VERSE

Again, Jeffers

The Story of a parson outgrowing his profession, turning bitterly on his congregation with the news that Christianity is outlived, that God has left his church and returned to the fire and whirlwind, is one that might, almost any day nowadays, provide a sensation for the outspoken U. S. press. Particularly if there were violent or sexual details would the public be served to surfeit, until a very real crisis in one man's life became a vulgar byword, grossly misinterpreted.

Poet Jeffers unfolds just such a story,* with the high seriousness of a prophetic pantheist. He follows the Rev. Dr. Barclay, a man of 50, from a deserted pulpit southward down the Pacific coast from Monterey. Common sanity is dropping from him like a cloak that he may carry or not. His spirit runs naked to the spirit of the hills, of the "iron wind" on the sea promontories. He will be possessed of a god beyond the old ethic, "good and evil."

The region around Point Sur is already crowded with psychic disturbances. While dry winds blew, followed by a night "striped with lightning" and a day of yellow floods, two boys crucified a hawk; their brother, a visionary, saw the Virgin walking on the sea, mountain tall, mourning her lover; a ranch girl fled to her man to slake her fear of death; the lighthouse keeper's daughter, Faith Heriot, went in a famine of unnatural love to Natalia Morhead, whose husband's act unsexed Faith Heriot two years before. Morhead is not back from the War. Faith nurses his crippled father under the old rooftree, moving about the house "like a restless fire." Natalia mistrusts everything but her child.

An unseen multitude surrounds Dr. Barclay approaching Point Sur--his disciples; minds at any distance aware of his power. The women at Point Sur,--even Maruca, the squat half-breed whom he uses as deliverance from a 15-year chastity--vaguely understand his announcements: "God thinks through action .... Nothing you can do is wicked."

His complete deliverance lies through an act for normal men the most unthinkable. When his young daughter, April, comes to Point Sur to fetch him for her mother, he forces her, passing through incest to the full exaltation of godhood.

People follow him into the mountain, their campfires lighting weird scenes of license and ecstasy. He moves above them, brooding on the dark ridges. There is an earthquake.

Down at the house, Morhead returns, made more bestial by War. The women are drawn to the God, "the black maypole," on the mountain, which now is scourged to the north by fire from the camps. Natalia smothers her child to preserve its innocence. April, informed with her dead brother's spirit, smuggles out a pistol to kill her father but quails at sight of him, shoots herself instead. He roams back into the burnt hills, fasting, escaped from human automatisms, inexhaustible, thirsting to create. . . .

The Significance of Robinson Jeffers as a poet is, by critical consensus, that of one to rank with the greatest poets of all generations. Homer and Sophocles have not been held too lofty comparisons for him--yet he remains distinctly a product of this continent. Inhuman in his intensity--he says "Humanity is needless"; calls men "the apes that walk like herons"--he repels people who seek comfort in poetry. He takes the race as a starting point--

. . . the coal to kindle,

The blind mask crying to be slit

with eye-holes--

and seeks tracks for its life force to reunite with the cosmic force of the impersonal universe, in "the hollow darkness outside the stars and the dark hollow in the atom." The nerves of his writing are taut under elemental strains--the strain of the Pacific against its granite boundaries, of a mountainous coast verging on earthquake, of oil tanks about to explode and consume themselves, of brains splitting with a dasmon. His greatest word is

. . . Annihilation, the beautiful

Word, the black crystal structure,

prisms of black crystal

Arranged the one behind the other

in the word

To catch a ray not of this world.

Like all poets, he finds language inadequate; is forced back upon "match-ends of burnt experience human enough to be understood." But from his match-ends he extracts white heat, terrific convulsions, monstrous images, without more linguistic violence than a harsh ellipsis and radical translations of character. He pictures

The coast hills, thinking the thing

out to conclusion.

The strata of the continental fault

are

. . . tortured and twisted

Layer under layer like tetanus, like

the muscles of a mountain bear

that has gorged the strychnine.

The sun is "the day's eyeball," and, elsewhere,

The yellow dog barking in the

blue pasture,

Snapping sidewise.

The Poet. Born in Pittsburgh, 40 years ago, he was schooled in Europe until 15. His parents moved to California where he studied medicine at various universities but never with the deep interest he had in poetry. His early work, Californians, is of a surprisingly flat, "native son" variety.

He married Una Call Kuster in 1913. They have twin boys. Lean, athletic, needing solitude, he built a house of sea-boulders on a headland near Carmel, Calif. Falcons nested in his tower of "hawk-perch" stones. Some years ago he offered Tamar and Other Poems to Manhattan publishers but only an obscure Irish printer, Peter G. Boyle, would risk handling such inflammable material as a tragedy of incest (TIME, March 30, 1925). Reviews soon brought him to a notice for which he has small regard but which must become, despite the book world's busy piddlings, nationwide and perpetual.

FICTION

Let-Down

A GOOD WOMAN--Louis Brom-field--Stokes ($2.50). This book were better left unpublished. Coming on the heels of three splendid predecessors, the last of which (Early Autumn, 1926) won a Pulitzer Prize and brought the author back from his European haunts in a triumph of press-agentry, it is a sorry letdown. Florid, artificial, repetitious, it is incredibly dull and sloppy work to come from an author of Mr. Bromfield's well-earned reputation.

It unreels the story of an Ohio boy whose domineering mother married him off young and innocent to a pallid missionary, a virgin before the Lord, called Naomi. In an Africa which Mr. Bromfield must have studied up on lurid picture postcards, Philip Downes revolts against his calling and celibacy. Attacked by bloodthirsty blackamoors, he narrowly escapes with life and wife back to Ohio, where he enters a steel mill and espouses his fellow-workers' cause. Just before they go on a losing strike, he slips off unexpectedly into a career of painting.

To his mother's and Naomi's horror he has learned about drink from the hunkies. To his own horror, he learns about women from Naomi, who bears twins in her effort to hold her man. But he is enamored of Mary Conyngham, widowed sweetheart of his childhood. She installs him in the barn of Shane Castle (the Shane family, bygone royalty of "the Town," being lugged in to connect this book with its predecessors as another "panel" in the Bromfield series). Mary Conyngham is out to rescue Philip from his mother, whose pious meddling caused everyone's woe.

But it is Naomi who resolves the impasse, by eloping suddenly with a sex-starved minister as far as Pittsburgh, where both commit prayerful suicide. This leaves Philip nothing to do but marry Mary and return to expiate something or other on the African postcard scene.

Philip's father, a handsome, slippery little dog named Jason, is brought back from 26 years of supposed death for no better purpose than to furnish comic relief to the sagging last third of the book. At the end he is killed off, by a drunken fall on his return trip to Australia, where he has an informal second wife and family.

Emma Downes the mother, the "good woman," passing at last from her tribulations, marries a Congressman and goes to her grave trailing ironic clouds of Y.M.C.A. glory. The book is named for her and dedicated-- to all of her ilk in U. S., "which has more than its share of them.'' It is she that is most to blame for the book's failure. Mr. Bromfield has undoubtedly met the type but he has never, apparently, been sufficiently interested in an Emma Downes to draw of her more than an obvious, uninspired caricature.

Smooth Blend

THE MAN IN THE SANDHILLS-- Antony Marsden--A. & C. Bom ($2). John Creed, perfect English gentleman, calls late at night upon a Mr. Murgatroyd to punch his head for a card game insult. Mr. Murgatroyd drops dead after taking a right to the chin. A motorcycle and a friend's lugger land John Creed safely among the dunes of France. With Scotland Yard sleuthing furiously in alternate chapters, John Creed evades the law through great physical discomfort, many a hairbreadth escape, but never for an instant ceases to be a perfect English gentleman. He rides in a circus, skins through a fire, hides in a creek, saves lives right & left while preserving himself for a happy and innocent ending. Author Marsden's smooth blend of color and complication might well start the addiction of conscientious objectors to the detective story.

*THE WOMEN AT POINT SUR--Robinson Jeffers--Boni & Liveright ($2.50).

*There is also a formal dedication, to the late Critic Stuart P. Sherman.