San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Tor House unearths the story of California poet Robinson Jeffers.
Carmel cottage sparks interest in writer who embraced natural world
A man sits down to put pen to prophecy, conjuring a view of the polar ice caps melting as waves overrun cities and coastlines to begin reclaiming everything humans thought they could build near the awesome reach of the oceans.
This vision of towns entombed in mausoleums of arctic meltoff wasn’t written in the 2000s, or even in the mid1980s. It was jotted down in 1960, some 15 years before the term “global warming” entered the scientific lexicon. The man who wrote it was Robinson Jeffers, a California poet at the end of his life, a oncepopular figure whose reputation was obscured by critical orthodoxy and his own embattled political beliefs.
Jeffers’ lines had always pointed to humanity’s modest place in the Earth’s greater movements. They’d shared the soaring splendor of the outdoors, but also warned of harming delicate ecological balances:
Largely forgotten, Jeffers’ transporting words are slowly being unearthed thanks to the rise of digital tourism sites and a growing fascination with the strange house that he built on the coast of Monterey County. For a man who purposefully lived most of his life without electricity, the techheavy reintroduction probably isn’t the kind he would have chosen. Nonetheless, Jeffers’ work is reemerging just as the Golden State finds itself at a conservation crossroads, nearly paralyzed by climate change, polluted oceans and the growing costs of widespread habitat destruction.
For Dana Gioia, winner of the American Book Award and the 10th poet laureate of California, there are now plenty of reasons for a Jeffers resurrection.
“We are in a Jeffersserian moment in the state’s history,” Gioia said as he watched wildfire smoke billowing from a ridge near his Sonoma County home and waited for his second evacuation order in four years. “He believed we have to coexist with nature and not dominate it. Now, we have global warming. We have massive fires. We have a pandemic. We can see the wisdom in Jeffers’ philosophy because nature has humbled us.”
Jeffers was born in Pennsylvania in 1887. He first came out west as a teenager, studying literature, medicine and forestry at various schools in California. The brother of a cuttingedge astronomer, Jeffers is recognized as having had more scientific training and understanding than any other poet of his era. In 1918, he and his wife, Una, moved to the thenquiet hamlet of Carmel. It’s where Jeffers started his life as a writer. It’s also where he began building a house on one of the rising sea bluffs. He constructed the dwelling from granite stones, pieces of shipwrecks and rocks that friends brought him from around the world. It would come to be known as Tor House and Hawk Tower, a cozy, castlelike cottage just above the crashing beauty of the Pacific Ocean.
Jeffers’ biographer, James Karman, says everything about creating Tor House spoke to Jeffers’ obsession with environmental stewardship.
“He wanted to find ways to live with nature in a reciprocal, positive way, so building a house of stone was an act of reclamation,” Karman noted. “Jeffers felt the rush toward exploitation of natural resources for
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite
— FROM THE POEM “CARMEL POINT” (EXCERPT)