99 Stories of God

34. Tragedy Has Obligations

She was studying the works of Robinson Jeffers. She considered him a great poet of nature and the sublime. He was an inhumanist, utterly disillusioned with human civilization. He believed that Jesus was a well-meaning teacher whose doomed mission to save mankind through a gospel of love was based on the deluded sense that he was the son of God.

Jeffers built his house and his tower of stone with the aid of his twin sons on the wild cliffs of Carmel, California, and planted two thousand trees there. His wife, Una, was described (by scholar Albert Gelpi) as “the ground, the air, the matrix and inspiration of Jeffers’ creation in stone and words, wife, mother, muse, anima.” She died in 1950, and he lived on until 1962.

She wished she could find some writer that she could be that important for — a great writer, of course. She was attracted to writers. She knew people thought of her as an old-fashioned girl.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, she went to a party and there were several writers there, all ancient, stooped, and a little hard of hearing but very sweet. One of them told her that he had visited Robinson Jeffers at Tor House with the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

“He was short, leathern and lean, with vague, slow-moving eyes,” the old fellow said. “The place was surrounded by ranch houses, lawn sprinklers, baby strollers, and painted ducks with wings that turned in the breeze.

“As we were about to leave after a desultory conversation, Jeffers said, ‘But you must see the tower! Una will take you. I’d go myself, but the climb has become too much for my heart.’

“And just then,” her new acquaintance said with a bit of a flourish, “Una appears with a bag of groceries. She gives us a piercing and entirely hostile glance and says, ‘Follow me then.’

“Over a beheaded hawk carved in stone, a great many pigeons are flying about. We pass under a low lintel, go up spiral stairs to a room showing no sign of human habitation. There was only the booming of surf and the cooing of pigeons. Mrs. Jeffers stands by, staring at us, says not a word, and leads us back down. Shaking her head, she disappears.

“Outside,” the old fellow went on, “we were accosted by children in Indian war bonnets brandishing plastic rifles.”

“This was in 1947,” he added.