by Ansel Adams
I shall never forget the events of the next day. We were up early and drove along the foggy Highlands coast to call on Johnny and Molly O’Shea. They lived in a massive home built of local stone and huge timbers. Johnny and Molly greeted us at the entrance, and Albert was warmly embraced. I remember the paintings by Johnny that I saw as being very strong in form and color, with semiabstract respect for the scene. The rocks were huge, the waves tumultuous, the trees incredibly gnarled and agonized: nothing soft about O’Shea’s paintings.
The lunch was ample and delicious. Out came the whiskey; the O’Sheas and Adams paid due honor to some fine old Irish booze, and Albert drank coffee. As the fog lifted, windows were opened and the sound of the sea flooded the room. The ocean magic of Carmel came over me, different from the mountain magic of the Sierra, but unforgettable.
After stops for several other short visits, we arrived at the Robinson Jefferses’ just before four o’clock. I knew and admired Jeffers’s poetry and was aware of his celebrity status. I was nervous. We walked up to the gate beyond which the stone house and tower loomed in the returning Carmel fog. Across the entrance a chain supported a little wooden sign with the words, “Not at home before four o’clock.” The message on the other side of the sign was even more terse, “Not at Home.” Neither of them were to be disregarded. All but their intimates wrote for appointments or waited in the road until the little sign and chain were removed. Sometimes the “Not at Home” sign was displayed for days at a time as they lived a quiet life on their own terms. Jeffers’s chosen daily routine was spent in intense writing and strenuous labor personally building their home, Tor House and the Hawk Tower. Constructed of native shore granite, it took him years to finish. In “To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House,” he wrote:
Lend me the stone strength of the past and
I will lend you
The wings of the future, for I have them.
Promptly at four, Una Jeffers appeared, removed the sign and chain, and greeted us. She was a slight though striking woman of great poise and charm. She led us into the house where Jeffers was awaiting us—a tall man with a hard face and a bold shock of hair. He was wearing an open shirt and knickers. Quiet and shy in manner and voice, he possessed a strange presence with his rugged features and relentless glance. He grasped Albert’s hand in welcome and turned to me. Albert introduced us and, with a faint suggestion of relaxed eyes and lips, Jeffers murmured, “Glad you could come.” I sensed a power of personality that I have rarely felt. We had nothing important to say to each other at the time, so we said nothing. One did not make small talk with Robinson Jeffers.
Una brought out wine for us and fruit juice for Albert. We were made to feel very much at home, and Albert held forth with torrents of discussion on books and libraries, writers and literary gossip. The vivacity of both Albert and Una was balanced by Jeffers’s quiet tranquility. Una was always in tune with this genius who, in my opinion, produced much of America’s greatest poetry. The writer Mary Austin categorically praised Jeffers as “the greatest poet since the Greeks.”
I passed time by absorbing the conversation and inspecting the beautiful, simple furnishings of the room, including a fine Steinway grand piano. Later Albert asked me to play for the Jefferses. I was tense, but I knew my notes. I played a section of a Bach Partita, then a Mozart sonata, and I recall the performance as creditable. Una was touchingly appreciative and Albert was beaming. Jeffers said, “Good.” The glacier began to melt; Jeffers brought out a copy of Roan Stallion and inscribed it to me, June 26, 1926. The fog thickened and Una set out candles. Jeffers thawed a little more. When we departed for San Francisco at dusk, I felt I was leaving new and truly warm friends.
Jeffers’s poetry deeply affected me, not so much because of the narrative complexities of the epic poems, or the stern messages involved in many of them, but the extraordinary grandeur of the images invoked and the profound music of his lines. In addition to the great themes of tragedy and symbolic experience, his poetry contains musical word-sounds and relationships. The surge of the ocean lives in the flow of phrase and imagery; the brilliant shafts of sheer beauty that illuminate so many passages in his work give an added dimension to the harsh bones of his creative vision, expressed in lines such as these from “Night.”
The deep dark-shining
Pacific leans on the land,
Feeling his cold strength
To the outermost margins.
Jeffers was a dramatist, deeply concerned with the ebb and flow of humanity in the chaos of an inhuman cosmos, writing of the eternal realities of the natural world where man is but an accidental phenomenon. He promised a future when man will go the way of all species and the eternal domains of nature will persist magnificently without him. There are sheep by the billion, but the shepherds are few. And the shepherds in the modern capitals of the world may lead us either to pasture or to slaughterhouse. Jeffers saw man as inseparable from nature; thus man must conduct himself accordingly or he is doomed. Jeffers was a prophet of our age.
That first trip to Carmel was but one of a number of trips that Albert and I made together. A most memorable one was in 1927 to Santa Fe, my first trip to our American Southwest: twelve hundred long miles, mostly on washboard roads.
Our entrance into Santa Fe was greeted by a dust storm. I went to bed depressed; the bad weather destroying my hopes for a land that had promised many new photographs. The next morning all was diamond bright and clear, and I fell quickly under the spell of the astonishing New Mexican light. The magical transference from dusty wind and heat to sparkling vistas and translucent air was unexpected and felicitous. Summer thunderstorms create the dominant symbolic power of the land: huge ranges of flashing and grumbling clouds with gray curtains of rain clearing both the air and the spirit while nourishing the earth.
Those who have not visited the Southwest will not discover its true qualities in texts or illustrations. Very few artists have caught its spirit; the siren-calls of the theatrical are not favorable to aesthetic integrity. Color photography usually takes advantage of the obvious. Black and white photography fares better, as its inherent abstraction takes the viewer out of the morass of manifest appearance and encourages inspection of the shapes, textures, and the qualities of light characteristic of the region.
Traveling with Albert and me on that first Southwest trip was Bertha Pope, a wealthy, intelligent woman who could not abstain from buying Indian pots, blankets, and other objects to decorate her several houses in the Berkeley area. The three of us spent many wonderful days sightseeing about Santa Fe and meeting many of its exciting citizenry, including the writers Mary Austin and Witter Bynner. The native peoples had responded over the ages to the stark benedictions of earth, water, sky, and sun, giving testament to those four elements in an architecture of noble style and service: the Santuario de Chimayo, the wonderful St. Francis Church of Ranchos de Taos, and the Penitente moradas.
While the Southwest natural scene has always seemed beautiful and inviting, the human experience has often been otherwise as I glimpsed vistas of the surge of its history. What I experienced in the 1927–1946 years was a time of pause between two periods of exploitation—the Spanish Conquest of the past and the Anglo conquest of the future—when the human pageant was in quiet suspense and the natural character and integrity of the land was temporally secure.
We finally made our way home, stopping at Zuni and Laguna Pueblos and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. At each of these places Bertha added to her purchases, while insisting on sitting in the front seat. I shall never forget Albert, squeezed in the back, draped with rugs and adorned with pots, literally covered with Bertha’s collection. There was no air conditioning, of course, and if the backseat windows were opened, the blast of air would damage the feathers of the Hopi Kachina dolls. Red as a beet and dripping with perspiration, Albert manfully endured the three-day ordeal of the hot return trip. Bertha and I thought the trip had been wonderful. Albert was less impress
ed with the wild west but enjoyed the human contacts and the sophisticated life of Santa Fe.
My wife, Virginia, and I traveled to Santa Fe for an extended visit in 1929 to photograph the marvelous people and landscape. I loved northern New Mexico, and in the back of my mind was thinking of moving there. To balance income with expenses, I planned to seek out portrait commissions and what other work came my way.
On this trip we were accompanied by a friend of Albert’s, Ella Young. Ella was an event! Superficially an eccentric, she was a brilliant and sensitive woman with an imposing career in law and politics and had been dangerously active in the Irish Revolution. Feeling that she had fulfilled her obligation to society, she turned to poetry and Irish myths. Ella believed in the Little People and said that she communicated with them often, especially her own indentured pixie, Gilpin.
She was also a great ceremonialist. On this trip whenever we reached a state border she asked me to stop and would get out of the car, stand in silence for a few moments, and then pour a little wine and crumble a little bread on the new soil, chanting a few words in Gaelic. At first this seemed odd to us but her sincerity dominated the ritual.
On April 4, 1929, I wrote to my father from Santa Fe:
Today there is a thick black sky and snow is falling in the hills. Tomorrow it may be a crystal clear day; the changes of the weather are always startling. The night we went hunting the Penitentes the stars were more brilliant than I have ever seen them—I could really see the shape of the Orion nebula. And the sunrise over the Sangre de Cristo mountains was most extraordinary.
Mary Austin invited Virginia and me to stay with her in Santa Fe. We accepted and our friendship quickly grew. Its natural progression produced our enthusiastic decision to collaborate on a book of words and pictures on a New Mexican subject. As I wrote to Albert that spring:
We have finally decided on the subject of the portfolio. It will be the Pueblo of Taos. Through Tony Lujan, the Governor of Taos was approached “with velvet”—a council meeting was held, and the next morning I was granted permission to photograph the Pueblo. It is a stunning thing—the great pile of adobe, five stories high with the Taos Peaks rising in a tremendous way behind. And the Indians are really majestic, wearing, as they do, their blankets like Arabs. I think it will be the most effective subject to work with—and I have every hope of creating something really fine. With Mary Austin writing the text…, I have a grand task to come up to it with the pictures. But I am sure I can do it. Dear Albert—look what you started when you brought me to Santa Fe!
The conditions of the pueblo council included a fee of twenty-five dollars and a copy of the finished book. The pueblo was opened to me for as long as I needed to work, and I was permitted to return until I was finished with the project. The book I presented to the pueblo was, I am told, carefully wrapped in deerskin and installed in one of the kivas.
Albert took great interest in Taos Pueblo and offered to sponsor it. Valenti Angelo was employed to design the thunderbird insignia for the book. Albert again suggested we have the Grabhorn Press produce the typography and printing. Rather than use regular half-tone photomechanical reproductions, I decided to make original photographic prints that were then bound directly into each book. Many weeks were required in the darkroom to make the nearly thirteen hundred prints.
Will Dassonville was commissioned to make the printing paper for me. Will was an excellent technician and a remarkably consistent local manufacturer of photographic papers, though it was impossible for him to compete nationally with the large manufacturers. After the specially ordered, rag-base paper had arrived from a New England mill, Dassonville delivered half the paper to the Grabhorns for the text pages and coated the other half with a rich silver-bromide emulsion, a variation of his standard paper, Dassonville Charcoal Black. It had an exceptional tonal range and depth with a matte surface. By 1933 I ceased using it only because of my growing preference for smooth, glossy papers.
Taos Pueblo was published in 1930, a final edition number of one hundred beautiful books (plus eight artist’s copies) with twelve original prints. Albert set the price at seventy-five dollars each and, of course, took ten copies. Several friends said I would never sell the books at that price, but they were all gone within two years. In a recent book auction I was astounded to learn that a single copy brought twelve thousand dollars.
From Mary Austin’s text:
Every house is a Mother Hive, to which the daughters bring home husbands, on terms of good behavior; or dismiss them with the simple ceremony of setting the man’s private possessions—his gun, his saddle, his other pair of moccasins—outside the door. To the wife—the soft voiced matron who trips about on small, white shod feet in fashions of three hundred years ago,—belongs the house, the furniture, the garnered grain, the marriage rights of her children. Peace and stability, these are the first fruits of Mother-rule. It is this peace and stability which makes in so large a part the charm of Taos for the restless Americano, all the more because it lies so deep, secret without being hidden, secure because undefended, loved,
“As a woman with children is loved for her power
Of keeping unbroken the life of peoples,”
says the Creation epic. Tap-rooted, the charm of Taos should endure for another hundred years, even against the modern American obsession for destructive change. But before that it will have fulfilled the prayer of the Rain Song of the Rio Grande pueblos,
“All your people and your thoughts, come to me, Earth Horizon!”
Mabel Dodge Luhan, never a victim of convention, chose to spell her married name differently from her husband Tony Lujan. They were both legendary characters in the Southwest fantasy. Mabel’s cultural education had been her association with the movers and shakers of her time in Europe and America. She played out her life on a stage, illuminated by her great wealth and the sycophantic bees that flocked to her hive. She did bring great artists into her fold and aided them, but I always felt it was a demonstration of the enticements of the huntress rather than a determined contribution to culture.
Tony, a stolid and burly Taos Indian, had married Mabel after a period of serving as her chauffeur. Tony was a pleasant and theatrical character—his black hair in long braids, his red, black, or white blanket, and his haughty, Indian demeanor. He had abandoned his Indian wife for Mabel, and the Pueblo was angered. Mary Austin, always a proponent of human rights, notified Mabel that if she did not do right by Tony’s former wife, Mary would bring the weight and wrath of the Bureau of Indian Affairs upon Mabel’s head. Mabel provided alimony for life for the displaced wife, and the pueblo returned to peace.
My introduction to Mabel was arranged by Mary. Mabel’s home, Los Gallos, was beautiful, and the surrounding country, magnificent. Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, John Marin, and D. H. Lawrence were among her many guests. All were free to go about their creative business. Some left feeling that they had experienced a new Athens; others found Mabel’s strong personality an unbearable strain. My relationships with Mabel and Tony were most agreeable, and Taos Pueblo might have been impossible were it not for Mabel’s hospitality and Tony’s assistance in obtaining the permission of his pueblo to make the photographs.
One night at a large party at Los Gallos, Mabel decided to hold dinner until Tony returned from Denver with the new LaSalle car she had given him for his birthday. Seven o’clock had been the anticipated arrival time. We waited until ten-thirty, imbibing the best “Taos lightning,” as the local hootch was called, until few cared if there would be dinner. Tony finally arrived, looking quite disheveled.
Mabel asked, “Tony! What happened?”
Tony said slowly and convincingly, “I hit cow. She right there. So was me. Boom!”
After Tony had changed blankets, we went out to inspect the new car: a ruined front end and cracked windshield, covered with blood and cow fragments.
In 1930 the Luhan/Lujans visited us in San Francisco for a few days. Tony loved nothing better than to
perform on his drum, repeating the Taos tribal songs ad nauseam. Shortly after arriving, wrapped in his blanket he seated himself on the curb in front of our house and began singing and loudly beating his resonant drum. In no time at all neighbors and children living blocks away were drawn by the insistent throb and the guttural chants he rumbled forth. It was an extraordinary experience: an incongruous happening in a conventional setting.
Theirs was a strange, but apparently happy, marital situation. The last time I saw them was after they had given up Los Gallos for reasons of advancing years and bought a little cottage in the Rio Grande Canyon, halfway between Taos and Santa Fe. The house was very plain, and there were only a few valuable objects of art in sight. From a glamorous, almost opulent, environment and life-style, they had changed into that of a staid, elderly couple: Mabel retaining her intense conversational style and Tony his drum and blankets.
While the center for the gatherings of the creative in Taos was Mabel’s, in Santa Fe it was the home of the poet Witter Bynner. Hal, as he was generally called, invited us often to his typically riotous parties. In those euphoric and bibulous days, the entire Santa Fe intelligentsia, a mélange of strange life-styles, would attend Bynner’s bashes. His friends affectionately called him “America’s greatest minor poet.” I rank him among our best lyricists. He introduced Virginia and me to many people in the world of letters.
I drove Virginia and Mary Austin to one such party. Entering the fray with too much enthusiasm, the potent bootleg liquor worked its charms early. I grandly played the piano, including my spoofs of a Chopin etude with benefit of an orange in my right hand and Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, performed both with my fingers and, for the emphatic chords, with my derriere.