Not Man Apart. For a 1965 Sierra Club photo book, the environmental activist David Brower took this title from Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). A mind-cleansing rightness strikes home if we hear those three spare words, “Not Man Apart,” the way they actually occur. Praising “Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,” Jeffers then says: “Love that, not man / Apart from that”–a loaded line break!
Ansel Adams found Jeffers “a strange presence with his rugged features and relentless glance” when they met in 1926. Later, he told Alfred Stieglitz he hoped “to call attention to the simplicities of environment . . . to ‘the enormous beauty of the world,’ as Jeffers writes. Pray for me.” His photographs of California’s Big Sur coast were featured in Not Man Apart, and Adams mostly turned his lens on the non human world.
Jeffers deplores the “contagion” of selfish human consciousness on our planet,
Beauty of the world requires for
completion our ghostly increment.
Less hangs on “Beauty” here than on “enormous,” the cosmos in which humanity is a late and transient addendum. Completion, perhaps, and consciousness, yes, his poems pulse with it. But not egocentric self-consciousness.
Not “man / Apart,” he wrote, and this too: “No imaginable / Human presence here . . . ” Jeffers’s “The Place for No Story” holds back like George Oppen’s “Psalm,” impinging on a landscape only by the force of imagery.
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
Notings only, with no main verb, and semicolons hold this terrain intact, unstoried (as Frost, a continent away from Jeffers, said about “the land vaguely realizing westward”). But any scene requires a seer: “shaped like flame,” he says, “hardly apparent.” And whose pasture, whose herd? Jeffers might have ended on “gray air haunted with hawks,” but his colon there won’t let him:
Human presence here,
he moralizes. No human could help but “dilute” raw rock, old ocean, the surf’s white violence. Let such things stay pristine, primal, “as if I were / Seeing rock for the first time,” he says in a later poem.
Prophetic arrogance has been the charge against Jeffers, and misanthropy, something sharper than Frost’s “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Yet the bitterness Jeffers felt at human spoliation–the “year’s filth,” “the wheels and the feet,” “the power-shovels”–always sprang from awe of the earth he settled upon and basic faith in our love for it.
His family, strict Calvinists, had moved from Pennsylvania to California in 1902. At 17, in The Youth’s Companion, Jeffers published “The Condor,” whose rhyme and meter he’d soon abandon but not its austere stance: “My wings can dare / All loneliest hanging heights of air; / . . . I reck not of the earth below.” California condors had thrived for tens of thousands of years, until whaling and sealing deprived them of marine carcasses. Then, thanks to power lines, pleasure shooting, and lead poisoning from hunters’ kills, Jeffers saw them decline from 600 to about 50 to none in the wild. By 1985 one breeding pair remained. Then an astonishing recovery program literally snatched them from the brink of extinction and they’re now back in the hundreds.
After college in southern California, Jeffers in 1914 moved north with his new wife Una. Traveling by stagecoach they “looked down through pines and sea-fogs on Carmel Bay”–“our inevitable place.” Una describes Big Sur, south of Carmel, with the skill and verve of a Dorothy Wordsworth transplanted to the Pacific rim: “Canyons, gushing springs and streams, are thickly wooded with redwoods and pines, laurels, tan-oak, maples and sycamores, and, high up, the rosy-barked madrones. . . . Lashing waves roll in, incredibly green and blue beyond the foam, menacing and gray in storm”; wild flowers of every sort, “Flashing bird-wings . . . And high above, arrogant hawks hover, marsh hawks and sparrow hawks, redtails and peregrine falcons. Vultures too peering down, and a rare pair of eagles.” In “Lashing,” “Flashing,” “peering,” you can feel the bent of mind she shared with her husband, plus what he mightn’t have said: “incredibly,” “menacing,” “arrogant.”
“I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” This bluff thought, from “Hurt Hawks,” might turn one off Jeffers. But listen to the end, after he’s fed the broken-winged redtail for six weeks:
What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river
cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
No false sentiment, no sentiment at all, spoon-feeds these lines. We sense a flayed openness. “Soared . . . fierce . . . fear”: The poetry identifies utterly with animate life, while “rising . . . unsheathed from reality” discovers a raw and spirit-bound beauty.
Along with hawks, Jeffers bonded with gray rock, the “granite sea-boulders” he hauled up “wind and wave-worn” to help construct Tor House on a stone outcrop 50 yards above the Pacific. Digging for a fireplace foundation he found bedrock blackened by ancient Indian campfires. A few years later, with his twin boys, he built the four-story Hawk Tower (setting into it a piece from Yeats’s old stone tower in Ireland). Again and again his verse comes back to “living rock,” “lonely rock,” “water-darkened . . . lovely rock,” “pure naked rock.” His poem “Rock and Hawk” calls these two presences, bird and stone, “Fierce consciousness joined with final / Disinterestedness.” No American had bound together such starkness and passion in writing of nature, speaking from “this granite edge of the continent.”
Jeffers first caught East Coast attention thanks to a 1925 California anthology whose title poem, “Continent’s End,” has ocean storms shaking “beds of granite” and the poet “gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray.” Here was a voice like Thoreau’s confronting “vast, terrific . . . inhuman Nature” at Mount Katahdin in Maine. From his own standpoint, Jeffers held to a tenet of “Inhumanism,” based on “the astonishing beauty of things” and “the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe.” However perverse this sounds, he felt it a mark of nobleness, maturity.
As he aged and his voice grew faint against the noise of progress, Jeffers dug in, “Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth / Under men’s hands and their minds . . . my own coast’s obscene future.” Nowadays California coastal dwellers, watching their bluffs and beaches erode, build cement “sea walls, because we don’t put waves before the homes of people.” This may seem sensible, but it hides a puzzling idea of waves.
A certain pain arises from photos of Tor House and Hawk Tower solitary on a wild bluff in 1919, 1923, 1927, before “suburban houses” crowded round. And from Jeffers recalling how he and Una once watched a puma stride along a nearby ridge. In the mid-1930s the carving of a coast road, Highway One, brought acute dismay, yet “the great bronze gorge-cut sides of the mountains” remain “Not the least hurt,” “Beautiful beyond belief.”
That summer Jeffers hiked with his son up “the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek” near Big Sur, and recounted this event in “Oh, Lovely Rock.” Introducing his lucid, level reading of the poem to a 1941 audience at the Library of Congress, he said, “You must understand that this is not southern California. There are no orange groves and no oil wells.” Instead there was “forest on forest above our heads.” Past midnight the fire’s flame “Lighted my sleeping son’s face . . . and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall / Across the stream.” Jeffers stares at “pure naked rock . . . as if I were / Seeing rock for the first time,” those dots of his allowing for a movement of mind from the visual into the visionary. They occur again as he sees
And living rock. Nothing strange . . . I cannot
Tell you how strange.
Why “living” rock, as if there were another kind? And why strange, when a rock is so familiar? Because in it he sees a “fate going on / Outside our fates.” He and his son will die, “this age will die,” but “this rock will be here,”
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above.
Ending this memory of a “lovely rock,” Jeffers says he “Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.” Such sentiment does not belie his severe creed, an integrity of humankind’s organic wholeness with our earth. It takes rare keenness to sense those atomic energies, and humility to move from “lovely” to “lonely,” speaking for himself in speaking for pure naked rock.
Turning 50 and stirred by Europe’s imminent barbarism, in other poems he draws on the fierce oracles of W.B. Yeats, for whom “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Where catastrophe for Yeats was cultural, Jeffers imagines the sun combusting like a nova:
Green trees would become a moment’s torches and vanish, the oceans
Would explode into invisible steam . . .
And where Yeats hoped an aristocracy rooted in folk tradition could save civilization, Jeffers relies on a lonely rock and our needs and nature no more changed “in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.”
Sometimes disdain vies in his writing with a stubborn love for primordial nature. In “Orca,” written just after World War II, he taps Walt Whitman’s surflike verse for his own coast: “Sea-lions loafed in the swinging tide in the inlet,” and offshore rocks
and thousands
Standing thick as grass on a cut of turf. Beyond these, blue,
gray, green, wind-straked, the ocean
Looked vacant.
Then “two black triangles, tacking and veering,” killer-whale fins, drove in, panicking the seals. “The water boiled for a moment,” while below “a screaming / And wheeling sky . . . brown blood and foam / Striped the water of the inlet.”
Terror, death, “yet it looked clean and bright, it was beautiful. / Why? Because there was nothing human involved . . . no smirk and no malice.” Calling “the breed of man” a “botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped,” Jeffers waives any affection for “man / Apart” (and for himself too) in favor of a deeper, necessary love.
John Felstiner, professor of English at Stanford, is the author, most recently, of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. This essay is adapted from So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency.
