Poet’s life mirrored ‘ cool, grey city of love’
For almost three decades around the turn of the 20th century, San Francisco’s most famous Bohemian was a poet named George Sterling.
Sterling was a strange bundle of contradictions: extremely sociable but deeply solitary, a compulsive womanizer who found his deepest fulfillment in friendships with men, a Dionysian reveler who was profoundly modest,
a gifted poet who did not take his muse seriously and needed the stimulation of alcohol or sex to prod himself into creativity.
His poetry has moments of beauty and depth, but its mannered, highflown rhetoric had begun to go out of style even during his lifetime. As Miriam Allen de Ford writes in her 1941 book, “They Were San Franciscans,” “Those who knew him loved him, and with cause; but it is difficult, in the harder and more complex age which has come upon us even in the few years since his death, to describe him so that to eyes that did not know him he will not seem slightly ridiculous.”
Sterling was born in Sag Harbor, N. Y., in 1869. His father wanted him to be a priest, but Sterling showed zero interest. In 1890, he was sent to Oakland to work in the office of his uncle, a real estate developer. The impecunious Sterling reluctantly clerked there for the next 15 years; it was while commuting by ferry between San Francisco and Oakland that he began to write poetry.
The most important influence on Sterling’s nascent literary career was Ambrose Bierce, whom he met in 1892. The famously caustic scribe lavished hyperbolic praise on Sterling, writing, “You shall be the poet of the skies, the prophet of the suns.”
Bierce’s support encouraged the insecure Sterling to keep writing, but the older writer’s narrow aesthetic vision and pathologically controlling nature — violently antilabor, Bierce became enraged when Sterling befriended the socialist Jack London — probably did the young poet more harm than good. Sterling himself later said, “Ambrose Bierce laid a hand of ice on my youthful enthusiasm.”
Sterling’s friendship with London was more rewarding. For London, Sterling was “the great ManComrade” he had always sought. The two men called each other by their nicknames — Sterling was “Greek,” a reference to his classic profile ( memorably described as “a Greek coin run over by a Roman chariot”), while London was “Wolf.”
As Nancy Peters writes in “Literary San Francisco,” the 1980 book she coauthored with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Their friendship was intense; Charmian ( London’s wife) called it an eloquent spiritual comprehension. In the early days, they hiked in the Piedmont Hills above Oakland and on the Carmel beaches, hunted, fished and went to the fights, talked socialism and literature, stayed out drinking, and haunted the burlesque houses and bordellos of the Barbary Coast.” London paid Sterling the ultimate writer’s compliment of asking him to edit his books.
Sterling soon became San Francisco’s leading Bohemian poet, famous as much for his pleasureloving lifestyle and generous nature as for his poetry. At their Piedmont home, he and his wife, Carrie Rand, entertained a lively crowd of writers, poets and artists that included the Londons, journalist Jimmy Hopper, painter Xavier Martinez and novelist Mary Austin. Sterling was a central figure of “the crowd” at Coppa’s, the famous cafe in the historic Montgomery Block. He rented a room in the Block not to write in, but as a rendezvous place for his many amours.
In 1905, Sterling built a house in Carmel and became a central figure in a stimulating, if sometimes incestuous, colony of writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals. Sterling found a measure of peace in Carmel’s beauty, but his drinking and philandering finally drove
Carrie to leave him; the break was precipitated by what de Ford called “an affair of monstrous proportions ( that) became the prey of every wagging tongue.” Carrie loved Sterling to the end: In 1918, after a failed attempt at reconciliation, she put Chopin’s funeral march on the gramophone and took a lethal dose of cyanide.
Sterling never got over Carrie’s suicide. In a poem titled, “Spring in Carmel,” he wrote, “So like a ghost your fragrance lies / On the path that once led home.”
He kept up his hedonistic lifestyle, but the aging poet was increasingly depressed. He could no longer attract the young women he had effortlessly seduced all his life; he suffered physical pain “like a pencil boring into him,” and drank to relieve it, but drinking made it worse; and he had a despairing, and correct, sense that his best work was behind him. He began thinking more and more about death.
The end came in 1926 in a fashion equally tragic and ridiculous. Sterling’s friend, the legendary Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken, was coming to visit him at the Bohemian Club, where an anonymous admirer had paid for Sterling’s lodging. Mencken was delayed and Sterling drank all the whiskey he had laid in for his friend. Mortified, he got his hands on more alcohol, and fell ill.
When Mencken finally arrived, Sterling was sick in bed and unable to serve as toastmaster, and Bohemian Club members selected another writer whom Sterling despised. “Sterling lay in his room and, in an agony of humiliation, imagined the scene downstairs,” de Ford writes.
The next evening, Mencken found Sterling’s door locked. When he had not emerged the next day, the manager entered the room and found him dead. He had taken the little vial of cyanide he had carried with him for years. He was 57 years old.
Some last fragments of poetry were found in his room. One read, “I walked with phantoms that ye knew not of”; another, “Deeper into the darkness can I peer / Than most, yet find the darkness still beyond.”
The writer James Rorty described Sterling as “an invincible, believing child, full of passion and kindness and pity.”
The unofficial poet laureate of San Francisco — a better man than a poet, and a better friend than a man — is commemorated by George Sterling Park, one of the city’s loveliest places, atop Russian Hill overlooking the Golden Gate. Near the intersection of Lombard and Larkin, at the foot of steps leading into the park, is a plaque bearing a verse from one of his poems:
“Though the dark be cold and blind Yet her seafog’s touch is kind And her mightier caress Is joy and the pain thereof; And great is thy tenderness, O cool, grey city of love!”
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. His new book, with drawings by Paul Madonna, is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle. com/ portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle. com/ vault. Email: metro@ sfchronicle. com