ROBINSON JEFFERS AND "THE ANSWER"
In December 1914, a young poet and his wife came up the coast from L.A. The world had just begun “its violent change,” but along with war, the couple fled scandal, sprawl, civilization itself.
“In those days one did not attempt the coast road by motor,” Robinson Jeffers remembered. “We waited in the dawn twilight for the horse-drawn mail stage that drove twice a week to Big Sur, where the road ended then.” They arrived at night, ”and every mile of the forty had been enchanted. Clouds dragging on the summits. Storm on the rock shore. Sacred calm under the redwoods.”
In troubled times, we fall back on instinct — fight or flight? Most choose to fight, but there is solace in those who fled.
Then what is the answer? — Not to be deluded by dreams,
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come many times before. . .
Having fled to the craggy coast he called “the inevitable place,” Robinson Jeffers never returned. Never went back to L.A., where his affair with a prominent lawyer’s wife — his beloved Una — was front page scandal. Never returned to the “perishing republic.” Never lived among “that poor doll, humanity.” Turning his back to the continent, Jeffers built a life, a home, a tower of stone and words. There he sought “The Answer.”
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction. . .
Today, Jeffers is remembered mostly in anthologies, but a century ago, this hardened, hawk-faced man built a towering reputation. Rejecting the modern world, he first fell back on the Latin and Greek that his father, an Old Testament scholar, instilled in him.
Jeffers’ early poems were tragedies fraught with violence. But as he, Una, and their twin sons aged, Jeffers turned outward. Perched on his bluff overlooking the foggy coast at Carmel, he saw an ocean and a universe of answers.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted. . .
Apprenticed to a local mason, Jeffers learned “the art of making stone love stone.” In 1924, he finished Tor House, Hawk Tower, and his first book. He then turned his back on himself. “I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotion that I did not feel, not to pretend to believe in optimism or pessimism, or irreversible progress; not to say anything because it was popular, or generally accepted, or fashionable in intellectual circles, unless I myself believed it; and not to believe easily.”
Over the next decade, Jeffers was compared T.S. Eliot, hailed as “the best which this country has so far produced.” Tor House hosted visitors eager to meet this brooding sage. Chaplin and Lindbergh. George Gershwin, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay. . .
One visitor wrote, “I felt in his presence almost as if I stood before another and nobler species of man. . . someone out of time, an oracle who would presently withdraw among the stones and pinewood.” Jeffers remained unmoved.
. . .and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled. . .
He called his outlook “inhumanism.” In the lives of local fishermen and farmers, he admired “the still, small music of humanity,” but inhumanism demanded a shift “from man to no-man. . . The rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.”
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history. . . often appears atrociously ugly. . .
Today Jeffers’ inhumanism can seem a bitter pill. Surely our struggles aren’t that pitiful, our causes that futile. But back when world war followed world war, leading to threats of Armageddon, the turn from human folly brought inner calm. Perhaps it still can.
Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty of organic wholeness. . .
When World War II began, Jeffers’ pacifism ended his public favor. After the war, young poets found him “shoddy and pretentious.” In 1950, Una succumbed to cancer. Alone in his tower, Jeffers felt “the steep time building like a wave, towering to break.” He died in 1962, largely forgotten.
Three years later, the Sierra Club blended Jeffers’ poems with photos by Ansel Adams and others, creating a book that spoke to the greening environmental movement. Not Man Apart opens to reveal the majestic beauty of Big Sur. And there is Jeffers, at the gate of Tor House, the cold blue Pacific as his front yard. “It is only a little planet,” the book begins. “But how beautiful it is.”
What, then, is the answer? It’s not time to flee, to turn our backs. But the craggy poet from the California coast can lift us above today’s troubles, tonight’s news.
. . .the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
