Robinson Jeffers Revisited

...The wind over the desert/Has turned and I will build again all that's gone down./I am inexhaustible...

...Seduced by a sense of power, he rapes his daughter, and incites his followers to commit various unnatural acts, culminating in infanticide...

...The play of the title, a Yeatsian pseudo-Noh drama that was banned from production in some cities as sacrilegious, now seems almost reverent in the light of current Gospel reinter-pretations...

...Dear Judas (Afterword by Robert J. Brophy, 179 pp., $8.95), 1929...

...But their comments and selections have done this important writer some disservice in placing too much emphasis on philosophy, as if poetry must stand or fall on ideology...

...Dear Judas ultimately suffers from the same faults as Jeffers' popular adaptations of Greek tragedies (most notably the Medea that starred Judith Anderson in a famous production...

...the pain is not my own pain/From which I come praying for deliverance...

...The storm in his thoughts dominates the landscape, and soon ideas are fleshed out in minor characters...

...The minister is clearly the poet's own dark side...

...Yet the longer narratives that initially made his reputation, like Tamar, Roan Stallion and Cawdor, are less familiar today (though some are still in print...

...In the first section (foreshadowing the vitriolic literature inspired by Vietnam) a dead soldier, resurrected by hatred, returns to kill his patriotic father and lie with his weak, frivolous mother...

...The shock of this necrophiliac romance was doubly horrifying to those who did not share Jeffers' political convictions, or his perception of most human relationships as "a kind of collective onanism, pathetic and ridiculous, or at noblest a tragic incest...

...Robinson Jeffers breaks out of the familiar humanist mold that willingly sacrifices God to man...

...While Jeffers shares his agonist's vision of the death of the Church and the pettiness of human concerns, Barclay misuses this revelation in deciding to express his love for humanity in acts indistinguishable from hatred...

...It concerns the progressive madness of the Reverend Doctor Barclay, who resigns his pulpit one Sunday by telling the sheeplike congregation, "I am going off alone/and gather my mind, 1 have something fiery/Here that will burn the world down to significance...

...Unfortunately, its heroine is so innocent, her pathetic fate strikes the reader as sadistic—it lacks the cathartic power that justifies the deaths of Tamar, Cawdor's son and Barclay...

...Barclay's frenzied preaching wins him disciples among the inhabitants of a lonely farm on Point Sur...

...The second section presents the earth's one righteous man?the Inhumanist"—whose passions have turned away from violence and toward God "in the astonishing beauty of things...

...Jeffers obviously suffers the same lacerating compassion, in spite of his denials and insistence that it only leads to further harm...

...In later years, when he had become something of a hedge-preacher, he wrote: "But truly, if you love man,/swallow him in wine: love man in God./Man and nothing but man is a sorry mouthful...

...she tries to shoot her father, then turns the gun on herself...

...Alas, this old geezer is as full of portentous aphorisms as Ghibran's Prophet, and his virtues dull against the complex and brilliant energy of less redemptive characters...

...Once he even appears as Barclay's doppelganger...

...the moaning of men and beasts torments me...

...The play's companion piece is another long narrative, The Loving Shepherdess, that also examines the destructive power of saviors...

...In "Apology for Bad Dreams" Jeffers explained his narratives as yearly offerings to the Point Sur "coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places": / said in my heart, 'Better invent than suffer: imagine victims Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist, or you Martyr some creature to the beauty of the place.' The only possible redemption comes from "imagined sacrifices," for "Pain and terror, the insanities of desire," are "not accidents but essential, and crowd up from the core...

...By 1948, believing that civilization was driving toward atomic holocaust, his libatory wine burst the old wineskins in fermenting The Double Axe...

...his poetry reveres science as the highest form of worship, and one calculated to force the race's recognition of its own insignificance...

...The true protagonist is Jeffers himself...

...though already stinking with the corruption of the grave, he is clean beside their degradation...

...He prefaces the book by telling of his own withdrawal from society to "Tor House"—the stone tower he constructed at Point Sur—where, he complains, "Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it...

...The editors of these three volumes are to be commended for making more of Jeffers' work available again...

...Jeffers' poetic philosophy has proved more often than not a stumbling block to contemporary critics: His sagas of violence, sexual perversion and general human nastiness were acclaimed in the "Freudian '40s," but after World War II, when he savagely denounced American imperialism and suggested that Europe be left to rot in its own corruption, he was regarded with horror, as a kind of mad dog...

...He had become, however, a solitary voice crying in his California wilderness, provoking some derision, and much indifference...

...It proved double indeed, striking a crippling blow to its author's reputation...

...Its Judas is a humanist who came to Jesus because "I am in the prison of my pity...

...Robinson Jeffers recognized man's perversity and accepted it as his own...

...Many of Jeffers' shorter lyrics continued to show flashes of the old fire, but, as he once remarked, "time sucks out all the juice,/A man grows old and indolent...

...Those misanthropic anthology pieces?Shine, Perishing Republic," "Apology for Bad Dreams," "Hurt Hawks," "Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind"—stick in the memory like burrs, each prickle exuding a little acid...

...The heavily rhythmic, uneven and unrhymed lines (in part influenced by Greek alcaics, in part by the stress patterns found in the prose of the King James Bible) intensify the pity and horror evoked by this darkly perverse tale...

...Throughout the poem Jeffers intrudes, not merely as omniscient observer, but as the "ape of God" whose creative force drives the action...

...The conclusion is an elegy, spoken by Lazarus, for the hanged and the crucified: Let him and the other at the poles of the wood, Their pain drawn up to burning points and cut off, praise God after the monstrous manner of mankind...

...Still, his language wrests illumination from darkness, taking sublime comfort in "the fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn...

...The Women at Point Sur, the most compelling treatment of Jeffers' religious themes, is a modern Faustus story of corruption...

...this fictional madness keeps the creator sane and enables him, in subsequent works, to build a new creation out of Barclay's ruin...

...At its best, Jeffers' peculiar voice is wild and beautiful, like the hawks he admires: not expounding "fashionable pessimism," but demonstrating "the ways of my love" in "Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no thought apparent but burns darkly/Smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault...

...Like his contemporary Eugene O'Neill, whom he resembles in many respects, Jeffers' world view is more Elizabethan than Greek: He owes less to Euripides than to Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore...

...Leaving his orgiastic proselytes to dismember corpses, the clergyman wanders off to die, babbling, "I want creation...

...Jeffers, "a man having bad dreams, who invents victims," had declined into a spoiled Calvinist pulpit-pounder, continually reminding his hearers of the apocalypse...

...The impetus for Jeffers' bitterness was World War I, which had transformed him from an obscure conventional poet to a darkly powerful innovator...

...Until his death in 1962, this Timon of Point Sur continued to expound the doctrine that "Humanity is the mold to break away from, the crust to break/through, the coal to break into fire,/The atom to split...

...Together they illuminate the philosophy of "Inhumanism"—transcendence of man's solipsism?devised by this son of a Calvinist theologian to explain the discrepancy between a God whose terrible beauty and power is manifest in His natural order, and a fallen and debased humanity...

...though fitfully powerful, it cannot help being less than the original...

...Feeling the time ripe for reappraisal, Jeffers' original publisher, Liveright, has just reissued three important volumes long out of print, each with a new critical evaluation: The Women at Point Sur (Afterword by Tim Hunt, 220 pp., $8.95), first published in 1927...

...and The Double Axe (Foreword by William Everson, Afterword by Bill Hotchkiss, 197 pp., $8.95), 1948...

...His daughter eventually goes mad, convinced that she is possessed by the spirit of her dead brother come to avenge her...

...D ear Judas, continuing Jeffers' jaundiced scrutiny of saviors, is less successful...