Stories in Stone (9 page)

He returned to Southern California in the summer of 1911 and ran into Una within an hour of arriving.
Fate sealed their romance.
In May 1912 Teddie sent Una to Europe to get her away from her young poet.
With Una gone, Jeffers “drifted into mere drunken
idleness.”
²⁰
He also produced his first book of poetry,
Flagons and Apples
.
He paid for its publication with an inheritance from his uncle.
The book’s one review, in the December 8, 1912,
Los Angeles Times
, noted Jeffers’s “distinctly novel and individual touch .
.
.
[which] contains some of the best poetry I’ve seen in a dog’s
age—except of course, my own.”
²¹
(If only modern writers could pen their own reviews, as Jeffers did.)

Una returned from Europe in November, prompted by Teddie’s growing relationship with another woman.
After Una and Teddie split
up, she and Robinson began a more open life together.

Jeffers made it into the
L.
A.
Times
again on February 28, 1913.
Under the banner headline “Love’s Gentle Alchemy to Weld Broken Lives” the paper detailed the
love triangle of Una,Robinson, and Teddie, calling it “a story so remarkable as to almost defy parallel.” A day later a second
feature on the “eternal triangle” provided more details, as well as a copy of Jeffers’s poem “On the Cliff,” with lines such
as “our eyes were blind while my lips drank/Oblivious love at yours.”

By this time, Robinson was back in Seattle.
Una eventually followed him north to wait for her divorce from Teddie to be final.
She and Robinson were married on August 2, the same day that Teddie remarried.

The Jeffers moved to Carmel in September 1914.
They had not planned to.
Their stated intention following their marriage was
to settle in Lyme Regis, in Dorset, on the southern coast of England.
By November 1913, however, Una was pregnant and they
decided to stay in La Jolla, where they had settled.
Una gave birth on May 5 to a ten-pound girl, Maeve.
The baby died one
day later.
They then moved in with Robinson’s parents, who lived in Pasadena, and planned to leave for England in the fall,
but the outbreak of World War I ended that idea.
A friend suggested they investigate Carmel.

They arrived by stagecoach from Monterey.
“[When] we looked down through pines and sea-fogs on Carmel Bay, it was evident
that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place,” wrote Jeffers.
²²
They rented a small cottage.
He wrote poetry and Una studied “certain aspects of late 18th century England.”
²³
They could see only three houses from the beach when they walked with their bulldog, Billie.
Una described the time as “full
and over-full of joy.”
²⁴

Carmel is a spectacular place.
It sits on a deep blue bay with a white sand beach.
Rarely cold and rarely hot, the climate
is a pleasing mixture of fog and not too many completely clear days.
Outside of the central business district of either overpriced
or too cheap tourist shops, the streets are quiet and without sidewalks.
The older houses lack street numbers; mail only goes
to the post office.
And to the south, the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains drop treeless down to the famous Big Sur
coast.

Carmel was both old and new when Robinson and Una arrived.
Spanish navigator Sebastian Vizcaino chanced upon the harbor in
1602 and named it for his patron saint Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
In 1771, Franciscan Friar Junipero Serra established a mission,
made first of wood, then of adobe, and finally, in 1793, of sandstone, quarried one mile away.
The mission thrived until 1834,
when the Carmel priest moved to Monterey, the state capital.
Eighteen years later the roof collapsed and the remains moldered.

In 1903 developer Frank Devendorf began promoting the property he had recently acquired around the bay.
By the time the stagecoach
dropped the Jeffers on the main road—dirt-covered Ocean Avenue—about 350 people lived in the village of Carmel.
Most homes
used kerosene for light, movies were a nickel, and news was posted on a bulletin board at the post office.
Despite, or because
of, the lack of amenities, Carmel had started to attract a well-known crowd, including Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mary Austin,
and Sinclair Lewis.

Two years after arriving in Carmel, Una gave birth to twin boys, Donnan and Garth.
The family continued to rent a cottage
and go on walks, including their favorite one, which wound along a grassy track and through acres of poppies and lupines to
an open knoll topped by several granite boulders.
Known as Carmel Point, the land had been a nine-hole golf course until World
War I.
In spring 1919 Robinson and Una bought two and a half acres (sixteen lots) on the point, which reminded them of barren
knolls, or tors, they had seen in Dartmoor.
(Never wealthy, they had a ten-thousand-dollar inheritance from Robinson’s uncle
and about two hundred dollars per month from a trust established when his father died in December 1914.) They found golf balls
in their garden for many years.

Work on Tor House began in late spring at the property’s high point, near the granite boulders known as the Standing Stones.
Carmel contractor M.
J.
Murphy had submitted a thirteen-item estimate, including lumber, labor, cesspool, and profit, totaling
$2,230.
Because work progressed slowly, Jeffers apprenticed himself to the stonemason, a man named Pierson.
“[Robinson] hadn’t
any skill of any kind so he did the hardest and plainest job (at $4.00 a day, I think),” wrote Una.
²⁵

The rocks came from the cove below the house.
Murphy built a wooden track and used a horse to pull a cart up to the site.
They also used the horse to help excavate the foundation, along with pick and shovel.
Jeffers helped mix the mortar and place
stones.
By the end of the day, he was tired but happy, wrote Una.
Murphy, Pierson, and Jeffers finished the house in August
1919.

To the Rock that will be a Cornerstone of the House

Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen,

How long a time since the brown people who have
vanished from here

Built fires beside you and nestled by you

Out of the ranging sea-wind?
A hundred years, two hundred,

You have been dissevered from humanity

And only known the stubble squirrels and the headland
rabbits,

Or the long-fetlocked plowhorses

Breaking the hilltop in December, sea-gulls following,

Screaming in the black furrow; no one

Touched you with love, the gray hawk and the red hawk
touched you

Where my hand now lies.
So I have brought you

Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of
famine

And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind.

I did not dream the taste of wine could bind with granite,

Nor honey and milk please you; but sweetly

They mingle down the storm-worn cracks among the mosses,

Interpenetrating the silent

Wind-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older

Scars of primal fire, and the stone

Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry

A corner of the house, this also destined.

Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you

The wings of the future, for I have them.

How dear you will be to me when I too grow old, old
comrade.

Yoshinobu and I entered Tor House through the narrow front door, on the lee side from the ocean.
The compact twenty-foot-by-fifteen-foot
living room felt somber due to a combination of dark, redwood paneling and cloudy light coming through the large west window
and smaller south windows.
Bookshelves ran along the base of the windows, as well as to the right of the front door, holding
dark hardbacks with ragged-edged spines written by Yeats, George Moore, and Swinburne.
Well-worn carpets covered the floor
and absorbed any footsteps.
In the far corner stood Una’s Steinway piano.
A few feet away, blackened by decades of smoke,
was a tawny sandstone fireplace, a necessity in a house originally without electricity or gas.

Jeffers based his design on a Tudor barn Una had seen on a trip to England.
Although he was over six feet tall, he built the
house low as protection against the prevailing wind blowing off the bay and because the only heat came from fireplaces.
Kerosene
oil lamps provided light, and the Jefferses heated water in kettles in the fireplaces.

In a nook around the corner from the door was Una’s built-in desk and portraits of Yeats and the twins, Donnan and Garth,
along with drawings of Irish towers, a passion of hers.
Above her, in a loft reached by steep stairs, Robinson would pace,
pondering a line of poetry, periodically stopping to jot a finished thought.
Family lore holds that during extended lulls
Una would thump the loft with a broom and shout “Pace, Robin, pace.” The family also slept in the loft, which is off limits
to the public.

We passed through the doorway west of the fireplace into a small bedroom, where a black-and-white photograph of Una by Arnold
Genthe is hung on the wall next to the bed.
With her long dark hair wrapped around her head, she stares directly at the viewer
with earnest eyes.
No other photograph of Una reveals her piercing beauty as well.
The bed was, as Robinson wrote in “The
Bed by the Window,” “unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth.” Jeffers died in this bed on January 20, 1962, during a
rare Carmel snowstorm.
In the same poem, he wrote, “I chose the bed down-stairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed.”
²⁶

After leaving the bedroom we walked back through the living room into a corridor about five feet wide and twice as long.
Originally
the kitchen, books now lined its walls.
It is hard to imagine how Una cooked for four in such a small space.
In a red-velvet-wallpapered
bathroom off the kitchen stands a red clawfoot bathtub.
A leather shaving strop dangling by the little sink looked as if Jeffers
had just used it.

As the Jeffers boys matured, Robinson decided to build a larger dining room off of the kitchen.
The room felt more open and
friendly than the rest of the house because of the two picture windows and lack of dark paneling, which also allowed closer
inspection of Jeffers’s beautiful stonework.
Although people often thought of Jeffers as unfriendly and misanthropic—he famously
had a sign posted on his gate reading No Visitors Until After 4 O’clock, by which time he and Una had headed out for their
daily walk—Robinson and Una often entertained here.
Friends such as Edna St.
Vincent Millay, Charlie Chaplin, and George Gershwin
sat around the six-foot-long oak table drinking homemade wine fermented from oranges, raisins, and rice.
Entertainment included
songs and performances, acted out in the Minstrel Gallery at the room’s south end.
They were warmed by the big corner fireplace,
which Jeffers built on the exact spot where he found fire-charred stone five feet underground.
(“The rock-cheeks have red
fire-stains.”)
²⁷

A locked door on the eastern wall leads into what had been the garage, the first building that Robinson constructed by himself.
After finishing the garage, which has an arched opening, Jeffers read that he should have used bigger buttresses to support
the arch.
One of these expanded buttresses now jutted into the dining room.
A second odd feature was the five-foot-tall door,
which was at most two-thirds the width of a typical door.
When Jeffers’s son Donnan and his family later moved back to Carmel,
they expanded Tor House and converted the garage into a kitchen, which required cutting an opening into the shared wall.
Workers
spent several hours trying to drill through the wall but made only a small hole.
Two men came back with a pneumatic drill
and needed two days to cut the hole.
When one of them died of a heart attack after the second day, everyone decided to do
no further work on the doorway.

Yoshinobu and I exited west outside through a normal-sized door to Thuban, the great rock Jeffers describes in “To the Rock
that will be a Cornerstone of the House.” Nearby was the group of rocks known as the Standing Stones, one of which the family
called the Anvil Stone.
When asked whether Jeffers mixed honey and milk on Thuban,Yoshi-nobu responded: “I think he really
did it.
Pouring wine and honey was another way for him to honor the stone.”