CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
Following Robinson Jeffers' poetic path in Big Sur
He was taken with Big Sur's natural beauty and ruggedness. We let his writings be our tour guide.
Big Sur, the 90 or so miles of rugged Pacific coast that unfurls south of Monterey, is known for pricey, reservations-only restaurants and as a capital of the New Age movement. It's a place, then, for well-fed people to get in touch with their inner selves in a spectacular natural setting.
But before the arrival of $120 prix fixe dinners, before the human potential movement was founded at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur was associated with one of America's most austere and, for a while, famous artists. He settled just north of the coastal stretch, in a foggy, barely inhabited area he loved for its remoteness. And even when Robinson Jeffers became so celebrated that he landed on the cover of Time magazine for his poems about hawks, stallions, sex and imperial decline, he kept working on his poetry and on the rough stone tower he built himself.
FOR THE RECORD:
Big Sur poet: A Sept. 6 article on poet Robinson Jeffers and Big Sur incorrectly reported that writer Henry Miller moved to Big Sur because of Jeffers. Although Miller became a friend and admirer of the poet, he moved to Big Sur for his own reasons. Also, the Henry Miller Memorial Library was described incorrectly as a shrine to Jeffers; the library is dedicated to Miller, not Jeffers. —
It was this vision of Big Sur -- an older generation of Bohemia that was about rigorous creativity and not hipster posing, a worship of nature rather than narcissism -- that my wife, Sara, and I drove up the coast in July to meet. We wanted to get deeper into Jeffers' life and terroir -- there's probably no American poet more specifically associated with a single location -- and the period of his heyday.
The 1930s, when the poet's reputation was at its zenith and just before a decline as steep as the Big Sur cliffs, were also when the outside world began to make contact with this once-forbidding stretch between the ocean and the Santa Lucia Mountains.
That's when Pacific Coast Highway was extended to what it is now, a simple two-lane road that winds through a canopy of trees. A huge patch of wilderness -- what is now the 1,000-acre Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, where the son of the region's first European settlers lived in a log cabin -- was sold to the state for public use. This was, of course, a period of lavish public spending, much of it intended to jolt the nation out of the Great Depression: The spectacular Bixby Bridge, which offers overhead views of the waves crashing into beaches and rocks, was completed in 1932, the same year as Jeffers' Time cover.
I suspect Jeffers was difficult to get along with. Photographer
Rugged coast
Driving along the precarious, twisty coastline north of San Simeon, we felt as though we were already in Jeffers country: The tableau of rough waves, towering redwoods and bent cypress trees, cows and
It was just this scene that attracted Jeffers, a Pittsburgh native who had moved to Southern California as a teenager with his family. He graduated from Occidental College at 17 before studying at the University of Southern California and in Zurich, where course work was as varied as geology and medicine to Old English and Dante.
Happenstance brought him here in his 20s. Jeffers and his wife, Una, had considered a move to England's Dorset Coast, known as
"Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions," he wrote in the forward to "Selected Poetry." "Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will do for thousands of years to come."
With that as our introduction, we thought it incongruous to stay in one of the region's pampering hotels. We settled on Ripplewood Resort, a series of rustic bare-bones cabins, some alongside PCH or, like ours, beside the Big Sur River. Jeffers' work could be passionate to a fault, and I find some of it overheated and long-winded. But sitting beside the river or at the wooden table under the redwoods was a heavenly place to revisit his work. Our favorite place in town, where we could not get a reservation, was Deetjen's Big Sur Inn, built in the '30s by a Norwegian settler I imagine as having a touch of the spirit of Jeffers, a rugged individualist who respected nature and solitude.
We could have happily spent large stretches of our stay in and around our cabin, especially because the combination of ocean fog and sheltering trees made the grove around our cabin cool, shady and fragrant with peat.
To the extent that there's a real village here, it's spread out along PCH, and from our cabin we were easily able to get to the first-rate Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant, to striking, sparsely populated beaches and to hiking, a department where Big Sur offers a wealth of options.
Tor House
Some of what we did was inspired by Jeffers' life and work more or less directly.
The first real event of the trip (besides a memorable dinner at the casual Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant) was a visit to Jeffers' Tor House. He built the home in the late 1910s, and a few years later, he rolled stones up from the Pacific, a few dozen feet away, to construct Hawk Tower for his Irish American wife.
Tor House is among the best writers' homes I've visited. Guided tours are offered only on Fridays and Saturdays, so it's crucial to book early: You get an entree into the life of one of the few American poets to create his own mythology, embodied in the place he lived. The quality of docents can vary here as elsewhere, but my guide, teacher and poet George Lober had a combination of deep knowledge and humor not always found in those attracted to literary shrines.
The compound is built mostly from local stones. But I was struck by the odds and ends Jeffers added to the house, walls and tower: a stone cross from a cemetery in Ireland, a Hawaiian lava rock, an ancient Roman statue that once belonged to painter John Singer Sargent, a shard of the Great Wall of China, ballast and portholes from ships that had run aground nearby.
This isolate who spent much of his life rooted in one place brought the world to him.
We toured a low-ceilinged main room, lined with redwood, where Una played Irish songs on the piano and the family (they had twin sons) would pass around Shakespeare plays to read parts; a dining room designed to look like a British pub, and the guest room where the poet died in 1962.
My favorite part of the tour was the story of the young Jeffers' prying Una away from her first husband, a respectable Southland lawyer. I won't spoil the tale, except to say that Edward Kuster became so obsessed with winning his wife back that he moved virtually next-door to the couple and built a larger, better-appointed stone house of his own.
The most eccentric part of Tor House is the tower Jeffers built largely with his own hands. It's not easy to reach the top, but from the roof you can see the beach, with its jagged rock outcroppings and, the day I was there, a great deal of windblown fog. You can also see some of the 2,000 cypress and eucalyptus trees Jeffers planted and hand watered.
Natural wonder
Much of Carmel has been overtaken with development and commercialism the poet came to detest, but the mission, founded in 1770, is beautiful. Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo was once the headquarters of the
We also stopped at the tasting room of the Morgan winery, just off PCH. Jeffers was reportedly a red drinker, so I limited myself to the Pinot Noir, Grenache and Syrah, much of it from vineyards in the Santa Lucia highlands. I think the poet would have approved.
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