Jeffers wrote of rocks as the “bones of the old mother,”6 the “world’s cradle,”7 and “old comrades.”8 Waves were “drunken quarrymen/ Climbing the cliff, hewing out more stone for me.”9 The surf “cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum.”10 During erosion the “hills dissolve and are liquidated.”11
And it is clear Jeffers felt the tremor of at least one earthquake. He wrote:
. . . the teeth of the fracture
Gnashed together, snapping on each other; the powers
of the earth drank
Their pang of unendurable release and the old resistances Locked. The long coast was shaken like a leaf.12
In a second, haunting description:
The heads of the high redwoods down the deep canyon
Rippled, instantly earthquake shook the granite-boned
ridge like a rat
In a dog’s teeth; the house danced and bobbled,
lightning flashed from the ground, the deep earth roared,
yellow dust
Was seen rising in divers places and rock-slides
Roared in the gorges; then all things stilled and the
earth stood quiet.13
Yoshinobu’s mother read Jeffers’s work to him when he was a child, but it wasn’t until he went to college and she gave him The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers that he realized how much he liked Jeffers’s language. Around the same time, when Yoshinobu was hopping between majors—first English, then astronomy—his mother also suggested he study geology. He thought it sounded boring but his girlfriend was taking a geology class and they went on a field trip together. He enjoyed it far more than she did, ended up majoring in geology, and went on to get a masters degree and doctorate, which he received from the University of Southern California in 1999.
His mother gave him another book of Jeffers poetry, Cawdor and Other Poems, during his work on his dissertation. The title poem, an epic narrative, centers on a family living at a ranch near Point Sur, thirty miles south of Yoshinobu’s hometown of Pacific Grove. He read it every night in his tent in the Klamath Mountains. “There’s something about growing up here and Jeffers’s ability to grab the essence of this region. He made it universal,” he said. “Taking Aeschylus and Euripides and recasting them in a new way on the Big Sur coast in a totally different rhythm. It was like nothing I had read before. It floored me.”
Jeffers’s passion, knowledge, and understanding of rocks and place centers on Tor House and Hawk Tower. “At the same time he’s building these structures, he’s working on his most evocative poems, that are not poems for this age but poems for ages on end,” said Yoshinobu.
John Robinson Jeffers was born January 10, 1887, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to Annie Tuttle Jeffers, twenty-six years old and described as charming, outgoing, and musical. She was more than twenty years younger than his father, William Hamilton Jeffers, an intense and private man known to neighbors as “old Ichabod Crane.”14 A scholar of Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Babylonian, Hebrew, and Arabic, he taught biblical and ecclesiastical history at Western Theological Seminary, in Pittsburgh.
“When I was nine years old my father began to slap Latin into me, literally, with his hands,” wrote Robinson, many years later.15 To keep young Robin, as the family called him, better focused on his studies, Dr. Jeffers first planted a large hedge around their home, then moved to the country. The family also traveled extensively in Europe and lived abroad for many years. Robinson attended schools in Switzerland and Germany, often switching yearly. By age twelve, he could converse in Latin, read Greek, and spoke German and French fluently.16
His father’s gift of two small books during the family’s final year in Europe may have had as significant an impact as slapping and schooling. Robinson quickly abandoned one volume, the poems of Thomas Campbell, but he fell in love with the other, the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The florid verses intoxicated the impressionable fourteen-year-old, kindling a passion in Jeffers that led to subsequent encounters with Swinburne, Shelley, and Tennyson. He later wrote, “If I should ever wonder about the uses of poetry, I have only to remember that year’s experience.”17
The Jeffers family, which also included Robinson’s younger brother, Hamilton, returned to Pittsburgh in 1902. His father placed Robinson in the University of Pittsburgh for one year before Dr. Jeffers’s poor health forced them to move to Pasadena,California. Continuing his tradition of switching schools annually, Robinson now began again, this time as a sixteen-year-old junior at Occidental College. He attended classes in Greek, biblical literature, rhetoric, and astronomy. He wrote poetry for student magazines and in 1904 sold his first poem—“The Condor”—for twelve dollars.18
At Occidental, Robinson took two additional classes that had long-lasting effects on him, according to Yoshinobu. The first was a surveying class, which probably helped Jeffers when he began work on his stone structures in Carmel. He also studied geology using a standard text of the day, Joseph Le Conte’s Elements of Geology. Le Conte, who was a pioneer member of the Sierra Club and an early proponent of evolution, compared the study of Earth with the study of the human body. Structural geology, defined as rocks and minerals and how they are arranged, was analogous to anatomy. The planet’s physiology consisted of erosion and weathering, produced by water, wind, ice, plants, and animals. Historical geology, like human embryology, examined physical and biological changes over time. And like the human body, each facet of geology influenced the others.
“That’s totally Jeffers. Le Conte has to be an early influence on Jeffers's notion of living, breathing rocks, the idea that everything around is part of one living entity,” said Yoshinobu. “He can’t wait to die to dissolve into calcium, which will form in the soil, which is part of the DNA of the first thing to crawl out of the ocean onto land. Oddly, Jeffers got his worst grade, an eighty-five, in geology.”
Jeffers graduated in 1905 and that fall started at the University of Southern California. He planned on studying for a master’s degree in letters, taking classes in oratory, Spanish, and advanced German. The latter course changed his life, for there he met the outgoing, intelligent, and beautiful wife of Edward “Teddie” Kuster, a prominent young lawyer. Una Call Kuster, two years older and three years married, had entered USC to escape the “incessant whirl of activity”19 of her social life.
A hesitant romance began between the two but when Jeffers left again for Europe with his parents in 1906, he sent infrequent postcards. Upon his return, after taking a job translating German medical papers for his mother’s physician, Jeffers entered medical school at USC. He also found time to swim and walk the beach with Una. By 1910 they knew they were in love but also knew they couldn’t marry. Thinking that absence might help the heart grow colder, Jeffers moved to Seattle, with his parents and Hamilton, to attend the University of Washington School of Forestry. By late spring, Una and Robinson’s romance appeared over.
He returned to Southern California in the summer of 1911 and ran into Una within an hour of arriving. Fate sealed their romance. In May 1912 Teddie sent Una to Europe to get her away from her young poet. With Una gone, Jeffers “drifted into mere drunken idleness.”20 He also produced his first book of poetry, Flagons and Apples. He paid for its publication with an inheritance from his uncle. The book’s one review, in the December 8, 1912, Los Angeles Times, noted Jeffers’s “distinctly novel and individual touch . . . [which] contains some of the best poetry I’ve seen in a dog’s age—except of course, my own.”21 (If only modern writers could pen their own reviews, as Jeffers did.)
Una returned from Europe in November, prompted by Teddie’s growing relationship with another woman. After Una and Teddie split up, she and Robinson began a more open life together.
Jeffers made it into the L. A. Times again on February 28, 1913. Under the banner headline “Love’s Gentle Alchemy to Weld Broken Lives” the paper detailed the love triangle of Una,Robinson, and Teddie, calling it “a story so remarkable as t
o almost defy parallel.” A day later a second feature on the “eternal triangle” provided more details, as well as a copy of Jeffers’s poem “On the Cliff,” with lines such as “our eyes were blind while my lips drank/Oblivious love at yours.”
By this time, Robinson was back in Seattle. Una eventually followed him north to wait for her divorce from Teddie to be final. She and Robinson were married on August 2, the same day that Teddie remarried.
The Jeffers moved to Carmel in September 1914. They had not planned to. Their stated intention following their marriage was to settle in Lyme Regis, in Dorset, on the southern coast of England. By November 1913, however, Una was pregnant and they decided to stay in La Jolla, where they had settled. Una gave birth on May 5 to a ten-pound girl, Maeve. The baby died one day later. They then moved in with Robinson’s parents, who lived in Pasadena, and planned to leave for England in the fall, but the outbreak of World War I ended that idea. A friend suggested they investigate Carmel.
They arrived by stagecoach from Monterey. “[When] 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,” wrote Jeffers.22 They rented a small cottage. He wrote poetry and Una studied “certain aspects of late 18th century England.”23 They could see only three houses from the beach when they walked with their bulldog, Billie. Una described the time as “full and over-full of joy.”24
Carmel is a spectacular place. It sits on a deep blue bay with a white sand beach. Rarely cold and rarely hot, the climate is a pleasing mixture of fog and not too many completely clear days. Outside of the central business district of either overpriced or too cheap tourist shops, the streets are quiet and without sidewalks. The older houses lack street numbers; mail only goes to the post office. And to the south, the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains drop treeless down to the famous Big Sur coast.
Carmel was both old and new when Robinson and Una arrived. Spanish navigator Sebastian Vizcaino chanced upon the harbor in 1602 and named it for his patron saint Our Lady of Mount Carmel. In 1771, Franciscan Friar Junipero Serra established a mission, made first of wood, then of adobe, and finally, in 1793, of sandstone, quarried one mile away. The mission thrived until 1834, when the Carmel priest moved to Monterey, the state capital. Eighteen years later the roof collapsed and the remains moldered.
In 1903 developer Frank Devendorf began promoting the property he had recently acquired around the bay. By the time the stagecoach dropped the Jeffers on the main road—dirt-covered Ocean Avenue—about 350 people lived in the village of Carmel. Most homes used kerosene for light, movies were a nickel, and news was posted on a bulletin board at the post office. Despite, or because of, the lack of amenities, Carmel had started to attract a well-known crowd, including Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mary Austin, and Sinclair Lewis.
Two years after arriving in Carmel, Una gave birth to twin boys, Donnan and Garth. The family continued to rent a cottage and go on walks, including their favorite one, which wound along a grassy track and through acres of poppies and lupines to an open knoll topped by several granite boulders. Known as Carmel Point, the land had been a nine-hole golf course until World War I. In spring 1919 Robinson and Una bought two and a half acres (sixteen lots) on the point, which reminded them of barren knolls, or tors, they had seen in Dartmoor. (Never wealthy, they had a ten-thousand-dollar inheritance from Robinson’s uncle and about two hundred dollars per month from a trust established when his father died in December 1914.) They found golf balls in their garden for many years.
Work on Tor House began in late spring at the property’s high point, near the granite boulders known as the Standing Stones. Carmel contractor M. J. Murphy had submitted a thirteen-item estimate, including lumber, labor, cesspool, and profit, totaling $2,230. Because work progressed slowly, Jeffers apprenticed himself to the stonemason, a man named Pierson. “[Robinson] hadn’t any skill of any kind so he did the hardest and plainest job (at $4.00 a day, I think),” wrote Una.25
The rocks came from the cove below the house. Murphy built a wooden track and used a horse to pull a cart up to the site. They also used the horse to help excavate the foundation, along with pick and shovel. Jeffers helped mix the mortar and place stones. By the end of the day, he was tired but happy, wrote Una. Murphy, Pierson, and Jeffers finished the house in August 1919.
To the Rock that will be a Cornerstone of the House
Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen,
How long a time since the brown people who have vanished from here
Built fires beside you and nestled by you
Out of the ranging sea-wind? A hundred years, two hundred,
You have been dissevered from humanity
And only known the stubble squirrels and the headland rabbits,
Or the long-fetlocked plowhorses
Breaking the hilltop in December, sea-gulls following,
Screaming in the black furrow; no one
Touched you with love, the gray hawk and the red hawk touched you
Where my hand now lies. So I have brought you
Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of famine
And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind.
I did not dream the taste of wine could bind with granite,
Nor honey and milk please you; but sweetly
They mingle down the storm-worn cracks among the mosses,
Interpenetrating the silent
Wind-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older
Scars of primal fire, and the stone
Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry
A corner of the house, this also destined.
Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you
The wings of the future, for I have them.
How dear you will be to me when I too grow old, old comrade.
Yoshinobu and I entered Tor House through the narrow front door, on the lee side from the ocean. The compact twenty-foot-by-fifteen-foot living room felt somber due to a combination of dark, redwood paneling and cloudy light coming through the large west window and smaller south windows. Bookshelves ran along the base of the windows, as well as to the right of the front door, holding dark hardbacks with ragged-edged spines written by Yeats, George Moore, and Swinburne. Well-worn carpets covered the floor and absorbed any footsteps. In the far corner stood Una’s Steinway piano. A few feet away, blackened by decades of smoke, was a tawny sandstone fireplace, a necessity in a house originally without electricity or gas.
Jeffers based his design on a Tudor barn Una had seen on a trip to England. Although he was over six feet tall, he built the house low as protection against the prevailing wind blowing off the bay and because the only heat came from fireplaces. Kerosene oil lamps provided light, and the Jefferses heated water in kettles in the fireplaces.
In a nook around the corner from the door was Una’s built-in desk and portraits of Yeats and the twins, Donnan and Garth, along with drawings of Irish towers, a passion of hers. Above her, in a loft reached by steep stairs, Robinson would pace, pondering a line of poetry, periodically stopping to jot a finished thought. Family lore holds that during extended lulls Una would thump the loft with a broom and shout “Pace, Robin, pace.” The family also slept in the loft, which is off limits to the public.
We passed through the doorway west of the fireplace into a small bedroom, where a black-and-white photograph of Una by Arnold Genthe is hung on the wall next to the bed. With her long dark hair wrapped around her head, she stares directly at the viewer with earnest eyes. No other photograph of Una reveals her piercing beauty as well. The bed was, as Robinson wrote in “The Bed by the Window,” “unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth.” Jeffers died in this bed on January 20, 1962, during a rare Carmel snowstorm. In the same poem, he wrote, “I chose the bed down-stairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed.”26
After leaving the bedroom we walked back through the living room into a co
rridor about five feet wide and twice as long. Originally the kitchen, books now lined its walls. It is hard to imagine how Una cooked for four in such a small space. In a red-velvet-wallpapered bathroom off the kitchen stands a red clawfoot bathtub. A leather shaving strop dangling by the little sink looked as if Jeffers had just used it.
As the Jeffers boys matured, Robinson decided to build a larger dining room off of the kitchen. The room felt more open and friendly than the rest of the house because of the two picture windows and lack of dark paneling, which also allowed closer inspection of Jeffers’s beautiful stonework. Although people often thought of Jeffers as unfriendly and misanthropic—he famously had a sign posted on his gate reading No Visitors Until After 4 O’clock, by which time he and Una had headed out for their daily walk—Robinson and Una often entertained here. Friends such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charlie Chaplin, and George Gershwin sat around the six-foot-long oak table drinking homemade wine fermented from oranges, raisins, and rice. Entertainment included songs and performances, acted out in the Minstrel Gallery at the room’s south end. They were warmed by the big corner fireplace, which Jeffers built on the exact spot where he found fire-charred stone five feet underground. (“The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains.”)27
A locked door on the eastern wall leads into what had been the garage, the first building that Robinson constructed by himself. After finishing the garage, which has an arched opening, Jeffers read that he should have used bigger buttresses to support the arch. One of these expanded buttresses now jutted into the dining room. A second odd feature was the five-foot-tall door, which was at most two-thirds the width of a typical door. When Jeffers’s son Donnan and his family later moved back to Carmel, they expanded Tor House and converted the garage into a kitchen, which required cutting an opening into the shared wall. Workers spent several hours trying to drill through the wall but made only a small hole. Two men came back with a pneumatic drill and needed two days to cut the hole. When one of them died of a heart attack after the second day, everyone decided to do no further work on the doorway.
Stories in Stone Page 7