Vulture Poets of California Part 1: Robinson Jeffers

Robison Jeffers was once famous enough to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. However, he was a fiercely independent individualist, and his strictly isolationist politics and his public objections to the US entering WWII meant that his star fell thereafter. He is not well known today. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, but he scandalously stole the heart of a married women while studying medicine at USC in 1912 and fled with her to Carmel where they married and raised a family. He built a three-story tower for his beloved Una, carrying the stones up from the beach and setting them by hand. Indeed after working with a professional mason on the small house where the family began, he built much of his Tor House by hand, one stone at time. Una would fend away all visitors in the morning as he wrote, and then he work on the building in the afternoons. He planted most of the trees you’ll find today on the hill marking the southern end of the Carmel beach.

Jeffers certainly was not a Pagan, nor even a proto-Neo-Pagan to the extent, say Yeats (who headed the Golden Dawn for a bit), was. The scandal of Una’s divorce, and the wild beauty of the California coast certainly made him something other than Christian. He gave the name “Inhumanism” to his philosophy. He judged that humans were not the center of everything and that, ultimately, we would all just be an ephemeral bubble in the torrent of beauty that is Nature.

And he made sacrifice to Her.

Jeffers took modern poetry in a different direction than his peers. He too did not use rhyme and regular meter. However, his major work were long narrative pieces based on long lines. And in each of the major pieces, someone dies. He was a classical tragedian, but he speaks in a later poem (unpublished in his lifetime) of the deaths within the poems being a sacrifice (to keep his family safe, IIRC).

Jeffers also wrote shorter, more accessible pieces which accompanied his longer narratives in his books. (You’ll find his vulture poem below.) Common to both his lyical and narrative poems are themes of the beauty of Nature, and how in the midst of living we are almost always oblivious to that beauty. For instance, in Cawdor a wounded eagle is caged and ultimately succumbs, and the narrative follows its spririt up:

It saw from the height and desert space of unbreathable air
Where meteors make green fire and die, the ocean dropping westward to the girdle of the pearls of dawn
And the hinder edge of the night sliding toward Asia; it saw far under eastward the April-delighted
Continent…

There the eagle’s phantom perceived
Its prison and its wound were not its peculiar wretchedness,
All that lives was maimed and bleeding, caged or in blindness.

You can visit Tor House in Carmel. I’ve made the pilgrimage twice. His granddaughter was the docent for one of the tours. One tiny cupboard in the original living room mantel contains the skull of an infant. The tower has a secret passage, and the dinning hall has a balcony and medieval decorations. The photo of Una is surrounded by unicorns given to her by Jeffers. He died in that house as snow (!) gently fell there the day after I was born.

Jeffer’s presence influenced the community of Carmel in ways both direct and indirect. A small inheritance allowed him buy a large chunk of what became the present city. He sold off bits of the property to developers to support his family and deal with the taxes. Eventually, the rest of the town grew up around him, adapting their houses to the trees he had planted.

And, of course, Steinbeck came to Monterey, not far away. There is no evidence that the two interacted at all; however, in one of the stranger twists of history a 27-year-old Joseph Campbell came to Monterey, met Steinbeck, had an affaire de coeur with Steinbeck’s wife, and left on a ecological expedition to Alaska with Ed Rickets (the basis for “Doc” in Cannery Row) after the three decided (fairly mutually by the acounts in Campbell’s biography) to preserve the Steinbeck marriage. While in the area, Campbell read Jeffer’s Roan Stallion which nudged him towards making the study of mythology his life’s work. (!) Those of you playing your semiotic bingo at home will note that there is, thus, a direct line of influence from Jeffers to Star Wars.

Here is Jeffers’ poem about vultures:

Vulture
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, “My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.” But how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes–
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.