It is important that, in conjunction with the life and career of Smith, we review those proper to Sterling himself. What Sterling accomplished, initially under the tutelage of Ambrose Bierce, led inexorably to what Smith in turn achieved. The
group that we have labelled the California Romantics, and that flourished from
c. 1890 to c. 1930, or slightly refigured, to c. 1960, included other significant figures, but with the one exception perhaps of Nora May French, Sterling and Smith remain two eagles flying high over flocks of sparrows.
As the leading California Romantic, Clark Ashton Smith—poet, storyteller,
painter, and sculptor—inherited from George Sterling the figurative Cloak of
Elijah bequeathed him by Ambrose Bierce. It is their shared and uncompromising
vision, their vision of what they perceived as the truth—and the burning need to communicate it in the manner of the Biblical prophet Elijah, that is, with utter passion—that we commemorate in this essay.
George and Clark, Respectively
George Sterling emigrated to Oakland, California, from his birthplace Sag Harbor, New York, in 1890. While working, during the period 1890–1915, as personal secretary for his uncle, Frank C. Havens, his mother’s brother, a wealthy real-estate operator in Oakland, Sterling met a variety of significant literary figures there during the mid-1890s, including Joaquin Miller, Ina Donna Coolbrith, Ambrose
Bierce, and Jack London. London belonged to the same generation as Sterling, and the others represented an important survival from California’s first “Golden Age”
of literature that had also included Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among many others. Sterling became good friends with each of his new
acquaintances, but a special bond soon united Sterling and London. Kindred spirits in many respects, they became the closest of friends: truly, drinking buddies and
14 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
boon companions. Whereas Sterling called London “Wolf,” London called Sterling
“Greek.” Although London would go on to become one of the most popular au-
thors of his time, Sterling’s fame would remain restricted more or less to the
United States, Britain, and especially California. Because Joaquin Miller and Bierce had established a sort of literary beach-head in Britain during the 1870s, this foot-hold had served as a special mode of communication between the London and San
Francisco literary scenes, a conduit that benefited many California poets and writers from the 1870s on into the 1920s at least. It helped many littérateurs who
would not otherwise have become known abroad. These figures would include
both Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith in their turn.
Jack London admired Sterling enormously as person and poet. Later, in the
novel Martin Eden, he painted a glamorous portrait of him as the elegant and cultured Russ Brissenden. Sterling for his part thought so highly of London’s ability as storyteller that he volunteered to edit and proofread all London’s books published from the late 1890s up to his death, apparently by suicide, in 1916. Later still, during the 1920s, after H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (as Sterling’s own chief protégé) became close friends, but only through correspondence, Lovecraft often addressed Smith as Klarkash-Ton. However, in their own correspondence
and friendship that lasted from January 1911 until the elder poet died in November 1926, Sterling and Smith simply called each other George and Clark, respectively.
Today many admirers of Smith’s highly imaginative stories know Sterling
only through Smith, and it would seem that, just as Sterling “carried” Smith in a sense under his protective aegis (during 1911–26), so now it seems likely that, as time goes on, Smith will return the favor and increasingly will “carry” his long-term friend and mentor under the aegis of his own ever-expanding international reputation as a unique and inimitable author. Nevertheless, Sterling in his time created an extraordinary legend of his own as a poet, and as the popular ideal of a poet in his public persona.
George Sterling: Poet Laureate of the Far West
At some point during the 1890s George Sterling (born in 1869, and thus in his
twenties at that time) began writing his first mature poetry under the direction more or less of the satirist and storyteller Ambrose Bierce, who had agreed to act as Sterling’s poetic mentor. Poetically the two had much in common: a disdain for the then fashionable sentimentality and a preference for traditional meter, form, and rhyme. Very much the product of the fin-de-siècle, Sterling’s first major poem (in two extended sections) emerged as The Testimony of the Suns, a striking and grandiose appraisal of the cosmos at large. The first section is dated December 1901, and the second February 1902. The poem became the dominant feature, as well as title
poem, of Sterling’s first collection, published by W. E. Wood of San Francisco in 1903. It remains an austere and very sober disquisition on the uncharted and star-strewn immensities of the cosmic-astronomic spaces, as well as the utter indiffer-
Klarkash-Ton and “Greek”
15
ence of the cosmos at large to human beings and their concerns while residing and evolving on a small and inconspicuous planet circling around an insignificant sun located almost at the edge of the Milky Way, one galaxy among billions. This long, rather digressive, but certainly impressive poem still represents the strongest statement of cosmic pessimism or nihilism ever penned.
The poem and the collection, by the scope of the subject matter and the
quality of the execution, established Sterling as the foremost poet of San Francisco and California, if not indeed on the entire west coast of the U.S.—although he did not become recognized as such until the publication (under Bierce’s aegis) of his next major poem, “A Wine of Wizardry,” in the Cosmopolitan during the summer of 1907. Meanwhile, changes were happening in Sterling’s life, of a radical but positive nature. In 1905 his aunt, Mrs. Frank C. Havens, gave her nephew his “freedom money,” and with this gift he left the San Francisco Bay Area to settle on the Monterey Peninsula. He purchased some land in the village of Carmel-by-the-Sea, built a house there (as well as a cabin farther back on his property), and proceeded to devote his time to writing, fishing for abalone, hunting small game, growing a
vegetable garden, and fostering other forms of do-it-yourself husbandry. Soon
other writers and artists, inspired by Sterling’s example, came down from the Bay Area to set up a Bohemian existence in Carmel. The town owes its early development and character almost completely to Sterling as San Francisco’s “King of Bohemia” (as the journalist Idwal Jones nicknamed him). Apart from occasional
sojourns back in the City and elsewhere, Sterling’s principal residence from 1905
until 1913 remained the developing town of Carmel.
Whatever reputation he may have won from The Testimony of the Suns, the young poet soon saw it eclipsed when, through Bierce’s influence, the Cosmopolitan for September 1907 published “A Wine of Wizardry,” a glittering and highly colored fantasy in sumptuous rhymed verse. Sterling’s poetic mentor outrageously
trumpeted the poem’s praises in his accompanying essay. The poem and the poet,
no less than the claims made for them by Bierce, aroused an astonishing and of-
ten inimical chorus of controversy from all over the U.S. But the controversy produced Bierce’s desired effect: it established Sterling as the poet laureate of the Far West, even if uncrowned as such. It placed poem and poet solidly on the literary map of America. Among other connoisseurs of the weird and fantastic, the science fiction writer Fritz Leiber has judged “A Wine of Wizardry” equal in value to Coleridge’s ineffable effusion “Kubla Khan,” that Holy Writ of the high romantic
imagination.
Meanwhile, the performance that same summer of Sterling’s first verse drama,
The Triumph of Bohemia, had p
roven eminently successful for what it was, a hastily composed although competent poetic drama of no great merit, but amusing and
appropriate. It depicted with naive idealism the triumphant battle waged by the good forces of Nature against the evil strategems of Mammon, seeking to cut the Bohemian Grove itself down for mere filthy lucre. Sterling had written the play for
16 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
the Bohemian Club of San Francisco (to which he belonged) for its annual revels, or High Jinks, that took place every summer at the Bohemian Grove on the Russian
River up in Marin County north of the City. This was a small forest of giant red-woods and of great beauty. The Bohemian Club subsequently published the play in 1907 as the second of Sterling’s books of poetry. The national notoriety deriving from the magazine publication of “A Wine of Wizardry,” no less than the local
fame generated anew by his Grove Play, produced another and very positive result.
It brought Sterling to the attention of the eminent bookseller and publisher A. M.
Robertson, who owned and operated a successful bookstore in San Francisco, a
significant cultural institution of its type known throughout the Bay Area.
Living chiefly in Carmel and making occasional sojourns up to the City, Ster-
ling himself was very little affected by the great earthquake and fire that devastated much of San Francisco during April 1906, although he did go up there at the time to lend what aid that he could to those dear and close to him. Like everyone and everything in the areas surrounding the City, whether near or far, he felt the
shocks, which had proven of unprecedented severity within living memory.
Both the major new poem and his first verse play now made up the principal
contents of Sterling’s next collection, A Wine of Wizardry, brought out in 1909, the first of ten volumes of poetry published by A. M. Robertson. Their titles evoke not only the poet’s lush and exotic romanticism but also (some of them) their raison d’être in contemporary places and events of San Francisco and California, no less than in the world at large: The House of Orchids (1911), one of his best single collections; Beyond the Breakers (1914); Ode on the Opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), actually celebrated in honor of the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, and at the resplendent fair grounds in both San Francisco and San Diego; The Evanescent City (1915), a series of three connected poems detailing the building, then the animated existence, and finally the demolition of the San Francisco fair’s grandiose but ephemeral structures; Yosemite: An Ode (1915), celebrating one of California’s greatest natural wonders.
But now the Great War that raged in Europe during 1914–18 obtruded into
the lives of Americans everywhere when, in part because of the sinking of the British liner Lusitania (with American citizens aboard) by German submarine action in May 1915, the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, staying the course
until the Armistice in November 1918. As part of his new role as San Francisco’s unofficial poet laureate, several books by Sterling at this time reflect the war and connected events, as was perhaps expected, even if it did not result in
some of his best work: The Caged Eagle (1916) and The Binding of the Beast (1917), a collection of war sonnets. (Although both the last two volumes reflect the
Great War in Europe, the latter title does so much more than the former.) A
special mention must be made here of a rare volume not brought out by A. M.
Robertson, and one of the few books of poetry ever published by the Book Club
of California based in San Francisco: Thirty-five Sonnets (1917), honoring Sterling’s
Klarkash-Ton and “Greek”
17
acknowledged supremacy in this form, almost invariably of the Petrachan type.
Rosamund (1920), another verse drama, and the collection Sails and Mirage (1921), one of his best, are the last volumes by Sterling published by A. M. Robertson.
Most, if not all, of these ten books constitute elegant examples not only of Art Nouveau binding but above all excellent printing by various fine-art printers of San Francisco during the period of 1909–23.
A variety of publishers, located outside California with two exceptions, issued Sterling’s remaining seven volumes during his lifetime or afterwards: Selected Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1923), his single most important collection by its very nature; Truth (Chicago: The Bookfellows, 1923), another verse drama; Truth (San Francisco: The Bohemian Club, 1926), a revised version; Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926). Finally there are three posthumous collections: Sonnets to Craig (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1928); Poems to Vera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938); and After Sunset (San Francisco: Howell, 1939). Of Sterling’s four verse dramas, only two have been pro-
duced and performed, and moreover successfully, The Triumph of Bohemia in 1907
and Truth in 1926, both by the Bohemian Club. Both Rosamund and Lilith (1919) appear eminently stageworthy in a practical sense, and it might make a fascinating experiment for the Bohemian Club or some other appropriate organization in San
Francisco to produce and perform these plays.
Along with an occasional negative criticism (as usually caused by his perceived lack of modernism), many honors came to Sterling in the course of the years between 1907 and 1926, and most of them he richly deserved. Following his unsuc-
cessful sojourn back east (mostly in New York City) from the spring of 1914 until the spring of 1915, he returned to San Francisco, welcomed back as its unofficial poet laureate, a role that he played to perfection until his death late in 1926. The architraves of the grandiose edifices erected on the fair grounds of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition presented (in carved or engraved form) apposite quotations not only from the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Firdausi, etc., but also from that of Sterling as San Francisco’s own adopted son. Somewhat later the San Diego version of the same exposition (constructed in Balboa Park) honored him with a “George Sterling Day.” Following the fair in Bagdad-by-the-Bay, the vast piece of real estate that had provided the fair grounds became the Marina District, the northernmost section of San Francisco southeast of the Golden Gate at its most narrow location. The land was mostly fill.
All these honors represented the greatest public accolades that Sterling was ever to receive. It happened coincidentally during early 1915 that the governor and legisla-ture of the state proffered to Sterling the position of poet laureate of California, seemingly created expressly for him as the state’s most visible poet as well as its most flamboyant public figure of a poet. This was a very great and unprecedented honor, indeed! However, with characteristic self-effacement and generosity he did that which most people in his position would never have done: he declined the honor,
18 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
insisting instead that such should go by all poetic justice to Ina Donna Coolbrith, that now rare survivor from California’s first “Golden Age” of literature. With deserved acclaim Coolbrith fulfilled this position from 1915 until her death in 1928, thus outliving Sterling himself by several years. But, let us remember and emphasize, she could not have done so without Sterling’s fine gesture of self-sacrifice. Only he would have known of all the help and encouragement that she had given as librarian at the Oakland Free Library to so many emerging minds, such as Jack London and
the dancer Isadora Duncan, guiding their adventurous reading among the great
books inherited from the past. After all, Sterling had honors to spare, universally if unofficial y acknowledged as he was as the poet laureate not just of San Francisco but of the Far West.
Having changed almost overnight from artistic revolutionary or outlaw (at
least as perceived in 1907 because of “A Wine of Wizardry”) to virtual civic institution, Sterling entered the final phase of his life and career from 1915 t
o 1926, thus recognized as the very spirit of the City’s now long-lasting Bohemia. In this role he functioned as the on-site but unofficial ambassador or master of ceremonies for San Francisco, entertaining a great variety of celebrities literary and otherwise.
Whether in person or through correspondence, whether before or after 1915—in
fact, almost from the very start of his life in California and lasting until his death—
Sterling maintained an enormous range and number of friendships and acquaintan-
ces, and as indulged by San Francisco’s city fathers, he performed various picturesque pranks on occasion, such as the celebrated swimming in the nude in one or more ponds or lakes of Golden Gate Park in the company of some attractive lady
friend, also nude.
The poet, it must be remarked, was tall, slender, well knit, and spectacularly
handsome. Many people referred to him as an Apollo, and he had great charm. He
was also athletic, an excellent boxer, swimmer, etc. At Carmel he seemed to be a veritable ocean deity, frequently diving for abalone and other shellfish, and performing the task with skill and panache. Given his looks and charming personality, it is not a surprise that many females found Sterling irresistibly attractive, and that, with no strings attached, he consummated relationships with an innumerable succession of willing and beautiful women. Almost throughout the entire period of his marriage to Carrie, from 1896 through 1913 (they had separated in 1911 and were divorced in early 1914), Sterling had made love with a great many other women besides his wife. Carrie committed suicide by poison in 1918.
During all this very busy life and career Sterling not only had had his po-
etry and prose very widely published in all manner of periodicals and collections nationally circulated, but as always he found the time and energy to help, encourage, and instruct innumerable poets, both men and women. Apparently he re-
garded this as a sacred obligation, the passing of the “sacred fire” of art from one generation to another, and it is the one thing that remains as a genuine credit, in a very personal sense, to his memory, and that possesses a real nobility and selfless-
Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc Page 2