Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony
Nolte, William H.
BOOK REVIEW Rock andHawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony William H. Nolte / University ofGeorgiaPress / $14.00 Lawrence Clark Powell Until recent years saw publication of Robinson J...
...and the next decade witnessed the Alex Vardamis bibliography of J effers criticism and William Everson's discovery and editing of unpublished works from the Texas archive...
...The Chinese are still taking pills by mouth...
...Of course we do not know, but the average Tibetan, who used to be a feudal serf or slave, is certainly better off than before 1950...
...Service mentions...
...BOOK REVIEW Rock andHawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony William H. Nolte / University ofGeorgiaPress / $14.00 Lawrence Clark Powell Until recent years saw publication of Robinson J effers' letters, a biography (albeit not definitive), and the reissue of out-of-print volumes of his work, critics lacked the information necessary to judge this poet's substantial achievement...
...That's what's wrong with our leadership today...
...It complements earlier books by Everson, Brophy, and Coffin on J effers as a religious philosopher...
...In a word, Paris' left intelligentsia is changing its politics...
...The obvious was overlooked by most: that Robinson J effers is above all a religious poet...
...Tibet with its new roads, its transportation system, its health care, its industries, itseducation, its new openness, is looking towards the future...
...Only a few, like Mark Van Doren and Dwight McDonald, perceived J effers' breadth and depth and recognized that he transcended his Monterey coast locale even as Yeats and Hardy had theirs...
...Are the people happy...
...t t * it Is the thing possible...
...Also mentioned are Tibet's ancient links to China...
...I know how annoying it is when a critic dwells on the book a writer has not written or intended to write...
...If there was any one decisive trauma for the gauehiste intelligentsia it is what has been happening these last years in Vietnam and Cambodia...
...Caroline Service is identified as "the wife of FSO-retired John S. Service," whose photographs accompany the article...
...All of this critical activity benefitted from the perspective that only time brings...
...Again the answer must be a question mark...
...Mrs...
...Nolte displays an easy familiarity with all that has been written by and about J effers, and yet he has not overloaded his book with learning...
...Martin Peretz, editor of the New Republic: "Whenever my wife and I visit Paris we spend a good deal of time with friends, most of them intellectuals and artists on the left...
...remember my own difficulty, 50 years ago, in acquiring all of J effers' texts when I proposed to write about the man and his work...
...Service to her hostel room for three of the trip' s nine days and caused some concern...
...This includes reports and abstracts of academic work, descriptions of source materials (the most important of which, in addition to Occidental's, are at Yale and Texas), as well as valuable installments of the correspondence of Una J effers, the poet's indispensable helpmate, whose death in 1950 left him creatively diminished...
...The Services visited both a health clinic and a medicine factory...
...Some mistakenly consigned J effers to the so-called California school along with J oaquin Miller and George Sterling...
...That is no longer the case...
...and yet I confess to hoping that William Nolte will now bring his aesthetic taste and critical skill to plumbing an oceanic body of work that sounds with an organ music long absent from our poetry...
...There was no electricity in Lhasa until the 1950s," Mrs...
...A new one is being built...
...Service and his colleagues became "the highest-octane fuel of McCarthyism...
...Jack and I were both struck by how much this part of Tibet resembles the American southwest...
...Yet the Yankee egghead is slow to change his ways, and so we gladly pass on the February 17 observations of Mr...
...No wonder critics failed to understand J effers...
...The Services have an unusual circle of friends, judging from the questions they are asked...
...I would find the book even more satisfying if the author had given the same attention to the medium that he gave to the message...
...Also, they have been watching our Carter blunder with Brezhnev, their 1978 elections sobered them up, and socialism's performance has been less than glorious...
...A Robinson J effers Society was founded at his alma mater, Occidental College, which has since issued a semiannual Newsletter, edited by Robert Brophy...
...According to him, it is more important for a candidate to influence policy then merely to win the Presidency: "I really don't think the object is winning...
...This is a strong and nourishing book...
...Americans returning favorably impressed from trips to China seem to have an odd preoccupation with industrialization, odd because it is hard to imagine the same people making any comments, or at least any positive comments, on American industrial centers--on Gary, Indiana, for instance...
...I canimagine the return of the Dalai Lama, but not the return of the old, closed feudal society...
...I I I I A Visit to Tibet "We flew into Lhasa airport over some of the highest mountains in the world," Caroline Service writes in the December issue of Foreign Service JournM...
...The 1960s also brought Melba Bennett's biography, and Anne Ridgeway's compilation of the poet's letters, introduced by Mark Van Doren...
...Mrs...
...But after all she has seen Mrs...
...When China 'went Communist' in 1949," (why the quotes...
...Service is still cautious in coming to any conclusions on Tibet: "Nine days for us was a nine days wonder, but answers, of necessity, must be somewhat tentative...
...He handles his material with grace, keeping his sight more on the poet than on his critics, although he does land hard on Yvor Winters, who saw no good in the work of his fellow Californian...
...I was given antibiotics I . III I by injection and a variety of pills by mouth, some of which were traditional medicine...
...No, we have not changed our friends...
...R.E.T...
...Carter bungles so incessantly and colossally that even Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III gives thought to taking him on in the primaries...
...Mr...
...Indeed, he launches one of the soundest declarations in many a moon...
...What about industry in Tibet...
...It is open," she notes, "to all who wish to buy things there...
...Which way then is Tibet looking, towards the past or towards the future...
...Now, in this latest contribution by Professor Nolte of the University of South Carolina, we have an unremitting concentration on the philosophy that permeates J effers' poetry...
...Although he is obviously appreciative of J effers' poetic genius, he seems almost to take it for granted...
...They feel themselves responsible...
...In answer to one last 'question'--do the Tibetans in Tibet want the Dalai Lama to return...
...Service's article on Tibet is a travel piece with sidelights on Tibetan society, especially the differences between present conditions and those of the pre-1950 period...
...the uncanny predictions of Mr...
...French leftists, like some Americans in the streets and faculty clubs of our country, were not simply anti-war...
...Service is one of the legendary "China Hands" who, as James Thomson put it in the March 11 New York Times, were the victims of "barbaric hounding...trauma and injustice.., groundless charges of proCommunism...a continuing witch-hunt" simply "because they predicted the outcome" of the Chinese civil war...
...The object of a game is to win...
...The Services were shown one structure which, they were told, dated "back to the seventh century when Buddhism first entered Tibet from China...
...The American Spectator May 1979...
...If it has a shortcoming, it lies in Nolte's concentration on the philosophy at the expense of the poetry...
...They had country estates as well...
...How much did all this cost them...
...There are hospitals...
...Moreover, the junior senator from Illinois commences to make sense...
...Before 1950," Mrs...
...Service explains, "industry, as we know it, was almost nonexistent...
...their objective is not the exercise of power but the acquisition of power...
...Nothing...
...Germain...
...She describes the townhouses where the Tibetan nobility used to live...
...In elucidating J effers' central belief that man's ills come from his excessive narcissism, Nolte supports his argument with well chosen quotations from the poetry...
...However, she writes, "the ministrations of a Chinese doctor and a Chinese nurse vanquished whatever bug I had...
...They were like the blind men describing the elephant...
...In order to carry out his pioneering study of J effers' prosody, Herbert Klein, my fellow teaching assistant at Occidental College, typed out the texts of both volumes (photocopies were beyond the horizon, photostats expensive and cumbersome), at the same time making carbon copies for me...
...Service describes a new arts and crafts shop in Lhasa...
...they were pro-North Vietnamese, pro-Viet Cong, pro-Khmer Rouge...
...We see how our age has come philosophically to where J effers was long ago, and also why the poet is likely to be read in years to come because of his choice of permanent themes...
...The death of Jeffers led to new interest in his work...
...As in China proper there is free medical care, both western and traditional, for all...
...Already his first two books, Flagons and Apples (1912) and Californians (1916), had become scarce and costly...
...is another question we are asked...
...I think the object is to inform the people so that they can make sensible decisions...
...A cold restricted Mrs...
...Today there are wood pulp and paper mills, match factories, cement plants, woolen textile mills, sugar beet refineries, and a small electric motor factory...
...El o~e~eo~e~oee~eeoeoee~e~ee~eeeee~ee~eoee~e~eo~eee~e~o~eeooe~eeeeoe~ee~*~eo~e~eo~eeeoeo~eoeee~oeee~eeeee~eo~e~eeo~eoe~ee~ e ooooeoeeoeoeeo , ,, , , ,, S P E C T AT O R'S J O U R N A L iii . I I Left Bank Fashion We have tried for half a decade to apprise the American Left of changes in intellectual fashion, lest they suffer embarrassment when next they roost at the Caf~ Deux Magots...
...they've changed their politics...
...Thus there are bourgeois murmurings along the Boulevard St...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
