California Laureate

SPLENDID POSEUR (310 pp.)--M. M. Marberry--CrowelI ($3.75).

Joaquin Miller's mother claimed that he had been born in a manger, but Joaquin himself always stoutly maintained that it was in "a covered wagon, pointed West." Both had escaped the fact: Joaquin (pronounced Wah-Keen) was actually, born in bed on a farm near Liberty, Ind. in 1837, and never climbed aboard a covered wagon till he was a strapping six-footer of 14. Nonetheless, it was a strangely modest yarn for Miller, who spent a lifetime stretching the truth about himself until it snapped. Famed on two continents at the turn of the century as the "Poet of the Sierras," and touted by critics of the day as the peer of Byron, Browning and Whitman, Miller has undergone a near-total eclipse since his death in 1913.

As Biographer M. Marion Marberry, an ex-newspaperman, makes abundantly clear in a breezy, irreverent biography, Miller was less the victim of literary fashion than of simple justice. The sole significance of his first-known poem is not its idiosyncratic spelling:

Alone I sit in my cabbin today

And all is quiet around

Save the rain which falls on the canvas roof

With a dull and monotinous sound

It is its kinship in primitiveness with some of his last ones:

You will come, my bird, Bonita? Come! For I, by steep and stone, Have built such nest for you, Juanita, As not eagle bird hath known.

Biographer Marberry wastes no time shoring up this literary rubble. Instead, he focuses on the flamboyant poseur who fashioned it, a man with the instincts of Barnum, the imagination of Munchausen, and the verbal aplomb of W. C. Fields.

A Girl Named Paquita. After a bucolic boyhood in Indiana, Cincinnatus Hiner Miller (his real name) did indeed go west in a covered wagon. Hot with "Oregon fever," the Miller clan made the trek in 1852, but with most of Oregon to choose from, papa Miller, a hard luck farmer, staked out 320 arid acres. Restless and unhappy, Joaquin won his father's consent to go prospecting for "Californy gold." In later years, Joaquin claimed that he threw all but the biggest nuggets away, but his accounts show that he had a cash balance of $5.25 when he quit and went native with a Shasta Indian girl named Paquita. When Paquita bore him a daughter, Joaquin decided he wanted to be a college man more than a father and skipped for home.

His stay at Columbia College in Eugene. Ore. lasted only three months and no records survived, but Joaquin always said that he was valedictorian of his class. He soon added horse-stealing, jail-breaking, and pony express riding to his postgraduate skills. Already writing doggerel himself, he was bowled over by the newspaper poems of one Minnie Myrtle, "Sweet Singer of the Coquille." Joaquin met, wooed and won Minnie in three days.

Buffalo on Beacon. In the next ten years, Joaquin fought Indians, fathered three children and two slim, dim books of verse and spent most of his time boozing in "doggeries" (saloons) and pasting whisky ads in the family Bible. Fed up, Minnie left with the children, and on June 6, 1870, Joaquin sailed from Portland, Ore. for San Francisco and the life of letters. Blond locks aflow, Joaquin strode down the gangplank and announced: "Let us go and talk with the poets." But Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce and the other "Bards of San Francisco Bay," as he dubbed them, refused to take Joaquin as seriously as he took himself. Undaunted, he printed up some calling cards, "Joaquin Miller: Byron of the Rockies," booked a $65 cabin and sailed for London.

This time he talked to dead poets, declaiming memorial odes for Burns, Scott and Byron, and even tried to sleep in Westminster Abbey to save on hotel bills. London's literati could not resist his sombrero, chaps, and jangling spurs--or his tall tales. Dante Gabriel Rossetti watched wide-eyed when Joaquin put two cigars in his mouth, lit them up, and bellowed, "That's the way we do it in the States!" Others stood spellbound as he told of lassoing buffalo as they stampeded down Beacon Street in Boston.

Though he rhymed Goethe with teeth, a book of his poems drew rave notices, and he became the pet of London hostesses. He told the ladies that his favorite dish was pemmican, but at one party when his own verse sent him rolling on the floor in frenzy, he nibbled aristocratic ankles in order of rank--duchess, marchioness, countess and lady. He took to appearing in a bearskin, squatting on the floor and chanting gibberish "Indian songs my mother taught me in the cradle." As the royalties poured in, he began mouthing cloudy dicta, e.g., "Genius works night and day and the antipodes do not affect it." Privately he admitted, "I'm damned if I could tell the difference between a hexameter and a pentameter to save my scalp."

The Holy Grotto. When his English triumph wore thin, Joaquin headed back for the U.S., where, after another unsuccessful marriage, he bought 70 acres on a crag high above Oakland, Calif. Here he established "The Rights," part hermitage, part harem, and part reforestation bureau.

The Rights had several unique features, e.g., Moses' tomb ("No man knows where he is buried, and why not here?"), a rainmaking machine on the roof for poetic inspiration, and a funeral pyre intended for Joaquin's eventual use. The place ran on Joaquin's Law: no whisky before noon. On neighboring slopes, he planted some 75,000 trees. In 1892, in the Holy Grotto, as Joaquin called his writing room, he penned his best known poem, Columbus ("Sail on! Sail on! And on!") and got $50 for it. Later, when the poem had become a schoolroom staple, a W.C.T.U. member quizzed Joaquin on his inspiration. "Whisky, ma'am," said Joaquin.

Sarah Bernhardt, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Taft visited The Hights to pay their respects to California's poet laureate, but it became notorious for the succession of girls in their teens and 205 who stayed there and left rapt testimonials. Samples: "I was his Empress and the Hights was our Empire," "Joaquin was such a wonderful lover." Fearing for his own women relatives, Ambrose Bierce wrote down an emphatic promise: "If that woolly wolf, Joaquin Miller, doesn't keep outside the fold, I shall come down and club him soundly."

Tragedy and old age clubbed him first. His half-Indian daughter drank herself to death, a son was jailed for theft, arteriosclerosis felled Joaquin. "It is not poetic to take pills," he fumed. On the afternoon of Feb. 17, 1913, saying "Take me away, take me away!" he died.

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