deeply cynical against humanity and this is what took him down as a writer of the heart, I suppose. Humanity may well be bankrupt but what can humans put in it’s place?
Here is an old Alaska poem of mine.
