Books: Harrowed Marrow

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The Jeffers' intention to live in Europe was thwarted by the War. Looking for a place to live they came on the spot where Hawk Tower and Tor House now stand: ''When the stagecoach topped the hill . . . and we looked down through pines and sea-fogs on Carmel Bay, it was evident that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place."

Wings. His wanderings now over, Poet Jeffers devoted himself to following his mind's rising, widening gyres. He had already written much poetry, published one book. At 14 he had won a Youth's Companion poetry prize. A conventional book of love-poems, Flagons and Apples (1912), he followed four years later with Californians. In its most notable poem, '"Invocation," he addressed the westward-shining evening star that had led his ancestors out of Asia, across Europe, the Atlantic, America, to leave him, a solitary poet, stranded on

the verge extreme, and shoal

Of sand that ends the west.

Balked by the Pacific Ocean, Poet Jeffers, unless he were to retrace his father's steps, had only three directions left to go: down, up. in. At different times he has taken all three.

For eight years he published nothing. He explained to Journalist James Rorty. who came across him while editing, with Poet George Sterling, an anthology of native California poetry, that he did not think anybody would be interested. Tamar and Other Poems (1924) had just been published in New York by an obscure printer named Boyle. The plates were offered free by Printer Boyle to at least two large publishers, who declined to print the poem because of its incestuous theme. Through the efforts of James Rorty & friends, the Boyle edition received a fanfare of reviewers' praise. In 1925 Liveright brought out "Tamar" in its edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. In the latter volume Poet Jeffers generalized his theme:

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 break into fire,

The atom to be split.

Tragedy that breaks man's face and a

white fire flies out of it; vision that

fools him

Out of his limits, desire that fools him out

of his limits, unnatural crime, in

human science,

Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that

leap over the walls of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science,

Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowl

edge of the spinning demons

that make an atom,

These break, these pierce, these deify. . . .

The visions, the desires that fool man out of his limits lead Poet Jeffers' tragic heroes & heroines into dark and terrifying ways. "Tamar," "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," ''The Women at Point Sur" all tell incestuous tales. "Roan Stallion" tells of a woman's love for a horse. Though critics, with few exceptions, have extolled the splendor and intensity of Poet Jeffers' works, some women think that he spoils his poems with such outrageous themes. Even his wife complained. "Robin," said she after he had finished "Roan Stallion," "when will you quit forbidden themes?" Robin answered with an enigmatic smile. To him, there is nothing in his writings either "surprising or subversive, but the mere common sense of our predicament as passionate bits of earth and water." To dignify men's passions, men's predicaments, he had merely motivated his tragedies with themes al ready given classic sanction by the Greeks. A brief excursion into Christian mythology in Dear Judas, apparently taken from sense of duty, did not much advance his thought; neither did Descent to the Dead, a compilation of 16 poems written in Ireland and Great Britain on a trip with his wife and twins about three years ago, during which Poet Jeffers spent much of his time looking at graves.

"The soil that I dig up here [wrote Jeffers of Cawdor and Other Poems] to plant trees or lay foundation stones, is full of Indian eavings, seashells and flint scrapers. . . . Not only generations but races too drizzle away so fast, one wonders the more urgently what it is for. . . ." Poet Jeffers has already shown how, against the desert western American landscape, the characters of his imagination, impelled by Greekish lusts, drizzle themselves away. In Thurso's Landing he writes his most native American, least Greekish tragedy, leaving sexual perversion almost entirely out. Its terrors are more Amerindian than Greek —the terrors of a diminishing race under Nature's relentlessly observant, semi conscious eye. The outlines of the Amer ican continent and of its troubled in habitants, grow colder and clearer under Poet Jeffers' western-starry light.

The coast hills at Sovranes Creek:

No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin

Over rock shaped like flame;

The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast

Gray extension beyond the long white violence;

A herd of cows and the bull

Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;

And the gray air haunted with hawks:

This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.

No imaginable

Human presence here could do anything

But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.