Not Man Apart [antikvár]

More than thirty years ago, accompanied by Edward Weston, I met and spoke with Robinson JefFers on the road beyond his door. The circumstances have long faded from my mind except for the haunting presence of his features, lined and immobile as a Greek mask. I have also a rough memory that he spoke casually and without heat, of being called for jury duty in a homicide case, and of having been rejected by the defense because of the assumed cruelty of his countenance. The eyes looked at me side- long as he spoke, not with amusement, but with the remote, almost inhuman animal contemplation that marks his work and that very obviously had aroused the mistaken animus of the defense counsel. I felt in his presence almost as if I stood before another and nobler species of man whose moods and ways would remain as inscrutable to me as the ways of the invading Cro-Magnons must have seemed dark to the vanishing Neanderthals. In later and more mature years I have met cleverer vocalizers and more in- genious intellects, but I have never again encountered a man who, in one brief meeting, left me with so strong an impression that I had been speaking with someone out of time, an oracle who would presently withdraw among the nearby stones and pinewood. A yearning for that retreat can be felt in JefFers' work. D. H. Lawrence once observed that the essence of poetry "is stark direct- ness, without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection any- where." No one reading JefFers can escape the impress of the untamed Pacific environment upon which he brooded. He was its most powerful embodiment—an incarnation of the spirit of place so intense as to epitomize Lawrence's demand that there be no deflection between the poet and what he expresses. Jeffers' peculiarly distinctive style, developed by degrees from the un- promising conventional prosody of his youth, has the roll of surf and the jaggardness of rocks about it. Something utterly wild had crept into his mind and marked his features. I cannot imagine him as having arisen unchanged in another countryside. The sea-beaten coast, the fierce freedom of its hunting hawks, pos- sessed and spoke through him. It was one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural back- ground that I know in literature. It tells us something of the power of the western landscape here at the world's end where the last of the American dream turned inward upon itself. Jeffers was not limited to the simple expression of the natural. Fierce shapes and dark symbols, as intimidating as certain super- natural evocations in his long narratives, erupt from even his short poems. He was an educated man whose mind roved from the contemplation of nebulae to the incipient beginnings of planetary life. He felt in his bones man's transcience and the looming disaster contained in the sciences upon which man placed his hope. Stones, the bones of deer, Indian palm prints in a cave—all relate themselves symbolically to us but remind us at the same time of our human mortality. Man himself will descend into the night he has decreed for other creatures. His untidy lunch boxes, his defilement of beaches will eventually, in some oncoming age, disappear before the great winter storms of the Pacific. Musing upon the rusted machinery m an abandoned stone quarry, Jeffers notes the persistent intru- sion of expelled nature: "Men's failures are often as beautiful as men's triumphs but your returnings/are even more precious than your first presence." With an artist's eye he has seen how quickly ugly ruins perched upon by birds and subjected to the weather can be trans- muted and softened into beauty. He observes that a similar but lost nobility would return to man if he could but regain "the dignity of rareness." Of an old rancher who had spent his life under the open sky, JefFers remarked that his was an existence all of our ancestors since the ice age would have known and appreciated.