The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts 9781503628090

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the

Point Alma Venus manu s c r i pts

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The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts Preliminary Versions of The Women at Point Sur

By RO B I N S O N J E F F E R S ed i t ed by Tim Hunt & Robert Kafka

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Stanford, California

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stanfo rd u n ive rsi ty p re ss Stanford, California Editorial matter © 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Point Alma Venus manuscripts © by Jeffers Literary Properties. Frontispiece photograph courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jeffers, Robinson, 1887–1962, author. | Hunt, Tim, 1949– editor, writer of introduction, writer of afterword. | Kafka, Robert, editor, transcriber. Title: The Point Alma Venus manuscripts : preliminary versions of The women at Point Sur / transcribed from Jeffers’s manuscripts by Robert Kafka ; edited by Tim Hunt and Robert Kafka. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2021. Identifiers: lccn 2020050949 (print) | lccn 2020050950 (ebook) | isbn 9781503628083 (cloth) | isbn 9781503628090 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jeffers, Robinson, 1887–1962—Manuscripts. | American poetry—20th century. | LCGFT: Poetry. Classification: lcc ps3519.e27 p65 2021 (print) | lcc ps3519.e27 (ebook) | ddc 811/.52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050949 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050950 Cover design: Rob Ehle Jacket photo: Hawk Tower, c. 1924. Tor House Foundation Archive Text design: Kevin Barrett Kane Typeset at Stanford University Press in Centaur MT Pro

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CONTENTS

Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Note on Citations xv

the point alma venus manuscripts 1 Storm as Deliverer (initial version) The Occidental Fragment 24 Fragmentary Beginning 1 27 Version A 30

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2 The Ur-Point Alma Venus 45 Fragmentary Beginning 4 114 3 Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version) Yale Fragment 158

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4 Point Alma Venus 161 Fragmentary Beginning 2 236 Fragmentary Beginning 3 241 Harvard Fragment 249 Afterword 251 Chronology 283 Textual Notes and Apparatus Emendations 297

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PREFACE

On April 26, 1926, Robinson Jeffers wrote to his editor at Boni & Liveright, Donald Friede, about his plans for a new collection to follow up on the electric success of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, published less than a year earlier. The poem is called Point Alma Venus. I began it quite cheerfully, soon after Tamar was written. I put it aside because it was too exciting, and ever since has been a struggle to keep it out of my mind by writing something else. The story, like Tamburlaine or Zarathustra, is the story of human attempts to get beyond humanity. . . . (CL1: 563–64)

Just four days later, he wrote again, more somberly: [W]hen I gave a whole morning to reading the manuscript considerately it became dreadfully clear that it would not do. Better for me to discover this than you, or the public at large. Every story that ever occurred to me had got wound up into this one poem; and it was too long, too complicated, and, from the attempt at compression, neither clear nor true. I should have discovered this a year ago, but was still hoping that the end would justify the earlier part. One has to try experiments, even costly ones. Now I must pick this thing to pieces . . . (CL1: 566–67)

When I first read these passages in the early 1970s, I was intrigued. What was the narrative material that had to be excised? How did it relate to what was finally published in 1927 as The Women at Point Sur? Within a few years, I had relocated to Dallas, and took the opportunity to spend weeks at a time at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin with this material, preparing a page-by-page transcription, and then a reconstruction of the various incomplete versions. I shared the transcription with a few people—Lee and Donnan Jeffers and William Everson among them. Everson was very enthusiastic and wrote that the versions demonstrated that vii

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Jeffers had determined to let go of a lot of the narrative threads and characters and to concentrate everything on Barclay. I was surprised that this came as a revelation to me—it seemed a rather obvious conclusion from a first reading— but it was an important insight. Still, what was cast off intrigued me, and this volume presents that material. What we discover is a much wider cast of characters—the MacToralds, Woodfinn, Rose Nelson and her father, and others—who do not survive into later Jeffers narratives. Further, we find workings and reworkings of narrative material—the seance, Barclay’s visit to the lighthouse, etc.—that likewise exist nowhere else. This clearly is a unique collection of material that reveals the veins that Jeffers mined during his most creative period. Not only does the work presented herein offer significant new perspectives on Jeffers’ narrative artistry, but it also provides us with new ways to understand his most ambitious long poem, The Women at Point Sur. Most importantly, the Point Alma Venus manuscripts richly repay reading in their own right and are an important addition to the Jeffers canon. Robert Kafka

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project began as an outgrowth of a master’s thesis I wrote in 1970 at Lehigh University. The subject was The Women at Point Sur, for which I had occasion to consult the original manuscript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. This led later to my transcriptions of the present material at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. I am grateful for the support and enthusiasm for this project to a number of people—to Tim Hunt and Jim Karman, noted Jeffersians, for their encouragement and help over many years, and to Norris Pope, lately of Stanford University Press, whose forbearance has been essential. And especially to my late wife, to whom this volume is dedicated. It is my great regret and constant self-reproach that she did not live to see its publication. Without her gentle lash, it would not have appeared at all, at least in its present form: To, for, and because of Kyuja- san Robert Kafka

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I don’t remember why I was lucky enough, some forty years ago, to have Robert Kafka send me a copy of his typescript of his first iteration of these transcriptions. The 1977 Liveright reissue of The Women at Point Sur may have been how he came across my name. Whatever the explanation, I’ve been extolling the importance of this material ever since, and one of the joys of my academic life has been my friendship with Robert Kafka. First, and above all, I want to thank Rob for the untold hours upon hours of work he’s invested in these transcriptions and the patient care with which he’s assembled these versions. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle of a million pieces and having to first decipher the faint pencil scrawl on the pieces and then put the puzzle together. All who care about Jeffers’ poetry are deeply in his debt. And I would like to thank him for allowing me to help with ix

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this volume. I would also like to thank Norris Pope for his judicious counsel; Erica Wetter, Executive Editor, Stanford University Press, for her belief in this material and her deft guidance in bringing it into print, and Lindsay Jeffers and the Jeffers family for their support of this project. And, too, I would like to acknowledge Kyuja Kafka for her beauty of spirit. Tim Hunt

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INTRODUCTION

This volume presents transcriptions of Robinson Jeffers’ handwritten manuscripts of the four primary attempts at the Reverend Barclay’s story collectively designated The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts. From spring 1922 through February 1927, a period of not quite five years, Jeffers wrote and published the long narrative Tamar, the verse drama The Tower Beyond Tragedy, the shorter narrative Roan Stallion (all gathered in the 1925 collection Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems), as well as the book-length narrative The Women at Point Sur (published in 1927). In these years he also wrote a number of his most important—and most admired— shorter poems. The transcribed manuscripts published in this volume show that Jeffers was even more productive in this period than we had realized. In these crucial years and perhaps the year or so prior, he also developed these substantial attempts at what became The Women at Point Sur. These attempts, which he came to designate Point Alma Venus, and related material comprise nearly 270 pages of manuscript. Each attempt is recognizably part of the same project, but each develops along different lines as Jeffers evolved his sense of the poem’s central figure, the Reverend Arthur Barclay, “who outgrew his God,” and as he, also, evolved his approach to narrative poetry. Even though Jeffers never completed any of the attempts at Alma Venus, they are a significant addition to his canon. If these abandoned drafts were fragments from an otherwise lost work, a primary goal would be to consider how they might allow imagining the unavailable whole—much as an archeologist might infer an ancient vase from the bits of design and lettering on the surviving shards. Instead, these drafts reveal poems that might have been but never were—each anticipating Point Sur as completed, each overlapping with the other attempts, and each diverging from the others. The attempts share certain characters (most obviously Barclay), scenes (such as the seance), and settings (such as the lighthouse), but they develop these elements in shifting configurations and to somewhat different purposes as Jeffers’ thematic sense of the material developed and as his approach to narrative poetry evolved in tandem with it. Read as a series, they document Jeffers’ conceptual explorations xi

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of the figure of Barclay, who outgrows his Christian God and embarks on a Faustian quest for ultimate knowledge—a series that culminates in The Women at Point Sur, the poem he would later claim was his “most inclusive, and poetically the most intense” (CP4: 390). Read in relationship to Tamar, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and Roan Stallion, the Alma Venus attempts challenge us to reread these well-known poems and, as well, to understand them as related to (perhaps even aspects of ) Jeffers’ ongoing explorations of Barclay’s story rather than as poems that precede his final development of Barclay’s story in The Women at Point Sur. Just as importantly, the attempts at Alma Venus, though unfinished and abandoned, reward being read in their own right. They develop compelling narrative situations. They are rich in implication. And they contain passages equal in power and beauty to Jeffers’ best writing. And, too, the versions show Jeffers probing the aesthetic, psychological, and theological challenges evoked in the initial version as he searches his way toward The Women at Point Sur, while writing The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Roan Stallion, and perhaps even Tamar along the way. For those who value Jeffers’ narrative poetry, these are works they will want to read and savor. For those who seek to understand Jeffers’ thought and achievement as a poet, these are poems they must read and study. But why, one might ask, read these abandoned drafts at all? Reviewers who had hailed Jeffers as a major poet when Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems was published mostly viewed The Women at Point Sur as a misstep and at least a partial failure. In his 1938 Foreword to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Jeffers himself characterized it as “the least understood and least liked” of his narratives and included only a single brief passage from it. And in the years since, critics and scholars who have engaged his narrative poems have followed his lead and mostly skirted Point Sur to focus, instead, on other narratives that have, I’d suggest, seemed more approachable. Moreover, some Jeffers scholars have argued—and continue to argue—that his lyrics and shorter meditations are his best work. In their view, we should quietly move the long narratives and verse dramas featured in the original collections to that critical back burner labeled of historical interest and focus, instead, on such poems as “Salmon Fishing,” “Shine, Perishing Republic,” “Boats in a Fog,” “The Purse-Seine,” “Oh, Lovely Rock,” and “Vulture,” which they contend most fully realize his artistry, best argue for his place in the canon of American poetry, and most clearly convey his philosophical, ethical, and environmental vision. While the shorter poems clearly merit serious attention, it should be remembered that Jeffers’ long poems were the basis of his initial reputation in the mid-1920s when he was widely regarded as a major poet. They were also central to his ambitions as a poet, including his rejection of the aesthetic paradigm of xii Introduction

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the Modernists, especially T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Just as we would not think of trying to assess their careers without considering The Waste Land and The Cantos, neither can we fully understand Jeffers without engaging his long poems with their sweeping cadences and violational plots, compelling imagery, and philosophical reach. Even though recent scholarship has enriched our accounts of American poetry in the 1920s by recovering the voices of previously marginalized groups, the ascendancy of the Modernists remains an important element in our understanding of the period’s poetic production. We celebrate their aesthetic break with the Victorians. We parse their alliances and competitions. And we tend to privilege their commitment to formal experimentation (collage, elision, juxtaposition, and such) and accept their view that narrative poetry was a mode whose moment had passed and was not a viable option for a serious modern poet. Jeffers’ decision, as he put it in his Introduction for the 1938 Modern Library reissue of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, “not to become a ‘modern,’” was both a rejection of the Modernists’ emphasis on stylistic experimentation and a commitment to transforming narrative poetry into a viable modern form. We cannot, then, understand his alternative vision for poetry in this era, his determination to offer an alternative direction to what the Modernists were urging, without considering his narrative practice. His long narratives are not only the poems that made and initially defined his reputation, and they are not only the poems in which he dove the deepest and reached the farthest, they are also the poems we must engage if we are to recover Jeffers as a significant figure in the tapestry of modern poetry. It may be easier to demonstrate that Jeffers wrote poems of merit and significance by focusing on the shorter poems, but setting aside the longer poems distorts what he achieved and makes it significantly more difficult to understand why his work matters for our understanding of American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century. We can admire Jeffers through his short poems, but we can only understand his full importance by engaging, as well, his long poems, including The Women at Point Sur, both in and of itself and in the context of the Alma Venus material that led to it and which underscores the complexity of its relationship to the better “liked” narratives featured in Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems.

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The body of this collection presents the four primary preliminary attempts Robinson Jeffers made at composing the long narrative poem he subsequently completed and published as The Women at Point Sur. These versions of the Reverend Barclay’s story, transcribed from Jeffers’ handwritten manuscripts, are xiii Introduction

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presented in the presumed order of their composition. Each primary version is preceded by a headnote that indicates the basis of the title assigned to it, and its relationship to the fragments and workings that have been grouped with it. For additional discussion of these matters and matters pertaining to the transcribing and editing of the material, please see the sections “Chronology” and “Textual Notes and Apparatus” that follow the transcriptions. In the transcriptions, words that are conjecture (informed by the problematic visual evidence, the context of the passage, and the context provided by similar or related passages but still uncertain) have been placed in square brackets. Words that can be neither determined nor conjectured are indicated by empty square brackets. Words and passages that Jeffers cancelled as he composed (and presumably would have omitted had he completed and typed the draft) are scored through. Jeffers’ working notes have been boxed, placed (in general) to the right of the verse lines, and positioned to indicate the note’s relationship to the developing draft. In Jeffers’ manuscripts, some notes are circled, some boxed, some have no border. Some run vertically, some diagonally. The setting does not attempt to reproduce these features. The manuscripts themselves show that the first and third versions were titled, when Jeffers was drafting them, Storm as Deliverer. The title for the second version as it was being drafted is unknown. In this edition “Point Alma Venus” serves as a comprehensive term for the attempts to write the Reverend Barclay’s story that precede The Women at Point Sur. In part because this is the title Jeffers used for the fourth and most nearly completed version and in part because his remarks in his September 4, 1925 letter to Benjamin De Casseres and April 26, 1926 letter to Donald Friede (see “Chronology” for the relevant passages) indicate that he had come to think of these versions collectively as a single evolving project under the title Point Alma Venus. Tim Hunt

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NOTE ON CITATIONS

Citations to The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (edited by Tim Hunt, published by Stanford University Press) and The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers (edited by James Karman, published by Stanford University Press) are indicated parenthetically by CP and CL, respectively, followed by volume number and page number. Unless the context of the sentence clearly indicates otherwise, the italicized titles Tamar and Roan Stallion designate the narrative poems rather than the collections Tamar and Other Poems and Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems in which they were first published.

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Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

Jeffers titled this first attempt at the Reverend Barclay’s story Storm as Deliverer. It has been designated “initial version” to distinguish it from his third attempt at Barclay’s story, also titled Storm as Deliverer, which has been designated the “MacTorald version.” In June 1922 Jeffers composed a Preface for an unpublished collection (see pp. 285–286) where he notes that he was “until quite lately . . . unable to discover any rhymeless measure but blank verse,” but adds that he was “at length discovering rhymeless narrative measures” of his own. Other comments in the Preface indicate that neither Storm as Deliverer (initial version) nor Tamar were included in this collection. The sense of measure and diction in Storm as Deliverer (initial version) suggest it dates from this early stage in Jeffers’ process of “discovering rhymeless narrative measures.” Similarly, this version foregrounds the plot action more prominently than the other versions, suggesting it is earlier than the other Alma Venus versions. Three fragments, two brief and one extended, seem related to this initial phase of work on Barclay’s story. In the first, designated the Occidental Fragment, the handling of the line suggests it predates Storm as Deliverer (initial version); the notes that are part of this fragment offer an alternate, early sketch of Barclay’s story. The measure of what is here designated Fragmentary Beginning 1 suggests it follows Storm as Deliverer (initial version). In it, Jeffers seems to be exploring a sort of hexameter, which plausibly locates it in this period of searching for new “rhymeless narrative measures.” The apparent connection between another passage in the June 1922 Preface and the more extended fragment, here designated Version A (see p. 286 suggests it is transitional between Storm as Deliverer (initial version) and The Ur-Point Alma Venus.

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S TO R M AS D EL IVERE R (I NI T I AL V E RSI ON)

1. The Rev. Dr. Barclay outgrew his God, He went to Europe with his wife and his son But the trouble followed him in all his travels. He wrote from Florence, under the blue sky So much like home, resigning his pastorate Of the Los Angeles church; his health he wrote Had not mended as hoped. At Interlaken The mountains troubled him with a sort of vision That frightened and enthralled: the three peaks, Jungfrau, Moench, Eiger, so accepted him: he and the peaks Became one mountain: that mystical communion Was dreadfully like death: and death approached, He was sixty-seven years old. He went home to the west, To the house of his vacations, on the Carmel cliff. He was not a poor man, and he could live At ease without the salary. His lost faith tormented him. The creed of his church had like a chrysalis 3

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Kept his mind tender up to old age, and now it was gone—what? He gave himself to study, Gathered new books, enlarged the house to hold them; he had few years left to fling at the mystery. A mind By nature unadventurous loathes that leap in the dark: there will be light from all this learning? 2. Before, when he was quiet in mind, in the safe church, To educate his son had been his passion. He had taught him Latin, and read Greek with Edward When the boy was ten years old; in mathematics Forced him ahead of his age; and engaged tutors For modern languages, so that lately in Europe From the Tiber to the Rhine Edward had been Interpreter: but the father now forgot Pride in the education of his son, Himself to educate, himself to orient In the strange little island before death. No time now for the boy, now for himself To learn what to believe before he dies. He sent Edward to college; who strange and shy Hated companionship and scorned to study What needed none, he had known it for years already. His classmates were all stupider than himself, And older: he’d lacked playfellows all his childhood And now refused them. Idle, nothing to learn, He lived among his own imaginations His mind eating strange food. The story of Hannibal’s Ring with the poison in it fascinated His adolescence; death, that appalled his father, To him sang like a sweetheart. In the laboratory, he found a vial of crystals Marked KCN, he snatched up filter-paper To wrap it out of sight, he smuggled it home 4

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And tucked it under the clothing in his trunk, His mind singing “I am safe now, I have found the key, This key to the wild pasture, and the mind Outside the stars.”—“Enough to kill a hundred,” He thought, “instantly, without pain.” Another day-dream Often possessed him, he was Attila, Genghiz, Or Alexander, and leading hundreds against thousands battered with conquest The armed nations and the continents; often he played his game on the map, he found the Mongol tribesmen Air-planes for ponies, he commanding they invaded the world. He spread one wing over wide Asia, And one over the two Americas. This was in the year nineteen-thirteen, when courage, Not come to the act, dreamed in men’s minds. He had got another and more lonely mode of revery: Himself solitary, possessing power over the elements, to cause earthquake, call storm, Fold himself in thick cloud and rule the thunder, hunted by men, warring against mankind, Scornful and dangerous. Always in his dream he strove against many, There was no peace in his dream. 3. Nor in his father’s: The old man would wake at night to stare at the darkness That hides the turn of the world. Annihilation? Existence? How? What sort? Could no one tell, No book teach him? No glimmer of certainty? He read Those records of the talking dead and found Nothing but doubt. He was alone; his wife Remained Christian, himself had never renounced The faith, not publicly, could not take counsel Of anyone but the books. And Audis his wife Being twenty-two years younger than himself 5

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Was a cold comrade now in his old age And far enough yet from having to confront The dreadful fact, the end . . . the change . . . what change? Does it fly away? Does it wither? Yet it was Audis Helped him; she’d a clairvoyance that he always Shrank in from, now again she appeared to feel The maturing of his mind. “It would be better,” She said, “to find out for yourself than read The other men’s findings.” She had heard talk lately Of an honest woman in Pacific Grove Through whose trances the dead were heard speaking, And who had veridical visions, or at least Was said to have had. “I’ll ask where you can find her. A Mrs. Nelson.” He suspected mockery In Audis’ words; none showed; yet in defense He said “I have other studies, I have not time, It needs rigid perpetual control, Worthless without.”

psychic liaison between father and son—extraordinary rapport that continues through life and beyond.

The war is forecast in Rose Nelson’s vision.

. . . . Now it happened to him, To Dr. Barclay, one of those complications Of obscure incident that seem to have meaning, Yet there was none, the event proves, or it escapes Rose Nelson’s vision of Edward killing the Our comprehension. As if a [train] of purpose sun. This seems to him to represent his Utterly unrelated to humanity imaginary war against many. It brings his Should catch the witness in its wake by hazard, subsequent killing of his father into that circle. He perceives consequences that lead . . . where? . . . Nowhere . . . or he is dropped out of it . . . it may go on Mahadev But he is dropped out of it. . . . Dr. Barclay that night Suffered a curious dream: (It was his belief that he dreamed rarely:) on waking He had a diagram of concentric rings in the mind’s eye; it was rayed by a long channel. Later in the day, having occasion to write something, he found his pen tracing this figure. While he considered it with a dim emotion the unremembered dream came to his mind

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And was remembered. An old stone house, Big blocks of square-hewn granite, mostly plastered over, stood central in the rings; a round tower Pierced the house and topped the roof . . . now, as he reimagined the dream, the rings were hard to imagine. They were perhaps round walls enclosing the house? The channel cutting into them was a roadway, For in the dream he had walked there, it led him out of the rings To a place of tomb-stones. Others were there walking, but in the circumscription And cavernlike twilight of dream not clearly seen. One of the graveyard slabs was clear though, It was wrought with neither name nor date, but with that diagram of the rings and the ray from the center. Now seeing it in his memory of the dream cut in a gray stone he thought “Mahadev . . . Mahadev They call it in India—I [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] somewhere—why, I myself have [ ][ ][ ] Carved in the stone in Brittany. He couldn’t think what brought that into his mind. Audis, after a fortnight, Persuaded him to a house where Mrs. Nelson, The medium she had spoken of, under dimmed light Murmured what people thought authentic messages From spirits that had passed death. Though Dr. Barclay Took no part in the [necromancy] he was at least Attentive; it seemed to him that the woman was honest; The wife of the Point Pinos lighthouse keeper, And took no pay for her prophecies. If one could take her Out of the circle of too credulous people Her powers might be worth studying. He went with Audis To visit the lighthouse where she lived; they had never been there. They drove over the hill and round by the sea. On one side, through the wind-bitten old pines, Lay a bare graveyard; on the other the grounds of the lighthouse. They came to a white gate

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And entered; having run down the long driveway Dr. Barclay caught breath, it ended In a circular road around a circular hedge Of old wind-beaten cypress; in the midst, the house; Big blocks of square-hewn granite, mostly plastered over; and the round tower Crowned with its lantern Pierced the house and topped the roof. The diagram of the rings and channel, The house pierced by the tower; and—now he remembered— Even the graveyard that the channel led to. All this the northwind’s fog [enclosed], as most often The fog [hangs] at Point Pinos, with the circumscription And underworld twilight of dream; And he had dreamed all this place a month before. Surely he had never seen it . . . surely. . . . Then Audis Startled him, for she said “It has a style of its own, A megalithic air, this place, a cup-and-ring marking In large. No wonder that the woman has visions.” “A cup-and-ring marking?” he asked. “A symbol The people who set the stones on end in Brittany And westward, used to cut into their stones. What it means no one knows. We saw it at New Grange Among the spirals. Concentric rings around a cup in the stone, A groove run outward from it. The road and the circles, The house in the midst.” “Oh, now,” he said, “I remember.” He thought “There is some extraordinary connection. This, and my dream, and the old stones.” “Shall we go inside,” He said, and they entered through a gate in the hedge, Under an arch of the clipped hedge. No token Of recent human life in the enclosure; Old brick patched with sea-stone for pavement; a few geraniums Strayed in the borders. They heard the door-bell jangle Far back in the cave of the house but no one came, And wandering between the house-wall and the hedge They came on a young girl in the rear courtyard Standing vacantly, gazing at nothing, who started Like a touched lizard when they came behind her And turned with large dark eyes where laughter and dread

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Seemed house-mates. “We rang the bell,” said Audis. “No one Came . . .” “You want to see the tower: I’ll call father.” Dr. Barclay had laid his dream and the strangeness Aside to be considered after a while, “Mrs. Nelson lives here,” he asked, “I met Mrs. Nelson Lately: and we came to speak to her: though the tower too— We’d like to see it, we’ve never been here before Although we live in Carmel.” She slipped in-doors, And after the old sea-man her grizzled father Had led them into the lantern of the tower, Displayed the light, and they had descended again The worm-drill of the stair, came Mrs. Nelson To meet them in the hall of the house. “My daughter Told me—Oh, it’s you Dr. Barclay. My husband Captain Nelson, Mrs. Barclay.” “What sort of a doctor?” The old lighthouse-keeper asked, frowning. “Of divinity,” Said Barclay. “And you hark to voices, like her, How else came you to meet her? The book of the Word Isn’t enough?” “You live here,” Barclay answered, “Out of the world, you don’t know what great waves Beat in the world of thought against belief In spiritual things and the life after this life. Such talents as your wife’s the wisest men Seek out to study them. We do not say the dead Speak through her, we do not know. But I came to ask Whether she could at times come to my house And let me try the voices.” “Study the devil,” Said Nelson, and his gray eyes under the gray hair Stormed. “That’s where they come from.” “If they are false We shall find it out.” “The old Serpent is too wise For men like you,” said Nelson. “I have noticed before That almost all parsons are fools.” He turned Into one of the inner rooms and shut the door Behind him. Then Mrs. Nelson, “I will come If you want me to.” “To-morrow evening?” “Oh, yes,” She answered, shyly coloring. “He will be angry, But in the evenings he has the light to think of.

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I do my work, I don’t see that it’s wrong, After the housework is all done and the mending, To use my gift. And I will take April with me.” 4. He had come before the hour, and did not wish to wait In possible conflict with old Nelson at the lighthouse. He stopped his car outside the gateway And wandered into the graveyard over the road. The stones, and the dim evening, recalled his dream, So that half consciously he looked for a stone with the cup-and-ring symbol. The last red faded West, and the whistling-buoy anchored off-shore Snored with the movements of the waves. The lighthouse tower rhythmically unrolled and folded Its fan of light, silhouetting the tops of the pines, and the sea made a murmur. Dr. Barclay Felt himself shamed by so much calm. Be fretted for the soul’s future Under the waves of the great rhythm of day and evening? Be agitate, ask anxious questions When all the world moves to slow dance-music, impassive and exalted, the tides, the seasons, Life and decay and light and twilight, the growth of the pines, ring over ring from the pith. “It is true. It would be better to walk in the night and not ask questions. The rings are quiet and their center Except that slash cut through them. Man’s anxious mind? I am travelling it now inward,” he said; he had opened The painted gate and moved along the radial road into the circles. Mrs. Nelson Was waiting for him, flushed face and shining eyes under the slow eclipses of the beacon. Her daughter followed. “This is April, Dr. Barclay. Yesterday You spoke to her when you came, when no one answered the bell. Let her sit by you, And I will sit in the back: I must be quiet and collect power.” The light above them

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Moved over the open car and Dr. Barclay Saw it focussed in the girl’s eyes as she turned, And felt a fatherly tenderness, the eyes were so large, Though she was no doubt seventeen. What a strange life For a child to endure in the old lonely place here, With such a father, and such a mother. “You’ll be warm enough?” He said, “It’s a cool night.” “Oh, I’m never cold. We’re used to the northwind.” He felt like a caress Her eyes watching his hand manage the levers At starting; he said “You like to drive?” “Oh, very much. We have a horse and a buggy, but to-night’s The third time in my life I’ve ridden in a car.” We have only an echo of energy, but released When they began the climb from Monterey from the animal needs acts, the economy of the Over the ridge, Mrs. Nelson leaned forward: body, what is left can do much. “Tell him the story, April, about the two vaqueros Most of living energy is used up in merely living. The dead do not have to live, they That found the baby on the hill.” “Oh, that? are therefore more able to concentrate on a But I don’t think it’s true. They say two cowboys single course of remembered passion. Were riding home from Monterey in the evening And heard a baby crying in the bushes Beside the road, up there, near the top of the hill. One of them held the horses, the other looked for it And found it under a willow. He took it in his arms, But when he was in the saddle again it said ‘Look at my teeth.’ ‘Look at your teeth?’ It opened its mouth Full of big teeth and all blackened with burning, And smoke and sparks came from its throat. He threw it Back into the willows and they never stopped galloping Till they came home. The old Spanish people here Have such queer stories.” “That is indeed a queer one,” He laughed, feeling the child’s presence Like a delight beside him, it was delightful To drive behind the long stream of the lights Under the sleeping pines, the winding road Down from the ridge, vistas of glowing vapor In the curves of the forest. “My wife,” he said, “Has asked the Morheads to our house this evening, The marine painter and his wife, nice people. Do you think your mother will mind? They can go home: 11

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They live near by us.” “I think that she’ll be glad, It will be better with two more.” They slid Down through the pines into the sleepy village, Carmel, which in those days had but few houses Under many trees, few lights fretted the evening, And coming out of the wood onto the Point The whole sky with its stars, and the wide sea Surprised them, and a wind blew out of the valley. They came to the house. Mrs. Nelson took charge Actively, her chair was set in a chosen place, The others arranged opposite; the lamps were shaded or extinguished, And settling into her chair the woman appeared sombrely happy, ripe with revelation, A dark weight purring in the room, purring to herself With confidence in her power. One heard cloth moving, soft breathing, the medium’s body Was moved in her chair so that she sat more upright, purring audibly with a happy slumber. April regarded the faces in the shaded lamplight: Morhead’s, the painter’s, finely chiselled, Dark brows, a shade of disdain; he looked much older than his wife, she was not young, but beautiful, Perhaps thirty years old, slender and beautiful, full of life and desire, her eyes, thought April, “Like mine, though not so large.” Her features too and her stature resembled April’s. She appeared impatient, And it was true that “mother makes us wait long, and looks queer sitting there asleep, bolt upright. If only she’d begin soon.” Mrs. Morhead Leaned, laughing softly, to whisper to Audis Barclay, Who nodded, and then suddenly, “We’re tired waiting,” Said Mrs. Barclay, “Have you nothing to say?” But Dr. Barclay: “No, no. Have patience. In a strange place It must take longer at first.” And April, nodding: “Yes, it will take longer.” And like a child Repeating something learned in school: “Does anyone,” she said carefully, “Wish to communicate this evening?” Her mother’s lips moved in the shadow and after a moment

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The words grew audible, the medium’s voice, roughened a little: . . . “out of the burning sky,” it murmured, “Into this fog-bank where it is hard to finger the keys and make plain talk. Faces and faces Gathering around a little reddish light in the fog . . .” the words ran into an inarticulate Stream of broken sounds, and then the medium stiffening herself in the chair, her eyes half opening: “Now Captain Muscarve will speak.” The voice changed; it was still the woman’s, disguised and coarsened: “I was the master of the Ann Williams out of San Francisco homebound for Liverpool, the fog-bank And one of your damned northwesters broke us on Point Joe, we drifted ashore among the cargo. A wave broke on a rock, all in a minute I looked down out of the white air and saw my carcass rolling with its head split open And the other rats crawling ashore. Jim Truro came along in the sky shaking and grinning And we looked for his but couldn’t find it, it was sunk under.” “How long ago?” asked Dr. Barclay. “Might be six years . . . or sixty.” “You can’t remember, Captain Muscarve?” “The Ann Williams.” “You don’t keep time Where you are now?” “Eh? what in hell should we keep time for? Her drift’s on the rock yet, Look for a date.” Mrs. Morhead was smiling Toward her husband, who said: “I think that Jane could tell you— There’s someone here could tell you, Captain Muscarve, How long ago it happened.” But Mrs. Morhead: “Let me ask him . . . please. . . . How many were saved out of the ship, the Ann Williams?” “All but me and Jim Truro.” “Why, no,” she answered, “didn’t you see the boat turn over, Captain?” “Who are you?” it said; and carefully: “There was a fog.” “Do you remember Hanvec?” “Certainly I remember the wreck.” “Hanvec. There was a Frenchman in the crew, do you remember a Frenchman?” “Frenchy,” it said. “Vous parlez.”

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“He came from Brittany, his name was Pierre Hanvec. One of your men.” “Ah, dive for the ship’s papers,” It answered sulkily, “do you think I took them with me?” Then Dr. Barclay: “Will you tell us How you live now? Are you happy? What do you do?” “Nothing. They won’t give me another billet.” Mrs. Morhead again: “Ten years. It was ten years ago, Captain. You struck in the night; at sunrise you began to break up; you launched a boat and a raft, the boat Smashed in a minute and the raft was licked clean, the swell increasing. What was your cargo, Captain?” “You know so much,” it answered, “don’t ask questions.”—“Hanvec stuck to the ship, in the afternoon He floated on a spar, I swam in the surf and saved him; none of the others Lived; he has worked for me since then, he is my gardener. He’s had enough of the sea; he didn’t tell me Your name was Muscarve, he said it was—what? What was your name, Captain?”—“Muscar—Masters— I was the master of the Ann Williams . . .” “Did you really,” Said Mrs. Barclay, “save that Frenchman from the shipwreck? You saw the ship breaking?” “Yes, I was there, There was a crowd on the shore, the country cowboys Tied their spurs on their ropes and flung for silks That floated out of the hull, unrolling in the water. Hanvec was drowning, none of the men helped him, But I could always swim and I brought him out. Somebody threw us a rope.—What was your name, Captain?” There came no answer. Mrs. Morhead whispered Smiling, “His name was Marlow. No doubt we forget names. The wreck’s a country story and Mrs. Nelson Must know it by heart: why doesn’t she tell it better If it’s her own unconscious mind speaking?” “Ah, true,” said Barclay. “Strange, it is strange.” He saw The look of trouble in April’s little face And the dark lakes of her eyes, “No one,” he whispered “Doubts your mother, not for a moment, these very errors Prove honesty—perhaps more,” and touched her hand Tenderly; and a new voice came from her mother: 14

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“That old unhappy man, you’ve sent him away into the darkness. It’s badly done for one who will die To mock one that has died already, Jane Morhead with the drowning-mark over her eyelids One that has died in the water: a time will come and you in your turn Jane Morhead Strain without flesh down the steep fog-bank To reach the little reddish light in the horror of the fog and speak to the living: then remember In the impotence and the scraps of memory Name, date, and all, and to be laughed at.”—“What do you mean,” said Morhead, “Not ask questions, not correct obvious mistakes? Hear Madam Oracle.” “Let her alone, Julian, Don’t spoil it, she’s delightful,” Jane Morhead laughed; and Dr. Barclay: “You have not understood. Mrs. Morhead is right to ask questions and correct mistakes: a spirit to prove its presence Must give its evidence: we must compare the evidence, its memories with our own: how prove survival Without memories?” “Can you living,” it answered, “remember the future? Remember me next autumn, She will be here then, through this mouth talking, and the world of the nations Be split eastward.” “You talk strangely,” said Barclay, “Who is it speaking?” “Write this down,” it answered. “You have wretched memories. Write, if you want evidence.” “But what do you mean? Say clearly. Tell me who is talking.” “The spirit that can give evidence without memory. Proofs dripping-new out of the future. Write though, Write,” it repeated. The medium’s hand moved as if writing. [one or more pages seem to be missing here]

5. The tide of the year drew seaward leaving poppies And lupine-flower for wrack on the headlands. At the entering in of April Edward came home;

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The Easter holidays. He had grown taller since Christmas And widened chest and shoulders, growing out of boyhood, So that his head appeared no longer a fruit Too heavy for the stem. A certain sulkiness in him Troubled his mother: in childhood he had been frank But not for years; but when he came at Christmas He had been talkative the first day; he had nothing To say now, and it seemed more to conceal. He always stood guard over his thoughts. His father Feeling him vaguely hostile forbore to question him; Barclay had laid the claims of the boy’s future On other men, on the university; and was busied Also with other thoughts than of his son. The churches of the peninsula had planned An Easter service on a hill, like the one in the south On Rubidoux; and Barclay having been pastor Of a big city church was asked to lead it. He, flattered in his retirement, and elate At having (he believed) in a more recent Luckier seance than the first found justification For the Easter faith in life after this life, Consented; the day approached now, and what to say In the dawn sermon was difficult to think of. A need of ambiguity: he did not share The childish creed of these believers; he must not lie, Yet he must not offend; surely he also Was Christian, he also believed in immortality . . . Surely . . . or was it possible None of these anchors held now? He had not for long Tested the worn foundations of his life, And circled with a pain like darkness he left the house And walked the road in front, over the sea-cliff, “Surely I believe,” he sighed. The ocean . . . ocean . . . Spoke power; the granite . . . persistence . . . But the granite would wear down, grind into clay and sand, The ocean like any globe of dew wither in the morning, “Even the atoms of the elements, their new analysis Tells us, are mortal: power, yes, endures, 16

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What action, what conflict among the auditors, to dramatize the sermon on the mount?

Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

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Is it any consolation to us? I believe it endures, But wait till the last analyst tries it . . .” Suddenly he did not dare take one step forward For fear of walking into the gulf, the grave there, the enormous Gape with the shelving edge . . . his eyes knew perfectly The cliffside road went on unbroken, but his fear said It was split under his feet: he did not dare take one step forward But gazed into the depth, down, down and down, Not even a darkness . . . no veil, clear depth. . . . He had suffered it more than once before, but not so vividly; The cold sweat had not moved under the hair on his forehead Before; and he had convinced himself the threat was not real, and had gone forward. This time what saved him Was a girl’s face that floated up out of the gulf, April Nelson’s face, something the eye could catch at In utter vacancy. . . . When the vision, may one call it, Faded he was left pondering its significance (this was the habit of his mind Toward rare occurrences): the girl’s face that saved him . . . the person . . . the face, the soul, the essence of the person . . . It had survived, it had floated up out of annihilation . . . the inestimable value Of human individuality . . . a sign granted him? The power behind power, the mind beyond minds Had sent him a vision for a symbol? And why April’s? Was there some bond, occult relation Between the old man and the young girl? Unformed, untaught—but a human soul, therefore of value Utterly not to be reckoned. He remembered the uninterpreted diagram of his dream, The plan of the lighthouse that had answered it: was it April, was it her mother’s oracles, the dream foreshadowed? He seemed to be walking among wonders . . . and lifting his eyes to the sweet curve of the hill southward He thought, “In this excess of ignorance, we in the dark, hands and tokens touching us, but whence No man in the world knows . . . We cannot live without hypothesis, light that may prove false, but it is better than darkness, And I, if I base my thought on this hypothesis of the soul’s survival, not a liar. 17

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Here signs are sent me to speak freely. I will prepare nothing against the Easter sunrise, But speak my heart; and what the spirit of the world sends me to speak.” He gazed at the sea, the sea-fog Banking aslant off Cypress Point, and turning toward the south he gazed at Lobos, like someone Wakened to joy out of an evil dream. 6. Like the early church Meeting in secret, a few worshippers With faint lanterns struggled in groups up the hillside, up the troubled darkness. The veil of the night in the pine-boughs made division Between the winking gleams of lanterns and the ancient star-gleam, No one could see the flowers that his feet trampled, But they felt the wetness of the grass. Below, in the road, the long rays of the headlights of late-comers Played, and the people on the hill Could hear the motors rattle and stop, and the voice of a man Quieting his horses. The hill above the toll-gate On the road between Carmel and Monterey had been chosen, For though the slopes are wooded a glade at the top Opens to the east. Here in the dark the pitiful flock, A hundred perhaps, gathered about the cross of untrimmed pine Planted in the earth to be their standard. The Barclays had come earlier, And Dr. Barclay arranging with a local preacher the order of service Saw the shadows with their lanterns Whisper up the hill-slope; afterwards he passed from group to group Seeking his wife and his son; he passed a shadow Of which he knew that it made him glad before he knew Who it was; it was April Nelson, Her mother by her. “Oh, you are here! To you This Easter festival has a surer meaning,” He said to Mrs. Nelson, “than to many. How did you come? You drove?” “April can harness 18

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The horse as well as any boy,” she answered. “Come and let’s find my wife,” he said. “My son’s come home, I was looking for them.” They found Audis and Edward Standing apart from the others. Few words were spoken; In the cold darkness all who were present Felt themselves like fled spirits that have left behind Empty lives, and there is nothing to remember; But yet at meeting Edward Mrs. Nelson Caught back her breath. A dreary singing began Where certain choristers under a gasoline lantern Were stationed in a thicket behind scenes; At the signal Dr. Barclay went off to his place; The Nelsons drifted away from Audis and Edward And stood behind them. “This was meant to be a song of rejoicing,” Audis whispered to her son. “Our people have grown away from festivals. It is useless trying to revive them, the spirit is outgrown. In the east of Europe They go with glad faces at their Easter: ‘Christ is risen!’ Imagine the people here Crying out that Christ is risen.” “Mother,” said Edward, “do you believe he is risen? What do you believe, Mother?” He had not before since he came home Spoken like one forgetting himself, nor without dim hostility, and Audis was glad, But could not answer. Could she say that she believed what the church teaches? But could she say She disbelieved it? “I must think . . . must think . . . later we’ll talk together About these things.” The voices of the singers rose without sweetness In an edged cry out of their thicket. The east had grown light. Mrs. Nelson whispered to April: “That boy, old Dr. Barclay’s son, has terrible thoughts. I cannot tell whether he has thought them yet. I smothered a cry When we spoke to him, I saw dark rays Framing his face in the darkness. Remember what I say, for sometime He will be terribly known: perhaps I shall see more in a little.” April was used to her mother’s 19

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Tales of prophetic sight, and having known them sometimes verified, with dreadful fascination Regarded Edward’s head and shoulders, outlined on the dawn-light. “The thing’s a bitter failure,” The Rev. Mr. Gore lamented in his mind, “after all my planning, all our trouble. The music’s wretched, there aren’t a hundred people. Eight little congregations besides my own Promised me their support.—Now we can’t hear The speaker,” he thought; for Dr. Barclay Had begun speaking. His voice, choked with the dawn-hush, Cleared sooner than the light in the east. “Little flock,” he was saying, “Before I speak of what we are gathered for, Stand off in spirit and look at what the dawn sees: the wave of light That comes from the east of the world: its gray foam breaking on the mountains far off Finds the earth sleeping in springtime, the valleys dark and asleep, the shores asleep, the towns unconscious; A pagan shadow, enormous gulfs of darkness. . . . It sees on a lone hill, like a brother dawn, You, little flock, the light of your awake and shining spirits, the light of the eyes that have faith, The spirits that look beyond the world. You are withdrawn out of it, you fronting the dawn Are the pure flame of the earth drawn out of darkness, drawn to a point and focus, the flame of the altar Burning before the power that has promised us eternal life, to whom the dawns burn.” The light Increasing, they could see his figure darken against it on the rough platform, tower up against it And take their minds with his thought; he skilled in speech, using through the habit of years The unapparent tricks of eloquence. Four minds there were not given to him; his wife and his son Whispered together of other matters, and Mrs. Nelson Evoked a vision and whispered to her daughter. 20

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“You are few,” he was saying, “few as the first disciples. You have great faith; you stand on a hill over the darkness; out of you here, out of this small seed God may begin to build his nation.” Edward was whispering to his mother, “I must tell you sometime. I’m not going back.” “What do you mean, what are you saying?” “I’m not going back to Berkeley, mother. For three weeks now I have attended no classes; I couldn’t waste my time.” “What—what did you do?” “Walked in the hills, or by the wharves. Father has taught me enough, the things that one can learn out of a book. And mathematics I wouldn’t study. I’m tired studying. I watched the air Move on the hills; and the blue water. He will be angry; but he can do nothing. I thought What can he do? If he won’t keep me I can go to work at something.” The light seemed suddenly Doubled, for standing rays appeared in the east of heaven; the mist over the saw-tooth mountains Far east was like a fixed billow; one small gray cloud Turned red as if a lamp were lighted within it. And Dr. Barclay: “After he was tortured to death On such a mast as that one”—he pointed toward the cross—“the life returned to him. It was the path That every human spirit will tread or has trodden. Have you thought of life returning, the incredible sunrise? Faintness and blackness; even pain decays and passes; the shock of death, darkness more thick than midnight. Then the dim glimmer on the freed spirit: perhaps it brings a little pain, as a man revived From drowning suffers pain: no matter: it grows, brightens, spreads flaming wings, as the morning yonder Shoots rays of light into the sky. Light. Life. Enlargement. It grows. A glory; a huge renewal. The spirit is dazzled. What has come to me, what splendor?” —“Does he believe it? He’s doing it well, isn’t he?” 21

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Edward whispered to his mother. And Audis: “Hush. I know that he believes it . . . or for the moment Believes it . . .”—“So the spirit,” Barclay went on, “grows conscious, Of itself and of its world. A spreading light. What does it see? We shall know sometime. We have faith To know it is light such as none living on this earth has witnessed. It stands in the vast morning And waits, waits for a glory beyond glories. It has full faith, it knows, it is made perfect, As we on this hilltop have faith, waiting for sunrise. Of the ineffable splendor that comes to the spirit After the body dies, springtime that clothes the winter hills and dawn that comes certainly Are given us for emblems: wait with me now and watch the glory.” April Nelson heard her mother Moan softly, and when she turned saw seizure in her mother’s face, and caught at the rigid body Before it fell. “What is it, what’s the matter?” The white lips parted and shuddered, straining at speech, And whispered, “What it means nobody knows. I saw him aim arrows at the sun and kill it. The boy there, Barclay’s. If he should kill the sun . . . ” “Come mother. It’s only a vision. You are too tired. We must go home and rest.” “No, I must warn the sun.” “Come, mother.” “Oh, I’m better. Did I scream out?” “No.” “Let me stay.” Barclay was saying: “The night has been long. I am old. But now all darkness has departed. The valleys, and the low waters Shine with clearness.” The people saw his slender figure, like a prophet’s, In the heart of the dawn, so that it seemed as if his words had made the daylight; far down beyond him They saw, as a bird sees, the broad arc of the bay-shore, the oaks, the buildings, jewels for clearness, And the last flag of mist melt over Gabilan Peak, caught in the flame at the edge of the world, And the sun rose. “There, too intense for the eyes to see, but a dim symbol

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Of the glory the soul waits in the morning of its freedom, the face of God. And there is the rising Of joyful Easter, the day of his victory over death, and of our deliverance. It is good,” he said more quietly, “to remember The sunrise of this day, and make it shining With songs and flowers.” The acid voices streamed out of their thicket. Many of the group on the hill-top Felt enriched by that sunrise, as if they had never Seen the sun rise before. The music, in the immense daylight, Acquired a plaintive and a lonely quality It had lacked in the night, it grew through its faults As pitiful as the hopes of men and women, That whittle down to likelihood ere they dare Grow conscious, and then more often freeze in the flower, But being achieved taste bitter.

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[THE O CCID E NTAL FRAGME NT ]

I 1. Randal my mother’s brother

Barclay’s Book

II I think it was too much noise about nothing. Audis my mother was the greater fool though. She in fear of seeing a fiend’s face in the papers Chose to go north to the house that she was born in And bide there, the one place that she most hated. Oh let the snake crawl home to her hole, But what a fool she was to draw the wolves along. They drove under the waning moon of the Easter And watched the morning star [arrow] through the oak-tops. (One of the passengers has murdered the driver: 24

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In this rushing and violent Bottle-neck of non birth

Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

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But that’s no matter: that was long afterwards: I tell you the war’s near.) They saw the sunrise, Smelled Monterey and bridged the Carmel River. The hills were pointed flames black against morning And nobody told me then I must go mad on one. Here’s how the house looks: remember it? I saw it yesterday Stand up over the stunted twist of cypress: Redwood logs squared and jointed, black with old weathers, The seams filled with new plaster make white stripes on it, The thing is high and cubical and striped like a zebra. So that’s the sort of tomb she crawled out of To marry the preacher and bear the parricide: they bred me for it; People must pay for their pleasures. But here I reconstruct my father: who’s dead: He came west. He built in this place. By the thick walls I knew that he was fighting against death. Something to stand at the collapse of the flesh, Tie the wild soul to; stone, undecaying granite. He happened to meet the lighthouse-keeper’s wife then. Happened? I found a page among his papers Dated about the time he outgrew his God, Years before we came west: “I dreamed three nights This figure”: a diagram of concentric circles, A line cut through them from the center outward [These notes, from the second page of this fragment, may either precede or follow the passage presented above. Whichever, cyanide as a plot element suggests that these notes, even as they project an alternative narrative arc, are closely related to the same phase of work as Storm as Deliverer (initial version).]

Storm as Deliverer

The Drunken Sacrifice at the [farm] of the [three] little [graves]

Jane Morhead Julian Morhead Hanvec Capt Nelson Rose Nelson April Nelson

Scene at sea Séance on the shore

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At the lighthouse: shipwreck Death the specter few years off and [not a gleam through the darkness]

Occidental Fragment

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Rev. Dr. Barclay Audis Barclay Edward Barclay

The Ford The lie of the Easter Sermon Audis & Edward

[ ing] to the [ ], her struggles to keep Edward from Jane Morhead. Edward gets cyanide at Berkeley, [meditating] death to himself or to his father. Let Audis do it, at the end of the war, just before Edward comes home, out of hatred of Barclay for April’s sake, and to have Edward to herself, Barclay had driven him away and would do so again. Edward’s suspicions and [certainty]: Where is the cyanide? Half of it’s gone. Her awful struggle to keep Edward, when falling from one wildness into another.

Storm as Deliverer The Acts of God Beautiful country shine again, Point Pinos Light down to the Big Sur River. [Sh ] Burn as before with bitter wonders, coast and ocean, and the Carmel water. Tongues of fire [on] the high hills leap in the [nighttime], lakes of star gleam Burn in the sea-scum [where] [it] [breaks] on the granite reefs in the [ ] fog.

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[F R AGMENTA RY BE G I NNI NG 1]

In his sixtieth year the Rev. Dr. Barclay outgrew his God. He would not stand up again in the carved oak pulpit and tell lies. Not a poor man, he could pass the salary, he resigned his pastorate; Peace was not so easily won, the creed had wrapped him chrysalislike Keeping his mind tender into old age: now, what was clear, what sure, Spectral death but few years off and he a child asking for light? He had bought a house on the Monterey Peninsula near Point Pinos, Many pine trees folded the hill, the level Pacific filled the windows; Down below, Point Pinos lighthouse tower turned the long sheaf of radiance Every night over the water, over the dunes and the dark hill. Dr. Barclay troubled with enormous doubts dreamed of the lighthouse; Light is dear to aging eyes, the dream appeared to promise something. “Come” he said to his son Edward, the morning after the third dream, “We have lived here nearly a year and never have visited the lighthouse.” In the dream he had thought of it as a symbol, something ancient, a labyrinth, Circle within circle of walls, the light for an oracle in the center. Down the road they came to a gateway, opposite lay a naked graveyard, From the gate a way led seaward to the lighthouse: Dr. Barclay Saw with a stirred mind his dream’s fulfilment, the way ended in circles

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Fragmentary Beginning 1

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Labyrinthlike, a circular road around a circular cypress hedge, Clipped and ancient, that the northwind had burnt brown, a circular pathway Lay within the hedge, and in the midst the old granite house, the tower, Circular also, pierced the house, stood high above the ridge of the roof, “Why,” he said, but not to his son, “this is the very place I dreamed of.” After the keeper had led them up the worm-drill stair into the tower, Shown them glass and bronze, the light and the turning shutter, and they had descended, “You’re a minister, sir?” the old lighthouse-keeper asked; and Dr. Barclay: “Yes.” “I wish you’d see my wife, the parsons in this country are fools.” Barclay looked at the man with wonder, a little grizzled sea-faring fellow, Wrinkled face, an atlas of old storms: “Your wife? What can I do for her?” “Tell her,” the old man answered, “where her voices come from. A talking sickness. Thinks that dead people talk through her, I say the devil will talk, not dead men.” Barclay, in the ache of the vacuum his lost faith had left behind it, Had been trying all doors, he had read the records of the talking dead, Too absurd to be believed, too circumstantial to be scorned, Spectral death but few years off, and he a child asking for light. “Is it,” he thought, “the oracle of my dream in the labyrinth of the circles?” “Gladly,” he said, “I’ll speak to your wife. We live near by; my name is Barclay.” “Oh, you’re Dr. Barclay; I know the house; wait and I’ll call the woman.” Edward Barclay went to the door, his father saying “I’ll follow presently.” Edward issuing through the gate in the hedge, crossing the circular roadway, Climbed a stile and wandered into the dunes westward, the whistling-buoy Anchored off the lighthouse foreland bellowing through the distant sea’s voice. II. Edward lay in a cup of the dunes, a rim of the ocean, gold and azure, Shone between two sand-hill shoulders; the reveries of his adolescence Gathered form again in the sun in Edward’s mind, he wandered far Over the ocean into Asia; there in the north, in the desert, smoulders Something yet of the fire that more than once beat west, nothing could bind it But it burst through the ancient empires, under Genghiz, under Timour, Under Attila, till the Atlantic edges of the world were shaken. 28

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Edward called the nomad horsemen, spoke of the ancient raids and welded The wild tribes into one weight, one terror, one weapon, himself to wield it. Dr. Barclay stood in the stiff lighthouse-parlor, in the stone labyrinth, Pictures of old ships hung on the plastered wall. The woman entered. “Dr. Barclay, this is my wife, Rose Nelson,” the keeper said, and Barclay Took the hand and gazed in the face he hoped would prove oracular for him. Heavy flesh and sombre eyes under thick Indian hair; the face Had a sweetness in it yet, she must have been pretty when she was younger. Barclay smiled: “Your husband says that you have trances and hear voices. Tell me about it.” She, indignantly: “Mayn’t I, when I’ve got the work done, Think of the things I’ve always wanted to think of ? I always have had visions. When we lived at Point Conception, three years before we came to this place, I was shelling peas in the afternoon, and looked, and saw it plainly. Saw the circles”—Barclay caught his breath to hear his dream reflected— “Saw the circles of the road and the hedge, and the house with the tower through it; Saw the graveyard over the way—that was ten years ago this summer— Everything as plainly as in a picture, and myself walking toward it. Nobody can say that I neglect my work, it’s only afterwards, In the evenings when he sits and dozes over the day’s paper, When the foxtail light goes turning through the fog under the stars, Then I let the spirits come in and speak out of my lips; my daughter Tells me afterward what they’ve said.” “Now tell her,” said the lighthouse keeper “Whose the voice is, tell her Satan’s. The dead go up or down, and no one Comes again from hell to talk, the doors open one way, and no one Comes from heaven, what, turn back from the shining of the Face to babble Out of the throat of an old woman at Point Pinos?” “I cannot tell,” Barclay answered, “without hearing. If they speak evil things they are evil. But a simple faith like yours is rare in the world, and wisest men Listen willingly to such voices, try them whether the truth is in them.” “Ah, you prove it,” said old Nelson, “that all parsons are fools,” and turning Stamped out of the room. The door shutting behind him, Dr. Barclay [The last page of this fragment has a three-inch space at the bottom, indicating it was abandoned at this point.]

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Fragmentary Beginning 1

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[VERSI ON A]

I On the north horn of the peninsula Standing back from the tides Point Pinos lighthouse Watches the dune move in the trade-wind. The house is of squared granite, between the two gables The round tower of the light piercing the house Holds the bronze lantern high above the roof-ridge. Here is the tower in the center and the house around it. A cypress hedge concentric with the tower Rings the house, a gravel driveway circles the hedge; A long drive leads from this to the white-washed gateway. The house is lime-washed too; ancient for the country; It was built the year before Fort Sumter was fired on. The hard granite retains the [marks] of the quarry And of the building chisels; none since, no attrition, Time’s, raging southwind’s, equinoctial trade-wind’s, That has beaten a younger eucalyptus planted Near by, against the stable, to a low arch, And kills the cypress twigs on the northwest. 30

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Rose Nelson dying of cancer: Edward and his father separately thought perhaps this terrible swollen figure on the bed, kept for months under opiates, is the author of everything. He and April, the lighthouse, the stars, all, are but the dreams of her drugged sleep.

Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

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II The Rev. Dr. Barclay outgrew his God when he was fifty years old: the creed like a chrysalis Had kept his mind tender; a child emerged out of the shell, hurt, bewildered, triumphant. An honest child; and when he stood in the carved oak pulpit to tell lies on Sunday mornings The child would break the sermon in the midst, scrutinize the thoughts, balk at the prayer. He dreaded scandal; he’d means enough to live without the salary; he resigned his pastorate, Pleading ill health. The plea was honest; his health had broken. He went to the house of his vacations On the Monterey peninsula; among the pines, over the ocean, near Point Pinos lighthouse. He enlarged the house for books and permanent living; he’d perhaps twenty years to fling at the mystery, Fifty from those three score and ten: some twenty years of studious leisure; he might know something Before sunset; at least have learned to accept with strength and peaceable mind the strangeness of things. III His wife, his son’s mother, died the next year. He lied to her; he played Christian when she was dying. What other drug was there to soothe the dying? The strange thing that he did not know: she, the believer, Cared nothing for the promises; all her failing Faculties gathered at the difficult exit Agonized there, looked out for nothing next-world: He, the unbeliever, by his own conscious falsehoods Was comforted and quieted. She died in the evening, About bed-time. The nurse stroked shut the eye-lids That struggled up to the light yet. 31

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Version A

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Dr. Barclay Felt the almost happiness of long strain ended. He thought “Am I so heartless?” and looked at his son Edward, whose shoulders heaved and shuddered, his face Hidden in his hands. “He indeed grieves; but mine Will last longer, though lacking tears.” IV An hour later— He’d gone to his study and had been pacing back and forth beside the book-shelves, quieting his thoughts,— He struck his forehead with the flat of the hand, “It is contemptible of me to feel so faintly Hers, when the thought of my own . . . what is my life now but a . . . trembling preparation for it? What I’ve been reading? this mystic: who makes no appeal to me: what is to me, whether resolved Into the light and thought of the world, or into darkness? Either way lost . . . lost . . . : and these records Of the talkative dead; talking through some entranced woman; who keep, it appears, Personality; their whole labor to prove it. I half believe. If it were true, she lives then. I shall live too. How slight,” he thought in the honesty of the moment, “her presence, that leaves hardly The ache of a void behind. In Edward no doubt. He will be comforted.” Barclay turned out the light And stood at the window. Moonlight through gray cloud. Three black pillars Roughened with little branches: two pines left of the window, One on the right. Between them, over the dark shore far down, gray sea. A violent brightness Shone in the midst of the picture, for the lighthouse Turned its ray up the hill. The light swept into silence. In half a minute the violent brightness Returned; swept into silence; the violent brightness Returned; swept into silence; the light dazzled the eyes, the incessant returns blinded the brain, 32

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Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

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The slow half-minute rhythm; the violent brightness Returned; swept into silence; the violent brightness returned; the tides move up the shore and return; The sun sets and returns; the violent brightness Returned; swept into silence. . . . He turned from the window and made a light in the room. “The cruelty of rhythm. It forbids thought. How terrible is life with thought forbidden. The rhythms; innumerable rhythms; The pulse-beat in the brain to vitiate thought in the very fountain; the rhythms of night and daylight That we have invented lamps to abolish; the rhythm of the years, inexorable, sweeping me away.” V Edward Barclay lay on his bed in the darkness. He had not undressed. His passion had not been loss but pity. He thought, now it was spent, “Whether she suffered Is past.” He felt that she was freed; and himself Freed, as from chains, there was one feeling presence He would never have to fear paining again. He did not think, but felt, liberation; and saw The narrow seaward window lighten and darken Twice a minute, the long ray from the lighthouse Crossing it, the rhythmic returns that bruised his father’s Mind, quieted his with its common channel Because he was young: life, the animal tides, the rhythm Symbolized, swept his way, he had only to wait for it, That ebbed from the other. The sixteen-year-old boy Played falconer like his father with the winged mind. The man’s worried the blind cloud death, yellow eyes And sharp wings beat no prey from, or but phantoms; The boy’s quartered another nearer future. He had made himself a waking dream and used it

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Version A

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Against the world: he self-mistrustful, ruled by his father, Ruling no one, had made a dream for refuge: Of domination: Macedonian Alexander Shaking the tower of the world . . . Tamburlaine . . . himself Edward Barclay . . . he had written a bloody history All over the blank pages of his future, He against the people: he had gone west into Asia, Wakened Mongolia out of the ancient slumber, The wild riders gathered to him, he had made them a wedge To split Asia, flung the west on Europe, the east Intolerable over America, and ruled, One terror, the twin destructions of the world. It had begun so bloodily but as he grew older The dream was changing, Asia outweighed the victories, The enormous mythical and most ancient continent Called to him like a mother:—not this false mother, The mother perhaps of his body, the slight nature That died to-night:—no, but to enter Asia: The sacred coasts, the unmastered rivers, the incredible mountains: To watch the Himalayan snows before dawn And talk with the human Gods in the great desert, Where incarnation after reincarnation Hives wisdom in old walls . . . Thus father and son Followed their dreams; the dead lay quiet in the house, And did not, it is thought, grieve at desertion. VI Barclay, sitting alone in his study, observed his hand Drawing circles on blank paper; concentric circles, a ray slashed from the center through the circumference. His mind had been absent; but now it returned and saw what the hand had drawn: a cup-and-ring marking The old masons cut in stones at Carnac and north in the islands? He wondered had the figure a meaning? The rings might signify enclosure: the old form of the world, sphere within sphere: the ray cut through them, 34

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Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

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Escape? The way of the spirit, of the freed spirit? But when he would have meditated the symbol His mind went to the nearby lighthouse: it stands ring within ring, enclosure within enclosure; The house encloses the tower, the circular hedge encloses the house, the circular driveway the hedge; Then there’s the long drive to the lime-washed gate, that slashes the circumference and flees outward. Perhaps it was this the hand was drawing. And beyond the gate? The highway. And beyond the highway? The graveyard. Far over the road, opposite the gate to the lighthouse, lies the wind-vexed graveyard Edward’s mother Was buried in last year: that’s what they meant by the emblem, Who built the light-tower and shut it in with circles, half a century ago: the way of escape Points to the graveyard? O bitter dust! [now] [come] at once to Rose Nelson.

After Edward’s Latin lesson was over, he said “Let us visit the lighthouse.”

VII Barclay as he believed dreamed seldom; but lately the lighthouse Haunted his nights: the throbbing rhythm, the animal . . . why did he think of it as animal rhythm? Astronomical rather . . . unless it were a heart pumping the night with light-blood: . . . and often The fabulous form, the tower piercing the house, the circles closing it in, the ray slashed through them: He’d roam in his dream a labyrinth of many circles; but ever—he thought it strange—not seeking Escape, but toward the center; there was a prize at the center: what then? An oracle, some vital secret, Under the light, at the tower’s base, in the midst of the labyrinth. It was like the Sphinx keeping its wisdom. Because he dreamed of it at night he thought of it in the mornings. He thought the driveway cutting into the circles Was like the bar between two poles, two opposites, The poles of a magnet: the light-tower, plus; the graveyard, Minus: life, death. He dreaded the woman’s figure, 35

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Version A

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Edward’s mother, might rise at the bad pole Out of her earth and beckon to him. For sometimes He had seen her among his dreams: he dreamed too much Lately: she always carried a taint of earth Or a green pallor: some badge of the not-living: And always, like Alcestis, mute: like the plus-minus Figure in algebra: ±: half way between poles. He thought to himself he had loved her very deeply, But it was painful to him to dream about her Now that she wore the badge of the not-living. The light-tower: sometime he would visit the lighthouse; He had never been inside, it was so near by. VIII The housekeeper, Mrs. Wilkinson, had borrowed Books from Dr. Barclay to read in the evenings. He had few novels; she read religious books And psychical research records; and once Returning a book she spoke about a medium Known to her, who lived near by. “Where?” “At the lighthouse. Her name’s Rose Nelson. The wife of the lighthouse-keeper.” It seemed to Dr. Barclay that she struck Into the heart of something secret in him. What, his night-dreams, his private thought?—Nothing, Of course: coincidence: an odd one: such coincidence Goes far to explain strange matter in these same records. He asked, subduing his tone to careful negligence, Had Mrs. Wilkinson witnessed her acts Of mediumship, the Mrs. Nelson’s? “No sir. A neighbor of mine” . . . she was rich with all detail About the neighbor’s troubles, and her own troubles, But had forgotten what the neighbor witnessed. . . . Or was it, Barclay wondered, coincidence? Perhaps a vague telepathy, some faint clairvoyance, Had made him dream an oracle in the light-tower.

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Edward’s lessons

Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

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IX Though Edward was to enter the university This autumn, his father who had been his chief tutor Reviewed nothing with him, he needed not fear Examinations; each day, the hour before noon Edward must come to his father’s study and recite Some new lesson in mathematics, and give Forty lines of new reading, Greek or Latin. That summer for the sake of contrast Barclay Had chosen De Rerum Natura and the Prometheus, Alternate days. Contrast of poem with hearer: They had entered the fourth book of the Roman six, The book of the image-theory, that hunts down The old superstition of the soul’s survival To its origin in false dreams and hollow specters: When Barclay, as the reading ended: “This afternoon We’ll go and ask the keeper to show us the lighthouse. We’ve lived a long while neighbors to it and never Yet been inside.” Some catch in the nerves made it hard for him to speak calmly. He was glad that Edward seemed to notice nothing. He wondered was it sullenness or unhappiness Had changed the boy’s eyes in the past year. Both father and son averted their looks from the bleak graveyard And turned in at the lime-washed gate. The long driveway led down into the circles: they rounded The circular hedge, they entered it through an arch in the clipped cypress: black twigs toward the northwest, Killed by the wind, dead thicket [glowing] internally, fired with little tumors of rust-red fungus.

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Version A

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X They had climbed the worm-drill stair into the tower and stood in the bronze lantern: then Dr. Barclay: “That’s our house yonder among the pines: we see your light in the evenings: we’ve been a good while neighbors And never visited you before.” “Oh: you’re the minister from the city; your name is Barclay.” “Yours Nelson. My son and I,” said Barclay, “were reading an old book this morning, by an old Roman, Who speaks of ghosts, spirits and phantoms. He says they are false and have no meaning. I’m told that your wife Knows something on the subject, has had certain experiences: I wondered whether sometime She would consent to meet me and let me ask questions.” Nelson stamped angrily the bronze floor in the narrow Passage around the turning lamp: “You’re a minister, you’ve been to college: you’ve questions to ask! Come now, I’ve made the lamp spin for you; I’ve shown you everything.” Barclay went down the stair behind him In silence. Edward followed his father. At the foot of the stair The lighthouse-keeper turned on them, in the stiff room with the ships’ pictures: “I’ve noticed,” he said, “that parsons Are mostly fools. There’s one book that will answer questions.” Barclay regarded him benignantly, The small brown sea-faring man, dark-eyed and white-moustached, neat and infirm. “You know so little,” Said Barclay smiling, “closed in with a few clock-work duties. You mean the Bible, Mr. Nelson?— A good book: did you read in the Old Testament or the New how to take care of a lighthouse?” A door opened beside the stair-foot; Barclay, whose back was turned to it, did not hear the woman Enter, but Nelson saw her, and like a threatened man raised his voice angrily: “Ask her questions? No, I’m the master in this house.” The woman came forward and said smiling, “You’re Dr. Barclay.

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I’ve often seen you. I told my husband yesterday you’d be coming.” “That we’d be coming?” “I often,” She answered, “know what’s coming.” Then Nelson proudly, “She does: she told me yesterday. But the other voices Are lies and I won’t have them. That dead people come back. I say when a man dies his spirit Goes one way or the other: the doors of hell don’t open backward: and as for heaven They won’t return, no fear, not from the shining of the Face To chatter in Pacific Grove to a pack of old women.” Barclay answered, “I don’t know that. One who is very happy Would wish to tell his friends.” “They are lying devils,” Said Nelson, like a man in fear; and Barclay: “The book you spoke of says one must value The tree by the fruit: I should be glad to hear, If Mrs. Nelson were willing . . .” She answered, “My husband Can’t say that I neglect the work in the house. I do my work: only in the evenings, He dozes in his chair and the foxtail light Moves over in the fog, and all the mending’s finished, I let the blessed spirits hover about me And whisper wisdom.” Nelson muttered something Inaudible, his last show of defiance, For he was subject to her; and Dr. Barclay Addressing Nelson: “Wise men study these things For good purposes. You live here and don’t know How shaken is the world’s faith in a future life. Many believe that messages like these Will restore faith.” Young Edward moved to the door. “I think I’ll go out, Father,” he said and vanished. XI Barclay said, “May I be present sometime When you communicate with the spiritual world?” “Indeed,” she answered happily, like a woman Asked to dance by one her husband mistrusts; “But,” sounding Nelson with narrowed, somber eyes, 39

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“I think,” she said, “it would be better for us Not to meet here: I will go up to your house: I’ll bring my daughter with me, she always helps me When I am entranced.” The little lighthouse-keeper Drew himself erect, and with the air of a man Who has rebuked evil and scared it from the house Left the room, stepping proudly, and mounted the stairway. Then Mrs. Nelson: “He is good, but can’t understand, Oh Dr. Barclay, how often I have looked up at your house in the pine trees And thought that a man of education lives there, a learned man, one who could help and advise me. I have strange problems. And there are tricky spirits among the honest.” She had a gipsy darkness In the eyelids under the dark eyes, and Barclay wondered had she Latin blood, or Indian, And suddenly felt oppressed with heavy enclosures, hedged with the local circles, ring within ring, The tower in the center, himself at the tower’s base, facing the . . . what? That oracle? “What day will you come,” He said to break the silence. “Whichever you choose: to-morrow evening?” He said “Would it be better To have more people, would it increase your power? I could ask the Morheads.” “This first time, no,” she answered. XII Edward had stood in the arch of the clipped hedge and gazed over the dunes; the whistling-buoy Bellowed hoarse pulses from the shoal; he thought of Asia over the all but infinite water And sighed turning toward home. Entering the highroad he turned in to the graveyard; there were no trees there, No shelter by the stone of his mother from the open gray sky; but dusty cypresses were planted Along the fence; he sat on a gray boulder by the sick young trees and contemplated In a gray fit of misery the rectangular paths, the coarseness of the shapes of stone,

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Storm as Deliverer (initial version)

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The bitter vulgarity of so many stones beside his mother’s. His father slowly pacing Went by on the road. “I will change my name. I have nothing to do with these people.” He breathed more easily, And saw the unearthly mountains of Asia lift in secret skies; wild snow-water broke down them Through impossible gorges; the great day of the world flew over them for the end-of-the-world armies were gathered Waiting his word in India; the messengers waited; but he in a cleft of the peak, on the bare granite Humbled the fierce-eyed and white-limbed, the caught falcon his enemy’s daughter. The Gods of the height Greedily witnessed her submission. XIII He was walking homeward; the afternoon waned. He looked at the stone gates of Morhead’s place, The marine painter’s; they are opposite the path That winds up hill among the pines to Barclay’s. Mrs. Morhead was in the garden and called to him. They were going swimming in a minute; “get on your bathing-suit And come with us.” He stammered he would; and wondered “Why does she want me to come?” He had lived without playmates Under his father’s tutelage and compulsion; That was his world; he was at war with the world And any offer of truce wakened suspicion. He thought, “If it’s to laugh at me, I can swim well. And she and her husband will not laugh, though it’s known That she’s a famous swimmer.” Climbing the path Toward the straight pines he felt the low sun break Through the cloud, hot on his shoulders; he remembered A picture that he’d seen of Morhead’s painting, Brown rocks, brown sand, blue and white sea, a bare girl Erect against the ocean, gazing toward it; And though the painter had thought only of browns On blue and white, hair, shoulders, loins and thighs, 41

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The sand and the rocks in the high sun, the boy Grew feverish over the remembered picture. Perhaps the painter’s wife had been his model; The muscular carved slender back; he entered the house Quietly, to escape question, and in his room Stripped off his clothes; he stood trembling a moment Maddened with wonder, feeling the air on his flesh, Before he drew the scant close bathing-garment Over his body. It seemed to him the wild years Of his youth to come held fire before him, unbearable beauty, Terrible and incredible unions. For love Was fabulous to him; he had read about it; Studied his father’s bible for it; and the Boccaccio On the top shelf. XIV The next evening Rose Nelson and her daughter came to the house. They came again the next week; and Barclay had asked The Morheads to come, to make a circle. The painter Laughed, answering that the visible world sufficed him; But Jane Morhead, whom it more deeply sufficed, Had other motive than to hear a ghost’s voice. This boy whose shy sullenness broke for a smile, who looked if one idealized him a little Like Michelangelo’s marble David: and he could swim, that was the thing, her art, that she valued; The gosling awkwardness melted off when he entered water: he would be there, she’d know him better, A hard creature to know, but a rare swimmer: attractive though a kind of unsteady innocence Crying to be toppled. She came up later, at twilight. There were six in the room then; Barclay and his son, Rose Nelson and her daughter, Mrs Wilkinson the housekeeper,

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Quiet in one corner but the click of her needles knitting the endless mufflers, and Jane Morhead Regretting she had come. XV The woman from the lighthouse settled herself back in the chair, and gathered Her dark glances, she seemed a dark weight purring in the midst of the room, purring to herself With confidence in her powers. The eyes closed, the room was silent. “Out of the blazing sky,” it muttered, “Into this fog-bank where it is hard to finger the keys and make plain talk. Faces and faces Flocking around a little reddish light in the fog. Who’s first, who’s first? Peck each other, birds. I was the master of the Ann Williams out of San Francisco home-bound for Liverpool, the fog-bank And one of your damned northwesters broke us on Point Joe, we drifted ashore among the cargo. A wave broke on a rock: all in a minute I looked down out of the white air and saw my carcass rolling with its head split open And the other rats crawling ashore. Jim Truro came along in the sky shaking and grinning And we looked for his but couldn’t find it, it was sunk under.

I facing him am no man, not Jeffers, Nor the son of a mother Seeing the the [

] and the [

], entrails viscera

Makes me I am ashamed to speak of the active little bodies and the misty brainfulls Of [wishes], of passion, of the desire to dominate And [inflict] rule 43

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____________________ Second Book or Chapter The old rock under my house; the hills with their hard roots, and the ocean cored With sacred quietness from here to Asia: unwasted presence and sufficience Make me ashamed to speak of the active little bodies and the misty brainfuls Of perplexed passion. Humanity is needless. I said humanity is the mould to break away from, the coal to kindle, The Blind mask that needs breaking, the atom to be split. The [atom] [breaking] I say that the eyes of the people in a poem are mirrors, Their bodies are reflectors, they ache with the powers That have no name under the sun it is neither Barclay nor his household

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The Ur-Point Alma Venus

Although the manuscript for this version lacks a title, its approach to the Reverend Barclay’s story resembles the final Alma Venus attempt, which Jeffers specifically designated Point Alma Venus. This draft has been designated The Ur-Point Alma Venus to indicate that it seems conceptually, though not chronologically, directly antecedent to Point Alma Venus proper. A late page is drafted on the back of a form letter that seems to date from sometime in 1924. This suggests that Jeffers began this version after completing Tamar sometime in the first half of 1923 (and no later than August 1923) and stopped working on it no later than late summer 1924 when he began The Tower Beyond Tragedy. One additional fragment, Fragmentary Beginning 4, may be from this phase of work. The sense of verse line suggests this unit is later than Storm as Deliverer (initial version), as does the elaboration of the séance material. However, whether it is this early is largely conjecture. A set of notes that fill the upper three-fourths of the initial page precede The Ur-Point Alma Venus (see the frontispiece for a reproduction of the manuscript page): One through love and one through despair, through hatred one, and one through enormity Of crime has broken the barriers: that hawk in the south by antenatal defect 45

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Inhumanized never knew them, she was born outside them. Her ears being silent Deaf-mute from birth And her tongue mute

My father was a clergyman—outgrew his God The lust that made me

I have killed the lust that made me

The father worships mother Earth (Kali); he has come to this worship through confusion with his dead former wife, not Edward’s mother; though communicates with her through Rose Nelson I know the story of Jesus Christ dying to save us is a vain story, I know it’s falsehood God is a woman to men, a man to women; to me God is a woman. She is Venus, she is Kali, she is the mother, she is the nourisher, the fountain. (That God is not sexual) I came out of her, I return to her in a woman’s arms, I return to her Dead, when I go underground; she takes me home, remoulds me, green I grow out of her. I am fifty years old but I am strong In a storm, the conflict Everyone knows that he was crazy; he threw himself over the cliff; I found him. The end of a vicious life

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The lighthouse on some fictitious headland—by Mari Cabra canyon— to [clean] Pacific Grove. This man had strength, a running fountain of hysteria streaked his nature A running fountain of hysteria streaked the stone of his nature Why his [brother] died it seemed to him that God had [ Edward, Edward.

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][

][

] him

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[The Ur-Point Alma Venus]

I 1. The Rev. Dr. Barclay outgrew his God; he rose in the carved oak pulpit The last Sunday, and said: “I will not choose, to-day, a text from the Bible.” He stood twitching, his hands twitching, his face quivering; a running fountain Of strong hysteria streaked the stone of his nature. “To-day: I have something to tell you. Last night no sleep visited my eyes; I paced the floor between the book-shelves All night long. I have been your preacher and your pastor twelve years; thirteen now. I was deciding whether I owe duty to you or to the church; Whether to resign my pastorate quietly; without reasons, without scandal; Or to speak out and tell you. My duty is to you; you have been my people; I have chosen. Then hear me. I have been blind leading the blind. My blindness is not removed. I cannot tell yet what is true. But I can tell what is false: this book here. And the church and the creed founded on it. All false, all false, lies of the liar.

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The story that Jesus was the Son of God and died to save us: a myth Related to the myth of Adonis. It is time we outgrew childhood, outlived Dreams and dead words. You must not look to me for light, I have none to give you. All I can do is to confess that I have spread darkness; and here, and publicly, Declare that I will not spread darkness again, tell lies, stand up before you In the carved oak pulpit and tell lies on Sunday mornings.” What he said further Was lost in the noise of people rising, the congregation talking and rising, Moving to the doors. Thus he resigned his pastorate. 2. He was fifty-seven years old. The creed had been a chrysalis keeping his mind tender He stood twitching, his eyes like flames in a chalk face, And raised both arms, and shouted across the noise of the people: “You have followed false light. It is time to look further Repent. Seek the Look for a true one Repent. Look further. Seek truth as I will seek it.” Thus he resigned his pastorate. Moving to the doors, or pushing toward the pulpit. He stood twitching, his eyes Like fire in a dead face, and sobbed for breath, and shouted with all his voice Across the stir of people: “You have followed false light. Repent. Repent, I tell you. Will you be dupes until you die? You are drugged; the drug of the people, religion. Leave it off, look for the truth, repent, repent!” Thus he resigned his pastorate. 2. He was fifty years old. The creed had been a chrysalis keeping his mind tender; Now it was broken, the mind was a child’s mind. “I have strength,” he said, “I have health. Fifty from seventy leaves me twenty years perhaps to fling at the mystery

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And know something before I die. In the depression after excitement He heard his wife Audis: “Dear, what will you do now, you have made plans? I think we shall have to leave Los Angeles.” He turned fiercely: “I have burned compromise. Planned nothing. But I have been thinking of the Carmel hills where I was born. Most of the land’s been sold. There’s yet a naked hill-slope falling to the sea, A shelf of soil over the cliff, and an old house, the shell of a house. We will go.” His mind was like a city built with towers, full of a vision Of the steep coast-line south the Carmel valley, the austere hill-solitudes, the gray Enormous water washing the stone roots of the ridges, reaching to Asia . . . II The old broken cabin was remodeled and enlarged, and the three lived there, Barclay, and his wife Audis, and his son Edward. (After a year’s experience The ex-clergyman learned not to try farming on the shelf of soil, not a garden even, And not to keep cattle on the hill; he had strength for plowing and strength for riding; It was time that lacked; he had few years left to fling at the mystery; he must find time For reading books, and to [ ] visions. Vast thoughts came over the water to him From the gray fogs diagonalling the sea’s face, from the great winter sunsets; And the hills like gray flames towering, pointed flames, gray, bitter and hard. He grew strong, Edward grew strong, Audis withered, stationary were like a passion of his own, strengthening his heart 3. They camped under a hill beside the shell of a house. Barclay hired labor, Rebuilt the place, enlarged it. In spring he had broken out of the church; by winter The house was built and the three lived there; his wife Audis, and his son Edward.

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4. The hills were not so high as he remembered; yet stone pointed like flame Stood lonely and fierce; they were like a passion of his own, strengthening his heart. He had meant to give his leisure to study, to track down truth through the religions And sciences; he had brought up his thousand books; they proved contemptible to read. Words, words, a mist of guesses. He lifted eyes To the lit windows looking westward: vast thoughts came over the water like visions From the gray fogs diagonalling the sea’s face, from the great winter sunsets. He would leave the study and walk on the cliff. He grew strong, he had a prophet’s Look in the gray eyes under the gray hair; he grew strong and feared death; It never had happened to him before, to think that death was terrible: not happened At least since early childhood. Was it because life had at length grown good to him? Now he grew strong and was content; and the boy Edward grew strong; but Audis Withered; she hated the coast; turned bitter and sad. She was not forty years old yet And grew to look like an old woman. Not [from] excess of labor; their life Was simplified to the essence; and after the first months they kept a servant, A Spanish-Indian girl, stupid but willing to learn, who lived in the house And did all that was needful.

He goes into the wilderness sometime, and comes back with a beard.

Death? Must we take it blind? That is the terror. Not take it at least—fooled. “I will not,” he thought “Believe that Socrates or Christ or Buddha died blind. No?” he thought smiling. “Why hast thou forsaken me my God is not a seeing man’s cry at leave-taking. And Socrates: pathetic fancies . . . fantasies. The Buddha Perhaps: he hoped little. For me, I have twenty years to plumb the pit in. The fifty-one from seventy-one: my father lived longer. To find my certainty And not die like a . . . man!” Edward was now sixteen years old; his father With some dim instinct of self-perpetuation trusted him to no school,

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Himself taught him and ruled him. They read together each morning, Greek and Latin, De Rerum Natura, this year, and the Prometheus. Barclay forced on his son His own moods; and the Roman’s open eyes against religion, the Athenian’s Titanism matched them. In the afternoons the boy Had freedom; he strengthened his body against the summer ocean, a lonely swimmer; And rode the horse his father had given him, the steep trails of the mountain. While Barclay Went up the hill to his rock of meditation; the book that he carried with him Remained unread; he sat under the rock and hypnotized his mind With the great track of sun on the western water; gazed with the eyes of a prophet Westward; the wind lifted his hair; the same sea-wind Sustained the hawk over the hill, the one lean hawk that always hung there As quiet as the moon. 5. He had read, evenings of winter, The records of the talking dead that through the lips of a tranced woman Strain after proofs of their identical survival. He thought: “I am pushed To the precipice: if a voice comes up out of the pit shall I not listen? Do I know where the truth hides? Nothing must be contemptible. The Power, the Mockery That seems deliberately to cover its tracks, to conceal clues, and stultify All question: likely enough would cloak under the puerile and the morbid, And under vulgarities, our great secret. I will leave nothing untried, no crevice Unprobed: I will go some year to one of the flocking-places of humanity, I will go to London, and sit in a medium’s circle, and strain the muddy trickling For its grain of truth.” What he wished, came to him. He did not need to go pursuing it Eastward; for it was here on the coast. It seemed to him finding it like an answer To prayer: if prayer were answered!

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His son had heard of the woman from the Hallorans At Garapatas, half an hour’s ride south. A Mrs. Nelson, Rose Nelson, The wife of the Point Aumentos lighthouse keeper.

(Alma Venus) people breeding

It had seemed like prayer answered: If prayer were answered! “Desire,” he thought, “has power in itself, without an instrument.” Yet it seemed nothing; he went two evenings to Point Aumentos lighthouse, and once The meeting was at his own; the woman mumbled and jabbered; there was no truth in her. II 1. Barclay was up on the hill under the one lean hawk that always hung there. A frightful restlessness plucked his nerves like harpstrings, “my life slips away, and nothing . . . Nothing . . . no hole in the darkness. Fifty-two years old and not an eye-hole Opens for me; the ant under heel Is not so ignorant as I.” He rose like someone wakened from a dream And hurried stiff-jointed down the hill-slope, stumbling, sliding. He’d go to the stable, Saddle Edward’s pony, and ride . . . to Point Aumentos lighthouse? . . . Shake the woman Out of her stupidities, frighten some crumb of truth out of her mouth, Do they live or-not live? Only one question under the sky and nobody answers. . . . 2. Someone was in the stable, beyond the stalls, in the dark under the cob-webs, And he thought that he had known someone was in the stable, he had come for that reason,

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To prevent someone . . . what then? . . . his son and the Indian house-girl . . . “Who’s there? you Edward?” Rustling, no answer; Barclay’s eyes had gazed into the sun on the water But while he fumbled about the dark they undazzled; he found Audis his wife Standing against an angle of the wall, stiff as a timber studding, the eyes Like white rings: “Is it you Audis, what were you doing?” She did not answer; And Barclay saw a noose of rope looped from a beam, and that she had brought A box under to step from. “Audis!” “Go out,” she cried, “what did you come for?” Her voice was like the hawk’s cry but then it quieted. “Go out, let me alone. I was finishing what you began.” “What do you mean, Audis?” “You killed me. I was only making the corpse ready to bury. Killed my belief in goodness, Killed my religion, my spirit, brought me to this coast Where the hawks kill all song.” He thought she would weep and he would comfort her; but she: “Now I shan’t bury the corpse: it will be dangerous to you, a danger in the house, Please God a danger to you. Let the rope hang, a time may come you’ll want it. Let it hang!” She pushed past him and ran into the sunlight. He followed to the house Her voice repeating “If not myself another, if not myself the other.” [ ]—The He marvelled while he followed man’s visions, the boy’s That anyone should seek death. What, seek it? Death? To go after it, to buy it passions, with pain, the mother’s Black monster of the world, the bite of the monster? Sheer madness: unless she passion. had news, a secret, Unless she had secret tidings from beyond the stars? Nothing. Insane. Insanity. III 1. Edward rode south under the hills like silent flames in the late summer, Like pointed flames, the hills on his left, the sea on his right; the fog was far out, A streak on the blue. He met Natalia Halloran with a towel in her hand Walking near Garapatas: Natalia la Chilena, Halloran’s wife, From South America where greater mountains root in the same water: she had eyes As blue as the water, hair like black metal; the eyes burned and dulled when she met Edward. 55

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2. Her blood was mixed beyond reckoning; Italian, German, faint brown trace far back Of Araucanian Indian; her language had been Spanish and now was English. “You ride, I swim,” she said laughing, “come swimming with me.” Hawks’ eyes are yellow Or reddish-yellow; her blue was the same keenness fixed on Edward’s face, He feared with shame that all he dreamed was known to her. 3. What he dreamed? Asia . . . Asia . . . Conquest . . . recklessness . . . He had been kept alone, oppressed he thought by his father, He lonely and unimportant had woven himself a world to be the power in, In nineteen-ten, when he was five years old, the year of the comet, he had ridden A flaming steed among the stars and brought the stars into subjection. Nineteen-fourteen drew him home to the disastrous planet; he would go into Asia He would gore Mongolia out of the ancient slumber, he would gather the wild riders; He answered, “I’ve no bath-suit.” “Have I?” She unrolled the towel and shook it out like a flag. “I’ll tell you, Edward. Here are two beaches near each other with a high spit of rock between them. If we meet outside in the deep water, we’ll have the water for a bath-suit.” He felt in the heat of the day the blood drain back against his heart, and his lips Stiffen, and his fingers fidgeting with the leather of saddle and bridle, stiffen. What then? Swimming is nothing, to go swimming with someone. But he answered “Yes” Like the answer in a sacrament, and dismounted stiffly, Natalia laughing And combing the mane out with her fingers. He’d have tethered the horse beside the road, But she: “Not here: won’t he go home by himself ?” Edward looped up the bridle, Turned the head north and clapped the haunch. 56

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The pony by the roadside

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3. He saw the flash of her arm swimming Beyond the point before he had entered the water. When he approached her, “Oh Edward, Isn’t it beautiful out here, in the gold of the sun, in the blue of the water? Now look behind you.” He looked landward and saw the gray skerries and cliffs And the hills like giants. “The best time is at night though, Edward, have you ever been swimming At night?” “Why, no,” he answered. “I like it better: I build a bonfire yonder And swim in the dark: Oh, often: every week in summer: my husband lets me. You lie in the water and look at the stars, millions and millions and all colors. Then strangest thoughts: I seem to mix into the ocean: I am the ocean And lie in the night and move gently and take the stars into my breast. If it’s foggy then it’s better: then there is nothing but me: I am the ocean. I feel the rivers feed me, all the shores of the world with all their rivers. I look landward and see three lights: my bonfire like a drop of blood there To steer me home, and Woodfinn’s house-light high on the hill, and Point Aumentos Flaps a long ray over my head, it winks and turns every half minute Far off in the north.” “Oh, can you see it from here, the lighthouse?” “Look,” she answered. While he looked she was gone, and while he looked for her He felt a rising movement in the water about him and suddenly her arms Circled his knees; he dipped his head and saw the whiteness in the water And felt her hands clutch and push off. She broke the trough of the next billow, Laughing and breathing. “Catch me,” she called to him, “can you?” He turned and followed seaward The swift bright flags of broken water, he lonely and shy forgot a moment To mistrust God, the dream a moment Ran with the fact, he levelled his vibrant body with the shining surface And breathing through the bright snow of the foam burned in pursuit; then the other Slacked speed; then he drew sidelong the quick feet, drew even with the brave throat, Reached for the shoulder; she through keen foam golden with joy Turned as he reached, so that his hand that meant to have caught the hard shoulder 57

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Touched the round softness of the breast, he felt the mould and magic of it Under his fingers, the terrible soft tenderness: as if he had shot At falcon and struck dove,—pity: as if he had stooped for a stone and gathered A curd of dung,—disgust: as if he had gathered a stick and it turned serpent The shudder ran back through the stretched arm: “Now what will you do,” she gasped laughing, Golden with joy, “now that you’ve caught me?” He looked at the long sunlit wave Mounded beyond her head. “I don’t know: what would a man do? I don’t know . . .” He answered full of sudden misery. “A man wouldn’t ask!” Her eyes were reddened With the brine sting, her face was puckered with the dazzle, and Edward shrank from her As monstrous. “There is no one,” she murmured, “no one can see us. Nobody ever Was more alone Edward than we are now.” He thought it would be a cowardice To wince away from the clear challenge: the face was distorted and was floating Against his face, the eyes fire through borings in a mask, it was like the idol That devoured men with fire. . . . One arm of hers folded his neck, The other hand swimming; the salted lips pastured on his, they were cold, it was strange, He had thought they’d burn like fire; he felt against his breast the terrible softness, The erected buds . . . he would abandon his body to her, be passive, no reason For terror, no more than for desire; he felt her hand fondle where it ought not, He wondered at her . . . he wanted now, he wanted now . . . his forehead was aching: And the horror of water, the blinding ache back of his forehead; “Let me go, let me go!” He cried, his teeth clacking together, he struck the soft breast with his hand The belly with his knee: she panted, grinning at him, the face changed and was lovely, Beautiful and meek, he thought, and sad, she turning shoreward. He swam beside her Wearily, convulsed with cold. He said, “My head aches terribly, that is the trouble.” She was sorry. Near the shore they parted, to the separate beaches. 58

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When she was drowned his first thought was joy: his humiliation erased, the only witness of it removed.

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IV 1. Dr. Barclay Had been reading in his study by the sea-window, the tawny afternoon sunlight Streamed on his back and shoulders, his head and the book shadowed. “No doubt telepathy Explains the whole matter: the medium brings true facts out of her trance, she has fished them Out of the memories of her circle, ties them to some pretended spirit. She dramatizes telepathy. Telepathy is established, verified, familiar, No test that lets it in can prove anything beyond it. Devise the evidence,” He thought, “to exclude it!” He took a pencil in his hand to make notes in a tablet. His thought wandered away; he was drawing concentric circles on the paper, Ring within ring, a ray slashed from the center Through the widest circumference. He looked with wonder at what he had drawn: what working Of the deep mind, deep under consciousness, Does that symbolize? Ring within ring, wall within wall, the prison of existence? The labyrinth of our awful ignorance? Escape, the ray cut through the circles? This sort of thing they sculptured before history begins on the stones at Carnac And north in the islands: cup-and-ring markings, the old masons Drew in a dream . . . “why,” he thought, “the actual diagram of Aumentos lighthouse, Ring within ring, the round tower built around the light, and the house embraces The tower, the low stone wall circles the house, the driveway circles the wall, The old cypress hedge circles the driveway. Then, from outside, the road leads down to it Cuts in through the hedge, the path runs through the wall to the door of the house: the channel That I was drawing from center through circumference. The same,” he thought, “the old same Instinct that made the cup-and-ring markings in Carnac, it planned the lighthouse And drew my drawing. We are one humanity.—Humanity?” he thought, “It was not humanity made the circle within circle of the eight planets.” 59

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2. He loved his thoughts, it was honey to him to pursue thought and track the idea Back to its origin: “Spiritualism was in my mind and without consciousness My thought of the medium in Aumentos lighthouse made me draw it in outline Here on the tablet.” He could not know that while he was drawing it Natalia pointed out the lighthouse for his son, they swimming in the ocean. But he could feel the abounding sunlight through the window Beat on his back and shoulders; and from nowhere he knew, and rather feeling Than thought, the thought came: “I am not an old man, life is yet hot within me. What do they know, boys, of desire? When I was thirty years old, a bridegroom, I never imagined. . . . And afterwards I fought it down for Audis’ health’s sake, beastly I called it, Fool, and have cast the creed and cast the starving code and gained late liberty— For what—yoked with a suicidal maniac’s hatred to mourn dead youth, Old deep hells of waste pain? His son gaining the race reached for the shoulder And touched the breast, revolted against the terrible softness. To Barclay came back Visions that he had chased out of his mind at adolescence, voluptuous Horror of visions: however he might have widened morality still were frightful to him: “The breasts, the breasts of Helen” he thought, remembering Tennyson’s “Lucretius,” the terrible The giantess breasts, the idol thighs, the Moloch belly: he rose, moaning, He would walk on the hill, conquer the persecution, who could have dreamed these monsters Lay in him hibernant more than thirty years, no sign, waiting . . . Why monsters? Monstrous, the sacred instinct? In repression, he thought, tortured and starved, Monstrous indeed. He heard Audis move and cough in her room up-stairs, Like the stir he thought of a sick bird. He heard Maruca, The Indian girl, clatter a sauce-pan in the kitchen; he opened the door And fled like a thief from his own house. 60

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He saw the hills aching and strained With unendurable daylight blaze like pointed flames in the late summer, Pale, bare, exalted: he thought, “They also!” He thought Maruca’s Brown stolid body, insensitive, resistant, could endure all extremes, Sun, frost, starvation,—nerveless, made like a stone— Many men’s passions, or entire starving celibacy, no matter to her: We white-skinned, fragile and excitable: the explosive race, bare nerves, unarmored, Burn up at a spark. . . . His son, in the water, endured with terror Natalia’s fondness; the arm circled his neck, the mouth pastured on his, He felt the breasts, he felt the hand fondle where it ought not: they were making magic, Barclay suffered the magic, it seemed to him the air in the great sunlight Was weighted with animal compulsion, a wild beast odor of the warm sea Drew up the cliff to him; the hills ached with their daring, pale in the blaze of daylight. Pain, pain might save: he was too sane and suffered nothing: only contagion, Nothing but the irresistible . . . He’d been wavering in the unshaded back-dooryard Between the old blue-gum row uphill and the door of the house: he returned to the door Trembling and called Maruca, “Come outside,” he said, “I want to talk to you. My wife is sick, you must try not to make much noise in the kitchen, Maruca, I heard you clattering the pans. Come with me and I’ll tell you, she must not hear . . .” The girl walked up the yard beside him, broad face, little black eyes in the fold Between the brown cheeks and the brow, heavy coil of black hair, broad throat, Wide hips and shoulders. She wiped her hands on the soiled apron. “She has morbid fancies, She is sick, Maruca. If she thought that you and my son . . . you can say honestly That you and Edward never . . . have been alone together Maruca? You never Meet him up here in the stable? Come inside, here we can talk.” The excitement And fever of him struck in at length behind the stolid mask, and the brain

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Groped with it, vaguely astonished. “Oh no, Oh no, I never do anything He seemed to have grown taller, like that!” Dangerous, and He said: “Maruca. It would be wrong because he is young: he is young: a full of strength child still. How old are you Maruca? You know a girl grows up much sooner than a boy, Noting the And if you were eighteen when you came to us . . .” He smelled the fragrant beam Audis had looped dust of barley the noose And the smell of the empty stall. Remembering a line in a play, the hunchback from Richard? He thought “Was ever woman in this humor wooed? Oh, but often and often.” He shook as if ice had struck against his heart. “It is frightful, I’d rather die. Compulsion, compulsion.” He circled with his hand the firm brown forearm, relaxed, Not drawing away from him: though it felt hot inside his hand: his hand was icy, His head burning and gorged . . . He seemed to the girl to have grown suddenly taller, Dangerous, and overflowing with strength . . . though she could not believe yet . . . “Angry?” She thought, “not angry: he’s kind”: and said she thought she was twenty-two years old, She was not sure. “Have you ever, Maruca . . . “ He drew her back into the twilight of the stable; he noted the beam Audis had looped the noose from: “Have you. . . . You were grown up before you came to us, I didn’t think you were so old: you have been with a man before you came to us, Not afterward?” “Oh no, not after I came here, no sir.” “Do I seem old, Maruca, it doesn’t matter, you have to come, you have to come, come with me. . . .” He thought Edward would put the horse in the corral, but any moment Might enter the stable to hang up the saddle. “We must go up the canyon.” He opened the small door at the back. Maruca went out. On Barclay following The sun struck like a giant. She went ahead, the path behind the blue-gums Across the hill-slope. Barclay, drunk with the sun, Felt himself tower above the trees, walking behind her. He reeled in the sunlight, And fears were past; he felt himself equal with God, with the great hills . . .

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V 1. Edward had drawn his clothes on the wet limbs, dreary with shame; his forehead Throbbed again at the short climb from the beach to the road. He hoped Natalia Had dressed and gone. When he got home he looked for his horse in the open-gated Enclosure by the stable; the gate was closed, the saddle sprawled on the ground Inside the gate; his mother cried to him from a window, “Edward, Edward!” “What is it Mother?” “Where have you been, the horse came home without you? O Edward, A horrible thing: wait, wait!” He went to enter the house, she met him in the doorway. “I thought you’d fallen: I’m not fit to live here: let us go home . . .” “What, mother? What home?” “Where we haven’t any: down under,” she answered coughing. “I unsaddled him.” “Oh, you had strength! I left him just a moment, I thought he’d stand. I’ll fetch it sunset Out of the way of his hoofs.” “No: wait! I want you to go walking with me.” He gazed at her in wonder, gathering the worn face into his mind Like a sharp relic: it had so changed: he had thought it beautiful All his childhood: sharpened now, the waxy cheeks thinned, the nose pinched, The light-brown hair bleaching, a line between the brows, and complex tremulous Lines by the chin: but beautiful still: “I’ve never been up the canyon, I haven’t Walked enough here: three years, I haven’t seen the country, it’s beautiful country. Your father’s been too busy to go walking with me.” “Why: if you’d like . . .” “You can go with me, you haven’t an appointment with anyone, have you Edward?” “I’d love to go, Mother.” “Can we pass between the eucalyptuses? They went through the stable and behind them: we can pass through?” “Who went behind them?” “No one. I mean I’ve seen your father go up behind them. Come: we must hurry.”

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“You’re trembling, you’re trembling.” “Why no, I shall grow stronger soon, I haven’t walked Enough to be strong. It’s very important: come, come.” He looked again: she was changed A second time: youth had returned: as if a thought of passionate pleasure Possessed her suddenly: a mirthful fury dancing between narrowed eye-lids. 2. After they had passed the trees and crossed the hill-slope, and were down in the canyon, She said, picking her way with loathing among the speckled granite boulders By the stagnant pools: “Why does he keep us in this frightful place? It is frightful. He feels its influence: something brutal, incalculable, has entered his nature. I am often afraid that he will . . . strike me, I brought you along for fear of meeting him.” Edward, tired and distressed: “You don’t mean what you say, mother. But come, You’re not well: let’s go back.” “Oh,” she said, “hush. There are willows up there: walk quietly.” “What do you mean?” “There might be a snake there. Whisper.” She caught his hand and ran with him Like a young girl: it was terrible to be with her: she darted up the stream-bed Into the willow-thicket: she peered and peeped angrily among the willows, And sat on a stone, panting, silently weeping. “Oh,” he prayed, stroking her shoulder, “Mother come back, come home.” She looked up through the tears, laughing. “Oh Edward, How amusing if we’d come on lovers under willows.” He thought she’d guessed His meeting with Natalia; full of shame and misery he drew away from her And heard a foot-step up the gorge: he looked and saw two figures: one vanished: He saw his father. “Father is coming down to meet us.” Audis sprang up Like flame out of the stone. “Let’s go on, let’s go on, don’t let him touch me.”

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3. He came calmly to meet them. Audis ran toward him. Edward following behind her Smelled with sick shame the acrid odor of her excitement, he felt he had sprung From diseased earth: his father he thought seemed great and quiet, standing to meet her. “Let me by,” Audis cried; Barclay’s grave quietness Filled up the path between the rock and the bush, “It’s rough up higher,” he answered, “You would be torn and tired. You haven’t walked much, better not go further Your first walk, Audis.” She struggled to pass him, with clawed fingers. He caught her by the arm. “I say no, Audis. Come back.” “Edward,” she cried, “go on. I want you to see Who’s up there, who’s up there!” Barclay, gravely: “Your mother is ill, Edward, you’ll help me See her safe home. We shall go down together.” “Mother,” the boy said gently, “Come mother. Let’s go back.” She stood erect, and suddenly, “Maruca, Maruca,” She screamed, “you beast of the hills come down. I saw you with him. Maruca come here!” They heard the shrill cry climb the gorge, vibrant between the gray bare flanks And the desolate hills. High up in the triangle of the sky a red-tailed hawk Hung with the sunset on him, Edward gazing saw him dip wing and go higher From the sharp cry. 4. They turned homeward: the west Blazed, with an autumn in its color. “Maruca will not be there,” said Audis. “No one to drop the filth into our food.” Edward with prickling eyes Prayed without words at the enormous westward splendor. He had seen plainly The second figure by his father’s: what if it were Maruca’s? His mother Suffered insane fancies. A frightful thing, this screaming woman—his mother! She lagged and failed, it was twilight when they came to the house. She stiffened at the door-step, “I will not go in. Ah: you will force me, will you? Edward,” she screamed, “help, help, Edward!” He did not answer but stood heavy with shame, regarding wearily 65

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A long scar of red light, around the corner of the house, toward the sad setting. She yielded, and entered. 5. Edward went up to get the saddle: his mother had forgotten To unbridle the horse; she’d let the reins hang down, they had been trodden and broken. While he was hanging up the saddle and the broken bridle he thought of his mother’s Pitiful inferiority: he saw through the open door of the stable Maruca Steal down to the house across the gathering carpets of darkness. He heard the ocean. Intolerable to think of Natalia. But there was pleasure mixed with loathing In the thought of what his mother had thought about his father . . . and the girl that passed there. How if it were true? Impossible? But the thought was somehow . . . tempting . . . it tempted him . . . To think of it intimately was horrible: but the Indian wench, yielding, accepting, Prostrate: she’d sleep to-night? Initiated? The coarse monster, the old one. But Edward himself, not yet. . . Initiated . . . felt without thinking how far away from him was judgment. In a world where all conjunctions and all origins, all the human ones, were heavy With hidden defilement: is one more than another shocking? Maruca’s than his mother’s? His own source, was that credible? O to cast restraint, to cast restraint . . . VI 1. “To cast restraint,” Barclay groaned to himself. “In act I cast it: to cast it out in spirit. One must know something. There was no pleasure in it. I repent nothing.” He remembered As if his mind were in two halves, with one half of his mind how he’d led 66

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Audis to her room: he’d felt a certain pitiful pride, forcing her to silence With the authority of his presence: now she’d be quiet: whenever there was need He could compel her into quietness again: not with reasons, nor rightness: Mere strength: he had grown stronger, he had grown enormously, he now could do outrageous Things and not shake nor sicken: refinement, culture, morality, (as religion had done) Were splitting from him like the bark from a growing tree. Was it the return To the hills that he was born under, the savage hill, the hawk that hung there? The huge breast of the sea? He had touched earth like the giant and was redoubled. But something wild and brutal and incalculable had entered his nature. 2. The other half of his mind through all this interval of thought repeated to itself A verse read somewhere: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; the road Of excess runs to the palace of wisdom, the kingdom of heaven; the road of excess Runs to the region of heaven; the road of excess runs to the palace of wisdom . . . 3. The two halves ran together, they coalesced. With the power of the whole mind: “Why should I care about my household? I must run pure. So few years left me . . . To the palace of wisdom. . . . That is the thing, the essence, to flow pure, to fling off L’arrière-pensée: yes, thoughtfulness, scruple, restraint: cast restraint, tread under Cowardice that wears the mask of thoughtfulness: to hawk-feather my thoughts, Beak-and-talon them, till they bulk in the world like actions, a desperado’s Deeds. Without purity, nothing.” He’d lighted the lamp; he paced the floor of his study Between the book-shelves. The self-consuming exultation died slowly away Like wine out of his veins. 67

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He failed now, he could not keep his ears from listening. Audis up-stairs moving about and coughing gently, would she never be quiet? The stir of a sick bird. “Now Edward moving? What Edward thinks . . . is nothing to me. I have chosen to go on At all cost. Edward as little as Maruca. Then her? Take her up with me Into the night? I need no one. She’s served the turn. Getting up to leave her, The hawk over the gorge: I saw one of my hawks hang over the hill First.” Then he thought what the hawk dreams on the tree, the lighthouse lenses of the eyes Shuttered from stargleam: red flesh aquiver Torn in the dream; enormous plunges under the cloud-cliff. . . . Should not he also Sleep, did he think someone would stab him in the night? 4. At breakfast the next morning No one seemed changed. Audis rarely came down to breakfast; he sent Maruca Up to her room with a tray. It was accepted. “They know I am out of their sphere; No longer accessible.” He’d have kept the day in its groove if he’d feared thought, He’d have heard Edward’s lessons in the morning, as commonly; but what the household Might think meant nothing to him. He would go to Aumentos lighthouse: all night Between the blanks of sleep the old walls of the lighthouse, the lantern-turreted Tower piercing the house, the circle within circle, the ray slashed through them, Had stood in his mind. 5. And now, walking the coast-road north, he smiled, remembering That in his dream he had called it Alma Venus, Point Alma Venus Instead of Point Aumentos. “So Lucretius last night sang me to sleep.”

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The name sang as he walked: Alma Venus, repeated, repeated: The kind goddess, the mother of life . . . his errand being to question the dead . . . For having freed the cutting-edge of his nature, cast pity, bared steel, no more At mercy of imposture, “I shall find out something or laugh them silent, that woman, Her ghosts, her daughter, the old stones of the lighthouse . . .” VII 1. Audis: “If to him brutality, Beastliness has come out of the hill: to me the weaker a wild-beast cunning, Will come to help me. What shall I do? Torture the Indian? She’s nothing to him. A sheath, a hole in the dirt,” she cried to herself writhing in bed, astonished At the infamous visions of her anger. “I’ve heard of such women. Punishment.” She also Felt, but with pain, the exultation of having grown. She was greater, she was dangerous; Gentleness, clean thoughts, temperate desires, refinement, splitting from her like bark From a growing tree. Even that desire of death: split off, sloughed like a skin. Death? Not his, even. To humble him, subject him, bring him down, make him cry out for it . . . But later she thought, considering her own body, “O death, O the soft cradle . . . But now it’s in earnest.” She bathed and dressed; went to find Edward. “No one? He’s gone With the old . . .” No word burned enough. She went to the Indian girl and said “Where’s Edward?” Without flinching; this shame not hers. Maruca holding her eyes downward So that the broad head was too laughable, greasy hair, big cheeks bulging, “I don’t know. He went out.” “My wish,” thought Audis, trembling with inward laughter, And went up toward the stable, last evening’s way, she hated the stable. She found him Unhappy, the bridle in hand, working a clumsy knot in the broken leather.

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How could she please him? She could help him mend the bridle: afterwards, what more? Edward looked up. He had dreaded meeting her. She seemed grown younger, helpful, bright-hearted, He was taken with astonishment. Clear-featured. He was sullen at first. Afterwards, for weeks He looked to see the old bitterness return to tarnish her. The old image faded Out of his mind Take out the lighthouse part, leave out much, At length out of his mind bring the old man’s visions Send him that morning to Palo Corona instead of the lighthouse He must return and take his [life]

VII Eyes at the curtained window Watched him go north; Audis had bathed and dressed in a moment. “If to him brutality, Beastliness has come out of the hill: to me the weaker a wild-beast cunning,” She thought in the bitter exultation of having grown. She was greater, she was dangerous; Gentleness, clean thoughts, temperate desires, refinement, splitting from her like bark From the growing tree. She found Edward in the stable, knotting the broken bridle. “There’s better to do with leather: a big strap and a bit of rope: O Edward You child, child, come. No, wait: I’ll bring her.” His eyes dizzy with fear and pleasure Followed his mother. What change? Youth? She was youthful again, the eyes shining, the movement Joyful and sweet: the clothes even; she had dressed herself like a girl: and the head High, the step free. He knotted the bridle. She stood by the kitchen door saying softly, 70

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“My husband has come back, Maruca, he asked me to call you. Come quickly, O quickly.” The brown girl came, she blinked her little eyes in the sun and followed to the stable. They entering, suddenly to Edward the look in his mother’s face became Natalia’s When she had turned wild in the blue wave, the eyes fire through borings In the blank of a mask: and Audis: “We’re all alone in this place, the old man my husband Chose we should live lonely as hawks, no one to help us here but our hands.” The boy standing aside against the cobwebbed wall felt his knees tremble, And his throat tremble; and his mother: “The black beauty. Your father fondled her Edward. And once I thought that I’d need rope and I hid me a bit at the end of the beam there. Here it is: put your hands through, dirty.” She opened the noose worked at the cord’s end, Maruca ran for the door, Audis caught her and fell with her, and lifting a face Bitten white with violence, “Whose side are you on Edward?” “Let her go mother. O please Let her go!” But when the hands clawed at his mother’s face he imprisoned the hands, They were greasy and slipped from his and he slipped the noose over them to hold them, and nothing Was clear in his mind until he heard Maruca whimpering and saw she was fastened By the bound wrists to one of the cross-beams, her arms over her head, she erect The head bent forward; when Audis struck her with the bridle the head was flung back And screamed; then Edward: “You mustn’t hit her with the bit, mother, you’ll kill her. Not the steel bit: the strap!” She turned with the teeth bared, it was inconceivable This fury was Audis: he stopped her arm as she was striking: “I’ll see the marks then,” She cried and catching the girl’s clothing behind the neck tore, and again Tore it, and dropped the rags on the floor, baring the shoulders, and tore sidewise 71

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Leaving the sleeves on the arms, baring the body to the waist where the skirt was drawn in, And Edward through a rushing mist saw the brown back, the smooth-ridged column Strained from the shoulders, the breasts drawn up in folds by the stretch of the arms, dark nipples Starred on the ridges, the ribs in their sheathes laboring apart: a dark-red cataract Curtaining the common motions of his mind out of sight and out of memory Raged in his ears: a new creature, another himself unknown to him before, Clear-eyed and thoughtless like a demon stood outside the curtain Approving the work. He said “The bridle’s no good to whip with: but the leather halter: Here it is, she earned it.” A gap of consciousness: And he was admiring his mother, the great swings of her slender body, the panting Passion of it; the white teeth nursing the under lip, the fury of her face: And he was admiring the brown victim’s beautiful endurance, the belly stretched slender, The red bars on the naked back, the skirt sagging from the loins, the twisting Body with a kind of love: what is called affection, Not lust but charity, with a sense of fevered beauty and delighted wonder: but the lash Was wielded too near, it ringed the strained-up back and the biting Tip was cutting the right breast, frightful to see, not Maruca but Edward Screamed at the stroke, the horror of a wound in that sacred softness, and he caught in both arms The white fire of the woman striking; she struggled against him, he felt on his neck The hot jets of her breath; he kissed and kissed her, smothering the violence, the hair, The face, the convulsed mouth; she relaxed in his arms, embracing him. “We two,” she whispered, “Have conquered the savage country, you and I”: to him suddenly That vapor of disgust blew on his fondness, the relaxed body, damp with exertion, Clinging and pendent to him: the cataract was gone that had veiled his mind, and the common 72

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Mind was moved against her; he untangled the clasped arms, “Stand up, stand up. The creature will die, mother, it’s crucifixion.” “If a worm dies,” she answered, “Dearest . . .” The wetness of her lips was loathsome to him, he pushed her from him And plucked at the knotted cord against the cross-beam, no memory at all remaining Of how he had tied it; he had to strain up against Maruca with her same erectness, And the stubborn knot: “A knife, mother, will you get me a knife? Quickly for God’s sake, Her hands are bursting . . .” Audis was unwilling to go; before she returned The knot had been plucked open; the Indian sat on the floor, the naked shoulders Like a half dome, the stripes crossing them; and Edward crouched beside her, to the eyes Of Audis’ insane jealousy loverlike, against her lap. He was kneading the blood From the blackened hands. His mother stood in the doorway gripping the knife like a dagger. Her mind returned; she helped him without speaking; they helped Maruca to the house. From this crisis Edward has laid aside boyhood, desire has become known to him, he goes about seeking its satisfaction. Barclay sees the Indian graveyard on the hill opposite the lighthouse; views of ocean, dunes, rock; is expected by Rose Nelson who greets him as freed and [build] to a great apocalypse. In dealing with her and her daughter he is perplexed with desires telegraphed from his son at the whipping. Possibly VII, 2, describing Maruca’s Later perhaps in the night Maruca goes

VIII 1. While these sounded their gulfs: the master of the house, the master-passion Approached his errand. He’d crossed Mal Paso bridge with great strides, thinking it strange The day and the night, the desire, the daring, the exultation, 73

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Had left him not tired; nor the hill beyond it tired him, between the tawny sea-fields And the brown storm-edge of the pines. He looked down, Point Aumentos below Lay in plan, the little peninsula cupping a blue bay, straining out seaward With toothed islets and rock-spits; landward a dune piled up from the northwest Smothered one side, one sees from above The flaws of the gray sand like smoke fly over it; but Barclay’s eyes were taken With the outline of the lighthouse, the tower piercing the house, the circle within circle, The tower for center; the wall, the driveway, the cypress hedge, the road slashed through them, The plan of a cut labyrinth. He came to the entrance-road, where it left the coast-road Opposite a round knoll that on this side was bare of forest, he thought The great breast of a giantess, it domed up so smoothly; and he saw at the top A granite knob crowning the dome, the nipple of the breast. A dreamlike wonder Troubled him: strangeness: a dream? Then also the miracle of his spirit’s deliverance Yesterday, a dream? He stopped in the road, recalling trivial things, and the shame Of what he had done with whom, to attain it, making the world real about him. 2. The magic, the influence yesterday suffered, the mental and sensual magic, the aching Compulsion: his son having now witnessed and shared the out-of-the-sun Ceremony; and flooding desire that finds no sea-mouth spreads contagion: Barclay discovered yesterday had not delivered him, full of wild thoughts yet Eyeing the symbolic hillock: to have suffered so many years of life and not yet Have seen the beauty of a woman’s body: and suddenly he thought The beautiful places that we travel to see, mountains, ecstasies of height, Rivers, round hills, the shaded secret hollows of forest and glen, what are they But pale reflections of the perfect body that we desire, or timid Symbols of our own flesh desiring? “Reality,” he cried in his mind, “to see God! Would bring deliverance from the torment, from the symbols.”

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3. Old rains had wounded The base of the hillock, where the road-graders had scarped the bank; in the gullies Sea-shells lay drifted like a fall of leaves. (The coast south of Point Pinos Is crusted with them, relics of the feasts of the Indians: the abalone, The broad rock-shellfish fed them.) Barclay among the mother-of-pearl fragments Saw the end of a thigh-bone thrusting up and wondered vaguely Was it human? His eyes wandered up hill, he saw more bones in the steep gorge, Broken and rotted; then the vault of a broken skull, the sutured bubble No one can doubt is human: he thought “an Indian burial-place,” he suddenly Hated the hillock, and turned downward toward the lighthouse. 4. Whom he sought, met him In the road, before he entered the circles. “I knew you were coming Dr. Barclay, I watched the road all morning.” “How did you know that I was coming?” “I felt you Coming.” He thought: “That is the secret of her power: telepathy: the dead Are dead: she fishes in the minds of the living.” His gray eyes weighed and measured her, As a wrestler his man before the meeting of the hard bodies, or as a horseman The wild horse he will ride: a very commonplace unintelligent creature; Perhaps a glint of gipsy cunning; dark-skinned, dark-eyed, fattening past forty, Older than Audis certainly, yet no strand of gray in the heavy black hair; And he thought “Who’d dream this coarse flesh has known vision, been shaken convulsed with voices Out of what void?” She looked up toward the breast-shaped knoll; “I have guides and watchdogs” She said, “in the round hill there, the old people keep watch there, an Indian graveyard. They lie over the road, they often know who is coming, I think it is they That make me feel it; they’re friendly to me; I often think of them.” “I saw,” he answered, 75

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“A piece of skull among the shells there, in the old wash of the rain.” They had turned Down toward the circles of the lighthouse. Rose Nelson looked sidelong At Barclay’s face, and suddenly: “You were a gray-haired child looking for guidance Last time you came: you are changed, they didn’t tell me, changed out of all resemblance. You have become one of the conquerors.” “Unintelligent?” he thought, “she has gleams then That beat intelligence: what is it, what has she got?” He was pleased; but he was astonished At his own feeling, a friendship toward her, an overflowing Of the male fondness that had even flowed out toward rock, toward the round hillock, The earth and the rock; then the error of his dream, Aumentos miscalled Alma Venus, Made him smile, crossing his mind; and he heard her saying: “Last time I saw you, you were one of those who wonders what life will do to them. You have become a master of life, you wonder into what form to mould it.” He answered, “No. Reality. To know what’s real first. If those visiting voices of yours are real or not, I intend to know them. I shall be merciless.” She laughed, “Be gentle with me.” She was full of obscure delight, As if he had been her lover threatening violence. He, with the like confusion Of feeling: “To-night, to-night?” “We must have a circle, I draw power from the circle—” “I thought so,” he muttered to himself. “Saturday night,” she said. “Old Woodfinn Will come; and Halloran, the Hallorans; Mrs. Barclay, your son . . .” “If you come to my house,” He said. “But I shan’t bring them here; my wife couldn’t walk.” “Well, at your house.” 5. They had entered the circles that surround the light-tower. At the arch in the clipped hedge

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He stopped. “I keep thinking of home, I must go back. You’ll come then, Saturday.” He saw through the arch the woman’s daughterstanding in the doorway. “Bring April,” He said, “you’ll bring April?” “Certainly.” “I’ll send my son to tell the Hallorans.” He felt a growing impatience, he must get home, he passed the breast-shaped hillock Without seeing it; he saw the hawks that hung over the hills, he counted them; Seven hawks, three to the mile. Edward dreams of suicide, perhaps attempts it.

Barclay feels toward the shipwreck by the lighthouse, that it is like the breaking up of civilization. He is, however, disinterested, as toward civilization. This is a culmination of the poem on the physical material side; afterward the long spiritual crisis, the actors more like disembodied spirits wandering in a twilight (some of them actually disembodied) remembering the clashes of heavy force in the youth of the world.

Second Book

IX

I (Defence of Poetry)

1. The old rock under my house, the hills with their hard roots and the ocean cored With sacred quietness from here to Asia: unwasting presence and sufficience Make me ashamed to speak of the active little bodies and the misty brainfuls Of perplexed passion. Humanity is not needed. I said humanity is the mould to break away from, the coal to kindle, The mask needs breaking: I say that the eyes of the people in a poem are mirrors, Their bodies are reflectors, they ache with the powers Unnamed under the sun. It is only for this reason: Because one has no language to praise God but the stutter of humanity: His beauty is glassed in the blind eyes, his power storms up from the bottom Through the round mixing-bowls of fire, the curdle of the brain, the sealed and sutured Bone vaults, the shells brimming with vision: I facing him am no man, not Jeffers, 77

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Nor the son of a mother: a God facing the God, outside humanity: but I Speaking of him must use the words that people have made, and the people for words, Barclay and his household and the others . . . or else be torn with silence: I could endure that also, Having entered the rock . . . He drew me forth out of the rock, he bade me speak of him . . . 2. Humanity is the bottle to be burst on a rock and the sharp savor Remember its wings; the grape for treading, the tower builded to fall, the gray bird Flying to be shot in the air: at the hour of the breaking, Wisdom: the moment between the fire and the ashes, between reason and madness, Wisdom: between the leaning and the falling: O world’s patience, rock’s quietness, Bear with me building; something in the fall of the mass, in the tragic moment Discoverable; some spark struck out by the stones falling; the star, the eye then Of the more sacred darkness . . . The more sacred darkness Draws toward all living, the man and his house, the deer on the hill, the helmeted nations; And these that skip like pygmies in the shine of the sun, like giants in the evening The shadows-joiner, like giants against the shadow Stride to their ends. Not yet; not yet the dignity; not yet deliverance. 3. He felt There was turbulence in the house, desire, anguish, gatherings and risings against him. He thought that his son and brown Maruca . . . he had thought so before, gone to the stable, Found Audis ready to complete her dream with a rope’s noose . . . lengthening his stride He counted the eighth, the eighth hawk: it shot over the road: this one a sparrowhawk; 78

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And the speck it was hunting: what forlorn dodges, nimbleness: it bound the flutterer With sudden talons; carried it away to the hill . . . Barclay was on the hawk’s side; The omen was good. He rounded the last seaward twist of the road, looked down On the house over the creek-bed, the blue-gum row behind it, gaunt trees dwarfed northward, The runted cypress-trees in front, dead hands had planted, old storms had warped them Into mere terror and suppliance. He entered between them and heard The little reed-organ Audis had not touched for years, its anxious voice: Vibrating in the wood of the house. He went to her room, the door was open, Young she looked, the head held high, the clear line of the throat against the window, And played with youth’s hardness, not the known gentle touch, nothing considerate, She grew aware of him somehow; stopped playing; the swollen bellows Wheezed through its leak. “I’m glad,” he said, “you have grown happier at last. Where’s Edward?” “Oh, within reason. Yesterday when your manners changed, did you think,” she answered, “Mine would stand still? It wasn’t yesterday? I didn’t know it till yesterday.” She thought, “What will he do? He doesn’t know yet. When he sees the brown thing . . . Perhaps she’ll not tell him.” “You’ve just come home, you haven’t seen your brown thing? To her,” she laughed, “you should go first.” He felt the fibres of his face Jerking: was it possible that Edward and Maruca . . . “Where’s Edward?” But Audis Not answered, laughing: “We with our little savageries: Imagination does it, it’s not in our nature, your Maruca’s the genuine. But Edward,” she said, feeling intuitively which nerve to touch, “he found her Insensitive: the defect of savages.” “You!” he coughed, heavily shaking. He turned And went from room to room about the house looking for Edward. Maruca’s Room was the last. He tapped, and hearkening for an answer he heard the organ Drone through the doorways and the wood. He thought “It is triumph; Something she has won.” He shook like a man shaken by nightmare. “Edward’s corruption? 79

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Agh: no!” and struck against the door with his fist. No answer. He pushed it open And saw Maruca huddled on a chair by the window. “You didn’t answer.” “I’m sick,” she answered smiling. “You weren’t sick this morning.” “Well: I got hurt.” “Where?” But she hid her wrists under the shawl that covered her shoulders. “Nowhere. Inside maybe. I fell . . .” “How did you fall? You need a doctor?” “Oh no, I must go away. . . .” He heard the organ like a storm over their heads, Voices outside humanity, exulting. He thought, “If that woman Has got outside humanity; like me . . .” He thought of the gray hawks, and the other Quick red one binding the bird . . . “this ruffled blackbird, No person, only material. What if Edward touched her,” he thought, exulting Like the organ up-stairs: “the sacrifice of a she-goat . . . Edward’s gone riding.” “Why,” he asked, “why did you say you must go away?” He saw her lips move; the organ Covered her words. Poor scape-goat of the Venus. “We’ll always be kind to you,” he smiled And turned, shutting the door. The organ: its crazy exultances: so great a thought Had come from the mad music and the world’s wildness: two ideas, hardly related, He thought they were one act of the mind: that Audis and Edward Like himself had cast restraint, taken the road outside humanity to Godhead: And that a God pervades, feels and sees from inside, possesses, interpenetrates, Persons and all; the hills, the hawks ranging them, the cattle ranging them, the stone hills and shore rocks, The whole region, the under ocean: himself the God, he to be God: possession: possess and penetrate All: the women, the forests, the rock, the secret places. . . . He seemed a moment To slip into the veins of the world . . . absorb it? . . . Suddenly the ecstasy Faded; much later he remembered it as prophetic; but now he was thinking “Not by Buddhist denial, by fierce alliance with all the wolves of desire To exceed humanity!” He thought, without forming the thought, that here at the entrance And door-sill of old age he was finding, not old age, new adolescence . . .

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X 1. . . . “With this peak of advantage, this mountain purity,” He ended the thought after two days, “that my new May is its own master. The old was social, sucked approval, sought guidance, modelled itself on leaders, A calf of the herd: I have lost all that” he cried rejoicing, “no longer forever Introvert on humanity; the eyes outward, the eyes outward.” His joy brought him out-doors Into the solitude of the fog, that had drawn over at noon and covered The coast with silver quietness. He walked the coast-road In front of the house; the silver texture and shut sweetness of the deep air Kept him glad without thought; at one end of his hundred paces the road Hung seaward, he heard the invisible ocean Mourn on its rock; at the other a twisted bush of cypress writhed up in the fog. He went and came until the fog reddened for sundown. He entered the house. Maruca had set the table; the household had absorbed its trouble. 2. In an hour Old Woodfinn came to the door; he stood against the dark, shaking the fog-drops From his hat, stroking them from his beard, the sad brown eyes drinking the lamplight. He was forty-five, he walked and spoke like an old man. He had walked; the Hallorans Came in their car; Natalia jewelled and shining when the cloak was laid by Smiled often at Edward, her smile made him ashamed, he was glad when Mrs. Nelson Came with her daughter in the buggy; he helped them tether the horse. The lamplight Was lowered; chairs had been brought; the lighthouse-keeper’s wife ordered their placing. 81

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Herself sat opposite the others, the shaded lamp behind her, and her eyes Blinked and quieted; she seemed to enlarge her presence, brooding her powers; they felt her Possess the room, settling herself in the deep chair, purring to herself With confidence in her powers. Maruca had come from the kitchen, there were nine persons Present; even Audis across the tide of her hostility, and even Natalia Across her mockery, felt that the one outweighed the eight others, that moment at least Was like a stone among light leaves. She stirred in her chair, settling deeper. In the silence Barclay thought of the hills beyond hills, the hawk-abandoned at night Stone flames of the coast; presences having he thought a consciousness beyond human measure Or comprehension uplifted; they stood over the house, crowding to the shore, Enormous, having their own stone modes of being: “I will break out of prison. This woman breaks prison in the trance, enters the consciousness of others, I’ll break Humanity, enter the mind of the region, the lonely, terrible, all stone, exalted Nature beyond thought. . . .” A voice recalled him, not hers, but out of her mouth: “Out of the burning sky,” it muttered, “into this fog-bank Where it’s dark to feel the set of the nerves and make plain talk: faces and faces Flocking around a little reddish light in the fog: peck each other birds, Who’s first, who’s first? You graybeard? Here’s an old man Wants Barclay, says that he wants Arthur Barclay . . .” Audis lifted her head Bright with new anger; old Woodfinn deeply sighing sank back in his chair, one voice Alone was his to wait for; and Barclay: “I am here. Well?” “You were young, Barclay, The days I knew you,” answered a voice like an old man’s, “young and unhappy. I remember you kneeling by the bed.” “Kneeling by the bed? What bed?” “Forgotten? Well, the years pass.” Then Barclay: “If you claim to be someone That knew me in my youth: you can give names and places. But I should tell you 82

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It will need proof.” The voice, laughing, “It’s I that ought to ask proof, my old friend Doesn’t remember me: how do I know you’re Arthur Barclay? The man that I knew Would have remembered the dark hour of his life.” “Your name? You have mine.” “You living Bother about names; over here they are not important; I think: Doctor . . . Wilkes was it? I was your doctor: I attended your wife in her last illness: neither my pills, Nor your prayers helped. Wicks: Gills: Gill-something . . .” “Gillespie,” said Barclay. “That’s it: Gillespie. Curious what importance you [larval] people Attach to a name.” “If names don’t matter,” Barclay answered, “does personality Matter to you? You keep it?” “Why: for occasions.” “You must remember,” said Barclay, “What we ask is evidence: we’re here asking about survival; names, facts, are evidence . . .” “Oh, evidence? I thought old friendship.” “Certainly: but first proof. A midnight meeting In the blind dark: one doesn’t want to be the fool of imposture.” “Ah. Take it. I’ve plenty, in a spurt of memory. A black spool-bed; she was thin-chested, Brown eyes, light hair: Clara you called her . . .” Edward was listening Astonished, with joy like shame. A reticence in the house had kept him ignorant Of his father’s former marriage: undreamt of, nearly incredible: and now in public Confessed . . . what, and Maruca: three women? It made him tremble With a sense of being set free: the broadness of life, the occasions, the brimming fullness . . . Flinch from the floods of life? Natalia’s challenge or another’s, there’d be no flinching, He promised himself, next time. Meanwhile the boy’s father: not life, the other thing Astonished his mind. He had made a picture of himself dead under the surface And conscious film; it had lain unthought of in the dark under thought; now he heard Clara described as if by one who had seen her dying, it was not her image 83

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Came suddenly visible; his own in the agony, as if he stood by his own death-bed. The sunken orbits, the eyes like lumps raising the wasted lids, the shrunken And yellowed skin of the high forehead, the ridges of bone thrusting up through it; The high nose, yellowy and waxy, pinched and drawn sidewise; the sagging jaws, the sour white Stubs of thin beard the skin shrank back from: and the breath—stopped. Finis. . . . This intense Picture through his nerves like subtle poison he shrieked in his mind “What will become of me, the me?” Caught back for shame between the brain and the lips, Impersonalized, the words had yet a cry in them: “Oh enough. Tell me Gillespie What you do, what’s your life there: conditions, experience: we on this side the . . . crisis . . . Would give something to know. And do all survive it?” “Eh! to be honest with you, I’m out of invention . . . wander in a fog . . . drift in a cloud I’d say . . . ask others, They’ll spin you yarns, Barclay.” “You mean, nothing, forever?” “Why, not exactly Forever: don’t ask me where they go to. A preacher: you’ve got your guide-book: vanishings We’d discuss on this side: only, since none of us knows anything . . .” The voice Dragged into silence; Barclay, half rising: “Gillespie! A moment!” There was no answer. Then a child’s treble: “I’m Flora: you’re there Georgie?” Old Woodfinn Groaned: not the voice he waited for: and sat patiently, the soft humble brown eyes Over his hairy cheeks wide open on the dull lamp. It was Halloran answered, Uneasily: “Is mother with you, little sister?” “Not to-night, Georgie, she’s tending A new soul in the south.” “You’ve got a message for me?” “The . . . Star . . . the Stare . . .” She said, faltering, “that ship . . .” “Staraway?” “Will be off the coast to-morrow.” “I know,” he answered. “They said to tell you the coast-road Is clear and safe . . .” Barclay broke in, at grips with the image of himself dead, Hawking for news of the hidden country: “Who are they? Ask her Who are they!” Natalia laughed, but Halloran darkening: “My message, Mister Barclay.”

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“Certainly: but ask her.” “The coast-road’s clear, Flora?” The piping voice: “But they said Sea-hawks—Oh do be careful Georgie!” “I will. Coast-Guard?” “One twenty-five. They said it won’t go south of Notley’s Landing, keep south of Notley’s Landing.” “Well, it’s a long run for the cars.” “They said keep south, keep safe.” “Well, Flora, I’ll land at Mill Creek?” “They said bring it in early for the road’s clear.” “Little sister, Your pretty spirit will be with me, In the dark, on the sea?” Barclay, subduing impatience, gazed at the man With wonder, the deep-chested thick-necked adventurer, hard face carved of dark stone Twisted and melted with emotion. The child’s voice carolled, “Oh, I’ll be with you, Georgie,” and certainly the man had tears in his eyes. He had been a driver, Edward had said; had been a sailor and knew the ports of the world; and now He called himself a fisherman; landed costlier than fish, more dangerous cargoes, In the dark of the moon. 3. Well after midnight, two nights later, Barclay awakening Heard motors roar, shaking the wood of the house, and light by light in the window The headlights of eight cars flared and went north. He smiled in the darkness, thinking Of bull-necked Halloran, the pilot of the smuggled whisky, the shrill-voiced child’s Spiritual guidance, in the dark, on the sea. He thought, “Nothing’s ridiculous. Humor: the eyes of the humble: for little bewildered minds, to sweeten their limits, Astigmatism of the mind: I’ll laugh when the hawk does.” Himself and Maruca; Halloran And his child guide; congruous he thought with the steep coast, the remote stars On the black [points] of the hills, the dark ocean, death hunting for men. 85

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XI 1. The world had changed; all the conditions of the world had changed in a month; It was hard to bear in mind that all relations were changed. He lay wide wakeful After the cars had gone by, surveying his changes. Audis, who’d been mere drag And invalidism, grown young suddenly, hatred a powerful tonic, grown bright With hatred, willing even to corrupt Edward to feed it. Edward, strange-eyed, Changed, and grew secret. “But I,” he thought, “have grown out beyond them, they are almost nothing.” Himself the fountain of all change in the house. “Humanity: a social creature: I have cast humanity: the me back of the mask, not human, emerges; the shapes That tower and burn; the beast that creeps for prey in the evening. Only that beast’s face Regards humanity at all.” He half dreamed, saw without thought the feral muzzle And eyes narrowed with flame: they glared at Clara, dead and dissolved long since; They glared at Audis, glared at Maruca. He slept and dreamed about the lighthouse, Ring within ring; the pulses of the throbbing light; the tower in the midst; The tower piercing the house, fixing it to the rock like a pinned moth. He awakened at dawn, his waking thought flowed with no gap: “The me that was hidden Is many: the human mask gave it a show of oneness: that’s down, there are many. The shapes that tower: one nature with the founded hills: they are self-sufficient, Have no wants, are not moved. The beast: one nature with the beasts of the mountain: Wants meat and women: feed him, leaves the others quiet: the road of excess To the palace of wisdom. The shapes that burn . . . multitude yet . . . Insanity, the nature Split into fragments . . . I fear nothing.” But when he thought that he feared nothing: the image of himself dead, the high features Like pinched wax, pitiful and disgusting, the eyes blunt lamps under the eye-lids, Lay in his mind as if a cloth suddenly lifted showed him the image. He thought “Give it up? Go ignorant? No: a stinking pursuit, I will pursue it. 86

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Why is it loathsome to me to talk to these Gillespies, these disembodied? But I will do it: I’ll worm out something: that woman the instrument.” The hateful image Of himself dead: he thought “Because I don’t know what’s beyond it, it haunts me. A door to open: one forgets the door when it’s open.” The lighthouse. The circles; The road cutting them; the rotting skulls in the Indian graveyard, on the hill like a breast. If he could have her by himself and cross-examine her voices. No others; Not Halloran asking where to land his liquor; not Woodfinn wailing at his dead; Not the eyes of Audis. 2. He was done with books, he read nothing, no man’s experience But his own, mattered; his ship had sailed out of the maps, there was nothing human (Except his own face, dead) in all this ocean. Exultant loneliness. . . . Weeks later He found himself, the first time since he’d conquered the Cross, thinking of God. 3. A spatter of rain fell in October; him walking in the sun the next morning Desire possessed him again, intolerable, by the body, like a man enraged. He thought nothing, he was about to seek Maruca, but he thought, “Waste force On the brown sponge? Ah: turn this burning to some purpose. . . . Purpose : it was freedom Lost, when I took the brown thing: was the beginning of freedom, when I entered the voyage. . . .” But turning down between the beaten cypress trees he gazed seaward Where the eastwind streaming from the canyon Beat higher the long blue rollers, caught them by the hair, twisted them backward. He turned North; and the waves and the rock were loud on his left hand. He hurried in the heat,

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Fists clenched, the sun beating his shoulders; made haste like a hunter, or a man hunted. Audis watched him go north. She went about the house looking and touching As if to be sure that what she suffered had not burnt things. Maruca was there; He hadn’t taken her: then Edward—Edward? The Indian, sullenly drawing away from her, winged ants Thought Edward had gone down to the shore. Audis went down and crossed the road In the rage of the sun; she followed the cliff-top toward the stagnant stream’s mouth, and searching The waste of salted rock saw the east wind Beat higher the long blue rollers, when they crashed catch them by the hair, twisting them backward. 4. Edward had thought of swimming, in the gold heat, in the long and beautiful Blue rollers, white foam; his days were long now, his father never any more called him To read Greek in the mornings; whenever he thought of swimming Natalia’s laughter Came to his mind, the scornful eyes, the shame of failure. He lay in the shadow Of rocks beside the sand-bar of the stagnant stream, at the beach for bathing, His mind and his flesh making a dream. Dominion of Asia: to wake Mongolia From the ancient sleep, he Tamburlaine and Genghiz, gather the tribes, the wild riders, Buy them with the first loot air-planes for ponies, shadow America and Europe With menace, with empire: so wide a dream had avenged on the world his subdued childhood For years, hundreds of repetitions, hosts of brave men slain in huge battles, And now there were women in the folds of the dream, one faithful, the others traitresses, Beautiful spies; the faithful one resembled April Nelson, that woman’s Daughter; she often wept for the others, they had fitting punishments, stripped naked, whipped senseless 88

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In the midst of the camp; but that black moon of treachery Natalia Halloran, himself Punished when she defied him; in April’s presence, with April’s terrified approval He tore the clothes from her white skin, she screaming, he humbled her On the rough bed in the tent. Afterward she’d be given to the soldiers. His mother Called from the cliff; he answered; went up languid with shame, pale with dreamed pleasure. When he came, Audis: “How long will you be satisfied? How many years yet?” “What do you mean, mother?” “To the end of childhood. No end? Do you want nothing? This coast, that I hate, keeps you in childhood. Eighteen years old, Edward; no work, No friends, no future: this coast making my man a beast and my boy a fool.” They had turned, her face shone in the sun like marble, he said, “What should I do, Go to work somewhere?” “Learn to want something more,” she said, “than to lie in the sun Or ride an old horse.” “I wanted to go to college, he wouldn’t let me.” She felt Her hatred of the father include the son, she saw Barclay in his eyes, Felt her blood light as fire crowd up, flame in the forehead: “One thing you could do, Kill him: he is not a man: a devil: I mean if you dared Face him he’d die. It would be good for the world. That is what breaks our wills Because we think that it’s not right to do right. The brave thing that would save us Mustn’t be done. He grows stronger, he’ll live forever. He has cast humanity, We keep ours and it spares him.” “Mother.” “Why should we lie and go on lying? We’ll not kill, Edward, but we know that his death would make us happy, his death Save us. Perhaps you love him, the son should love the father. His life’s an evil I’ll bear more easily for having told the truth once.” She heard in a white ecstasy Voices within her whispering shrilly, “Put it in his mind, put it into his mind. What comes to him’s nothing to you. Whom the beast bred.” Swallowing the lump of sickness Thought of that old embrace grown horrible raised in her throat, “Thinking’s no harm, The truth’s no crime,” she said, “Edward. Think: if he’d die: 89

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The keys of the world in our hands. You could grow up to be a man, Edward. I . . . leave this hell of rocks forever. To know what we want’s a kind of medicine. We can’t have it? At least we don’t tell ourselves lies. And who knows, Edward, Want it hard enough, know that we want it, want it hard enough, Might do something in time. Out there in the islands They pray a man dead: pray and pray and he dies: it’s wanting does it.” He thought “I never thought that I wanted it. She says so.” And then he thought “I would have money. She would have peace. I never thought that I don’t love him. But I don’t hate him. The keys of the world: money: of Asia, of the future . . .” He saw visions of himself; On the prow of the ship, alone in the seawind, going to his future, the great steel prow A spear in the doors of sunset; of himself riding the vast ocean of the steppes, Alone below the quiet vultures; himself in the immense Mountains of Asia, the snow-field over the oldest monastery, the peaks Like candles burning in the air. He turned cold eyes against her. “You talk too wildly. You’re too alone here.” As if they had shown him where the keys hung, the keys of the prison, He felt freedom, a widening: as when he had heard of his father’s former marriage, Similar delight: the door of life unlatching, the chances, the burning fullness . . . Flinch from the floods of life? Natalia’s challenge or his mother’s . . . “You’re too alone here,” He said coldly. She, writhing like a fire in the wind, “Oh. It’s fairly well known. To whom shall I go for friendship, to my beast or my fool? Or that Maruca? Three years ago, I had God. But there’s the least thing that he’s starved me of.” Then Edward: “What can I do? Say that I want him to die, is that what you want?” She lightened Like a fed lamp. “Oh, what do I want? You to want something. I can’t be helped now. But you, not to submit to him, want something of your own, stand up against him.

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He grows stronger. I tell you he’d break like a touched bubble.” “The holy family I’m cast for Christ in!” he said shaking, turning his back against her. She wavered Like the eddy of ashes in a fire’s path, she caught him by the turned shoulders. “Why it’s bone and flesh, I thought it was some machine of that old man’s. You grew in me, Which will you kill?” “Neither.” “I mean in your mind, your mind, only two choices.” “Neither. Let me go.” The shrill voices within her Cried not to press him, it’s in his mind, urgence would dig the seed up, he’d cast it Out of his mind: she laughed, “Murderess in heart doesn’t mean murderess in deed. Foolish of me to frighten you. We’re too civilized Edward, the coast can’t change us. Dislocated, a gulf between wanting and doing, too thoughtful spoils us For tragedy: now, that Maruca . . .” she laughed to herself . . . “will end badly I hope. But simple enough. Oh, civilization has advantages. Dirty, all dirty. If you get old and plot beastliness Edward, Choose a white skin.” He said “Please, mother. Please, mother.” She laughed and left him, turned homeward, Feeling a sort of joy at having transgressed boundaries. Vacant of thought He followed her, his mind like eyes hypnotized by a crystal gleam, but his body Laughed with unlocalized desire, the great world aching and blazing With white sunlight, like the drought of a giantess, her feverish whiteness, her pathos, Her need and fever about him: the way to quench it? . . . the way of the lightning . . . he a cloud Heavy with lightning, the whole world thirsting for him, the parched grass, parched hills, Natalia, the aching earth . . . He thought that he entered the house to escape the sun’s glare And the winged ants, they swarm certain hot days in autumn, their honeymoon days They mix in the heat of the air. His mother had gone to her room, he heard the organ Ache in the wood of the house. He tried to read something in spite of the organ For he thought “I must keep decent thoughts.” Nothing was pertinent; these waters not charted. He suffered a senseless fear: danger with cat’s eyes behind doors and the organ’s

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Voices would let it creep unheard . . . “die before I pierce Asia?”. . . . He would go Tell her that he too wished . . . he ought to have told her . . . but he went Into the sun, walked dizzily in the sun-glare between the house and the stable, Returned to the house; the organ still singing. “Maruca: if I asked you—” His lips moved without sound, praying courage,—“to do . . . walk up the canyon with me . . . What would you say, Maruca?” She looked in his face remembering punishment, her wrists Remembering the cord. His face as white as linen, his brow beaded with sweat, He seemed so near fainting she was not afraid. She said, “Why did you whip me? It was all wrong. You going to whip me again I never come back.” “No, no, I didn’t whip you, I’ll not let you be whipped again. Listen, Maruca, I want something.” She stood smiling before him, erect, thick, strongly balanced, The little black eyes over the broad fat cheeks smouldering. He thought, “Oh! This! How could he touch it?” Some deeper current within him would not be turned, drew him toward her Whom the mind loathed. He stood facing her, as pale and swaying As she was brown and solid. He could not speak. The organ, the rhythms of the organ. He found a formula made it possible to go on: to think of the sex And not the person, make an abstraction of her, nothing but female: the music Fell into flutings, lost mass, shaped sweetness: Edward remembered with the mind’s eyes Her shoulder blades strained up under the skin when the arms were bound up for punishment; The loins tapered to the waist; she had seemed slender; the round of the breast, the strain Of the ribs under the breast: the face not seen the flesh female and beautiful: “O please Maruca! I’ll never let her hurt you again. Can’t you come now?” She smiled, shaking her head. “You went with the other, the old man. Show me that place. Where did he take you?” She smiled, not answering. He forced his mind to think of the shoulders And breasts under the shapeless clothes, to be able to touch her. If he could handle her, She’d smile still, she’d come. He embraced her, his face averted, how had the old man 92

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Wooed? Edward struggled to remember the naked waist, the day they whipped her, The sagging folds of the torn clothes from the hips. She stood like a wooden doll, Perfectly balanced, smiling no doubt. Suddenly the organ Stopped playing: he drew his hand out of her clothing, loosed her in dread of a presence Might come from behind him, turned and went silently out of the house, his knees trembling. XII 1.

Used to be stones thrown; never when I was there, I’d’a thrown them back at it. The old house—knockings, stones thrown knocking in the wood most nights —————— Nelson in terror of death because of the helplessness he has surmised in it from his wife’s voices. The conclusion B. will come to. One death’s a plenty

Barclay had gone into the circles, into the labyrinth, to the door of the lighthouse. He rang four times before the door opened, and not Rose Nelson, her husband The lighthouse-keeper stood in the door. A little old man, grizzled and vigorous, His face a map of old storms. “Well: what do you want?” His hand twitched at the door-latch. “My name is Barclay. You remember me: Dr. Barclay. Your wife’s not home?” “No.” The man’s eyes were red, his hand trembled, his manner was changed. “Well then,” Said Barclay, “when will she be home?” He answered “You’re a parson.” “Not now. But if I were: would Mrs. Nelson come home the sooner?” “She’s down by the shore, You’ll find her. What about those voices of hers? I say they’re devils talking, Not dead people.” He passed his hand over his forehead; he must have been drinking, Barclay concluded. Good. He might answer questions. “I’m trying to form some judgment. How long has she had these . . . powers?” “Eh? Powers? Lived in an old house with her mother, Brown-eyed eighteen, always kept up a noise about the knockings and voices, Were knockings in the wood most nights: she’d answer, knock-knock: hell of a courting. I said ‘You spooks be quiet and let a live man talk once.’ A rappity-rap, 93

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Knock-knock. Used to be stones thrown: never when I was there, I’d’a’ thrown ’em back at it. Stopped when I took her away.” Barclay was thinking “I want something, O God I want something, I ought to listen, what was it I wanted?” He said, “The trances. When did the trance-talkings begin?” “The damned voices. When her first baby Died: she was sick: I let her go on. Lately the scoundrels Talk about dying again, the second death they call it, I say a man’s spirit Can’t die: proves that they’re devils.” His face had yellowed, he seemed infirm with extreme Age, the jaw slackening, the head shaking. “One death’s a plenty. You that’s a preacher: A man’s spirit can’t die?” “Why,” he answered, “what’s a man’s spirit. I came to ask her. I’ll go down. April’s with her?” He turned seaward from the stone steps and he heard The old man saying “To the liar for lies: go down to the fountain.” Barclay looked back Through the arch under the cypress hedge, saw him stand in the stone doorway, his face A mask like fear, his hands wavering like smoke. 2. “It is death that’s terrible to him. Millions of years: the race never grows used to it: sleep is not dreadful, why death?” He crossed the circular driveway and the stile in the fence, to the path led seaward And walked between the white grass and the dune, in the wild sunlight, wondering At the old man’s folly . . . between one step and the next Suddenly he dared not set the lifted foot into the path, for a gulf Gaped in the path: an end: vacancy: he recoiled on his foot-prints. It was quite certain The path ran solidly to seaward: he could not trust things, there are traps, pitfalls Under the fair appearances; in solid stone the frightful Voids between atoms: to fall, fall . . . he remembered 94

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Dreams . . . and Pascal’s gulf . . . needed all his strength for the next step, all his courage, And walked like one doubtful of life. He saw the woman and her daughter On the lip of the rocks, lonely as ants in the great sun-blaze, against the blue ocean. 3. She said if they should go to the little hill, to the Indian burials, Her friends might help her. “They did not warn you,” he said, “this time, that I was coming.” “I was too far, they don’t come to the shore,” she answered sullenly. They circled The house outside the hedge, followed the driveway toward the hill, she leading, Barclay and the girl a step behind her. He thought “Named April: April: well-named: Dark eyes with laughter and light in them: fear too, a tragic light there. A strange childhood In this place, with these parents,” and said to the mother: “Knowledge I want: you have others Want consolation, someone they love has gone, to whom they must speak, like Woodfinn; Or want assurance for themselves, confidence to meet death; or come to you For mere advice like Halloran: practical guidance: where to land liquor: it is proper They ask what they need. Mine is different from theirs, my business to know the end. If it were hopeless, like . . . a fall in a pit: to know it. My reason for asking To be alone to speak with them: things that another must not know, I may learn. If the life after this comes to an end like this one; or if it is shadowy And suffered in darkness.” He thought that he’d resolved to reserve doubt and suppose Objective reality in the tongues of her trance: one seeks truth through hypothesis: The tree by the fruit. He thought “Whom will this girl make glad, her slender body,

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Some boy’s . . . I’d bear it?” He trembled, “No joy nor light out of the flesh: ah pitiful Unfleshed: not even Maruca! Poor mist-wreaths in the pit’s mouth. Death, death? O drink All the cups first,” he thought shuddering, and heard Rose Nelson: “I’ll try. It is true That there are secrets.” “April may hear them?” “I would hide nothing,” she said, “from April. The young needn’t be spared, they are stuffed with life and nothing’s terrible. Oh friends,” She murmured looking up at the hill, “you have spent it, you are emptied, come tell us, Tired of all things but truth.” He thought “This hateful woman and her pretences. Go on with her? I have grown stronger for years; younger; no abatement; never in boyhood Felt such red promise of life in all my limbs, arteries aflame with the ageless Falcon and serpent: I that was born again Coming home to this coast, drank redwood sap, towers of millennial life yet: Patience for the vapors from the grave’s mouth?” Suddenly it shot his sky like lightning “For April I came. It’s her I dreamed of, not the old oracle, her, light at the heart Of the labyrinth, under the tower, under the tower piercing the house. All’s clear then.” 4. They walked on the breast-shaped mound of ancient burials and sat under the rock At the head of the hill; Rose Nelson with her back to the rock and her hand shuttering Her eyes: “If you had wandered in the wild air you’d have dissolved and vanished. You kept faith with the flesh and with the crumbling bone, you entered the hill As dreams do sleep; O dreams of the hill I am the hill that has lips, draw inward Where it is warm and soft, where the live blood is running, I have not often Called you to enter me; a man is here and a young girl to hear you: dream pictures On the dome of the brain, it will find words, it is not nothing nor little to you

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To bathe in the hot blood and beat in the ears of the living, leave lying on cold stone In the still earth that stops the sun, a moment breaks ages of pain Into bearable portions.” She breathed, shaking her body, and said, “The hill shakes, the old rock Swarms upward like an ant-heap. Creep up through the black earth, sit in the sunlight, Smell the bright air,” her voice had such dreamy compulsion in it that Barclay Was half convinced the hill lifted and broke with hidden existence, with life Not life but secret, he looked over his shoulder and saw nothing, saw April Shiver in the sun, the widening eyes fixed on her mother, her hand that had lain On the earth she gathered into her lap, he taking it in his hand to quiet her Felt it was cold and trusted him; he heard the mother: “Small green arrows of grass Break the black crust after it rains to shut out the sun, you hidden people How accomplish? Come up, break the black hill, because our wishes and our welcome are He questions Rose about her feelings: poured is she aware? Germ Like rain on the hill. We smelled the sage under the oak and the women of his future state gathered of awareness. His Acorns: where is the tribe: they brought us food for a little and then they [thought] attempted [has something on] left us? April, now crossWe smelled the waves on the weed, we gathered the great shellfish, where examines the mother, partly as a blind. is the people? You gave me nothing, buried no sharp stone beside me for killing nor skinning; No fire-sticks and my fire died the first night, I was too feeble to come to you; No stones for grinding mast, how did you know there is no oak in the midnight Under the world, or did you think I had chipmunk teeth? They were worn to the sockets.” Then Barclay to April: “You are so pale: dear child you are far from it, don’t fear it, Your mother is wrong to let you . . .” The voice, altered a little: “There’s fat and warmth here, Sweeter than fire: the rich red cavern.” Barclay, pressing her hand: “Dear April. Yours will be long and long and you must spend it. Life’s the only treasure, use it all, Pack every moment.” And the voice: “The sun used to be white, it has turned crimson 97

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In the sunset of the world? Because you see it through her blood, pull up the eyelids, Let me look.” It had not been frightful in the twilights before, when her face was shadowed, But in the sunlight it was, the eyes of the sallow mask breaking wide open, The light brown iris rings full circle around the black windows, and not one person But many aliens drifting behind. “It is white on white grass; and,” they said, “whitens The people’s faces.” Barclay thought “It is fraud, she is conscious. Fraud: let the staring Eye holes watch all they will, she’ll be not of service.” He caught April in his arms And she, her mind given up to ghosts and the fear of the moment, not resisting him Heard the voice out of her mother: “The wizard promised me I’d see God in the morning After the night: it’s the God out of the sun: cry to him wizard!” and heard Barclay, His arm gathering her flank, his hand pressing the gateway of life: “April, April, We’ll not waste ears on the weak dead, we have life: April: do you know the secret? You have had no lover? There is no joy for a girl—you have never imagined— Oh child You have never imagined any . . .” And the voice from the woman, changing: “It is God, I will speak. I’ll wait till he’s finished with his woman . . .” Barclay, burning, heard nothing. But April Felt, like one falling, the [mind] of her life faint, and she dreamed “What secret? A secret?” The element of stone had been omitted when her life was moulded and she Suggestible as wax had heard that the God must finish with his woman, her mother’s Lips lent it weight, he might be a God and he must finish with his woman: Who must not resist him: he was old, to be obeyed like a father: her mother obeyed him, And suffered for him in the trance. . . . He said, “Come down, we have nothing to do with the dead. Suddenly I think that we shall never taste it: come down, come down.” He trembled, 98

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Lifting her, he saw in his brain His own intensity, his exultation, great pictures fashioned of pale flame Streamed on the crumpled folds in the bone vault, the folds of a banner in a wind, the stars were shaken From the headlands of heaven, the crowns of the far coasts of the sky were gathered to be thrown at his feet, Multitude, the daylight moon to adore him, The sun, the crystal cyclone fountain, the inexhaustible rose of shining to flood him with the fragrance Of adoration: he scarcely in that tempest And whirlwind worship, in the vortex of the rose with the million petals, Felt nor remembered the young slenderness in his arms, her body was the fuse That fired the universe, yet almost nothing, less than the least of the stars worshipping Himself the center. . . . 5. She heard the voice from her mother, “O God with the white face Return, the night has been long, nothing but bits of bone lost in black earth, If I go down who shall stand up, the roots of the grass drink it up utterly, Never to see black shadows in the white sunlight again, Ai,” it screamed, “Ai, savior, Turn to us . . .” She turned and saw her mother Sitting erect under the rock, a hand on each knee, the face thrust forward The eyes like ringed stones: then April struggled up through her dream to a little resistance Not against anything she might suffer, but against being taken Away from the weird mother and the crying of the dead. He lifted her up and carried her Without labor; the strength that his youth had never known had visited his limbs At the slipping time, on the edge of old age. He walked with great strides toward the pinewood Down the steep slope, the burden like a bird’s weight in his arms, all the stars And the wonder of the sun’s music like light.

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6. The woman was alone under the hilltop Under the rock In the ecstasy, in the flame, on the edge Of the virgin harvest: that diamond grain of the mind that takes no part but is witness, The alien crystal set in a man like the eye of God, the hidden judgment Nor irony nor indulgence blinds nor colors: it sees from outside the circle: It lodged in Barclay’s mind, ringed with fires, with the adoration of the stars Not touched at all, not tainted by the spinning drunkenness watched from outside. An old fable of the world: the mother in the sun shaking with ghosts and voices, The God, the maid in his arms, striding downhill into the darkness. Demeter Rose from the rock; the ghosts babbled in her throat, she moved like stone walking, Her masters had forgotten how to guide the live limbs. 7. April was weeping Silently in the shadowed thicket; she thought “It would come sometime, it has come. Desire his youth had denied Rode the man with long spurs A fierier possession Rode the man with long spurs; not Barclay; the desire his youth had denied Avenged its prisons I create good and I create evil: I am the Lord 6. It is out of a story lost and forgotten In the youth of the world, before the first Demeter: the bereft mother in the sun, The God, the maid in his arms, striding down hill into the darkness. 100

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Minds dreamed In the dawn of the world: and you toward noon, and the attitudes, the gestures, Return, dreaming the evening of the world: you dreamed of wings in the wan morning, You have forged them about noon, fly with steel falcons. . . . I will tell you more clearly. There is a column carven with images, the triumphs of the race, the attitudes, the gestures; The ages wonder about it and consider its faces: after many returnings Memory is prophecy: you pilgrims of the circle would have grown weary but the attitudes Are beautiful, the gestures beautiful, evening’s worth dreaming. . . . The stone-eyed mother Rose from her rock; the ghosts babbled in her throat, she moved like stone walking; Her masters had forgotten how to guide the live limbs. 7. Fierier possession Rode the man with long spurs, desire his youth had denied avenging its prisons. His other burden, the girl April, In his arms, her eyes upward, hardly distinguished him from the intolerable sunlight, She felt the long strides of his strength, she saw the branches of the pinewood Cover the sky: some obscure Brutality to be suffered, a crucifixion: what violence? the sweetness of it Was the necessity: an irresistible power: submission was all. He was greater Than father or mother, the pleasure was the pleasure of rest, of peace, he imposed it Who was like God too great to strive with. There was a thicket in the forest, Wherein she endured him; the wood was full of pain and wonder: the breathless oppression: The secret: what secret, the flies on the pane share it? Nothing wonderful, the secret, Horrible enough. Yet she lay quiet wondering what worse, waiting to endure it, The man having gone mad. 101

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Incredible, he thought, how instantly Desire dies at the crisis, the sphered and shining universe instantly extinguished And the lost world reality comes home; the excitement persists but is turned outward, The mind avidly returns to the interests Abandoned a moment, flies at the world outward: he had asked the dead nothing: (And here was trailing wood-mint, yerba buena, over the pale pine-needles That matted the earth): a slow post-mortem decay it seemed they suffered: the psyche— Whatever it was left over—fading away slowly: if he could return And ask them questions: eager to answer: the decency of kindness Required him still: he must pretend not to have wanted merely . . . he must calm Her mind’s terror with quieter caresses: “I love you dearest”; she was not sobbing; “I love you April: we shall be happy, I will leave everything for you.” Her body Shuddered on the earth, her eyes and her hands clenched. “Oh. It is over?” She lay quiet, And it was Barclay drew the clothes over her thighs, for he thought “Even here Someone might pass.” Again he thought: “If I could leave her. If I could go back . . .” He forced his hand roughly between the earth and her shoulders, drew her up, “Dear April, We must go back.” She sat on the ground, the eye-lids open, retracted from the eye-balls, The eyes like ringed stones. Barclay remembered suddenly her mother, the shock of resemblance, Sitting erect under the rock, a hand on each knee, the face thrust forward, The eyes like ringed stones: and thought for the first time “She may have a child: or Maruca Might have one.” A shadow of pleasure, a shadow of anxiety Slid over his mind: no more: “no doubt it ought to matter to me: it is nothing: I have got outside humanity.” He felt the girl tremble, he heard her whisper “Listen!” There was a noise in the wood more than the wind’s, he heard the ocean Over the hill, he stood erect and April’s mother Came down through the young pines: as if the great stone at the hill-top should walk, So heavily and blindly: the ghosts babbled in her throat: her masters had forgotten How to manage live limbs. They cried out of her mouth, “O white-faced God Help me, I have found you.” Barclay thought, “It is known: I have broken out of humanity: 102

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They call me a God”: and he said: “When the smooth skin covered red flesh I was in you.” He thought, “They know. This is true,” his mind flaming and swelling. He said “Gray remnant The flesh ran from the bone and the bone has rotted. Shall I turn back? I am God. I possess others. I may turn back; never toward you.” He thought of Audis. Why had he spoken that infamy? Turn back—to Audis? He whispered “I am the God,” And fiercely chased out of his mind a picture of the oak pulpit in the south He had preached God from, and said: “The hills are mine and the rich odor of the woods: You desire them again: and the gray breath of the great sea feeding you with meat. I God go forward, I was in you, I return not. Gray smoke of a dead tribe Listen to me: you remember pain? you remember fear? you remember famine? Sickness that twists the bone, torture that strains the cunning spirit to nothing But a held scream He had preached God from, and said: “The hills are mine, the rich odor of the woods: you desire them again: And the gray breath of the great sea feeding you meat from shells. I God go forward, I was in you, And I return not. Gray smoke of a dead tribe: hear me, I am full of mercy. You can remember Pain? You remember fear? You remember famine? The terror outside the firelight: sickness that twists The bone: torture that strains the cunning spirit to nothing But a held scream? The little miseries; hunger; cold rain in the year’s dark: the great perpetual misery Of striving to be alive, when all the labor Leads to the cave; to the terror; to the lonely darkness. The lonely darkness, children? The one good rest That any man can gather in the world.” “To live,” they answered, “only to live!” “I God was terrible. I am full of pity: I will not punish fools for a prayer: go home into the sleep of the hill.” 103

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XIII 1. April stood just behind him, more heavy amazement Filling her mind; she had heard the dead speak from her mother, it was not incredible The live God from this man; she watched faintly her mother’s features: the emptying, The pallor, the swoop of the dark lids. The woman was swaying to fall; it was April Ran to her and held her, Barclay standing unmoved. The father had given himself up to be God: the son at that time Had gone to the hills back of the house; he dared not walk into the canyon; He lay on the earth under the oppression of the sun; it seemed to him the earth was not there, He lay on a void, himself hollowed, his own body Like a scooped shell; the frail partition between vacancies menaced one side By steel his mother, a locked steel chest, the unbearable corners and clear edges Crush if they touch: and bruised on the other side by star his father, the boiling Orbed fire: the antagonists would meet, himself be destroyed, The voids would meet then, the outer and the inner Mix like two waters: What was it he feared, the shell breaking? the form, a mere shell, dividing surface, Nothing but himself ? He ceased breathing. “I will not breathe again forever. Ends fear. Simple, soon done.” He suffered and grew dizzy, breathed again deeply, Defeated again. “A while ago I used to be happy, when I was alone!” 2. He was alone in a new manner, no splendor of turbulent dreams for company Fed him with cloud; some tincture of morality in him forbade the defeated

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Triumph in a dream in Asia: too lately and too consciously, too many times Put to shame here: even the brown housemaid! Not his own breath: he controlled nothing. Because he had nothing, a presentiment Grew, the next days, in his mind; the future strained on some event, and he thought Some end of darkness; on him passive would dawn Deliverance: a death? His own he thought or another’s, any violence of fortune Would be good fortune: and come like rain unstriven-for; perhaps with the first rain Whose death? He found himself dreaming his father’s, his mother’s: he would dream no one’s: He emptied his mind: not his own even. There was a power managed these things, not quite the same as the image that He unimplicable. [lived] in Barclay’s mind, but similar Edward: “It is surely his father who is about to die: not someone else?” The name of the book is—BARCLAY

3.

The father was up on the hill; the son riding toward Halloran’s. The father thought, “Death comes to us: the horror of emptiness.” The son: “Life is a horror Of emptiness: nothing, nothing, nothing.” “One infinitely little vessel,” Thought Barclay, “a few years deep: to be brimmed or not: then black eternity.” And Edward: “There was one person in all the world that showed me favor: the essential frustration Of life voided her gift. I have so much to be ashamed of, that shame Is nearly out of mind. To talk with her once more: not to hope anything; hope damns; I learn to wish nothing.” There was a third jetting the crystal ether With stains of intense thought: Audis, in the house, in her room: “It’s wishing does it”: She imagined herself a picture of Barclay dead: the high features: pinched wax in furrows Melting from the sharp bones: the eyes blunt lamps under the eyelids: The Mecca camel-driver ridiculous, 105

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The putty dignity of death: the picture Barclay Kept always in the cave back of his mind like an ancestral mask In the shrine of the house, but worshipped with hatred and concealment. She said “He will die; But soon in the heart of the wish, soon, soon, to-morrow.” And Barclay: “To have taken the God In the little vessel, have been the conduit of God flowing to a woman, have been The mouth of God speaking: the vessel be broken in a moment, it is not contemptible. All other experience is contemptible against the horizon Of that enormous night and stretch of nothing Comes up in a moment. Those two are one: it is God flowing through. I was not play-acting,” He said, shuddering with joy, “the time I spoke to the dead: it was God speaking.” 4. Halloran was not at home, Natalia was there, She came and stood outside the door, clear of the cypress, the great sun glowed Over her, filling her clothes and her hair with the warm gold. “No,” she said, “Edward, I’ll not tell him, and we’ll not come. You and your father may talk to dead people, George has business to-night,” (her husband’s name, George Halloran) “and I. . . . Feel the air: Warm for November? The water is not so warm and summer’s breaking: to-night For the last swim: there’s a good moon: when old Rose Nelson strangles her voice To sound like a dead child’s, think of me Edward lying in the moon’s wake, out far In the honest water.” He felt himself trembling: how dared she After the time that had been? He must pretend that he’d not wanted her. He answered With stiffening lips that [strained] against the words: “Here in the [ ] sunlight It’s pleasant to talk of: to-night I think it’ll be He thought, “Her nature has changed, like someone fey the [ ] in a In a Scotch ballad: I hope it’s not she that’s going to die warm moon.” He said “Alone?” because it was easier to say With lips that stiffened out of use; and she answered “I’ve no one.” He felt the stiffness

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Touch all the muscles of his face and his breathing, his mind running like water Behind them whispered to him, “Someone is going to die”: he felt his father Like someone present, he did not say to himself Barclay would die, but he thought: “Then this restraint will vanish, I shall breathe easily then, one lock on my life Will be unfastened”: no one he knew did not oppress him, no death of anyone Would not be a little deliverance: he heard Natalia: “You’re very quiet, you’d keep a secret. Summer breaks like a tree and to-night Is the last night: why shouldn’t I tell you if I’ve looked all my life for someone To love me swimming in the water: but George can’t swim; you hadn’t the strength, And summer is over. There never has been anyone. Edward: never dream anything Needs two to make it.” He thought she was vile or else insane, he dared not look up. 5. XIV 1. That night Woodfinn had brought his sister; the Hallorans were not there; the Barclays Were, and Maruca; and April Nelson had come with her mother. Barclay was silent: The Woodfinns had their medium all to themselves. His dead wife, their dead mother, By turns spoke of the happiness of the life after this, of their being together, Of love, happiness, deliverance. Barclay thought “Lies, lies, lies,” and burning toward April Thought only of the childlike soft white body his mind scorched like a fire; She felt him, she dared not look at him; he was a wild beast in the room there, self-caged In brittle quietness. She forced herself to listen to the spirits That spoke out of her mother’s lips. Woodfinn’s mother was saying, “Oh, Charlie, We wander in meadows starred with song-birds, and where we wished a stream crossing them There was a stream: it is there that Elsie and I are preparing

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The place for you and sister: after while you will come—” Suddenly her voice Broke off: a cry broke through it: Feelings of the “Help me! I drown: no one?” Woodfinn’s old sister groaned aloud, and witnesses (like a distracted chorus) Woodfinn horror, repulsion on the Sprang up from the chair: April forgot Barclay a moment, she thought part of the [women], that her mother admiration on Barclay’s Was dying, so broken a hoarseness bubbled between the pallid lips and (description of the figure, tufts of hair broke off: etc.) terrible feeling of And the eyes that had no sight turned to the door of the room. April Edward Barclay. had glided To her mother’s side, she bending over her did not see it at first, but the others Saw it come from the shut door: a female figure, naked, blue-white, not living. Water ran down the flanks from the fallen hair. Edward at once Knew it for Natalia, he saw the face. It stood in the room, and April turning Screamed, and shaking her mother by the shoulders, “Mother, wake up, wake up, It’s Mrs. Halloran.” When she spoke the name all knew the phantom. It passed Silently amongst them; they all could see the water dripping down from the hair, And the drops on the blue skin. They felt the chill of the water. The phantom crossed them, And turned by the far wall; flung up its arms, a gesture of passionate a sexual gesture hopelessness; It shone in the shadow, its light struck from within outward. To Audis it seemed Abominable; to Barclay beautiful, beautiful, he saw the curves from the flanks Straighten to the thighs, he saw the shining, The breasts like moons, the shudder of the throat, the passionate surrender; But Edward saw the mouth gasping in vain, the face like a mask, he remembered The mask that had devoured his strength that day in the water, he saw the three tufts Of hair on the white body, the arms uplifted, a triangle of dark stars That made this phantom of death Beastlike: he thought “No one remembers that shame of mine, the witness is dead, This vision means her drowning, the swimmer in the night.” He felt enlargement. “I knew Someone would die.” One of the people that oppressed him. The vision swayed, fading, Vanished into the shadowed wall.

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2. While the others talked, Barclay all burning Fastened his mind on April; what did she think, what feel? He had not been near her Until to-night since the unbelievable time. She had come to his house, she appeared Unchanged; she did not shudder at him, she did not Smile at him either; when she and her mother left the house he pushed between them And drew her from the pale moon into a cypress shadow. “I love you,” he whispered And caught both hands, he felt them jerk into a madness of trembling, he heard The breath whine in her throat; she raised the white oval of her face and writhed it To a pitiful smile. For fear she would fall dead before him, or tear the gray night With screaming, he unprisoned her hands. 3. “The internal tension” he thought lying in his bed, “Makes it frightful. They are wound till the spring cracks. April: Audis: and in me . . . The machine’s made for it: steel: I shan’t scream at a look. Good to be strong If one’s to dare experiments.” He felt the bed-frame Quivering: “the inner tension: stored strength”: over acres of rock and meadow the shore Thundered in the night: the sea had arisen, it was water, the pounding Surf shook the night hills. “If that was a true vision and the woman is drowned—” Edward had said that she’d gone swimming in the night—“the ocean suddenly grew monstrous For a far storm: none’s here, no wind here, moon in the window: drowned her; the beautiful Rest of her that appeared to us, curved sacred silver body is all battered to blood-bits Under this rage.” He felt through the strung springs of the bed the bed-rock vibrating

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And thought “The power’s here, tension like the atoms’ in the rock, only to apply it and the mind Would push through anything, pierce iron. Concentration. Fix consciousness One way”: it was all direction and abstraction: to shore it with an iron channel, Detach it from all things: Audis, April, the rock’s vibrance: fasten it entire On that curved flesh had gleamed in the vision: the fates of that flesh: . . . rigidly Lying he made that image stand up shining in his mind, realler than vision, Tangible, solider than flesh . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . it stood there . . . nothing . . . The shores broke, consciousness broke back to his body, the shivering of the bed, the wetness Of the skin: for he was wet with labor, like a man running: he’d not be beaten, He’d force it: he visualized again the gleaming white flesh: impossible: he felt The numbing muscles: impossible to abstract the consciousness From that rebel the body: the shining silver curves held in the mind’s eye Were realler: the wet black waterfall of the hair over the silver shoulders: It raised its arms, that gesture: the three dark tufts of hair, dark stars in a triangle: Realler than life, more tangible than stone, he could reach and touch it Anywhere, the thighs, the breasts; it was cold to the touch: he suddenly came round it, he held it In the round: it was like a rushing force from his own body: not brain: from the midriff, From under the inverted V of the ribs joining the breast-bone: a spouting column, A liquid force, that rounded the image from both sides, touched it all over, Every inch, touched it entire at once; flowed past it torrentlike, south, southward, no effort, No strain, smooth torrent, straight and smooth to the place: under the dark waves’ rage Rolls the cold flesh: no under-sea light, no seeing, by direct touch Known: it was broken out of its shape already, dented with the rock-teeth, torn surface, Rags of flesh floating. The swirl had doubled it, knees to chest, grinding on the rock. The mouth gaped open. The rushings of water, changes, pressures. That animal effluence, That serpent flowed of its own will up the rock, through explosions of foam, slid easily Into the white of the moon. It knew the cliffs, the place, the gap in the cliff, The half moon gone west: but not its process of retraction, how drawn to its source Like the dim end of dreaming. Barclay grew conscious Of relaxed muscles, they felt dropping from the bone, luxury to lie so lifeless.

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He had learned a new power. Power? Dream? Objective at all? Sometime to test it. But he thought “The attitude of death, the relaxed flesh flowing from the bones, the horrible symmetry, The arms flat at the flanks . . .” He was breathing: but sometime the horror . . . death . . . death . . . would reach him, The horror. . . . O dawn, come dawn, come dawn. 4. Came sleep, unhoped. The noise of a car Wakened him after moonset, before morning. He thought perhaps it was Halloran; Who passed at all hours of the night. XV 1. Toward evening Edward came home, And told of little boats atopple on the great seas, perilously coasting The sheeted rocks; the oarsmen would peer down in the water, prying for white flesh In the black tangle, Halloran in one of the boats, a man with insane eyes Floating in the set face. And men had crawled under the cliff at ebb-tide, Edward among them. Nothing at all had been found. Edward had seen the ashes And charred sticks of Natalia’s fire on the rock; her clothes had been found near it. 2. Its sexual beauty was its value; it has lost all that, it has no value. They search the wave, not thinking will it comfort the dead or help the living. The second day the waves were quieter; vain search; the third they blasted the water Hoping to untangle the prey from the jaws. Nothing. A few dead fish Floated; some weeds; nothing. 111

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3. Barclay had climbed to the peak of the hill whose shadow Covered his house almost all day in winter. He looked down from the summit On the hawk’s red back; it hung below him, hovering the bright wind. Right opposite Hung the south sun. The hawk and the sun were so intensely similar: one power: Two forms, one being. The hill twitched with the distant thud of the blast in the water. The hawk vanished; the sun and Barclay Stood huge over the world; two forms, one being. Symbols of the Power, the eternal God. Symbols? Presences. The God Made fire and made flesh. “Was it always in me or has it entered me suddenly?” The fluid, The serpent, fibrous serpent that slid out in the night and went exploring, Now without effort, without will or desire, answering exultance, went up Like smoke, but from the dome of the skull not from the breast; his very consciousness, Like a vast column, like the trunk of a tree, like a huge fountain, not falling, Towering; a tower taking the sky, from the mid-sky Taking the region. He felt at once, with passion, the hills crowding like cattle down to the water, The little dried-up rivers, the cattle on the hills, the redwoods, the pines northward, the Carmel Valley, All the rock, all the life, all the earth, all the water, Like members of his body, like his hands and his fingers. He was the boatmen laboring shorelong A few miles south, planting their blasts a little clear of the cliff: they raised nothing: he also The corpse they sought; he had washed under a shelving rock, no one should find him. At Point Aumentos He was the masoned and the cypress circles, and the house the tower pierced, and he the light-tower; he also The mad old light-house keeper, the dreader of death; he the fat woman; he felt the region his body 112

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Shudder with mystic marriage-passion, for he was April, he April, the singing beauty of the child, The white body mixed in his blood, included in him: he failed, fainting, panting, the tower Fell out of heaven; the energy that had raised it had run lower in the body. Another desire. Another desire had tapped the fountain Of energy. He stood [This version apparently breaks off here, mid phrase.]

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[F R AGMENTA RY BE G I NNI NG 4]

And climbing the path toward the straight pines, the low sun Hot on his shoulders, he remembered A picture that he’d seen of Morhead’s painting, Brown rocks, brown sand, blue and white sea, a naked girl Erect against the ocean, gazing toward it; And though the painter had thought only of browns On blue and white, hair, shoulders, loins and thighs, The sand and the rocks in the high sun, the boy Grew feverish over the remembered picture; Perhaps the painter’s wife had been his model; The muscular soft slender back; he entered the house Quietly, to escape question, and in his room Stripped off his clothes; he stood trembling a moment Maddened with wonder, feeling the air on his flesh, Before he drew the scant close bathing garment Over his body. It seemed to him the wild years Of his youth to come held fire before him, unbearable beauty, Terrible and incredible unions. . . . He was nearly Seventeen years old, but love was fabulous to him, Surmised, not known certainly; he had read about it; 114

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Dr. Barclay felt a predestination of death (he is the predestined victim)—did it concern him? Or his son perhaps, going to [war]? Had himself examined. Blood-pressure high, but he might live 20 years yet.

His mother called to him from her room, “Is it you Edward?”

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Studied his father’s bible for it, and the Boccaccio On the top shelf. 5. The sea-wall At the foot of Morheads place was buttressed on big rocks and broken in the midst With a narrow sand beach for boat-landing and bathing “You two may swim,” Said Morhead when they had entered the sea, “but in and out again Is all I want of the water.” “Then come,” Jane beckoned, And led out sunward over the little rollers, Her arms dipping and flashing. Edward, close after, Felt with delight the solid leverage Of his large hands on the stiff sea, the pleasure of flying, The joy that wide-winged birds know; he had left ashore The awkwardness of his adolescent body, Returning as if to his own element, and to feel the muscles Tighten and relax on his breast and the salt foam Bubble by his face was a great joy. Well clear of the forelands And spits of rock Jane turned, laughing and panting. “You are there still? I’ve been praying for a good swimmer To keep me company.” “I too!” “Oh,” she laughed, catching his arm Under the water, “it is glorious. Look back.” The unbroken wave-tops Were purpled with the reddening sun’s ray, the far foam on the rocks was tinted with it; Far off was the land, and all the shore had taken a fairy loveliness; pines like spikes of lichen Stood on the hill; three houses, Morhead’s, Barclay’s, the tower-peaked lighthouse, stood like toys in the rose-flood That poured from the west rim of the world: this beauty through eyes with their own rainbows in them, the lashes Dripping to the wet cheeks: “Oh,” she laughed, “child! I feel as if you had given it to me, I love Water and the light.” When he turned Jane was gone, there was no one near him On the great furrowed flat of the sea, and suddenly Arms wound him below, he felt the pressure and softness Of her two breasts against his flank, his heart-beats 115

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Shook his body as the great tongue of a bell Shakes all the bronze, over him the sky Whirled, spirals of white and red from the center, And when she rose in a moment a little distant And laughed, sobbing for breath, crying “Catch me! Out farther,” He pursued without thought; shyness and shame, Mistrust and immaturity all for the moment Drowned, and she breathless when the race began The sun going under–gray Could not dive under to escape him, she felt him shadow under red sky. Pass the stroke of her feet and draw up beside her, “Night-swimming” His hand slipped on the smoothness of her shoulder And caught at the edge of the thin swimming garment Back of the shoulder-blades, “You’ll tear it,” she cried, Drawing sharply away; but he held firm; she turned then, The breath coming in sobs, “now,” she gasped, “now, You’ve caught me, what will you do now?” He clung Like a drowning boy, shuddering, and “Oh,” he cried, “I don’t know. What would a man do?” “A man wouldn’t ask,” She laughed, and then the pain in his face moved her To pity and she said, “A man couldn’t have caught me. I’ve never known a better swimmer than you are. But now you’re cold, we must go back.” The shameful question In his blue eyes not quieted was like a hurt In her own body, what could she do, how deal with The puzzled pitiable rectitude of youth? She said “You’ll learn, there will be those to teach you. Your lips are turning purple,” she said, “with cold. My faithful man I saved I wouldn’t be the merwoman to draw you under, out of the shipwreck. So good a swimmer.” But while she spoke she looked At the strand and saw that it was vacant and turning Flung both arms around the swimming boy and caught him With her knees around his knees and her breasts against him, And pressed her warm lips on his cold ones: but he was taken With a sudden flow of terror, his mouth Against her face bubbled in the water, And striking out with both hands he pushed her off And under, feeling the ribs and the firm belly Indented under his fingers. She rose beside him 116

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Laughing, but not speaking, and they drew toward shore. The sun had gone behind the western fog-bank, The water was gray and the hill gray, but the little cloud Over the hill was crimson. Then Jane: “It is at night I am utterly alone and simple. The water is loveliest: nobody knows The beauty of things who has not been swimming far out On a clear night. Sometime I’ll ask you to come with me.” A wave lifted them on its curving neck And slipping into the hollow behind they saw it Strain at the top, and the white smoke of its ruin Spout over the slate-blue, the next one covered Their eyes with murmuring foam-wreaths; they waded astrand Against the back-draught of the waves, and Jane was saying That when she swam at night Hanvec her gardener Would build a fire on the shore, over the sea-wall For the beacon of her returning. “I lie in the smooth black furrows, Thousands of stars over me, The lighthouse flaps a shining wing over the water And the stars tremble through it. I put out of my mind the little distant ruby, My bon-fire on the sea-wall, And then I am utterly alone and simple, there is nothing in the world Stands between me and the ancient night of the waters. I do not even,” she said, “swimming at night Need to wear anything but the water around me. So I go back to the origin. If you go with me sometime I’ll have,” she laughed, “a good companion But lack simplicity.” 6. Dr. Barclay Had asked the Morheads to be present, to make a circle. Jane came, but not her husband. Rose Nelson and April Came up the path after the pines had gathered Brown darkness all about them, an edge of daylight Still wavering under the eyelids of the west. The lighthouse-keeper’s wife, intent on her business 117

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Jane M. watching her with curious abhorrence felt that she touched intimately everyone in the room. All felt her, a dark weight purring in the room, purring to herself with consciousness of her power.

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And full of her own central importance, said little But smiled and smiled, brooding on inward pleasure. “Where will you sit,” asked Barclay. “Oh, here,” she said, “Is a good place.” And then, scanning the lights, “This one,” she said, “behind me, will give light enough.” But when the others were extinguished, “It shines Too much into your faces. If we could shade it. April, if you could hang your scarf around it. That’s good, that’s good.” She settled herself Into the chair and seemed to expand her bodily presence; Jane Morhead watched her With curiosity and abhorrence, but Audis Barclay Without any emotion. Both felt her enlarge Like smoke spreading in the air, so that she seemed to touch Intimately all persons present, yet remain central When you regarded her; a dark weight purring in the midst of the room, purring to herself With confidence in her power. Her head tilted backward; Dr. Barclay waited for his oracle; None came; and after a little, expectance Becoming absurd, Jane Morhead: “I think the spirits Missed the keyhole to-night,” she whispered to Audis, Who said aloud: “Well: is there nothing?” But Dr. Barclay, Lifting his hand, “Dear, hush: be patient. We must be quiet.” Audis observed his hand shaking In the dim light. He was eager, he took it earnestly, she despised him for it. “It needs more time,” He pleaded, “and here in a new place.” Then the woman’s daughter, April Nelson: “Oh yes, it will take time; but mother won’t fail,” She said with such young confidence that all present Noticed her as if she had just entered the room, Her large dark eyes and slenderness, the little face Under the heavy dark-yellow hair; and heard her Speak further like a child repeating a lesson, The eyes round and vacant, gazing above her mother’s head, “Does anyone,” she said, “wish to communicate With anyone here?” And then to the living: “Up here On the hill it would take longer. Mother does best Down by the sea: they come quickliest 118

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On the edge of the sea.” She hushed, for a voice Moved in her mother’s throat. “Out of the burning sky,” it muttered, “Into this fog-bank where it is hard to finger the keys and make plain talk. Faces and faces Gathering around a little reddish light in the fog. Who’s first, who’s first? Peck each other, birds. Push, children of the air. Oh, Oh,” it groaned, “crowd, will you? Quiet now. This old man first. Barclay? Barclay?” “Yes?” answered Dr. Barclay, his lips trembling. “No, it’s someone else.” The voice changed; still it was Rose Nelson’s, disguised and roughened. “I was the master of the Ann Williams out of San Francisco homebound for Liverpool, the fog-bank And one of your damned northwesters broke us on Point Joe, we drifted ashore among the cargo. A wave broke on a rock, all in a minute I looked down out of the white air and saw my carcass rolling with its head split open And the other rats crawling ashore. Jim Truro came along in the sky shaking and grinning And we looked for his but couldn’t find it, it was sunk under.” “When, when? How long ago?” asked Barclay, His head wavering like paper in a wind. “Might be six years—or sixty.” “Was the lighthouse built then?” “The Ann Williams.” “I said, Can you remember whether the lighthouse was built then?” “Do you care, old fellow?” “Ah,” groaned Barclay, “You don’t keep time where you are now?” “Eh? What in hell should we keep time for? Her drift’s on the rock yet. Look for a date.” “What was his name,” said Audis. “Your name,” asked Barclay, “what was your name, Captain?” “Masters . . . I was the master of the Ann Williams . . . what do you want my name for? Masters . . . Mascarve, Mascarve my name.” “Her cargo?” Audis whispered. “You ask too many questions,” it answered angrily. “Come up, Jim Truro.” Barclay looked up as if to see them vanish. Jane Morhead, laughing: “It’s true There was a ship called the Ann Williams wrecked on Point Joe Some twenty years ago, but Mrs. Nelson 119

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Knows it of course.” “The old man,” Rose Nelson muttered, “the man with the pointed beard. Where’s he got to? Here’s an old man That wants to speak to Barclay, Barclay he says, Arthur Barclay.” “Yes, yes, I’m Arthur Barclay,” The old clergyman chattered. “We went to school together; I came to this side Not long ago, but I’ve got used to it.” “Your name, your name?” “Well, Barclay, I’ll be honest with you. I can’t remember. I was a doctor, I attended your wife in her last illness, you’ll remember me.” Young Edward Barclay, between shame At his father’s eager acceptance of imposture, And consciousness of Jane Morhead’s presence, and the dreams of his youth, Had ceased attention; but now he listened again; He had never, in that reticent household, heard Of his father’s earlier marriage, and to hear of it For some dim reason was like freedom to him, An opening of doors, a slipping of fetters: he felt, Not thought so, and heard his father: “You knew Sara? Her doctor? Then you are Musgrave, Harrison Musgrave, Is that your name?” “I think so.” “But you’d left school Before I came, you were older.” “I meant, the same one.” “Tell me what school, where was it, that will be evidence.” “Why, in Ohio.” “Yes, yes!” “Near—what’s the name of the town? There were two hickories by the schoolhouse.” “Two—there—you remember!” “But later things are clearer.” “Then tell me Where we were living when Sara died.” “I crossed the bridge from Pittsburg.” “Yes, yes, you are right.” “The house Was by the church; it was brick, a brick house . . . I’ll give you evidence,” The voice said, growing suddenly firm as if a jet of memory Refreshed it suddenly, “she died of what we called consumption. She had a pale brown mole Near the left breast, I used to put the stethoscope by it.” “Oh,” said Barclay, “it is true. Tell me, Have you seen her, Musgrave, since you . . .” “No. She’s not here.” “You mean . . . there are many mansions . . .” “If you like. Yes.” “She has gone up higher?” “There’s change and motion on this side as well as on yours.” “Oh, tell me something 120

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About the life to come. What do you do?” “I promised myself,” it answered, “To be honest with you.” “Yes, yes, tell me.” But the voice changed, And a thin female voice: “Is April Nelson Here?” “Yes,” the girl answered. “Tell mother,” it said “That sister Minnie came again, and is very happy.” “Oh yes, dear Minnie.” “Very happy.” But Audis Barclay’s Voice entered like a blade, “Why are you happy? Wait and tell us.” “I . . . we have peace . . .” “That’s something Something less than happiness.” “We love.” “Love whom?” “O cold Spirit,” it said, “who are you, trying to entrap me? How could I tell what great joy is around us, The light, the music, the love?” “You speak like someone Inventing a story,” Audis answered; and Dr. Barclay: “Dear: you are too mistrustful: how could they find The word of their joy: the sky-lark and the mole Have no language in common.” “That’s it,” the voice Answered, “the good old man. Birds sing and the serpent Listens, but cannot understand the joys of the air. Dr. Barclay Smiled and listened, while the thin reedy voice With many words strove to describe vague joys. 7. Five went down the path among the dark pines. They parted at the road, the father walking To the lighthouse with Rose Nelson and her daughter, The son lighting Jane Morhead home. “I think,” Said Edward, holding the lantern at the gate, “You’ll never come to a party again like this one.” “I suppose not.” The vibrance of her voice Moved him like wine and he said, “My father is old; I think I understand why he longs to know What will come next. But the old ought to be hard.” “Will you be, when you’re old, Edward?” “I shan’t Ever be old, I shall be careful,” he said, “To get myself killed first.” “Youth, youth!” she laughed, touching his hand, “I called you David after Angelo’s image Since yesterday I saw you come to the shore 121

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In your bathing-suit, so very young and earnest. Come around the house to the shore, David, we’ll see Whether my man’s faithful.” “What man?” “Not that one Who’s been two hours asleep. My gardener, Hanvec. I told him to make the fire for me to swim by, I knew there’d be some cobwebs to wash off me.” “Hanvec: is it French?” “Breton. You’ll hear about him.” They followed the path the north side of the house Through the mist fragrance; the gardens did not show Their scars of the salt wind by lantern light; The sea made hoarse wet noises, and against The mist of the waves a fire over the sea-wall Shone like a dancing blood-drop. “So there’s my beacon. And he’ll have laid plenty of firewood by it. Good-night, Edward.” “Oh,” said the boy, “you really Swim then, alone, it’s midnight, in the cold darkness?” “Not cold: and there’s no night like night in the water. I’ve mermaid blood.” “You said I might go with you Some night.” “Some night you may.” “Oh,” he said, “to-night?” “Your mother wouldn’t thank me if you came home An hour too late.” The boy went home trembling, So incredible a vision of smooth arms And pearl-formed breasts breaking the ocean midnight Burned in his body; and he despised the house That he returned to; the clean smell at the entrance, Contemptible it was; his father was contemptible; And even his mother Audis; and himself contemptible. Oh! They would sleep! while she, clean as a star, Flamed in the darkness of the waters. 8. His father did not Sleep, but lay corpselike still in his cold bed Remembering and remembering over again, The echo would not cease in the weariness of his mind,

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Each yard of his return from the lighthouse. He’d left April And April’s mother—why did he think first of April, by her name too?—the mother was the oracle— Left them under the rhythm of the light in the tower; the silences and brightnesses of the light Had beaten his brain out of humanity: the cruelty of rhythm: his lantern had lacked oil, it was waning Blue, and there blew by the hedge, the circle of the hedge inside the circle of the road, at the turn homeward, A wind blew by the hedge, and the blue light was blown like an old man by death and became— Nothing . . . light has no spirit . . . he was left in the dark, the tower’s light came like a great tide from northward Lightening, for that would go on, the planets would go on turning, no matter that an old man’s lantern Died out of fuel. . . . “O God I had laid away Prayer: I am not strong enough to live without thee: For Christ’s sake let me know if there is hope.” He had found his way by the waves of light, one every minute; paused in the spaces of darkness; Without the light his old eyes might have been able still to accept the starlight. But entering the road He gazed by ill luck through the iron grill into the graveyard opposite: that had no ground, no bottom: Prayer again. And thoughts of An absolute gulf. He stood stock-still: what evil trick had his the failure of organs in his body nerves played him, and the treacherous darkness? How could he know what black mouths might be open in the road, caverns communicant with that vacancy? To fall like the atoms in Lucretius, down, through darkness and dizziness, the nausea of height, the eternal Falling: why, this was a mere nightmare; he was tired; he had dreamed standing: nevertheless no step All the way home had appeared safe. Darkness was bad enough, but the terror of a gulf, Who was it felt a gulf by his side? Port-Royalist: Blaise Pascal: did it mean death, or was it Mere theology? Was hell stuck in his mind (in Barclay’s) whom thought, he had thought, had quite enfranchised? 123

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No: death: the organs in the old body Were rusting out, and they knew it. The heart labored; he seemed to hear the valves in the night stillness Creak, each tired beat: surely it might stop at any moment; frightened at the thought it hurried faster, Faster, toward death. The intestines were worn out, they needed washing daily. The horror of old age. “I am being hunted into the darkness, no escape, no turning: I shall discover the country To which I am driven; that woman helping. Why, even to-night there came at least one certain message. There’s life then. I shall live yet.” He fell asleep at dawn on that security. The rhythmic stabbings Of the lighthouse tower into a gulf of darkness were the dream of his sleep; a dream more wearing Than wakefulness; it seemed to draw at his whole body; he thought it meant the lighthouse woman Would help him to stab death with light. The organic rhythm, the cruelty of rhythm? The blood in his arteries. 9. [A ten-inch space at this point indicates that this fragment was abandoned here.]

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Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version)

Jeffers titled the third primary attempt at the Reverend Barclay’s story Storm as Deliverer, just as he had the first attempt. To distinguish this version from the earlier one, it has been designated the “MacTorald version.” Jeffers probably worked on this version in early 1925, after completing The Tower Beyond Tragedy and before beginning Roan Stallion sometime in April or May. The figure of MacTorald is found in no other version, though the character’s heightened, even visionary, awareness of the region and its human actors anticipates that of Old Morhead in Point Alma Venus, the fourth attempt at Barclay’s story. In the Yale fragment, the detail of the woman “Sometimes” wandering “half the night about the terrace” suggests that woman is Eleanor. If so, this page could be from a discarded scene from the MacTorald version or perhaps from an alternate attempt at it that has not survived.

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I Phaedra—but she will be called . . . Eleanor—looked down from the height. Behind her The hammers rang in the thin air; the old lion is building a new den. . . . Mrs. MacTorald Her name is now. What did she know of him? He is wealthy . . . he has strange powers. . . . Love is enough. A love Crossed with terror? “I feel myself a country Mary Who has married God. And yet I have been preparing myself for this, without knowing it, how long! It was not easy, on the ranch, to learn things, find books, know something. . . . He, I dare say, knows everything. And has been everywhere in the world.” Last night at sunset when they watched the shadow fill up The slopes of the canyons, he had spoken of dawn in the Himalaya mountains, lit peaks like rose-red Candles baseless over darkness.

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(She stood on the brink of the hill, the dome rose up behind her. Crowning the dome was the new house, and all the litter of building strewn about it, and the hammers Ringing on the height. To her left were the ancient redwood spires, the high outlines of Palo Corona, Shading the blackness of the pool, the spring the green-mossed roots feed on, that seems rather Distilled out of the roots. . . . She gazed at the under world; the Carmel Valley, her home valley, The bay, the river-mouth spread fanwise behind its bar; the village, with the strips of streets Cut through the pines; beyond it the little tumble of hills toward Monterey; the square peninsula, The great shore-sickle over it of Monterey Bay, the forelands beyond Santa Cruz . . . like a small map Spread under her feet . . . and all the left of the map flat ocean, ocean, a few vessels on it . . . Her mind was not behind her eyes; the eyes might wander, the gaze fly far, the thought continued Fixed on her man.) But travels are not miracles: he could do miracles. The evening she had been homesick, A week after their marriage, at the camp in Mariposa Canyon; the cook and the house-boy Camped down the stream: when tears came into her eyes he knew her trouble and without a word spoken Threw grass on one side of the fire, a white column of smoke went up, shining in the firelight; He touched her hand then and she saw on the smoke-screen, clear as looking through a window, the quiet Room in the ranchhouse; her father reading in the lamplight, her two brothers talking together. The lamp had a new shade; she learned afterwards that they’d broken the old one, and all was real That had been seen in the smoke. 128

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But where had he learned magic? In India? He came down from the house. She turned to him, feeling a gentle chill between the shoulders; and he through the quiet light-gray eyes That never seemed to stop at surfaces, looked gravely at his wife: the noble stature, the blonde Wreath of her hair, the deep breast and young strength: “What a fair vessel for the future passion, An agonist,” he thought, “for the foreknown tragedy,” and looking down the slope he said to her, “You can see far from here. It is beautiful, breaks our hearts, beauty is the thing. You’ll not be lonely. For I can show you what lives inside the hills, what moves under the roofs.” A part of the building Had been made habitable, they lived there. He led her in the evening to a great northward window In the uncompleted wing of the house; there on the empty-sounding floor, through the sweet odors Of hardwood dust, they gazed at the dim constellations of humanity, far down the mountain. The lights of Carmel, lost in the pinewood; the mast-lights of two ships on the wide sea; the faint gleam Of Monterey on the steep face of the fog-bank. “Now look,” he said, “to the left, at the north horn Of the peninsula: the light that burns and fades, Eleanor: Point Pinos lighthouse: I’m going to give you Companions: there are two little lights near it; planets of a sun that waxes and wanes, Their fates are bound to that one. Here is a sorrowful earth-astronomy: it will do to amuse you, Eleanor, On the lonely height. If you like stories? . . . I choose,” he said, “out of that sky The earth-stars that have some tragic touch of kinship with us.” MacTorald paused. “You’re shivering. The night Has teeth up here, even in June. But where else could you see from, breathe in? I am ambitious 129

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To make you praise God for his beauty before we die. I have seen it. I’ll fetch a chair and a cloak,” He said, turning away. She leaned on the sill, her eyes widening in the mountain darkness. The tiny stars of the shoreland mistily shook together. That variable sun, the lighthouse Mira Offended her nerves with its organic rhythm, relentless pulse and slack, the pin-point light Like something that no storm could shake out of its changes; the cruelty of rhythm. He came and folded her In the warmth of fur, and set the chair against the window so every light below was visible Over the low sill, and he said: “There’s an old man Who feels the winking light as you have been feeling it. More intensely, and with superstition. He’s lost his faith And looks for omens. Barclay; a clergyman. The Reverend Dr. Barclay outgrew his God; He’s not a poor man, he can be honest; resigned his pastorate; Came north out of Los Angeles to the house Of his vacations: the bead of light, on the hillside Among the invisible pines, nearby the lighthouse. (There are two beads of light beside the lighthouse: This inland.) But you shall see him. There is no reason why you may not see him.” He laid his hand on her neck, under the hair. He had been pacing the new floor, and suddenly Laid his hand on her neck. She shuddered as she had done in the Canyon before seeing her father And brothers in the white smoke. . . . It seemed to her the night Curdled and split away under the eyes of her compelled intentness. Her face went forward As into a gulf opening; her hands clutching the sill of the window the long cunningly carven Throat and chin sank into it. She saw then; Without effort: 130

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A strong-featured old man Seated before a table at a window. Books filled the walls of the room. The old man’s right hand, That held a pencil over a sheet of paper, Was firm, showed little of age but the large veins. She saw it perfectly. He had written a few lines, But now, as if his mind wandering away, Traced thoughtless diagrams on the paper, concentric circles, A ray cut from the center breaking outward Through the widest circumference. She heard MacTorald speaking through the darkness above her shoulders: “His deeper mind slips home to racial symbols: cup-and-ring markings: the old masons cut them Millenniums gone on stones at Carnac and north in the islands. It is escape that he desires, Out of the rings of the sky. He lifts his head now.” The man lifted his face. The chin was shaven; the child-blue eyes under gray brows Gazed at the vacant crystal of the window. Then Eleanor was aware what light and darkness, Alternate tides, washed it: in the wave of light The rough black pillars, the pines, were visible outside, And then the wave of darkness would sweep over. The eyes quailed, tortured with rhythm, the cruelty of rhythm. Eleanor said, “The light of the lighthouse?” “I told you,” MacTorald answered. “You know the lighthouse, Eleanor? Of course you do: the long drive from the gateway down to it, the circular drive around it, the circular Cypress hedge around it, the house around the tower: concentric circles, The tower at center: the driveway from the gate cuts through them: you understand what he was drawing On the paper there. The symbol takes his mind Because it was in his mind before he saw it.”

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II “What I am doing,” MacTorald said, “I am drawing the fates of the region, human, and some not human, Into your conscious life to dignify your passion. We play our parts, yours is a shining one. I enrich it from the region; I have made this old man in a manner tributary to you, He and the knot of his dreams and household to be conscious to you. Another . . .” But she gathering Her nerves to a front against him, stood up, pushing the chair back, her head thrown backward, the cloak falling, She erect against the gray of the window: “I am myself: I will yield to you but not to many. Our life is enough, I will not let these others enter.” But he quietly, “They are here already. Did you think anything is separate? The world and the stars, Eleanor, Take counsel together in that close young skull of yours, under the shining hair: it is only That you in a dream ignore them: always there are strangers in the house, but the owner asleep Stirs in his dream. Consciousness, Eleanor, Too little for its organ, like a firefly in a vault, lights the least part of the treasure. In tragic passion, in the fury of poet or prophet, perhaps at the instant of quick death, The small taper finds flame, brightens, a conflagration, what it lights, Eleanor. Not merely forgotten Memories, the mind’s exiles, criminal desires in the dungeon, lost instincts, racial memories, dead Gods, But faculties and powers that have been denied existence, or been thought beyond nature: clairvoyance, Telepathy, knowledge of the future: you need only waken the flame, Eleanor, the guests Are here already, and bring it bright enough they are no more hidden.” She, sadly, “If you wish it I will suffer these things. Only not knowledge of the future.” His face changed in the darkness, he knowing What dim foreknowledge prompted her to refuse foreknowledge. He said “I will remember. And you, 132

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Seeing what I show you, remember that the things are only stories, think of them as stories Read in a book, not touching you too nearly. Enlarge life but not torture it. The value of things Is in the beauty, the brave show, the wistfulness, the energies. Pity and reprobation, Disgust and laughter: all irrelevant, astigmatisms of the mind: to understand is something, And that debars them; to accept the world is more, and that prevents them. Look,” he said, “down the darkness.” A falcon (she did not wonder whether in dream or truth) slid down the hill into wide air, Visible by the sphere of light around it, and hung on the cloud over the Monterey hills Where the light of the town shone up from under: then she was conscious of desire under the hills, A white passion, an aching hunger such as she had never imagined. What was the boy Doing? for now she could see him, in the bare room full of white light, laboring the stiff gray mass On the big table: touching, fondling, desiring it into shape. The [wistfulness], the energy A sculptor over the clay? He had skeletons by him The [sea] [worn] [prow] of [one] of the Monterey But no model. After a moment Fishing-craft [dipped out of ] [a Eleanor saw his work, not as the fingers marble billow] Were moulding it; as the eye of the mind conceived it; Not anxious clay but marble, but breaking out beyond His name is— The limitary frugality of sculpture: you [will have this passion also] Is he the nympholept of form or of The sea-worn prow of one of the Monterey his own body? What do you think? Fishing-craft slanted over a marble billow; So much desire ought to achieve Behind it the wooden pilings of the old wharf something, [but it burns into madness]. Stood all in stone, three of them, [framed] at the tops You will have this passion With a squared beam far stronger; two of these pillars, With the others [for] [the] [garment] Entered the water behind the boat-prow, the third of your life On this [ ] [ ] Stood clear, enlarged and crusted all its base With the elaborate sea-growth visible at ebb, Salten and lovely intricacies of form: Easter sunrise, And footed on the prow, central, the white figure height over height, the mountains over the hill. Of a naked youth, pillarlike as the pillars, Slender and hard and vertical, dominating Earthquake— The heavy water, gathering into itself at the time his son writes asking to come. The erectness of the timbers. 133

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The wistfulness, the energy, Moved her like music. He was moulding the central figure; She saw the lucid and desirous brown eyes Ache at their toil: the figure was shadowy Where the flat muscles of the flank groove in To insert in the hip-bone: suddenly the boy stripped off His clothing; he had a mirror in the room; With eyes and fingers he pursued the lines Of his own body, moulding the clay to it, the stains Of the wet clay on his hand streaked his bare flanks.

Terrible last scene of MacTorald left alone in the house watching the ghosts come and go, and the end of [unfinished] stories.

MacTorald said, “Is he the nympholept Of form, as he believes, or of his own body?” She, tenderly, moved by the aching desire And the white youth: “Tell me his name, I will remember.” “Paul Arnot,” he replied; “his father Keeps an antique shop near the wharves. The boy: so much desire ought to accomplish something, But it burns into madness. This pale fire with the others for your life’s garment. How many ecstasies Flame up to feed your beauty.” She turned: “No. No. Give me other gifts.” “I am not the giver,” he answered. III They went to the finished part of the house. She undressed for sleep, she was troubled with remembered visions; The old clergyman’s face and frightened child-blue eyes fixed on cruel tides of light and darkness; the boy’s Brown eyes full of desire: she passed her hand over her slender flank under the linen Renewing the eagerness of his questioning hand, obscurely happy at feeling the slight infinite Difference between the boy’s and the girl’s, the muscle channelled and the smooth curve. MacTorald came in, And he brought wine, saying “Share the anodyne with me, here is a quieter of too much consciousness. 134

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The world breaks in and there are visions on the mountain, but wine builds walls, we must be private A little or not be lovers.” She sipped, he drank; she lay wakeful after he slept and felt The enormous hollow mountain night, like a great crystal sphere around her central, and swarming With stars and eyes, terrible to her, all alien, all intrusive, multitudes of consciousness Threatening to break the sacred limits that made her own. Yet she went with him about sunrise, Before the workmen wakened, to the west headland of the mountain-summit. Wide and gray day Soaked through the clouds behind the height, it streamed on either side the mountain seaward, and flowed Over the sea. From the west end of the ridge, the coast, across a groove in the lower ranges, Was visible southward, mile after mile of steep slopes falling seaward, mist-wreaths from the water Beading their bases, to Point Sur where the other lighthouse Sleeps on its rock. “To have nerves outside the skin,” MacTorald said bitterly, “needs a heart like the rock there.” “What is it you see, Alan?” “Nothing, less than nothing. A gull with a snapped wing. He has lain Three flares of day along the tide-line, lives drag at the end, death’s a slow savior. I didn’t bring you West of the morning for a sea-gull’s agony. Look down into the [nearest] break of the hill, The red bridge spans. No it’s not Mal Paso, Mal Paso is out of sight under the mountain, and this Miles southward, Garapatas. You see on the headland Between the locked-up stream-mouth and free ocean, this side, on the north side, the round stone tower, Stone roofs, and walls edging the cliff. You know the country better than I, you’ve always lived here.” “Vennerstrom’s castle?” she said. “The country calls it. A little enough castle if you stood 135

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Under the walls. From here. . . . But look now what a great rebellion built it. The years go backward,” He said, “there is nothing not present to us. The flares of autumn Flap over you; the rains, old rains; green-creeping springs; It is like the whirling of a many-colored Wheel backward . . .” She stood swaying a little, the slender and blonde body Wearily swaying, the head thrown backward, the lips parted, the mind obedient to him, the eyes Wide and absorptive; she saw, as he had bidden her, colors go by like a wheel whirling; the walls Of the little stone place so pitiably withdrawn far down the mountain appeared to crumble, unbuilding; The headland bared; the glimmering wheel rushed upon quietness, stood quiet. She heard far over a gulf Of flickering time his voice who ruled her. “Fifteen years,” he appeared to have been saying, “and look Along the tide-marks under the cliff, the afternoon ebb.” She saw a man sitting on a rock By the black ebb, and knew that he was Vennerstrom who would build the castle. It seemed not strange to her In the dim outward-flowering of her life, in that compulsion, To have entered the thoughts under the skull. His Bianca Had died of giving birth to the child Bianca. The child was deaf and mute. The double disaster A third followed. He had built with his fierce energy Fortune; and now he had no one left to work for But the deaf child who had killed her mother, his mind Lost its carnivorous quality, the eating of flesh Worried him, the many enterprises crumbled, The whole city was hostile. He [beaten] to the wall Saved remnants, one in ten of the hundred thousands, And learned hatred. He secured what was left; And on this [country] shore watched the wet tide-rocks Of granite crouch in the ebb, blackened with weed, And the water falling backward from their bases They appeared to come up sullenly out of the sea, Monsters. He thought of the soft flesh of his enemies, 136

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The sickly white breasts and the soft bellies, A crazy light flamed in his mind like joy, To call up the tribes of granite, The monsters out of the ocean, the maned with black weed, To crush and mangle, to invade And dispossess: he would people the patient earth With a new people, clean stone For the watery and corruptible members, hard crystal For the brackish cells: a noble and unremoveable Race, and a silent earth: his spirit flamed up Like standing lightning in the stone-humped desert He imagined. . . . The tide flowed in and the stone people Went home under the foam. The dream persisted After it was forgotten; the dream hired labor To gather stone under the cliff and build A little tower, dividing walls, distinction Between himself and the hateful race: this much Appeared on the wheel of time returning and suddenly Eleanor was back under the moving lantern That lights an inch at a time, the present, and saw This man’s daughter, the mute second Bianca, Risen from her bed in the stone chamber of the tower Gaze from a window at the dawn on the water. “A hawk,” thought Eleanor, Astonished at the birdlike turn, the hardness, the intolerance Of the little head; and heard MacTorald speaking at her shoulder, “Wait till you see the eyes, When she comes to the eastward window, then you’ll think so,” but Eleanor growing suddenly conscious Of the bewildered fire inside the narrow Vault of the small fierce head, had hardly attention For the yellow falcon eyes that now turned mountainward, So much burning behind them; anger, and surprise Remembered fresh from yesterday; contempt; having no speech She thought in rapid scenes and images: her father Leading a strange over-dressed hateful young woman To the stone door, yesterday. He had been in the city. This new creature was certainly soft and fragile Under the clothes, a thrown pebble would burst her. 137

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Bianca remembered when the tower was building, Among her first indelible visual memories— She was only four years old—a dark young man Who mixed the mortar and carried stone for the masons Had stumbled on the high scaffold, a plank flying loose Under him, and falling struck against a beam-end, Flung wide of the wall flopped on sharp rock far down The cliff near the clear level of the locked creek-mouth. He had lain, grotesque, a red lake under his head. And though she had liked him before when he moved briskly And whistled: his fall gave her so sharp a feeling As it were of wings waving; his queer subjection And quietness on the reddened rock so clear And deep contentment: she dreamed night after night The pleasure of it; now after thirteen years The memory brought a pleasure into her anger. But not this soft bladdery woman, this bride Of her father’s, a flung pebble would burst, she imagined fallen; The father himself instead, the hard lean body Broken on rocks, blood oozing: most his quietness, Subjection, passive subjection, gave her pleasure In the waking dream: which increased and appeared real, Dominating the falcon eyes even: that Eleanor Saw in her vision Bianca’s vision and thought it A new scene of reality.

And now Eleanor saw a plan forming in the forces of B’s life before Bianca’s own consciousness was [aware] of it–long befo[re] Hearst as poisoner on the yacht, wrecked? Like a starfish

A little turret Strained over the tower, set in the seaward wall And corbels in the wall; stone steps on the wall She kills her Easter [boy] in Went up to it, they had no parapet nor guard-rail; that manner, not her father. The man Vennerstrom mounted the naked stair, Rose Maruca, Eleanor And Bianca, whether floating falconlike Resemblance, unconsciously evident to On the wind, as it appeared, or leaping upward Eleanor, between herself and Bianca, MacTorald and Vennerstrom. From the platform below, with her wings—arms— Struck at his knees, pushed when he tottered, he screaming An old man’s harsh and broken cry fell seaward And swooped on the rock . . . a wrench of sickness Shook Eleanor’s eye-lids shut against the vision, the sea and the coast, the tower and the creature on it 138

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Seemed to fall dizzily off into a darkness from her, the muscles in her throat cramping And the firm breasts drawing in so that they ceased to fill the cloth that covered them, then she heard MacTorald: “Why are you troubled, Eleanor, at a phantom of desire? There is no creature in the world But desires often strangely a moment. I told you that the sights are only stories: and this A dream in a story.” The lids quivered and lifted from the deep-blue eyes, and she saw, as little As a grain of sand on the long coast, and under the steep hills, the stone roofs and round tower. “I can’t look any more.” She turned to the mountain. He, knowing that she (not knowing) had thought of herself In place of the falcon, and thought of her husband in the father’s place: therefore this jet of anguish At seeing her own forbidden future desire’s fulfilment in the dream In her sickness fever of another’s: he walked the agonists are present to Without words at her side, contemplating the future passion.

her. Her anger against Alan, author of her sickness.

IV

She is sick a couple of weeks.

He said in the evening, “Her muteness Makes the beauty: it is talk ties up the race and turns all faces inward: she islanded out of it Escapes the racial introversion; the elements are her people; stone, water and sky her people; And that exogamy is the jewel I held worth showing. It was hidden, her father’s new alliance Has filled the mind with vexing human images: you’ll see it flesh out yet.” He paused. “Are you not conscious,” He said, “of that old man beating the bars at life’s end, shaking the cage? Why no, not Vennerstrom, The old man by the lighthouse, the Rev. Barclay Who outgrew his God.” She felt . . . she could not tell whether herself trembled or she felt a trembling, 139

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And through her mind an old man’s shaken voice moved asking eagerly . . . some question . . . the word “evidence” . . . The word “survival” . . . suddenly it seemed She was present in the room where they were met, And had always known the lighthouse-keeper’s wife Claimed mediumship; was a mouthpiece for spirits; And now one speaking through her . . . (But here clairvoyance, Clairaudience, the opening wide and interpenetrative Consciousness came to certain limits: it was certain that the woman was in a trance, and speaking Not her own mind: but whether a part of her own or whether an alien; and if an alien whether A dead man’s or a mischievous fairy’s, was not apparent.) The people in the room were visible As if Eleanor herself were one: Rose Nelson, The medium, the lighthouse-keeper’s wife, a dark Weight purring in the midst of the room, purring to herself With pride in her powers; the old man, Eager and shaken; his son Edward, the fruit Of a young wife and late desires: it seemed none of these present people was at the moment Becoming known to Eleanor: it was as if she had always known them; they were familiar; but Edward Resembled someone . . . whom then? The young sculptor in Monterey, the boy with the clay: no likeness In feature: the other’s were common and unformed but that desire [flowed] through them: Arnot his name, Paul Arnot: oppression of so many persons crowding one mind! Edward’s were cut like a coin,— And clear enough why, from whom, his mother Audis Had the same features cut like a clear coin; Hers frozen and stilled; a fifty-year-old clergyman’s Bride in her girlhood; faithful to him; a mother Now seventeen years:—but what had starved, the intelligence had not, But fed on the rest and lived in the gray eyes, Sceptical, unhappy, confident of itself, Yet hypnotized with the name of Christianity, Referring all its free courses to that 140

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For standard: there were two others: Rose Nelson’s sixteen-year-old daughter April, Dark eyes floating a little sparkle of laughter Over a gulf of fears and wondering desire, Girl’s eyes, that sucked at the world; Jane Morhead, a neighbor, The wife of Morhead the marine painter Who lived in the stone house against the shore A little south of the lighthouse. Mrs. Morhead Had been swimming with Edward, her expert pleasure And game in life was the long overhand stroke Ruling the crisp waves of the shorelong ocean, The flow of the sharp strong amorous water fondling, The intelligent lithe body bared to caress; Edward, who swam well and whose youth she imagined Resembled Angelo’s marble David’s, his boy-shyness Pleasing her too, was a companion to follow Even to his father’s house: therefore she came, Though her husband would not, when the old clergyman asked them To hear the [necromancies] of the medium-woman He had discovered, who needed to have a circle For the spreading of her powers. These persons, their desires, memories, appearances, Flowed in as calmly as a slow river flowing on Eleanor’s mind, but all in a moment, and she heard The voice muttering and saying: “Down out of the brilliant sky Into this fog-bank where it is hard to finger the keys And make plain talk: faces and faces Gathering around a little reddish glowing Of light in the fog-bank . . .” The voice changed, but still Was the woman’s voice, disguised and roughened: “I was the master of the Ann Williams, from San Francisco Home-bound for Liverpool: the fog-bank And one of your damned northwesters threw us on Point Joe. She burst and we drifted ashore among the cargo. A wave broke on a rock, all in a minute I looked down out of the white air and watched

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My carcass rolling along with its head split open And the other rats crawling ashore. Jim Truro Came up the sky shaking and grinning, And we looked for his, it was sunk though.” Then Dr. Barclay Twitching with eagerness: “How long ago, when was it?” “Her drift’s on the rock, look for a date,” it answered. “You don’t count time, where you are now?” “What in hell Should we count time for?” “True, true. Your name, Captain? You said you were that ship’s captain?” “Masken . . . Masters . . . Masker . . . I was the master of the Ann Williams . . .” “You can’t remember?” Then Mrs. Morhead, laughing: “What sort of a ship was it, brig, schooner, steamer? How many masts?” “Oh hell, lady,” it answered, “Here’s too much talk. Come up Jim Truro.” Barclay looked up as if to see them fly off, sighed deeply, And the medium, changing voice, “Here’s an old man Says that he wants to talk to Dr. Barclay, To Arthur Barclay, he says.” At the name Arthur It appeared to Eleanor that light flame, light bluish, like alcohol burning, Came spiraling up through the old man’s skull, through the gray hair, emotion, eagerness, hopefulness; his lips Thinned to contain it; but his voice was tremulous, saying “I’m Arthur Barclay, who is it speaking?” And Eleanor saw that Edward was ashamed of the old man’s weakness, but Audis tempered contempt With comprehension: his mind had been shut in a strait creed from childhood, and now the faith was broken Like a cast chrysalis from it, the mind was a new mind and a child’s mind, credulous and eager, Bright with excesses of desire: and the voice out of the medium answered: “Arthur Barclay: we were in college together: But afterwards I studied the body’s diseases And you . . . God’s: theopathy.” “I don’t know you,” He answered sadly, the chin trembling. “Oh, but you do. Come, your best friend until religion split us. I used to laugh . . . you don’t want to remember.” “I can’t remember . . .” “I attended your wife in her last illness.” “Musgrave? Musgrave?” “The same.” 142

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The light that Eleanor had seen in her vision shining in people And without thinking about it known for consciousness or emotion: she saw it grow brighter suddenly In Edward Barclay, and knew that he had never in that reticent household heard of his father’s Earlier marriage; and now at the chance mention of it Felt suddenly a depth in life, new depth, widening, a liberation, with some remote admixture Of pleasure and loathing: he listened now and his father: “You used to say that death was the end, Musgrave.” “You used to think we’d go to heaven, Barclay,” It laughed, “I’ve got the best of it: enough mind left To know we’re still outside theology.” The old man: “That’s nothing. You have survived death, you can give evidence. Some fact to fix you: how do I know it’s you, Musgrave? You say so: well?” “Eh, Barclay, I’ll be honest with you. The mind crumbles, it’s not worth going through death for. Memory goes bad, I say, but ask and I’ll tell Anything you please that sticks yet: wait: wait: your wife Had a flesh-colored mole under the breast. I used to plant the stethoscope by it. Eh, evidence? Who else but you and me?” The old man trembling: “It is true! Oh tell me whether you’ve met Sara There, beyond death?” It answered vaguely and wearily, “No,” and that one flash of remembered life Seemed to have exhausted whatever it was speaking. The answers faltered, droned into nonsense, and April Nelson: “You mustn’t keep on, mother’s tired out, Oh, now She’ll be sick afterwards.” Dr. Barclay gazed Blankly at the girl, and then as if he had seen her For the first time in the world. V The medium groaned and waked out of her trance; but Eleanor MacTorald Not out of hers on the mountain, though she struggled with her hands pushing away the vision, 143

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She felt compulsion, she could not draw the spirits of sense home to their nature. She saw Jane Morhead Rise laughing, and with Edward go down the hill among the pines; she with divided mind Watched at once these and the others; Mrs. Nelson sighing with weariness and internal pain, Her daughter saying she often suffered after the voices Had spoken through her. The old clergyman brought water And she drinking and resting, after a little Was able to leave the chair, then Barclay lighted A lantern and they three went down the hill-path Among the pines. April carried the lantern, Her mother leaned on the old man’s arm. The others Young-eyed had used no light but the half moon’s That soaked through fog, silvering the sky westward, And had crossed the road and entered the stone gate Of Morhead’s place. In the almost darkness, In paths between the damp and fragrant plants The two drew closer, not speaking, and Eleanor watched The shining phantasmagoria of their minds Move in their heads and bodies, as warm dark nights The phosphorescent ocean waves are seen Not by their shapes, their shining: so she that watched Saw the innocent monsters of the boy’s dreams coil And shine, and shrink back from reality; the woman’s Experience of life, red health, old scenes, past lovers Move and glow in her mind . . . while always like a ghost behind the door a stabbing terror Of too much vision threatened the seer . . . “I shall be sick, die or go mad” . . . could she interpenetrate Alien personalities and preserve her own?—to the quick, deeper than the blood, Deeper than the thought, not one but many, so many—and after a time Draw back to herself intact? “I lack strength, I am not hard, I am giving myself, the kernel of me Dissolving . . .” She saw that the boy Edward Had lived inward and fed on dreams, his father Ruling him, dreams for refuge: the father had grown feeble These last two years, but the old ghost lived: what dreams? Of domination, Macedonian Alexander 144

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Shaking the tower of the world . . . Tamburlaine . . . himself, Edward Barclay . . . he had written a bloody history All over the blank pages of his future, He against the people: he had gone west into Asia, Wakened Mongolia out of the ancient slumber, The wild riders gathered, he had made them a wedge To split Asia, flung the east over Europe, the west Intolerable over America, and ruled One terror, the twin destructions of the world. The dream lived with him out of childhood, the great war Fed, not eclipsed it; but now two years new elements Mixed in this dream of vengeance on a world In which he was too little and separate; reality Breathed on the edge of the dream: and if Mongolia Were deaf to him . . . he’d no sword to whip the world with . . . A poet stands separate, against the world, wielding some power, He might put magic into words and make Something to be remembered against the world, Having ranged Asia, and the east wisdom: now sometimes Edward Barclay walked about his dream Poet instead of conqueror: the other element That entered with adolescence: desire came in, Wondering desire, visions of naked breasts And the white thighs of women: the woman here, When they were swimming, a week ago, had touched him On the arm and on the flank: he never doubting Himself contemptible still, although the future Would bow before him, had shrunk like bats from sun Thinking she mocked him: she caught his hand in hers Now, and he thought, “Mockery again? Not mockery?” Not-mockery was more terrible: he left her his hand, But shook with fear . . . a mountain chasm of failure . . . How could he be equal to any turbulence Or sweet crisis in the world?

Eleanor catches April’s mania When April gives herself up to be abused by many; Eleanor also exposes herself to one and another.

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But what she suffered was at home, against the fountain: as if the objects of vision Had entered herself: the crowding weight, the alien pressure: like tumors on the ball of twisted Nerves that make mind in the skull . . . these were like tumors in her . . . the intimacy that made her loathe them . . . They were part of herself . . . though Alan should have mercy at last, let her lose feeling of them, she’d know Always that they were present . . . that old man there, His feet in the little circle of lantern: one of the millions She desired not to know: only that he was part of her, had been part of her life: no choice then: And what imagination could have conceived The unending drama in the narrow brain-vault Swathed with the stiffening membranes seventy years old, Under the locked and boned-up sutures: two giants wrestling, Exultance and despair, a child watching them. Certainly he had got evidence: the dead live then! Why do such tricky witnesses, with their fragments, Stupidities, palpable lies, testify to it? If it were true . . . an angel’s voice, the trumpet of an angel . . . “I on the cliff’s lip, a man fighting for life: But if it were a fact it would be evident And simple as daylight . . . they reserve something, they know More than they tell . . . treachery? cruelty? all falsehood? This woman against my arm, is the secret in her? I’ll thrash it out of her . . . or if nothing—nothing. So that I know it’s nothing, and die quietly As a tree dies . . . ending . . .” But while he agonized Some particle of his mind followed eyes forward To the lantern-bearer and took pleasure in seeing The small brown hand holding the ring of the lantern, The light on slender ankles, the grace of the form Under the cloak, the young neck under cut hair: She’d seemed a dawning woman in the lit room, But now a child in the darkness . . . April her name . . . Well-named . . .

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While Eleanor watched the father she saw the son Walk in a sort of terror with Jane Morhead Around the house, the garden-ways: a ruby Flamed by the rocks of the sea. “My gardener,” Jane said “Builds me a bonfire on the sea-wall, the nights I choose to swim, my old habit, a mark to steer to And warmth at coming out of the wet kingdom. The water’s cold out there but no ghosts mumble. You know Hanvec, my gardener?” “No,” the boy answered. She held his hand. “Dark and short, like a rock. Faithful as one, and strong too. He comes from Brittany where his people worshipped them With candles in the evening: a sailor: the ship struck Near where that other, the Williams, an old woman Had on her mind to-night, broke years before. Struck in the evening and split in two by sunrise. So early there were only the country cowboys On the shore watching: and I: I was eighteen: It was twelve years ago: so now I’ve told you. How old are you, Edward, eighteen?” “Seventeen,” He said, downcast and trembling. “You’ve lots ahead of you. And will not even know what’s in your mind For at least fifteen years. I, I’d no sex then. Rode, swam, never suspected I was female. Not often. Not then: for when I saw the cowboys Point at a plank bobbing in the open water, A man clung to it, washing toward death, I undressed By a rock on the open beach, every stitch: one rag’s Hindrance, you know they stick when they get wet, Might have made all the difference in that water. I swam and got him, he’d lost the plank, my rock Was sinking like a rock before I got him, The young men shot their ropes to us in the breakers And warped me ashore. He’s been my dog since then. Never trusted the sea again. My gardener Since I’ve been married. Oh Edward the oil and filth out of the steamer

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That stuck to my bare body, needed a dozen Hot baths before I recognized myself. Dirty old freight ship.” Eleanor, far off, through the agony of her vision, Watching the father and the son, the father approaching the lighthouse, the son by the shore standing, By the red fire on the stone sea-wall, heard what he heard, the words of the woman, but saw clearlier The emotional picture that her words made in his mind: of a girl stripping herself naked On the open beach in the eyes of the young men, between the sea and the rocks: and Eleanor knew She had meant to light that fire in him, but had nowise Preimagined its excessive and sweet violence. He was like a boy fighting the fumes of ether, The red of the fire filled half the night’s vault, he in a vortex Saw the steep halves of red and black spin over him, While the sea raved in his ears. He dreaded falling And steadied himself by clutching the firm warmth Of the hand that had folded his. She said, “After you’ve gone Think of me swimming here in the beautiful water. The foxtail light I go far out and forget shore, the darkness Over and under: nothing I know is like it: One element, and the speck of life that’s me To equal and balance it. Then I turn shoreward And see, no shore, two or three lights in the darkness. Your house-light, and the faithful little red one Here on the sea-wall; and twice a minute the great ray Of the lighthouse like a wing beating the fog back. Yours goes out before midnight, I’ve often seen it.” He caught at courage: “May I,” he stammered, “let me Some night swim with you.” He saw her smile in the firelight, The clear and oval face under cut hair, Over the full strong throat. “To-night?” she answered. His fever shuddered in the death-cold breath Blown from the waves breaking, she felt his arm Jerk and stiffen to resist the spasm Of violent shuddering: through his mind lightened 148

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His dream of the recklessness of Alexander, Tamburlaine, the recklessness, the idols he had set up To resist fear with: “To-night: but I’ve no bath-suit: Will you wait till I go home . . .” She laughed low, herself Trembling a little. “You might: it would take a long while. When I swim alone, at night, I never use one. If we could each find a dark corner, Edward, Far off from the fire: after we’re in the water What difference would it make?” He had no emotion But terror while he undressed against a stone And stepped into the black coldness. His father had seen Rose Nelson and April to the lighthouse door. The candle in the lantern was consumed, The wick fell in the socket, flaring, and led him Through the arch in the hedge, there failed, the old man looked south, Sounding the darkness, then the great gray ray from the tower Slid over, a light that had no guidance in it For him under the source, but half a mile southward Lightened for Edward the round shoulder, brave throat, Gipsy eyes of his companion; the bitter coldness Did not cut at his breath now he’d been under, The adventure had turned wild and glad; Jane’s head Vanished as the light passed; he felt a hand Reach up from under and touch his flank, then arms Circle him, he lay on the water, his heart shook his body As the great tongue of a bell shakes all the bronze; Then the hands pushed off, as if fiercely, and broke water A little seaward. He heard her laugh and catch breath. “Catch me,” Jane cried, “can you?” He followed eagerly The white jets on the wrinkled wave; the lighthouse Swept its ray from the sea, flattening the water; As the light passed he came beside her and reached A hand to catch at her shoulder, she turning toward him He touched the sudden softness of her breast And felt as if a pang shot up through the arm And the arm withered. She laughed, “Now that you’ve caught me What will you do, Edward?” “Oh,” he sobbed answer, 149

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“I don’t know . . . what would a man do?” “A man wouldn’t ask . . .” She lay on the water, and he imagined warmth Could be felt through the water from her nearness. The light swept over. Her face was like a mask, Intent, smiling, terrible to him, the eyes Like fires in steel, he thought unless they were quieted They would kill someone: he’d have fled away shoreward But the eyes lining the darkness must be quieted. He cried “Oh, what do you want, what do you want?” and yielded As if to a suction, let himself slip toward her, Felt her soft strength cling to him all over, her hands Touch where they ought not, her thighs cling, he had no strength Even to uphold his face out of the water, And Eleanor, far away on the mountain, saw through his brain Fire-dragons hunt across the fog of the night, flying flames [tailing], processional; the smothering water; His youth’s failure; . . . through hers, the old curious never-fulfilled desire To know love in the water turn to fear At finding him helpless in her arms: she upheld his chin And shook him with her hands: “Edward!” The light Had passed again, it was very dark, no seeing Whether his eyes, that seemed open, had life. She slapped his cheek; he moaned, rousing, then she Turned on her back and drew him backward to her, Her hands under his arms, and twisting her chin Over her shoulder saw the bead of fire Red on the shore, steered to it, closing her thighs With great strokes on the firmness of the water. The light swept over, she saw the ripple of her speed Curve out from the boy’s forehead above her breast, And as the light passed felt a wave uplift them. When they fell into dark and foam she shifted One arm around his chest and with the other Ruddered for air, found foothold, dragged him upshore Past the last laces of the wave, there dropped him And fell by his side, she on hands and knees, her body Moved wavelike with great tearing snatches of air, While he drawing breath more quietly, “Oh, let me be, 150

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Let me lie, I am ashamed,” but with dim joy Felt himself slipped back to the side of life. And having in this extremity of experience Trespassed beyond the taught fear shame, he gazed Up sidewise from the sand at the grotesque Pose of the beautiful body by him, his savior, Following with a wonder that was almost love The round arm upward from the wrist, the powerful Curve of the shoulder, the broad convex breasts In the deep shadow, the arch of the belly shuddering For breath, the twin columns of the thighs: a spasm Of cold wrenched him as blood and strength beat back Into his relaxed body, and Jane turning her head: “You must get up and come to the fire.” He felt Contempt in the voice but gentle kindness in the act, She helping him to his feet and with the firm And polished smoothness of her side supporting His weakness; after he had taken three steps Up sand the night ceased whirling over him, he said “Now I can walk; I’d better not go to the fire. If someone should be watching they’d think it strange. I can remember where I left my clothes.” She left him at that. When he had dressed she was gone. VI The old man with the dead lantern, the boy’s father, Seen equally, at the same time, in the same vigil, Had moved like a man walking in a nightmare In the circle of the road around the circular hedge Seeking the road that slashed the circle. The ray from the center Slashed it, sailed over his head, writing a great Circle of hopelessness over shore and ocean. He brushing the stiff cypress tips that stuck from the hedge Coasted it, peering for the gray gleam path; At length found it and followed. The eternal rhythm Of the turning light wore his nerves like a pursuer.

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Some other . . . idea . . . some vague trouble, a tempting . . . Hung with the light over his shoulder; and Eleanor, to whom all else was clear in the double vision, Rebelled at this . . . idea . . . that it was cloaked in dimness. It hung between the halves of her mind . . . Ran from the son to the father: the boy’s emotion, terror, wonder, his vague desire, infected The old man, an influence like a cloud: she felt now Fibers of connection: when the turning light Had shown on the round shoulder, the brave deep throat, Gipsy eyes: the old man through his perplexed darkness had felt What [innumerable] honey drips lost From him when death covers: the heartbreak of the end: But if (she knew) he’d asked into his thought He’d have found only a shudder at death, no shadow Of the magic of the senses. It became more Compulsive; the boy pursued the woman’s challenge, the old man Saw vaguely a vision of ripple and white splashes. But as inexplicable sights and sounds Fall out of the mind unless there is something in them To give thought food, the vision fell out of his mind Unregarded; the emotion remained. When Edward Reaching for the hard shoulder touched the soft breast The old man with a sick terror suddenly remembered The one unchastity of his cautious youth; He saw it as a fleck of dry-rot in the feeding Stalk of the soul: would the stem break, immortality Be lost by an hour’s folly? One sin: a pit Seemed to open for his next step in the eyeless darkness. Oh, to go down, go out like a lamp, be nothing, For a fall, fifty years back! “I am not a Christian,” He said to himself, “not in their sense: but impurity May by a law of nature destroy the soul. It is terrible.” He stood, dared not a moment Take one step forward, fancying a bottomless chasm Crossed the road at this place. Edward was yielding Toward love as if to a suction of the water. 152

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The old man conquered his dread of the eyeless chasm, And walking forward felt, no visual memory, Like diffused perfume the remembered presence Of that young girl, the medium’s daughter, that April Whose face had astonished him with sweetness. Edward Slipped like a prey into the woman’s embrace. She was making magic, the old man suffered the magic. He imagined with his eyes the immortal spirit, His own spirit, naked, female in form, crouching In a corner of grim mountains to escape death. The body had died, death hunted the spirit; she stood, And it was April’s face and the fat sweet Body of a girl, the little breasts: he was warned To blot the waking dream out of his mind: But if it concerned the immortal soul, immortality, It was essential to him, he must follow it through: That satyr-looking shape stalking the naked Spirit: was it death? An old man, his own face. That one crime of his youth? Oh, would it catch, Throw down, violate, the April-faced soul? He tottered With passionate fear, drove the dream out of his mind, Leaned trembling on the white-washed wood of the gate At the end of the lighthouse road; the beastly rhythm Of the turning light tormented him with fear Lest the evil dream return: it might have hidden In some fold of his mind. Death? Death? Not lust. VII When he opened the foot-gate The vision-channelled midnight had begun to unsettle, move and coil monstrously Over Eleanor’s head on the high mountain; the labor of the seer was breaking her strength into confusion. Strands of darkness, like stray columns of smoke, covered her sight; she would see clearly a moment, And the next, darkness. She saw the old man open the gate, he was hidden while he crossed the high-road. 153

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“It’s a good thing,” she thought, “they’ve fenced the well-brink, and with spiked iron palings; the poor old man Would fall into it.” A well? A gulf: a ten-acre gulf, no bottom. And he through the iron palings Gazing fascinated. She looked as if over his shoulder into the gulf. Spirals of darkness Smoked up from the enormous depth. It had actually, she thought, no bottom. Down, down forever. But that’s the graveyard inland from the lighthouse; the fence of the graveyard. Now that she remembered it She could see floating on the depth . . . blocks of granite in rows, and slabs of moss-blotched marble . . . A little lower, a second scum over the vacancy . . . floating . . . old bones in broken boxes . . . And certain people, composed and swollen, all parallel, all horizontal, all in the same posture. The old man saw the essence and no more, the cavernous nothing. “But,” he cried out, “they have spoken to me. The nerves of my eyes are the liars.” And nothing could stand more than a moment. Beyond the Monterey hill-huddle The mean bare room of that young sculptor . . . modeller of clay . . . but where was the image he had been working Long ago, last night? He had broken it, it had slid back into the clay . . . what, now, he had found a companion? He had made his clay into her image: the squat coarse female figure: nothing but youth to help it. She was dressing now: Calabrian colors: and Eleanor with a desperate new tolerance wondered Had they celebrated love or art first? Mary Biggan, a fisherman’s daughter: a poor young artist Must take what model he can persuade. Dark skin, not used to bathing. He helped her dress: but the vision Moved like a storm, crossing the little hulls in the bay, and suddenly, beyond them, over open water Met the great face, the changeless eyes . . . what face, what eyes? . . . the great face tilted backward, the eyes

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Containing the world: they had never been unknown: but having no change in the gray depths . . . and it followed The arc of a parabola, over the sands northward, over the hills at Corral de Tierra, And came to the house of her father in the Carmel Valley. They were all sleeping. She said “I will enter And sleep”: but it was not her dream but Bianca’s: the south wind in it had no sound, and the storm Tearing the ridges of the hills was full of silence; the furious waves breaking the sea-cliff, Power without voice: it was Bianca Vennerstrom’s dream; the storm was her father and a split rock her mother, And the angry hawk-eyes covered with sleep. . . . Whose face came through it, not Bianca’s dream but Eleanor’s . . . a face Resembling the other . . . but the eyes were amorous under the deep ridges . . . a young man’s face . . . “I shall know it,” She thought, “when it is coming.” The multitude had no meaning but terror. And the high hill to the south was saying: “Now you are better, Eleanor? It will soon pass. I too Suffered at first, this fever.” She heard the workmen’s hammers building the house. “Is it you, Alan? I saw a young man’s face in a dream: gray eyes like yours, great brow-ridges above them: whose face? Or is it no one’s: I imagined it in the dream?” She thought, “It was wrong on the open hill-top To build lightly: I feel the wind shaking the bed; they ought to have used much heavier timbers, The wind shaking the house. It’s not myself trembling? It’s Alan trembling.” MacTorald trembling Answered, “I know the face. It is my son’s.” “You told me you have a son: I’ve never seen him: Why should I dream about his face?” She clenched her fists under the silk. “I’ll have no more visions. You have no right. I hate these people: are they fictions of yours?” “I chose them, Eleanor, they seemed Nearer you than the others, what, is it hard for you to bear with a few, I endure multitudes, 155

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And I the future? There’s nothing hard this side the future.” (Again: like a dark wind drawn suddenly Through some door opened in a distant room of an unknown house.) “It is for deliverance,” he said. “The great part of the world endures without deliverance: these that I show you, every passion Will be flung free before it ends. It’s to free yours. I’m saving you more bitter wisdom. Give me back my promise: let me show you a fragment of our future?” “The deliverance?” “The need,” He answered, “of deliverance.” “No,” she said angrily, “once to suffer it is enough. It is you That bring it to me. You can be patient, you know that you are bringing it. Or rather,” she said, rising, “I will have nothing of all this: it is all outside reality: some strain of cruelty in you Made into stories: the girl’s credulous, trouble her mind with stories.” “I am not the author,” he answered. “Yet,” wearily, “it is likely enough we live in a fable and are fictions; and the noon sun A lie written in fire. I was thinking that if you live it thoroughly enough you might live through it. I multiplied experience: I know experience is disgusting, life’s a wry mask, many masks Might speed the event. Life’s to break through: there’ll be a brittle one among many: I haven’t found it. And probably not until endurance breaks . . .” VIII She gave her thought to the new house, planned with the workmen, Drew designs for carved wood and studied panellings: she would be quiet in her one life: and the days Grew longer and lonelier: there is a penalty for renounced power: it had seemed unnatural to her, But now her life was like a room with walled up windows. And what did Alan know, in the silences 156

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He returned from with secret eyes? “Let me go home,” she said, “a day and a night: my father Will like to see me; and I am wondering about my brothers.” “Your brother George,” he said, “is away. But he’ll come back while you are there. Manuel will saddle the horses Whenever you want.” “One is enough, I’ll ride alone, I don’t need Manuel.” She rode with delight, Though the steep trail was worn with many hooves and heavy with dust. The house-materials had mostly Been brought up the patched road from seaward; this way had suffered traffic also, and the woods beside it Gray-white, the summer had no wind of strength to cleanse them. She passed old Osprey’s little farmhouse; the old man Was hoeing potatoes in a tiny field on the great shoulder of the mountain; he and his labor Had something fabulous in them, suspended between the cloud and valley [The two-inch space at the bottom of the page indicates that this version was abandoned at this point.]

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[YAL E FRAGME NT ]

But all about her and under her and over her the blinded fog Shuddered four times a minute, shot full of violent Splendor, the night could see her by it, the light without shadow When she stood erect opening her arms, the plunging Strokes and withdrawals of the light. But a later evening The fog hung lower only to the lip of her rock Like white and mounded water, she imagined horses Swimming the cloud, she set her hands on the parapet And looked over her shoulder, came hairy lovers Swimming up from the cloud, she did not dream of young men, Big dogs with lolling tongues and the wild rough flanks Dripping from the flood, their weight and fierce power. She imagined Her dreams were not innocent, she dreaded madness, And suddenly in the vacant hours of the day Found herself hating her body, it was that that betrayed her: That sucking mouth, desirous whiteness and softness, That wanter of things, what was it? it was not herself, Something she lived inside of, a third person in the ecstasy,

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Had spoiled the innocent ecstasy with figures of beasts: Leap from the rock, kill it and be free? O not yet, For the icicle stab of terror in the helpless air, She knew it in her dreams. It was not always easy to sleep. Sometimes she wandered half the night about the terrace. One midnight Between autumn and winter watching the moon set Red like a burning ship, and a ship’s light by it Little as a star: before the red trouble Sank, ran a quivering through the desolate sky

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Yale Fragment

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Point Alma Venus

The first page or pages of this fourth attempt at Barclay’s story are missing. It begins mid-scene immediately following this unit, which seems to be a note rather than part of the passage: My son do you mean to kill? I love you. Time is the master, I have only to wait. I shall see God first.

These waters not charted.

In his April 24, 1926 letter to Donald Friede (see p. 288–89), Jeffers identifies the narrative he is currently writing and expects to finish soon as “Point Alma Venus.” His characterization of the material matches this iteration of Barclay’s story, and so that title has been assigned to this version. Three of the briefer fragments seem from this phase of the project. The final page of Fragmentary Beginning 2 includes the opening of a letter to Benjamin De Casseres dated April 11, 1925, about the time Jeffers apparently set aside Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version) to begin Roan Stallion. This suggests that Jeffers, after abandoning the MacTorald version, worked on a conception related to The Ur-Point Alma Venus in the days or week or two immediately prior to writing Roan Stallion, or it suggests that this fragment followed soon after Roan Stallion as a preliminary to this fourth attempt at Point Alma Venus. Either way, Fragmentary 161

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Beginning 2 is probably transitional between Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version) and Point Alma Venus. The handling of the verse line in Fragmentary Beginning 3 suggests it, as well, may have been an initial attempt at the opening for this final Alma Venus attempt. The Harvard Fragment seems part of a discarded scene from this version or a now lost but similar version from this period, since it includes the character Faith Heriot, who is present only in this final version. A sheet of critically suggestive notes that mentions the September 14, 1924 oil tank fire in Monterey may precede Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version), may come in the transition from that version to this one, or may follow this version as Jeffers considered what to do next after abandoning Point Alma Venus. The notes read: Migration of birds, along the shore, “[ ] [ ] of water and glow of foam for guidance” The crowd of the world drawn toward the future, along the same sea-beach

Woodfinn’s sister, the bride of Christ, 40 yrs old. W is 50 Myrtle Cartwright and the Oil-tanks Quarrel between Agnes and Oliver W., he a spiritualist; she an adorationist, will not go and doesn’t want him to go. Might Edward at Easter be her Christ?

Fall migration of birds as exordium for new book

The process of Barclay’s story: first seance; second seance, Natalia appearing, her husband present

Begin IX with first seance; or else with Woodfinn and his sister

Humanity is nothing in itself but only as reflections of greater and more beautiful forms and forces, the active little bodies and the round bowls of fire, the brains, the bone skulls, the shells full brimming with vision, are [ ] to [contemplate] 162

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Beautiful country burn again . . . Second Chapter or II . . . Carmel water 2 lines : one section Humanity is the bottle to be broken, that the keen sun may spread living[?], that the sweet liquor may be spread abroad Therefore tragedy—–the [ ] peak of a life–the hour of the breaking–the bursting when the fire and ashes–the moment between reason and madness– That wink of the eye when the falling tree has not leaned yet– I must use human flesh and human thoughts, those worthless building stones: The time before it can fall must[?] be built up: bear with me O patience of the world, O quietness of the mountain while I build the tower, that we may see whether the violence of its folly may discover something. || Thence to a high and wide view of the coast country. That this is ode, not story.

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The Rev. Dr. Barclay, his hands like wires in a wind, Cried to the mountain pilgrims Easter sunrise: “You say this is the day of the grave broken, that Christ rose on this day, God had been killed And came alive on this day.” To himself: “It isn’t decent to want a following. What I want’s truth.” “You are simple people, glad to be guided, I remember Three years ago you were all for peace, two years ago Good Friday came command to be warlike; By Easter you were. Less than three days: you changed your natures in three days: an obedient people. You love authority, you’ll hear me. I owe you something, I am fifty years old, I have preached lies. After all it’s a much older festival. Men celebrated the springtime and the revived God Thousands of years before he was the son of Mary and was called Christ. A new beginning.

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The sun breaking the night, the spring breaking the year: the time to call you to a new beginning. Someone must tell you. I cannot tell you what’s true: I can tell you what’s false: the stories, the Bible, The church and the faith founded on them: the story that Jesus Was God and a son of God and died to save us: a myth related to the myth of Adonis. The story that he rose from death on the third day, the tomb in the rock was broken open: The yarns of idle fishermen, the washings of Syria.” “We knew it already but he is paid to have faith for us. Monster.” “Dr. Barclay is ill, he is not himself, you must not listen.” “You need not, you’ll hear. Here’s a beginning. I tell you it’s time you outlived childhood, outgrew dreams and dead words and the toys Of children: the idol uplifted there with the dead lights on it: the cross, that idol. As for me, I tell you I’ve come to myself: all I can do is to confess that I have spread darkness, and here and publicly Declare that I will not spread darkness again, tell lies, stand up before you in the carved oak pulpit And feed you lies on Sunday mornings.” Seas breaking on rocks; a woman’s scream like a gull’s cry. “Be quiet You mouths, you mouths of twilight. Down there in the valley it’s happy twilight, go home, here on the mountain The noble and clean and dreadful sun beats like a storm. You’re out of shelter for once, you’re caught In the hawk sky.” They blew the bugles and clarions that had sung for sunrise, they sounded the motor-horns, “I tell you the cross . . . feeds your deep lust, a phallus . . . your cruelty, a means of torture . . . I have shaken you From the opium sleep, beaten you awake with words . . . The house was rotten, I have pulled it down, build new . . . repent, will you?” They streaming two ways down hill 166

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Passed by the pulpit, it was like a boat anchored in running water, and Barclay at the rail: “I am casting devils out of you. Where the lies go flying the truth may come in.” They broke the platform, But none laid hands on the preacher. III

Scene: a double one:

Scene: Barclay, alone, on the hill. “Like cattle herded to the ocean The sun-smitten bare heights, the domed and pointed, crowd to the cliff. The echo of that denial On the inland hill in the south dies in this vacant greatness, Christ or no Christ is not important, The enormous gulf the slant white sun makes terrible, from the heights to the ocean. I repent nothing. Not that, But the lost fifty. Fifty years old: how many are left to fling at the mystery? Not die deluded, Not die as a fool dies. You are dreadful, you gape Between the heights and the flat water: I am dreadful too, since that denial what clouds of power Belt the brain, immeasurable stored forces waited release: they have found it: not yet Found the hill to blast open. But having tapped the power I’ll find the object. Culture is nothing. Discovery’s The way to walk in. Laugh at me, these thoughts trumpeting to me, Subduing myself to deal with my wife Audis Her drunken brothers, bargain with them for an empty farm-house, Clean it out and move the packed things from the south Into the shell to make a home. What they call a home, Sticks, cloth and books, tables and plates and firelight, Formed to wall out the wild face of eternity. I’ve shelved a thousand books down there in my study. Not one opens a spy-hole: blur things with words. Fifty years old, facing the desperate down hill, And pass the mornings reading Greek and Latin 167

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With pale sixteen. Eh, confess failure, depute My son Edward to find out something for me After I’m . . . what I’ll be . . . stuck out of the starlight To save stinking? . . . There’s the dumb instinct Set me on Aeschylus and Lucretius with him, The Titanism from Athens, the Roman’s pale eyes Against religion. . . . No more: the bleak remainder Serve me, not him. There’s more gleam on this mountain, If one could whet the eyes to it, Than any old man in Greece dreamed over Elboros. I’ll climb to the peak. The great north and south wall of the coast. Far down the stone slope My one lean hawk hangs in the streaming wind. That’s deep. Soberanes Creek and the dim house among the stunted cypresses by it Are twice the depth. There my wife Audis, my son Edward, motes at the wall-foot. . . . There I this night Shall sleep while the stars blaze. . . . Well, if that discontents you look south Barclay, Down the other slope: the roof of the log house Audis was born in: the Morheads, her drunken brothers, Her dotard father, . . . the strange old man nobody sees, alive or dead under the roof there? It is better to look farther. South, canyon after canyon, height after height, headland beyond reef, And the domed rock, Aumentos light, opposite the sea-wall of the continent. North, the gashed cliffs Ever more wildly tortured to the fjords of Lobos, and dim beyond Lobos the granite peninsula, Point Pinos light at the north horn, I saw it ablink in the evening. Behind me, the hills, the secret Hollows of the hills. Before me the enormous, the planet’s shoulder, reaching to Asia through the fog-line. Here’s room, Barclay, here’s room. The vulture’s got the sky of the falcon: you, brain, those clouds of force Belting you, will not break through? Death’s got the sky of the vulture, that’s the flaw in it. Fifty from seventy: But the half of those may drain into mere dotage. Space enough but not time enough: ten years: fear death, 168

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Lend me that one look over the edge first? You slimy Branched threads that make the brain, where maybe a billion Cells of the brute flesh come to one clear spot, One focus, one gleam: you never have worked in the half century, You shall flame now, Find out something before the blood turns sour And the wind shifts to burial: burn wild, burst up through it.” IV Toward Summer. Audis tries to hang herself V Double scene: Barclay and Maruca. Edward and Natalia. VI A little narrative: in the striped house

Edward falls in love with April, goes to college, while he’s away Barclay takes her.

IV Barclay on the hill. The scant grass bleaching toward summer. “The road of excess leads to the palace Of wisdom, the road of excess runs to the palace wisdom: I read it somewhere Life-before-this, I don’t remember the book. But why it torments my mind like an old tune Was not in the book. . . . What, drink too much like Randal Morhead And that other brother? Or like pale Audis Exceed in silent bitterness? Up to what palace Will these lead these? Palace: a closed and walled thing, not for a palace I’d break the sacred measure: to climb the peak over the sun I’d break it. The road of excess To the palace wisdom. They say that desire Makes these dreamings in the mind. I warned her she’d be wretched. Hated this coast from childhood: but home runs the hurt thing, So to be comforted by the precious brothers And sister-in-law. She has too much vacancy, her life Gone empty: a social creature: and brown Maruca, The Indian girl we hired to help in the house, Makes rough house-keeping of it, but Audis can keep Her room and distil bitterness. The road of excess To the palace of wisdom. If it were true: there’s not a folly 169

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I’d not tar myself with. . . . Thought’s lost, ridicules thinking That beats the unbroken sky like a blind bird. As if some devil had made the world, to plague men With promises, and put a hand over the eyes: ‘You thought to spy something? I keep my secrets.’ The seed of sight’s not in us: others submit to it; But me, the chrysalis creed kept my mind tender. And having cracked it, naif at fifty, the old child Dreams he can pip what all the rest of the world Admit’s impregnable, the old blue ironic shell there. The seed’s not here. The hope: to catch it from outside. Bare the frail nerves, expose the crazy organism To any fire in the world: special blind grace might take it at random, a random thunder-shot Split the atom, by the light of its own destruction Descr. April’s Seeing through a flare of pain: chance-kindled fire chew a way outward seduction might not Edward call attention Through the intolerable fabric of things, the intolerable darkness. to the steel nature that Here I stand. Burn me. can describe it coldly?

That shining fog-bank Has come slant from the north, covers the sea and laps the foot of the mountain, licks long white tongues Up every canyon.” . . . I’ve thought about him enough To know his secretive mind, the old man my father. I feel him shiver looking down at the sea-fog, And how he began to think “There’s something nasty Being done down there.” His heels ground the steep slope Down hill, he said “some vile thing being accomplished,” He entered the level fog like water and went Steep through its granular stillness until the row Of blue-gum trees behind the stable of the place Striped vertical rays of dark up the white world. What he thought was: I know him: he thought that his son And the brown house-girl, coarse Maruca, had stolen to the stable— Audis would be in the house—he entered the gap In the fence under the mournful erect trees

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And pushing open the little door at the rear end of the stable Spoke into the dusty emptiness “Who’s there? You Edward?” A noise of breath drawn like a sob in the dark. Barclay peering about him with eyes dazzled By the white flocculence out of doors, was caught with a sudden Trembling anger: they dared? Vile and desired are so mingled in the cup, he never doubted It was righteous reprobation shattered his muscles with disgust, when the mind pictured what the eyes Could not make out yet, the joined prostrate bodies, the coarse brown naked thighs crossed by his boy’s White adolescence: akh, beast! He fumbled raging about the dusty twilight, his eyes undazzling Saw—whom?—standing erect in a corner, stiff as a piece of timber studding in the angle of the wall, The eyes like white rings: “You, Audis? What are you doing Out here? Out here?” She didn’t answer, and he saw A rope noose dangling from a rafter, and under it The old milking-stool that stood about in the stable Set ready to step from. “Good God!” “Why, yes, I thought of it. I was finishing what you began.” “Audis.” “You killed me. I was only making the corpse ready to bury. The breath has to be stopped. Give me five minutes. You couldn’t let me alone five minutes?” He’d mounted the stool, And picking at the knot with his fingers: “Not one, Be sure, after this.” “Let it hang,” she cried laughing, “You great [crane] let it hang, you’ll want it sometime. Oh,” she cried, “you’ll not bury the corpse: it’ll be poisonous. You killed my spirit, killed Christ, brought me to this coast Where the hawks kill song.” “Your choice: you wanted to come here,” He said stepping to the floor, the rope in his hand, And she answered “Do you remember your last funeral, While you were still decent? That Mrs. Martin Fainting by the grave? I spend my time thinking How lucky the creature was, her husband had died, Mine will, mine will!” Her voice lifted like the hawk’s cry

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When it glides over the hill’s fold, but Barclay’s face Darkened so heavily with anger she quieted Her voice and covered her eyes with her bent arm Twitching herself into the angle of the wall, and he caught The wrist of the arm and dragged it from the eyes Saying “Neither of us, not yet.” They are gray, with dark lashes, Then vague with tears. She never had courage to affront him Angered; she trembled, played child. He led her to the house.

Face – anger – descr. She felt, as always when he was moved, such a power behind his eyes that she quieted and began to tremble. How stern life had become since they went north!

V Another scene, a double one. The grass on the hill Bleaching toward autumn; the summer fogs are all over. Barclay in his study Feels the hot torrents of afternoon beat in through the west window. His book’s in shadow on the table. What he’s been reading: tales of the talking dead, the psychical research society’s records, For Audis’ brothers, the household down at Morhead Canyon, Were spiritualists, gorged it down whole, the medium The lighthouse keeper’s wife from Aumentos Point; And Barclay, to himself: “The demon I begin to suspect Lets us know anything but what’s essential And fools us onward, twitching the core of the matter Just out of reach: likely enough would conceal Much meaning under the puerile and the morbid. I seem to follow His thought: ‘None but contemptible Minds will spy into contemptible matters, such minds Not to be feared, I’ll hide it here under contempt.’ It is possible.” But after he’d read among the records, “Telepathy,” he said, “Is proved enough: what drew me down from the hill The day Audis had nearly finished her madness? And these prove nothing more. Minds under consciousness Signal to each other.” I meanwhile—I mean his son Edward was riding the horse his father had bought him Our first month on the coast, and met Natalia Where the coast road curves outward onto the sea-cliff. 172

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(Natalia Morhead, Natalia la Chilena, Rich cauldron of mixed bloods. His mother’s brother Randal Morhead had lived in South America, Married her there and brought her home. I have lived Part of my madness out, I can remember she was lovely, And that her skin had gold in it, her eyes were sea-blue, Her hair night-black: [murmur] and quietly count up The mixture of her blood, Tuscan and German, A quarter Spanish, a faint brown trace far back Of Araucanian Indian: my uncle when he drank Would brag about her.) She’d a rolled towel in her hand, And said in her tricky foreign English: “Oh, Edward. It’s you riding so fine? You ride: I swim: Come swimming with me.” He sullenly: “I’ve no bath-suit. Make it to-morrow and I will.” “Have I?” she said laughing, Shaking the towel out like a flag, “the water’s a good one. Listen, you, Edward. Here are two beaches beside each other, a slip of rock between them, you on one, I on the other. You won’t peek over the wall. We’ll meet outside the spit in the blue water. You swim well, Edward?” “Yes I can swim.” He felt himself grow stiff and hot in the saddle, and shiver in the heat of the day. He thought “But swimming’s nothing: to go swimming with someone.” He slipped out of the saddle and stood Faintly, his hand on the leather to save falling. “I’ll tie him to the fence.” “No: send him home, can’t you?” He looped the reins over the saddle horn, turned the head north, and slapped the haunch. They parted on the cliff-head And met outside the rocks in the blue water. But Dr. Barclay In his room the two miles north: “Yet I’ll go into it. It is here, at hand. If there is anything not fraud And not telepathy in it . . .” He saw in his mind The old sandstone lighthouse up on Aumentos rock: And that the local medium lived in the lighthouse Made her less common: something symbolic In the plan of the place, the height over the water, detachment from shore,

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The rock crowned with a ring of stone, the light-house In the midst of the ring, the light-tower piercing the house the circular tower built up through the gable of the house . . . The hot sun settling westward beat through the window On his back and shoulders. His mind wandering awide Remembered how the verse had haunted him: “The road of excess To the palace wisdom.” The sun’s warmth; the strange form Of stone southward, the tower piercing the house . . . Natalia and Edward Had met in the sea. “Isn’t it beautiful Edward? And warm? You’re glad I let you Come swimming with me? O you swim well. Now look behind you.” He looked landward, saw the gray skerries And cliff, and the hills like giants. “The best time is at night, though. Have you ever been swimming at night, Edward?” “No,” he said, “. . . no.” “Oh then it’s wonderful. I build a bonfire And swim in the dark, so many nights in summer. The great stars swing above me and I am the ocean, and Aumentos lighthouse— See it there on the round rock—flaps the long rays over my breast; red, white; red, white; like bird’s wings. Two to the minute.” Dr. Barclay meanwhile Was seeing in his mind the tower piercing the house And feeling the hot sun-rays, and suddenly from nowhere Known to him, and rather feeling than thought, the thought came: “I am not an old man, life’s hot and turbulent in me, still hot and dangerous. What do they know, boys, of desire? When I was thirty, A bridegroom, I never imagined . . . And afterwards I fought it down for Audis’ health’s sake: conquered the beast, as I thought: the duty Of starving one’s self. And have cast the creed and cast The starving code and gained late liberty—for what? Yoked with a suicidal maniac hating me To mourn dead youth, old deep hells of waste pain?” Natalia said “If there’s a fog it’s lovelier. I swim in the night, and then there’s nothing but me, no stars, I am alone, I am the ocean. 174

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I lie in the night and move softly; I feel the streams feeding me, all the rivers of the world Flow into my sides. Look how it glitters above the lighthouse.” He looked, a long wave lifting him; saw the buildings Like specks on the rock, the light-tower piercing the house-roof, the lantern-glasses Wild fire opposite the sun-fall. While he looked, Natalia Was gone and the wave vacant, and while he looked for her He felt a rising movement in the water about him, hands caught at his knees, He dipped his head and saw the white in the water, and saw her through sun-bows Break up the trough of the next wave, laughing and breathing. “Catch me,” she called to him, “You can’t catch me!” He followed seaward The swift white flags of broken water, forgot he was Edward Barclay, forgot that he distrusted Life, he was chasing life in the water. To Dr. Barclay in the room northward returned visions He’d whipped out of his mind at adolescence, voluptuous Horror of visions: however he’d widened morality Still they were hateful to him: the giantess breasts In the room with him, the idol thighs and belly All gold in the window-shafted sunlight: he rose groaning, He’d walk on the hill, conquer the persecution. What, they lay hibernant in him These monsters, more than half a lifetime? Monsters? Monstrous The sacred instinct? In repression he thought, Tortured and starved it becomes monstrous. Young Edward levelled his body with the shining surface And breathed the bright snow of the foam, burning in pursuit; then the other Slacked speed; then he drew sidelong the quick feet, drew even with the brave throat, reached for the shoulder; She through keen foam golden with joy Turned as he reached, his hand that meant to have caught the hard shoulder touched the soft breast, he felt it, The round, the terrible softness: as if he had shot 175

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At falcon and struck dove; as if he had stooped for a stone and gathered A curd of dung; as if he had gathered a stick and it turned serpent The pang ran back through the arm, numbing it. Natalia Gasping “Now what will you do, now that you’ve caught me,” She laughed, golden with joy. He looked at the wave Mounded beyond her head and miserably answered “I don’t know. What would a man do? I don’t know . . .” While Dr. Barclay Heard Audis move and cough in her room up-stairs, The stir he thought of a sick bird. He heard Maruca, The house-girl clatter a sauce-pan in the kitchen. He opened the door And fled from the house. He saw the hills aching and strained With their late unendurable daylight blaze like painted flames in the pale summer, pale, bare, Exalted: he thought, “They also!” He thought Maruca’s Brown Indian body could endure all extremes, Sun, frost, starvation,—nerveless, made like a stone— Many men’s passions, entire starving celibacy, no matter to her: We white-skinned, fragile and excitable: the explosive race, bare nerves, unarmored, burn up at a spark . . . Natalia, “What would a man do? A man wouldn’t ask!” Her eyes were red with the brine sting, her face creased with the sun, the shoulder and the arm smooth-colored Shone on the water. “There is no one,” she murmured, “no one can see us. Nobody ever in the world Was more alone Edward than we are now.” She appeared monstrous to him; he thought it was cowardice To wince from the clear challenge: the face was distorted, Floating against his face, the eyes fire through slits in a mask, it was like the idol That devoured men with fire. . . . One of her arms Folded his neck, the other hand swimming; the salted lips pastured on his, they were cold, it was strange, He’d thought they’d burn like fire; he felt against his breast the erected buds and the terrible softness. They were making magic; Barclay in the north Suffered the magic, it seemed to him the air in the wild sunlight 176

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Was weighted with animal compulsion, a wild beast odor of the warm sea drew over the cliff to him, The hills ached with their daring, pale and strained gray In the late blaze: pain, could pain save? He was too sane and suffered nothing: nothing but contagion, Nothing but the irresistible . . . His son, in the ocean Felt the same terror, the straining breasts, the terrible softness. Oh: he’d abandon his body to her, be passive, not strive, no reason For terror, no more than for desire; he felt her hand fondle where it ought not, he wondered at her, He wondered . . . he wanted now, he wanted now . . . his forehead was aching: And the horror of water: the bursting ache back of his forehead: “Let me go, let me go!” He cried, his teeth clacking together, he struck the soft breast with his hand and the belly with his knee. She panted, grinning at him; the face changed and grew lovely, Beautiful and meek he thought, sorrowful, she turning shoreward. The cold struck through him, he swam wearily beside her. He said “My head aches terribly, that’s the trouble.” She was sorry. Near the shore they parted, to the separate beaches. But Dr. Barclay Walked back to the house-door like a dead man walking. He called Maruca. “Come outside” he muttered, “Maruca, I have to talk to you. My wife is sick, you must be careful not to make much noise about the kitchen, she hears it, I heard you clattering the pans. Come with me and I’ll tell you, she mustn’t hear us.” The girl walked up the yard beside him; hard face, Little black eyes in the fold over fat cheeks, Metal coils of black hair, broad and brown throat, Wide hips and shoulders. She wiped her hands on the soiled apron. And Barclay: “My wife has morbid fancies. She is sick, Maruca. If she thought that you and my son . . . you can say honestly

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That you and Edward never . . . have been alone together Maruca? You never Meet him up here in the stable? Come inside, here we can talk.” The excitement And fever of him struck in at length behind the stolid mask, the slow brain Groped with it, vaguely astonished. “Oh no, Oh no, I never do anything like that!” He said: “Maruca. It would be bad because he is young: he is young: a child still. How old are you Maruca? You know a girl grows up much sooner than a boy, And if you’re eighteen” . . . He smelled the fragrant dust of barley, The steam of the empty stall, saw the long shaft Of sunset all moted with gold lie thwart From the little window; he shook as if ice were lying Against his heart: “It is frightful: I’d rather die: Compulsion.” His mind screamed like a hawk “O take the lightning. Take the lightning. You are blind and sterile, Utterly hopeless but the stroke breaks you open, Dare, dare!” He circled with his hand the firm brown forearm, Relaxed, not drawing away from him, though it felt hot Inside his hand: his hand like ice, His head burning and gorged . . . He seemed to the girl To have grown taller, formidable, overflowing with strength. “Angry,” she thought, “not angry: he’s kind,” and she answered That she believed she was twenty-two years old; She was not sure. “Have you ever, Maruca . . .” He drew her up farther into the stable twilight, And under the beam Audis had looped the noose from: “Have you ever. . . . You were grown before you came to us: You’ve been with a man before you came Maruca, Not afterward?” “Oh no sir, not since I came!” “Do I seem old, it doesn’t matter, you have to come . . .” Edward would turn the horse into the corral But enter the stable to hang up the saddle. “Oh come, we must go up the canyon.” He opened The small door at the back, Maruca went out. On Barclay following The sun reflected from the hill struck like a storm. They followed the path behind the blue-gums Across the hill-slope. The man saw his own shadow Infinitely stream up the steep slope, he staggered in the path like a drunkard, the shadow 178

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Like David naked before the presence of God danced on the hill. The girl lingering he caught her By the arm and hastened forward; he laughed, he felt himself equal with God, taller than the hills. VI Edward came home in the great glory of sunset. The horse was in the enclosure, the gate was closed. The boy’s mother running from the house: “Come with me. I thought you’d fallen, the horse came home without you. Come quickly.” He said “Where, mother? I thought he’d stand. I left him a moment.” He said “But let me unbridle him First, and I’ll come.” “No: now. No: now.” “But what is it?” She cried “To go for a walk, I haven’t walked enough.” She caught his hand and drew him after her around the stable, Up through the blue-gums; and following the path behind them, “Look back,” she cried, “my window: I see this path From the east window: but hurry, but hurry.” The path Cut slantwise the hillside to the bed of the creek, And Audis: “O God look how it’s worn, they walk up here, I’ve watched them a hundred evenings.” “Whom, mother, watched whom?” He eyed her face and it was shining with the red sundown, It had grown young, grown furious, the shawl she’d thrown over her head framed the clear features So that they burned in his heart, the lips parting like a young girl’s, the chin like marble and the eyes Like the eyes of desire; and the eyes reaching up-canyon as if they expected miracle: the spirit of the stones To shine under the hill: “Nobody,” she said, “We’re only walking. But walk quietly: here’s willows,” She whispered. “What do you mean mother?” “There might be a snake here.” She ran ahead of him like a girl and skipping From boulder to boulder up the stream-bed darted and peeped Among the bushes. Edward was troubled for her, “Come home mother, come home.” “Oh, Edward, How amusing if we’d come on lovers under willows!” He thought she’d guessed his meeting with Natalia, 179

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He drew away from her, full of shame, and she cried “There, there!” He looked up-canyon, the red glow beat up-canyon Like floods out of the shining cloud and he saw Two figures in the solitude; one vanished; the other Came down to meet them. His father. Audis ran forward Between the dark rocks and red pools and channels. “Let me by,” she cried, “let me by.” Barclay’s grave quietness Filled up the path between the rock and the bush. “It’s rough up higher.” “Edward,” she cried, “go on higher. I want you to see who’s up there, who’s up there.” “Edward,” He said, “your mother is ill; you’ll help me with her; She must go home.” Her eyes were like the victim’s Between two butchers pleading with one and the other. Then Edward, trembling, “Come home mother,” and she screamed “Maruca come here, I’ve seen you. Maruca come here!” The shrill cry climbed the gorge beating up through the rocks Into the solitary triangle of the sky, like a hawk Missing its clutch: before it died in the sky She cried, “Look Edward, look Edward at the man’s knees, The dirt and the grass-stains. This man’s been praying. He dreamed about a slut and prayed in the canyon. Come home you’ll find the house empty, the slut’s away, Nobody at home to drop the filth in our food!” When Edward was unsaddling the horse he saw Maruca Creep home across the gathering carpets of darkness. She’d sleep to-night? Initiated? The coarse monster, the old one. But Edward himself not yet . . . Initiated . . . felt judgment far away from him, In a world where all conjunctions and all origins were heavy with defilement: His own source, was that credible? Maruca; Natalia; Audis his mother. He hung the saddle on the rack, The bridle by it. He brought the measure of grain, and the bundle of hay. Audis, up-stairs in her room: Her thought for awhile was mere screaming of the mind: but after a little: “It is time. I must toughen my nature.

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We lived gently. We have changed a little. If to him brutality, Beastliness has come out of the hill: to me the weaker a wild-beast cunning will come to help me.” But he in his room below: “I have done something, and the act . . . Was without pleasure. I repent nothing. The act’s the miracle, the wild furnace to melt the world in. A knife in the house: that’s nothing. What’s to be said about Audis, about Edward, one’s household? . . . Has served the turn. Now we’re a mile past caring. I must run pure. I had something precious: my thoughts: And this falcons them; they’ll make the sky yet. That’s the thing: to run pure. Like the hawk after meat. One person And one intensity. Getting up to leave her, The hawk over the gorge: I saw one of my hawks hang over the hill, like stationed lightning.” He thought: what does the hawk dream on the tree, the lighthouse lenses of the eyes shuttered from star-gleam? The rush through the air; the meat screaming; enormous plunges under the cloud-cliff. Should not he also Sleep? Did he think someone would stab him in the night? He slept. Fifty years old: having been born A second time and a third time in the turn of one year. Perhaps a part-division of Chapter VII or Book II or Act II

VII

I don’t think so.

Meanwhile Natalia: her father Had taught her swimming when she was five years old: the sea was her element. She rolling where the shoal waves plunged on the gray sand, naked in vain, watched Edward slink shoreward. All her life long she had dreamed of love in the water. No man was strong nor bold enough; she had known loves But not that love, the amphibious Eros Cried in his moving crystal temple, the God no fervor of one worshipper ever can serve. She watched the pale hard useless body of the boy Go up the strand, the taper to the waist, thin flanks, Lean and hard buttocks and long thighs like ivory. The candle that would not burn. 181

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Then fearing lest he see her as she had seen him Go up out of the screening water she floated Seaward with the under-wash and letting the waves Roar over her head; she rowed sidelong the streaming troughs And foam-strakes, then behind the rocks issued. She marvelled At her own careful modesty; she drew the garments Over the jewel guarded from eyes and sadly Went up the cliff not understanding herself, And homeward angrily across the long bright beams Of the low sun. She approached the high and square house, Black redwood logs, white plaster, striped like a zebra Behind its fringe of stunted cypress. It always looked desolate. Her husband Randal Morhead was in the doorway. She said, “What does this old man’s house do to you? You were a man in Chile the years ago And took me from my people with a high hand. Here you’re an asking boy.” He, staring at her, “By God I won’t ask then. You like Willie my brother: Takes and not asks. By God,” he said, “who did you swim with,” Seeing the damp black hair and the towel, “with Willie?” She smiled happily and proudly. “I swim all alone. Your brother’s like you, a little boy. And I hate him,” She said smiling. They entered the house together. The logs of the wall were hidden with battened panels Inside the house. Through the thick walls The sea’s voice is not heard, nor the wind’s in the cypress. She went up-stairs. Randal remained in the room, And after a little his brother Willie Morhead Entering, he met him in the doorway and slipped his fingers Into the light-brown felt of his coarse hair. “Your hair’s dry. Good.” “What of it?” “By God,” he answered, “Lucky for you it’s dry.” “Oh, she’s been swimming?” The brothers looked at each other and laughed together So loudly they were heard through the house. Natalia had gone Not to the room that she and Randal slept in But up the second flight of stairs, to the rooms

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Under the roof, where the old man nobody saw Lay in his bed like a felled tree and the house Was his, and the ranch, the ranges, the hills behind them. She tapped at the door gently, and after a moment A haggard girl with yellow hair and light eyes Half opened the door, Natalia whispered “Come out.” And the girl: “He’s asleep. He’ll be waking all night. What do you want?” she said trembling. “You. You,” Natalia whispered. But she: “You’re hateful and cruel.” She closed the door quietly and stood outside. “Oh don’t handle me!” Natalia said “I’m tired being woman. Ah Faith. Beautiful friend.” “You smell of the sea,” she answered, “your lips are all salty.” “If I could trust you,” Natalia said, “I’d tell you. I’ll easily call you a liar if you tell anyone. Everyone knows that you’re a liar.” “Oh,” said Faith trembling, “that boy, that Edward Barclay?” “Was with me.” She breathed deep in the breast, hissing between the under lip and the teeth. “We floated in the water.” “And you come to me?” “Who should I come to, to Randal? Shan’t I show you, Faith, Faith? The joy flames in me, the aching joys. The whole ocean caught fire. I’m bringing you fire out of the sea.” But Faith shuddering, “I can’t bear it. I’m bitterly unhappy. You come and you go.” Natalia answered, “It’s not my fault I have so much burning in my blood and both joys.” They heard the laughter below as if it were mocking them, Randal’s deep voice and Willie’s louder and higher, Then Faith shuddering away from Natalia, “Dearest, dearest. When they’re away. Please go now. They might come up after you . . . please go.” And Natalia “You’re funny, poor Faith, To be afraid of everything. What, those stuffed skins?” But hearing a door Open and shut she hurried down to her room And stood before the glass combing her thick strong hair. It was cut short at the shoulders and each fiber So full of life the salty and damp of the sea Could not subdue it.

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She went down and helped the cook, The old Chinaman, set the plates and food on the table. The farmhands had come in, the Swiss dairy-man, The two soft-voiced Spanish vaqueros. Faith Heriot With her great and frightened eyes slid into the kitchen To fetch the tray for the old man up-stairs. Natalia whispered to her, she whispered “Oh, Oh; I don’t dare,” and so shaken that the broth spilled in the tray, The old Chinese cook wrinkling the dry clay face Chuckled to himself behind her and sought Natalia’s Glance, to share laughter, he found it iron when he found it. Willie Morhead after the meal was over Rose, he spoke privately to Randal who said “Be careful,” Then laughed to Natalia, Randal frowning, “Come sister, A ride in the night.” “You’ve got your load without me,” she answered With averse eyes. “But when I go in the boat Next time,” he said, “you love the water.” His brother Rose angrily from the table, and he said “You’ll come too?” And went out of the house laughing. The farmhands Whispered together for he was a hero to them; He smuggled in whiskey from the sea, and to-night Would take the last load of the hidden liquor To his friend in Monterey. They waited in the house Till they were sure his car was clear of the driveway. After the three had gone to the outbuilding They slept in, Randal to Natalia: “I hate it. He’ll get drunk and be caught sometime. It’s the old man’s fault. They’ll take the car, and it’ll be trouble enough Even for me to keep clear. The fines will clean us. They’ll take the power boat. You talk to that girl up-stairs, could wheedle the old man.” She looked with hard eyes into his face; the sunburn Shone angrier color. “What do you want Randal? Ask him yourself, you’re the asker.” “By God,” he answered.

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“You know he hates me. What chance has a man’s son got? The granddaughter does anything and gets by with it.” “Anything,” she smiled, “poor little Faith does anything at all.” He went to a closet and fetched whiskey, and Natalia: “I married the right one. Willie risks life for it, Randal stays home and drinks it. I married the wise one.” “Here,” he said, “take some and keep still.” “Not without water.” He said more cheerfully: “I wouldn’t ask him to sell. Not one acre. We’d raise the money on a mortgage And in a year pay it, and be rich besides. The basin up there in the hills, I tell you It’s floored with oil, floats on it. Escobar flat. I’ve had it experted. Millions and millions underground there. By God. And just one little well would open it to us. Makes a man mad. The cows won’t drink the spring there, Streaked with rainbows of oil.” She answered, smiling To see him grasp with his hands, pale with desire, “The old man’s not the Lord God to last forever. The bones don’t knit. A year since the horse threw him And he’s been rotting up there under the roof. Give him two more you’ll have it if you want it enough.” He gloomily pouring from the bottle: “Will it to the others, That’s what he’ll do. He doesn’t want me to drill. You talk to Faith, she likes you. Promise her anything. Says he won’t have his dirt messed up with derricks. Thinks oil’s a medicine, doesn’t know it runs cars, Doesn’t know it’s worth money. You talk to Faith, write his name’s all I want of him. She’d coax him for you.” His eyes wavered in the orbits After the third half-glassful. Natalia stood up And looking down into the circle of lamplight: “I’ll ask her for you.” He nodded his head over the fragrant glass, The blond bright liquor in it, “By God, not now. She’s getting the old man fixed up for the night. To-morrow when she’s lots of time and she’ll listen.” “Just as you like.” Natalia walked to the outer door, drew it open, And stood breathing the night. Her whole smooth body

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Burned and moved under the clothes. The creeping wind made secret noises among the cypress. Creep in the night like a cat, surprise the snoring cowboys with naked beauty? Men are contemptible. Ruffians. The sea thundered far off. The clean sea. Natalia could not understand why tears Ran on her cheeks. She turned wearily in-doors. “I’m going to bed.” He nodded over the glass. “Come up when you’re ready.” She awakened when his loose weight lay in the bed, She turned her face from the rank breath. “To-morrow night The lighthouse woman with her ghosts and her voices,” Natalia thought, “will be in the house. Those nights They listen to her mumble and I swim in the sea, In the clear gray and sleep of the water. While Willie’s by him he doesn’t worry about me Swimming alone.” An hour later A scratching and breathing like a dog’s at the door Wakened her. She slid out of the bed trembling, Slipped barefoot to the door, whispered at the crack, “Who’s there?” It answered sobbingly “Faith . . . Faith . . .” She opened, the other stepped back shielding the candle With bright thin fingers. “He’s asleep, he sleeps sound. Natalia: yours is asleep?” Natalia drew shut The door, released the latch carefully. “Yes, drunk,” she answered. She felt her strength opposite the frail thin girl, She gazed with masculine eyes loving her weakness At the flushed spots in the thin cheeks, the hollows of the great eyes, The aureole of hair shining across the shoulders behind the flame of the candle. She reached with her hand and touched the little breast through the thin night-dress. “Faith: what do you want?” She felt her Tremble, and she said “You’re not afraid?” “Not in the night I’m not afraid,” Faith answered trembling. And she answered “Oh you are like a trembling flame.” “Oh come!” “You candle in the wind of the darkness.” “Come dear love come.” There was a room Faith’s father and mother slept in When they came to the farm, here the two girls 186

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Crept in, to feed without meat fruitless desire. But Faith was crying in her mind: “It was my mother betrayed me. O God That I had been like the child, killed before birth with a steel tool. It’s then she should have betrayed me, Before I was born. Never to have opened the eyes, never to have known anything, not a man, not Natalia. Not to have breathed nor cried but innocent . . .” He could not remember He had felt the emptiness of the bed, he was standing Beside it, he leaned on the bed to steady his drunkenness And found that it was empty, Natalia was gone. He breathing hard, darknesses without form And gleams reeling through his eyes felt for the door of the room And almost falling found it along the wall. His brain cleared when it opened. He saw a faint blade Of light down the hallway under the crack of the door, Groped toward it by the panelling and clutching the door-frame Heard sighs like screams. He struck the door with his fist, Before he could strike again it had sprung open, Natalia raging in the door, black against brightness: “You dog, you drunkard.” He stood dazzled and staggering, His face like the face of one screaming with terror, Yet shaped over the thickening tongue, “If it’s Willie inside there . . .” “Look dog,” she answered. He saw sitting on the bed Faith Heriot with a look of death in her face, The eyes like caves, the body wound in a sheet Like grave-linen, and quiet as a skeleton. “Drunkard,” Natalia said, “good-bye to your oil-wells drunkard. I was just talking to her, no time by daylight, You come in the night hammering the door . . .” “Oh,” he stammered, I thought it was someone . . . someone . . .” He pitiably Nodding his head peered all about in the room. Faith choked and fumbled her throat with clawed fingers, “Ah,” she coughed, “I’m all right. I’m all right. Ah. You’ve waked grandfather.” Natalia forced her husband Out of the room, handling him like a child, And he began weeping, and Faith gathering Her strength fled to the stair, fell on the treads, strained up. 187

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It is needful also To remember the hills over the house, the heights like great humped cattle herded to the sea; but glimmering With stars and full of seeming-eternal quietness. VIII They were moving east, and new stars Rose over them, the others drifting oceanward; in the clear night the leaning phantom of dawn before dawn Slanted from the east, a wind blew down from the summits On both the troubled houses and falling seaward Curled the white hair of the night surf: the phantom in the east Died, the true gray followed. Then Audis Barclay Saw the twilight before the light and remembered The change of the world. What was needful to do Stood perfect in her mind in a moment: she would go to her father, The house here is fouled beyond scouring; and Edward to college. The sanity of dawn. But not to meet with her beast She’d wait his absence, not to be soiled, rest in the room Until he had left the house, then leave it forever. She’d pack her things, one of her brothers would fetch them. The light in the east window colored, and the house Wakened below. What were they doing down there? Infamy. After an hour someone came up to her door, She knew by the step the slut Maruca. “What is it?” “He sent me up with your breakfast . . .” Audis thought suddenly “I must be cunning: among these beasts: a wild-beast cunning”: She opened the door and took the tray without words, And having locked the door wondered which food Was poisoned, the coffee or the bread or the fruit, The porridge, or the milk? She’d throw nothing away, Her brothers might have a dog that they could try it on. When the poor creature swelled, foamed in convulsions, 188

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Then they’d believe. She sat in a chair, waiting. Dr. Barclay had wakened like one embarked On a great voyage; and as the traveller puts by The tumult of departure out of his mind To feel forward: so he, cancelling all thought Of yesterday by an act of the will, flew falcons Into the towers of dawn. He alone in the world Would know something. Not to die blind. “Believe then That Socrates, Christ, Buddha died blind? Why hast thou forsaken me My God was not a seeing man’s cry at leave-taking. The Athenian then, the man who would not be fooled when he was younger . . . the fancies, the pitiful fictions Near death breeds in an old man’s mind: and this man, the stander-alone, hypnotized out of life By his dream of the state. I have some advantage, Cut out of the seduction of allegiances, Cleaving to nothing: some purity. Not to myself even; I am willing to burn on the way outward. If I’d embraced someone worth having yesterday I’d not be free now, I broke bonds without forging new ones.” While dressing He thought of a dream: the lighthouse, the stone circlet on the high rock, the house enclosed within it Enclosing the tower, the tower enclosing the light, the great ray of the light slashed outward, shearing Or overvaulting its triple enclosure: “clear enough what the dream meant,” He thought, “I am willing to burn on the way outward.” But in the dream he had called it Alma Venus Instead of Point Aumentos, Point Alma Venus. That was amusing: as Lucretius had done He also dedicating the adventurous poem Of life burning toward truth? “Why does this lighthouse Haunt me?” thought half of his mind, and the other half saw A vision of himself dead: he had often lately Suffered the vision: the sunken eye-pits, the senseless Shrunk-parchmented forehead over the lightless brain,

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The pinched nose, pitiful and disgusting, the wrinkles Of defeat framing the mouth. “The ash,” he said angrily Rejecting the vision, “the fire burns through, the ash crumble.” Breakfast was served. He did not speak to Maruca Until he sent her up with the tray for Audis. He went out-doors, thinking “to-night the Morheads Meet their medium: I’ll go: I thought the Demon Might hide a glimmer of the truth under contempt. This morning: visit the lighthouse that I dreamed of And see that woman: whom knowing I’ll sift the more easily. Point Alma Venus,” he smiled. “I’ll walk. One thinks, walking.” But suddenly he thought, “No, to hurry, to hurry. Ten years May be all I have.” He ran the car from the shed Built against the stable beside the corral, Turned and drove south. Eyes at the window watched him. Then Audis, the tyranny of his presence Gone south, caught both the curtains of the window and tore them from the rods. “The coast has taught him beastliness? But I was born here.” She thought “How cold I am outwardly, careful to be quiet in my furies, I have whirlpools of fire Behind the forehead.” Quietly leaving the room She locked the door and went down. She heard Maruca Clatter the dishes in the kitchen; she thought “It is my house. Twice I have been near leaving it: Once in the rope’s loop in the stable: not punish anyone? I’ll not die, I’ll not die. Where was the rope last?” She opened the door and slipped out of the house. The porch had climbing roses over it, the cypresses Gesticulated like dwarfs. Two waves of flame Rolled apart to the right and the left, between them Audis remembered like a tranquil vision The dusty cobwebs under the stable roof. There on the ledge under the eaves a cord She’d hidden when cords appeared the pathway to peace.

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It lay there still. Above it, rafter to rafter Collar-beams crossed the gable and cobwebs on them. She circled the house beyond the cypress trees And coming to the back door: “Edward, come, come. Maruca come, the horse has fallen in the stable. Tangled in the long rope. Come out and help me.” Maruca came, her hands glistening with soap-suds. But Edward when he came: “Not in the stable, How can he be in the stable?” She said “No matter, I tell you to come.” Entering the stable door She said “Not the horse. My husband Dr. Barclay Wants to speak to you here Maruca.” Who entered; Edward behind her. Then Audis: “Why, where’s he gone to? He wanted specially to speak to Maruca. But here’s his gift.” She stood tip-toe, reaching to the ledge, Edward admired her delicate panther litheness: how suddenly younger: And the clear face pupiled in the dim light Like a young girl’s: she held whatever it was Hidden behind her, “Hold out your hands Maruca. No,” smiling tenderly, “both your hands. His present for you.” The Indian Reaching her hands, the rope wound the two wrists, She twitched them back before it could knot, ran crouching Toward the open door, Audis clung to her and fell with her. They struggled together on the planks and Edward stupidly Watched, the thick legs and the slender ones straining For kneehold, heard the animal panting, and saw The white face like a mask above the brown one Like a lewd mask, he muttering “Mother, O mother,” And Audis, “Help me Edward, whose side are you on?” He said, “Let her go mother, let her go mother.” Then Audis raised the chalk face and great eyes From the heap, Edward saw blood on the cheeks, a nail-scratch, The brown hand clutched at the white lips, he caught it by the wrist Feeling the soap and the grease, he smelled the violence, He wrung it in his hands; Audis imprisoned the other, and nothing Was clear in the boy’s mind till the Indian woman Stood, with bound wrists. Audis threw the end of the cord Over the collar-beam of the rafters, and striking 191

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Upward the bounden arms, “Draw it tight Edward!” Who without thought in the faint-mindedness Of someone in a dream of horrible miracles Drew, having been commanded to draw. “O harder,” Breathed Audis heaving at the arms, and he his mind gone The way of a candle’s flame in a great wind Hung on the rope. The victim strained up like a pillar, And muttering all the while, not screaming, then Edward With a strange clarity in his change of consciousness Knew the rope must be knotted, held taut the bight of it In his right hand and passed the end with his left Through the acute triangle between the forearms And the coarse hair. “Throw it over the beam again, Mother.” Who threw, and then he tied it, and the pillar stationed Howled all at once, weary and brief, like a cry Required in the dim ritual, an act of ceremony. Audis said thrusting forward her face—and Edward Saw with a rich gladness the great bright eyes, The high ridge of the nose straight from the brow—“We have risen against him. We’ve done something together Edward, there’s more to it. Your father Willed we should live lonely as hawks, no one to help us here but our hands. The brown beauty your father fondled.” She gathered The bridle from the nail driven in the wall, She held it short by the head-stall and struck with the bit On the stretched shoulders, the head strained forward Between the arms; and Edward through the choked cry “God not with the bit, you’ll kill her with the bit, take the halter,” and he fetched it. “I’ll see the marks then,” Audis answered. She caught the clothing behind the neck and tore downward And tore sidewise, leaving the sleeves on the arms, Baring the body to the waist where the skirt was drawn in And the rags hung down across it like an apron. Then Edward through a rushing clarity saw the brown back, the smooth-ridged column strained from the shoulders, The breasts drawn up in folds by the stretch of the arms, dark nipples, the ribs in their sheaths laboring apart As the leather halter crossed the shoulders: the immense beauty Strikes inconceivable incarnations: it was beautiful to him; 192

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He feeling neither lust nor happy cruelty Loved, as one loves the passionate curve of a great wave, the writhing body; he saw it as one sees The lyrical curve and pure line of clear hills On the deep sky: but the lash Wielded too near ringed the back, cut the right breast: not Maruca but Edward Screamed at the stroke, he caught in both arms The white fire of the woman striking, he felt on his neck The hot jets of her breath: he kissed and kissed her, smothering the violence, the hair, The face, the convulsed mouth. She relaxed suddenly, And Edward: “Help me get her down or she’ll die there.” “Why no, we’ve sacrificed the savage, let it hang. Dearest we mustn’t set free the savage in us.” “The creature will die mother, it’s crucifixion. Stand up. I can’t hold you.” The wetness of her lips was loathsome to him. He pushed her back and plucked at the knots against the cross-beam. She helped undo them; they freed the hands; Maruca Sat pitiably on the floor, Edward and Audis Kneaded the blood out of the blackened hands Through the choked wrists. Audis had lost the look of famine And said “I have done what had to be done: you see Maruca We live alone in this place. I was going to leave it. Not now, not now. Why, not for anything. Edward,” she said, “I don’t need you any more, you’d best go riding.” She helped Maruca tenderly. Barclay drove fast Till Morhead Canyon was past and the high log-house of Audis’ father, but when he came to the gate Where the road to Aumentos Point dropped seaward from the coast-road he was driving slowly. He checked on the ridge. He thought “It might come suddenly, who knows when it might come? Illumination. Everyone’s failed Yet certainly to me, to me . . .” The morning confidence having faded He felt that he might charm it back with repetitions: “Certainly to me. Certainly to me”: Barclay returned at noon And went to his study. Audis after an hour 193

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Called him into the living-room to luncheon. “You, Audis? What’s become of the girl?” “Maruca’s not well. We’ve asked too much service perhaps. I told her She might rest in her room until to-morrow.” She smiled. He thought the famine had gone from her face. “How has she been fed,” he thought in his heart. “When shall I?”

IX

I know what the others want What do you want (to Barclay You are more fool than the others “who told you?” “Your Maruca. She was just here.”

In the evening at the Morhead house. That throat for dead voices to speak through The lighthouse-keeper’s wife sat at the end of the room, the others around her in half a circle. April her daughter had dimmed one lamp and Willie Morhead had extinguished the others. In twilight The twelve living were silent, the believers among them Felt powers and forms gather in the room, each of their minds turned back toward childhood remembering the dead. But Audis thought that she was ashamed of her brothers; Edward looked about the room for Natalia, And she was not there, he looked at April Nelson the medium’s daughter Who was dimly like her in the dim light, a girl and the other a woman. Dr. Barclay regarded The heart of the circle, he’d talked with her in the morning; a fat woman with a vacant mind, black hair Wounded with streaks of white, heavily pigmented Half circles under the slow brown eyes. She’d appeared honest. She sat humped in her chair, smiling With confidence in her powers. The stillness in the room became ridiculous; Barclay’s mind wandered To the height of the hills over the house, up there in the high darkness against the starlight some fire Might lighten in the mind, some night the lightning One waits patiently may strike . . . He heard the woman move in her chair and her voice muttering “O freed And happy, how long I am waiting. I have no happiness but the passage of yours. . . .” “Waits for possession,” 194

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Thought Barclay, “no happiness but in being possessed. A female patience, woman’s happiness. But I That wait to be kindled? Power’s in this one; it is not in the air, in the vague air.” The woman was silent, And cried in a new voice like an old man’s: “Out of the shining, out of the burning sky Into this fog-bank where it’s hard to finger the keys and make plain talk. Faces and faces Flocking around a little reddish light in the fog. Here’s food, who’s first? Peck each other birds. Here’s blood and here’s mast. Crowd,” he said, “children of the air.” Faith Heriot came in And stood back of the chairs, while the voice changing: “Children it’s I. Are you there Randal, you, Willie?” “Yes mother,” Randal Morhead answered; “there’s someone You didn’t expect, little Audis, Audis is here.” The voice was silent, in the silence Faith Heriot Leaned over Barclay’s shoulder and whispered: “Grandfather said he’d like to see you: can you come up?” He shrugged impatiently, watching Audis; and suddenly Audis: “I knew it was fraud: Randal, you think that mother Wouldn’t remember me?” The voice: “I remember a child Named—what did you say—named what?” “Don’t tell,” said Audis. And Barclay rising angrily, to Faith Heriot: “Yes, I’ll go up.” “Leave the church to try this?” He muttered, and heard leaving the room: “I remember A baby with brown eyes.” “Hers so light gray,” He thought, climbing the stair behind Faith Heriot, “That . . . what’s this girl, a granddaughter?” Her hair shone golden In the light of the lamp that hung over the landing. They mounted the second stair; the landing was dark. Faith paused at the door, “I’ll see whether he’s ready.” She entered, Barclay stood in the dark; and she opened The door and let him enter, brought him to the bed Where the old man lay, straight as prepared for burial In the yellow lamplight, under the great beams of the roof. His hair and his beard Were cut short and clear white; the lean and wasted features had power, not peace, and Barclay imagined 195

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They resembled his own. The head turned very little, the eyes turned, met Barclay’s, who wondering “Can he not speak? The throat paralyzed?” stood a moment, and began, “It’s a long time. I’m glad to see you again. I think it’s eight years.” The old man answered, “The bones Have mended, the nerves don’t mend. You pity me that I have to lie here? You needn’t”; He smiled like an old man brooding gold; “it’s bought me something.” Barclay remembered in his heart Audis Who seemed to have fed secretly, here this old man her father seemed to be fed secretly; and Barclay: “May I know what it’s bought?” “Now I shall hear about religion,” he imagined, “the people down stairs Have theirs, ancestor-worship, what here?” But the old man chuckling Like one who shares a jest with his pillow: “You’d like to know? Secret for secret. Tell yours, Barclay. You want something. I know what the girl over there Wants, and Natalia, and what my sons want. I know what the hills want and the trees in the canyons; the rock Under the ranges.” “I should think what they get is more important.” “That’s not in the nature, that’s fatal, They want freedom, release; get it, they’re finished.” Barclay wondered, “Where does this come from? The old man Was carrying this about the farm-work? Too old to coin new”: and said “Release is the end of the story, Wanting’s the story, you mean?” He answered: “Oh, I know something. Audis has told me something about you. That’s from outside. All want it; you broke the church to get it, now it begins again. See, Barclay, I lie here And feel the strain of the coast, the rock in the hills, the beef in the fields, Monterey, Natalia, the water, The wind turning: you’ve added yourself to it; You speck the picture until I know you.” Barclay said laughing, “It was not my choice, your daughter’s brought me To trouble the picture.” “She didn’t send you up Soberanes Canyon, Barclay, to mount the bay filly.” Barclay stood back from the bed, his face twitching and whitened. “She was here this morning?” “No, your Maruca 196

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Was here this evening.” Barclay answered, his hands like a man’s tearing paper, “She lied. No matter. You’re wasting my time. The years grow breathless after fifty. You’ve nothing to do but I’ve got something.” But Morhead: “I’ve filled the picture. To break out of the world as you broke the church, break human limits—” “These things, neither one told you.” The old man laughed. “Christ isn’t wise enough for you, Socrates isn’t. Eh, don’t torment my little Audis too much.” Barclay imagined eyes belting his life, He stood like a stone globed with eyes: what, on his morning thought, in his bed, when he waked in the morning In the ceiled chamber? “Who’s your spy?” he said trembling, “how does Audis know What I think and don’t say?” This bed-ridden old farmer—superior to him? He’d never met anyone His look and his mind could not subdue. What, Audis’ father? He looked over his shoulder like someone Hunted, he saw the girl Faith Heriot was not in the room, she and her torch of hair had vanished, And old Morhead: “True I was Audis’ father, something more’s come to me, I told you that lying alone here Has bought me something. . . . I don’t scold the stray couplings. An old man’s blood’s frozen, he’s glad of random fires crossing the dream, comforts his fingers.” Barclay, who’d thought he stood outside morality, felt disgust in his throat; this powerless old man’s Vicarious pleasures; Oh, and the sin too, he repented the sin. He said “Maruca was here Telling you lies, not Audis?” “She’d something to complain of, not your action, another’s. Poor animal Had borne rougher caresses than yours. Barclay,” he said, “repent nothing. The road of excess,” He smiled, “runs to the mountain wisdom.” “You’ve got a good spy.” It seemed to Barclay the ground under his feet betrayed him, gulfs opened under him, “I never spoke it Nor wrote it. Reads thoughts.” Then gathering himself, pitiably rational, “Someone to lean over my bed and listen at mutterings. I talk in my sleep, do I? Your Audis. 197

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Maruca hasn’t mind enough. The skull’s not glass, Lips leak in the night. A key snapped in the lock will spoil your miracles. Audis play spy: that evens us: If I had done something shameful.” Old Morhead answered wearily: “The dream is my dream, no one hears yours yet. I lie in my bed and dream it.” His eyes had dulled, like the one shaded lamp in the room down-stairs; And Barclay felt the reasonable strong crust of the world restored around him, he thought smiling, “The God dreams in the lotus? There is no God: there’s a world, not a dream: I shall break out through it,” And said “You are tired, I’d better go down.” Old Morhead answered “Go down but you cannot leave me; break out of it Is part of the dream.” He opened the old eyes dizzily and smiled. “Part of the power you deny, what emptiness Would stand outside it?” Barclay began to believe That the old man answered his thoughts and not his words; he had said surely Nothing but “You are tired, I’d better go down,” nothing more, angry and afraid, thinking “the house, If that’s not real the hills are, the hawk of the hill asleep in the dim canyon, the stars . . .” and old Morhead: “The rock-pointed and domed black in the starlight, the crumpled bed-linen here for lotus you thought The dream lies in . . .” “Some dervish trick of eaves-dropping on the mind I’ll not blank thought for fear of: you heard me then thinking ‘The old madman lies in bed and dreams himself God?’ I won’t hide what’s not hidden.” The old man smiling So that the clay lips moved the stiff white stubble: “Remember you’re somebody: been up the stair And face to face with the dreamer.” Barclay thought, “I’m not angry, what, angry At an old man paralyzed and gone mad?” He said gently, “Shall I call the girl before I leave you? Your granddaughter I think. Faith Heriot? Audis Has never talked about the Heriots.” Old Morhead Shook his head on the pillow. “But there in the cupboard You’ll find a glass and a bottle, set them by me On the little table, half fill the glass.” It was whisky. Barclay went down thinking, “A drunken God. 198

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Drunken God’s dream. That would explain something If we believed the world hopeless and twisted. It is straight, I shall see truth.” He went down trembling. X And heard the voice down-stairs Still droning sterile pieties and pitiful evasions. He stood in the doorway. His hands began twitching, he entered the room And stood back of the chairs. The voice of the medium: “We forget much; we are dressed in bright forgetfulness; How else could we be happy, there are dark places Behind, pain, sin and sorrow, we are insulated In thought, the white garments unstained . . .” Then Barclay Remembered the Easter mountain; there standing to speak Among false pieties he had felt the same whirl Of light anger in the brain, like the eddy of dust Down a scorched road; he said roughly and suddenly: “Where’s proof ? There’s none of what you say, prove who you are. I’m willing to be patient but not with proofless Vulgar pieties hour after hour, the praises of death . . .” The woman from the lighthouse, the medium, sat silent, In the dim light her eyes without moving Appeared moment to moment closed or wide open. She alone in the room was not moved, Randal Morhead Turned as on wires, his brother was up from the chair Laughing; but a neighbor from the south named Woodfin, Brown beard, brown patient eyes like an old dog’s: “Damn you. That was my wife speaking. You—you— Insulting the harmless ones who come to our comfort.” Barclay across his thick bent shoulder saw April’s face, The medium’s daughter’s, moving like a struck child’s, he repented impatience; But Woodfin pushing toward him, muttering “I’d quiet you, I’d stop your mouth,” he forgot April. “Go back to your chair.” His lean face, with the furrows from cheek to chin, shone in the twilight, Edward looked up And saw it like the marble face of the first Caesar,

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Incisive, not resistible; and heard: “If it’s honest It will give proof; if it’s fraud Certainly someone here is insulting your dead. I am not the one.” The bent shoulders and beard Shrank back into the dimness, and Barclay alone Standing, opposite the silenced oracle: “Reverence Has made the world stupid too many centuries. Tell me something.” He could not see the face in the darkness; But April by her mother saw the eyelids flutter, the lips without voice Move; when the voice issued from them after a moment, they appeared motionless. A new voice, she’d not heard it any time before: “God changes and drinks turbulent waters and his dream is troublesome. You in the storm-dark core of the dream, the others in the quiet star-fringe: what proof ? One mind Holds all: there is faith.” The word confused him an instant Because he saw Faith Heriot beyond the others, Her hair like a pale torch, “I thought,” he laughed, “that would be needful. It’s oiled monsters for men to swallow. Faith stretched to snapping Twangs ‘dream, dream,’ when you touch it. What dream? What God? An old fellow drinking whiskey, dreaming? Prove something.” He felt his underlip twitch at the corners with anger, he thought “What way is this worth anger? I’m not concerned. Necromancy? No one compels me.” And the voice: “The dream will prove itself, deepening; the freed folk, the dead if you like, Prove themselves here . . .” He answered angrily, “It’s time. You talking are one of them?” “No.” And the voice changed; as a fragrance Recalls a place the intonation recalled a person, it said “I was here All the while but not free to speak, you remember me.” But when the infection [burrowed] from the hand upward And [stained] the arm to the heart, I [ ] you Arthur, I got you something.” “The infection, [she had]?” [Then] Barclay Remembering his brother’s voice and his brother’s death, “You Richard? I mean your voice [impersonates] someone Known to me, in whose name do you speak?” “Dick Barclay. You know me well enough. He answered, “No. No.” And the voice: “You were young, Arthur. 200

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You’d know me by the little cough and the anxious breathing But those are gone by.” He stood silent. “Paradise is dull since You lent me a year’s paradise, I always knew perfectly I’d pass in a year.” He answered “You’re clever when you’re put to it. You wormed this out of somebody—not me—or the brain Leaks its [lost] thoughts. That’s it. Telepathy. You dramatize Telepathy.” “My name then, Margaret, and the mole on the throat, Although you used to kiss by it prove nothing to you.” He said, “Nothing.” Audis, who had sat stiffly Unmoved since he began to speak, wished to cry out “Take him. You claim him, take him!” She must not say it, Not in Edward’s presence, her hand found Edward’s And pressed it; and the voice: “The person that told me to speak— The person that told me to speak to you gave me cunning To meet this with.” Audis to herself, “A wild beast cunning Will come to me out of the hill, for I am the weaker. In my father’s house. Oh, die. Die . . .” The voice: “Somewhere you keep a metal box, and I think Hidden like a sin; old pictures, old ribbons, poor treasury That first unhappy memories then fear of waking them Kept shut against you. Two books are in it, have you ever Opened them since I died?” “Not since her death,” He answered. The voice: “And one not ever. You respected The little day-book: you must read what I wrote. I have knowledge of that. It is impossible this woman Can have picked that out of your memory.” He answered Reluctantly “It is impossible. What were the words? You must remember the words very carefully. That might be proof.” Before the voice answered, Natalia Entered the room quietly, but all observed her, And stood back of the chairs. Faith Heriot Breathed sharply; Willie Morhead turned toward her, smiling; Randal toward him; Edward Barclay sat rigid Because she stood behind him; he bent his head forward, Feeling her like a pressure against the spine Between the shoulders; keen salt and freshness Breathed from her, she’d been swimming in the night and brought The ocean into the room. Only the voice 201

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Untroubled replied: “I do remember them. Last entry Reads: Sunday . . . Sabbath . . . ah, gone . . . the month and the century Shook out of my sight while I was speaking. They were here. The words, quick, quick,” she spoke rapidly by rote Without pause or inflection: “New moon to-night In the maple-twigs . . . no, I can’t remember, I can’t remember, I can’t remember . . . Tell me that it’s the last? Your face and someone’s, The doctor’s, tell me it’s the last: my thought: but I wrote You’ll grow old little moon, I’ll never grow old, And I remember the sick terror that wrote it, Though I didn’t know you age afterward . . . afterward . . . the choking Struggle in the dark the soul never forgets Till everything crumbles away.” He was thinking “Where is it? Which trunk is it in?” and “They weren’t maples but elms She must have seen the moon through.” He said “Where was it You wrote those things?” “In the little book . . .” “No: what house, What place? You can’t remember the time but the place?” “I have hardly any memory dearest . . .” Audis was thinking “O take him. Die, Die.” And the voice: “That power poured memories into me but they’re fading . . . Now let me go . . .” Edward, who never had heard Of his father’s earlier marriage, wondering and somehow Elated, had drawn his hand out of his mother’s, Feeling Natalia behind him, feeling the greatness Of time and change. While Barclay, “What power? Tell me what power,” He pleaded and got no answer. This clouded the evidence When late that night he found the box and the book And the entry in the book (not last, third from the last) About the words that had been told him, “New moon In the elm-twigs you’ll grow old, I’ll never grow old.” A date, a Sunday in February, in ’ninety-seven. Twenty-three years. He thought “Does it prove anything?” He felt no sentiment nor pity, no more than the bright new serpent For the empty slough; except vaguely dislike Of the poor dead material needed sifting For the pearl of a little knowledge, distrust

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Of the strange ways one has to walk in, to the mountain of wisdom. His mind was troubled with a turning bewilderment. “I must sleep. Frustration. To-morrow . . .” Because the poem may rise higher to its fulfillment than the novel. Because Edward believes him to be God, Edward kills him. Deicide. Afterwards, recognition of the great God. Dramatic by-struggle in his mind, to disentangle his conception of God from his conception of his father.

XI The old paralyzed man at Morhead Canyon Lay like a corpse or a carved stone, in the dark under the roof, and drew the region through his soul. He told the hills like beads, the streams ran in his veins, the canyon redwoods towered in his body; He felt the cold ocean his bed-mate, he felt the strain of the coast, of the rock under the ridge; He knew something; he had grown out of bonds in contemplation, not human any more, what Barclay blindly Strove toward, this old wrecked man, without triumph, quietly had touched. Only a dot of it; the coast; Few miles of the coast, mere point in the circumference of the circle, but radial; with recognition. He felt the scattered particles of breathing flesh; The cattle on the hill, a drift of deer down Pico Blanco slope in the starlight from the oak to the willow, A lone coyote stepping among the cresses In Black Rock Creek over the stone folds eastward; he felt the squirrels huddled in the warm earths And loved them well; he had been a farmer and shot and poisoned them for fifty years, he felt them with happiness And deep earthy contentment. A gliding snake or a gliding weasel entered the little close cave He tasted their blood with fierce contentment, he felt the huddled terror

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With rich earthy contentment. All pleasures and all pains in the region, powers and despairs, red flesh Or gray rock served his gray ironical happiness; he grew with the trees and stood with the hills; he included The scarce heads of humanity like a region weed, a growth more rare than the others, much flightier, Less rooted, capable of sudden burnings or strong sets of desire, heavy with twisted desires, And rather in their illogical complications, obscure adaptments, absurd survivals, like the insects Than the straight beasts. He called Faith Heriot and heard her Moan in her broken sleep beyond the partition That crossed the loft; he called again and she passed The pale square of the window, she lighted the lamp And kneeling yet asleep by his bed reached under it For the required vessel; he saw the lamplight Shine in the gold fall of her hair, her forehead On the mattress edge. She drew the covers aside And placed the vessel and turned the terrible wasted flanks, The skeleton thighs. She emptied the vessel and he said, “No, don’t put out the light, I can’t go to sleep.” She sighed heavily. “Bring a clean glass, drink, drink, Pour mine.” He said “I’ve questions to ask, nobody knows What’s coming among us: I must draw the cords tight: you that come from outside Are strange to deal with. Are you cold Faith?” “No,” she answered, Warming the sole of one bare foot against the ankle of the other, pressing her thin white arms Against the night-dress, “the whiskey warms me in a minute.” He said, “I’ll die sometime. Then you’ll sleep safe if you have neither babies nor lovers.” He saw the lip twist as the teeth Gnawed at it gently. “Has he come home,” he said, “from Germany?” “He hasn’t come home yet.” “Faith: what will you do If he comes here to fetch you?” “Nothing. There were many.” He frowned. “Five boys have had you. Which one do you love best, The first one, or the father of the little baby 204

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They killed inside you?” She writhed her lean white length in the chair, the muscles of the throat Rising under the skin, straining the head sidewise, “Why do you punish me? My mother did it.” “Why yes,” he said, “she was the oldest of my children, older than Randal. Your grandmother was young and brought her up carefully.” Faith drained the glass. “I came to her,” she said, “I was crying, And told her I was afraid . . . She prayed all night with me. That didn’t do any good. I said in the morning ‘Let me go down to grandfather’s and have it.’ She said ‘First you must see a doctor.’ She swore by God It was only for examination. She was the one, she paid the doctor.” He answered, “Since then You’ve nothing to do with boys, you’ll never leave me Until I die. Even if Natalia should . . . die. . . .” She bent herself towards him, Earnestly, with parted lips, “If you know everything: You know what’s going to happen?” Then turning sidewise Away from him, “I am so hurt, my life wounded all over, There’s not a spot you can touch but I scream. It’s a poor game.” He said “Pour something Into the glasses. Drink, Faith. Randal and Willie get drunk together, we up here Needn’t be always sober.” She drank. “I’m warm now. I was so cold.” He said, “See without judgment. None of those hurt places would hurt without judgment. But if you were cured you’d leave me. Look, here’s the great ridge over the ocean. Wooded canyons, bare domes, All soaked with darkness. Orion’s in the east, the sun will soon rise. There are two built boxes, One’s white-washed boards, at Soberanes Canyon; the other at Morhead Canyon, it’s redwood logs, A young fellow named Morhead built it, fifty-two years ago. Here’s that same Morhead Like one of his logs, only aching, stretched on the platform. Here’s his son Randal Morhead, in the same box, asleep but his dead mother’s like a scar in him; He’s weak, wants mastery. Here’s Natalia asleep beside him, Wants to be loved in the water, I could tell you why . . .” Faith laughed shrilly, “We won’t keep secrets, not now. 205

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She goes swimming alone, she’s had enough now. It’s me that she loves.” “And here’s Faith Heriot, needs love, And knows that a woman’s hands won’t make a baby. Has love salted with safety.” She caught at her throat With hooked fingers, he saw the nail-marks When the hand came down to her breast, and she sobbing: “The night’s Almost finished, I ought to have killed myself Long ago, long ago,” he said “Here’s Willie Had his mind hurt in the war, fear’s like a fountain of poison in him . . .” She answered, “Where’s poison?” He answered: “O live and wait, you’ve got splendors to see yet, wait till the high lightnings answer each other High up in the sky.” His eyes watered and wavered in the orbits; Faith’s burned; he said “Empty the bottle. The hills are paralyzed like me, the ocean’s bed-ridden, When I drink they grow glad.” She stood erect, smiling dizzily and swaying, having filled the glasses, Leaned her head backward straining the fluted neck, straightened the thin bare arms, “You’re the hills? I’m sunrise. I come up, I come up . . .” He said “Be quiet. After I’m sleeping take it off for Natalia While she lives; wear it for me.” She shook the bush of blond hair, the head dropping forward, leaned on the bed-foot Like a cut stalk, regarded the lean bare arm through swollen eye-lids. “What am I? Bit of thin jelly With bones strung through it, why does it burn, grandfather, Hurt, flame? She’ll live longer.” “Faith, if you fall I can’t help you: creep to bed while you can.” “Why does it cry then?” She leaned against him laughing under blue eye-lids, And when she was gone he saw day drain through the room. The lamp’s flame like a little stone with no radiance Stood in the smoked glass shell. Old Morhead closed eyes To feel the hills taking the dawn, the universal light creeping behind them, the sphered Sea and the tangent rays; he had power to embody solid and shaped in his brain . . . he did not question Whether the real region or his dream of the region . . . but now it moved mistily, revolved 206

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On a central void; the surface wrinkled spirally leaning in to the vortex; He opened his eyes and saw the roof-beams; closed them, it spun More rapidly around the nothing in the midst. “Sometime it will suck home” He thought “to the nothing”; He struggled bitterly against his drunkenness, the whirling enemy Was conquered, he lifted a faint hand to his forehead And felt the cold moisture. He lay rigid, Steadying the roof-beams with his eyes, and the region, Against the swirl, straining himself against the vortex. Three canyons northward Barclay had lain waking from the first gray. “Well,” he’d thought, “is it proved?” He’d thought indignantly “Not yet,” and, though his mind seemed clear, distrusting The waking thinness of the mind, let it run wide That question; it drifted on Maruca and the act Perverse, irrational, pleasureless—compelled, was it? Requisite to the furtherance of life?—that had set Knives in the house-doors . . . he felt suddenly The strain, the strain in the house, better if it flew asunder, A cage of tawny prisoners stepping stealthily Eying each other . . . “I’m out of the set, this is just nothing To me resolved to run pure . . . son, wife nor household . . . The fire burning to burn outward . . .” The strain He denied and endured grew as if clairvoyant And felt for its kind: the girl Faith Heriot, her eyes And drawn lips; all those dummies around the medium Last night with their appearance of placid and loose: The strain within, not one of them but wound to brittle as glass: Wanting’s the tension; automatons with their tightened springs of desire Ticking from the ache inside: and deeper, the strain of the rock sheathes Under the mountains, the dark beds of the monstrous ocean, he felt for a moment The whole region in terms of growing tension, himself the Atlas: intolerable weight: a weariful triumph, As of one who has taken the first stage of the road . . . He understood nothing; elaborate thought 207

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Died for its higher: he perceived something: as if he had never before perceived anything. Not rock And water, not air and earth, not the rare forms and wakening bits of humanity as breathing flesh, The stretch of the coast abstracted, spiritualized, to a scheme Of static force; multiform strains, multiform set resistances, one force; no motion but latent Motion: the ache of locked power: but Barclay Knew it without thought, without words, without metaphor; saw it without sight, all in an instant: and he felt it Turn like a drunkard’s dream, revolve about a central vacancy, a wheel on the core of nothing, The cave in the hub. He lay in his bed and felt the turning sickness. The intoxicant river of thought, A moment suspended, flowed again; its turbid liquor Shot the innocence of perception. He thought as the turning quickened, “Not a wheel but a whirlpool: draws inward, Spirals home to the central hollow, the core of the vortex. It looks for destruction; Knows that alone in annihilation the world is resolved, The bonds and the strains loosened, faster, spin faster, Suck heart of the world, draw home the rebels, To the treacherous O in the midst, Dizzily, to quietness Draw it down . . .” But feeling himself approach the pitfall, himself, He flung at the stream and broke the spirals; the impure Remnant of that perception became memory. Later he thought of it as a dream, and he thought “I dreamed of Point Aumentos, the walls on the rock, Circle within circle; the treacherous O in the midst Sucking the world, a female symbol, Replaced the male strength of the tower, tower that [streams] light. Point Alma Venus,” he thought smiling, “I called it in the dream before.” He turned reluctantly To reconsider the evidence for life beyond death 208

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Last night had brought him. To his mind the question Appeared supremely important; to his feeling, frivolous. XII Something like sense of duty brought him back to it At the end of the week. Edward went to the Morheads’ with him. Audis remained at home, and she felt A deep breathing of peace. She wandered through the rooms; no one was in the house but Maruca. That tamed animal. She thought “Am I old? Not quite forty.” She felt the recent years of her life Writhe like hurt snakes down to this interval of peace. She thought, “Merely because I’m alone? No: someone’s To die. It’s wanting does it. But she felt the one plan Made her want and this death. What, God’s? To-night it seemed to have come to accomplishment. She imagined a fable: That Margaret’s voice, the wife who’d died of him within a year, To-night would call so sweetly he’d wish to follow. [“I s]han’t be jealous.” XIII Natalia went up-stairs in the morning, Knuckled old Morhead’s door. “You’re good sleepers. Where’s Faith? Did nobody want breakfast in there?” She heard the old man: “Faith. Faith. Get up from the grave.” The door was always locked; there came a sighing at the door, And Faith in her night-dress, her yellow hair dishevelled And damp, her eyes dull and perverse, in the doorway Dizzily clung to the door-frames when she’d opened it, Saying “What do you want?” “Oh,” the other laughed, “you won’t live long. You too? Why, the way you are you’d do anything,” She whispered, “wouldn’t you Faith? Randal’s gone off With Willie, we’ve got the house to ourselves . . .” The old man Called feebly, “Come Faith.” She twisted herself in the door. Natalia held to the damp night-dress. “Tell Natalia 209

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You’ve got a service to do, then you’ll go down.” “Faith: you’ll come back?” “Oh: in a minute.” Natalia Waited by the shut door. Faith without thought Drew back the covers of the bed, staggering against it, Placed the vessel, turned the terrible wasted flanks, The skeleton thighs. He said “Leave a full glass on the table. I held the coast from going under and the coast Shall have a holiday. You’ve got time Faith. Those fellows Will be gone for days. God drinks long and sin thrives, Fill his glass Faith, fill his glass. No: call in Natalia, I’ll have my angels about me before time darkens.” He said when she had entered and wrinkled her nose At the air in the room: “Oh Natalia time changes, You’ll have thicker to breathe yet. Faith, a clean glass. Nothing, dark hair? Oh a sip. Nothing? Well, Randal Makes up for his wife. Do you think God looks down On a sweet child to die, without weeping? Yet he made her death When he shaped the sun. Oh, there’s worse coming.” He drank, spilling the liquor, locked the clay-colored lips, Locked the eyes. Faith pitifully smiling Over the bed: “He knows everything. I don’t know Whether he’s the cause, the cause . . .” Natalia said “Come,” And ringed the slender wand of the arm over the elbow With firm fingers, she drew her to the door, Faith yielded Like a sleepwalker but in the doorway hung back, And her hands masked her face, “No, no, ah no, no,” She murmured and wept, “I’m sick dearest, I can’t Bear . . .” She felt force and hardness and the door closing Behind her, and dizzily opening her eyes, too near Saw her friend’s dark face distorted in the dim hallway, like the idol That devoured flesh with fire. Natalia: “You won’t? What else is there to do in this place?” And she caught The linen and jerked it up over the flanks and over The lean ribs, the little breasts, “Faith you pale flame Aching for a gale of pain to twist you: I ought to call up Hungry eyes to see it, the vaqueros: so delicate and thin And white; led down the stair . . . mine . . .” “O dear strength Do your will . . .” 210

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The old man behind the shut door Smiled at the murmurs beyond it. He built in his brain, unsteadily, with labor, The picture—no, the tangible and stone form of the coast, the moving image of the lives and the water And the air, one world, one being with many members: he had never been troubled to wonder Whether reality mirrored perfectly point for point; or mere dream, or high vision; or the actual Reality itself; nor whether included in the gray brain, or did the sutured Vault melt for vastness? He grew aware of the trees in far canyons, The cattle on high hills, the ache of strained rock in the dark under the sea-cliff, the clouds condensing and dissolving In the vulture blue above the hawk’s fields . . . his consciousness Came home to a flame in the house, blent flames, a tortured Ecstasy of life, the women in his son’s room making madness together, having cast shame Like clothing; the shining limbs, the bruised litheness: he smiled, and he felt East into the hills, under the blue blazing toward noon flecked with few shapes Of white vapor afloat southeastward; their shadows dappled the flat floor of a stubble-field basin Ringed with ridges of pasture: this was the ringed plain called Escobar Flat; at the plate’s flange Stood oaks, two great ones like green planets apart, A gray cabin beside them. Under the oak-trees Had not been sown nor harvested, on the white grass Randal Morhead was lying against a saddle Flung on the ground; his brother sat by him, and Onorio Calles, who lived in the gray cabin. These talked, But Randal heeded only the bottle’s passages, His gaze wavering across the plain, through waves Of flickering light and air in the steep tyranny And white of the sun. He brooded angrily the black wealth Of the oil he believed under the earth, a lens-shaped Lake he imagined, a flattened enormous blister Of wealth between the layers: tap it with a drill And suddenly men would admire and men would envy him, Even Natalia would forget her contempt, He’d bribe her with bought luxuries, he’d overrule 211

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The proud hard eyes with jewels to consent even to his having Mistresses—“No” he muttered clenching his hands Till the nails bit the palms, “mother, whose voice Reached me last night from the high spiritual world, I promise you and I promise God when I touch This happiness I’ll be good and single-hearted, Use it for no bad purpose, give much to the poor, Not be proud, not even drink too much, as I do In this longing: Oh,” he thought, “give it to me Before I die, Oh, I’d live pure forever, Not touch even Natalia.” He drank so deeply His brother snatched the bottle from his lips. The intense Great blaze and glare of noon flamed on the stubble. They went to the house, Randal staggering adroop Through the white quietness and heat. The wife of the herdsman Had prepared food. Faith Heriot, her mouth bleeding, her burnt-out eyes with no spark But a slant fear, dragged up the stair to old Morhead’s room and entered. The old man lay like chill stone, The eyes opened upward. She believed that he slept sometimes with wide-open eyes. A little with penitence, A little with love, she touched the bird’s claw hand that lay on the covers, And he not moving the eyes, “Faith if you thought You would die this week: pack long life’s furnaces of pleasure In the five-day frame of time, Faith light such a torch On the upright tooth and flyaway summit of the mountain Will golden with flame Both the black valleys of forever before and after. That’s if you knew.” “Oh, should I? It’s time then. This is not sweet: I’ll take it sleeping.” He answered, “Not you. The other.” “I’ll be glad: glad”: and touching her lips She looked at the red smear on the white fingers, Sighed wearily. “I’d warn her if I believed you.” She passed The doorway in the panelling under the roof-beam. In a moment he heard a cry like a cough, and she came Carrying some bits of clothing, blanched from the room Reeling; “I saw myself, I stooped for something 212

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And saw myself standing against the wall there” . . . He said “The mirror.” “No, no: it was me standing, And a shoulder against the window dark on the brightest glass: grandfather What does that mean?” “Nothing: that you’re worth seeing: Eh don’t trouble,” he said, “it’s nothing.” “I’m afraid To be alone, I’ll dress here.” She found a chair And having drawn one stocking to the knee, “What did you say?” She said quietly and rolled strangling a cry, Like stone from the chair. He heard the feet or the elbows Beat the floor like a drum and writhed his shoulders Against the pillow, twisting his head upright For sight over the bed’s edge, saw the bare leg And the stockinged one scrabble on the floor and beyond them A flash of the convulsed face in the smoke of the hair, The teeth bubbling red foam. Natalia struck on the door, Having heard the noise, “What is it in there?” The old man Gravely: “She’ll be all right, Natalia. Try if it’s locked. The child only needs rest.” Natalia entering saw first the upright Head of the bedfast body, gray face, white hair, Two tears running into the sparse clipped beard; Then the other on the floor, the neck locked sidewise, the chin on the right shoulder, All the lean body working like a broken automaton That when she touched it, crying angrily “Faith!” was knotted In worse contractures. She drew the hand back and seeming To recognize the spasm, “She hasn’t had enough?” Natalia said, “I’ve had enough. What shall I do with her?” She asked, and the old man: “Fetch a pillow from her bed And cover her with a cover.” He said “Come back In an hour, she’ll be asleep perhaps, come quietly.” After Natalia had gone he heard Faith breathe Like the harsh noise of surf sucking the pebbles In the echo under the cliff. XIV Natalia brought food, the old man tasted, she poured him liquor And he drank; she eased the broken worm of his body 213

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With the services Faith should have rendered. “I’ll easily,” She said, “carry this child to bed,” but he answered “No, wrap her warm and leave her where I can see her. I can ring if she needs help”: for a bell-rope hung By his bed, the bronze throat from a roof-beam: “but fill The glass to the brim or I’ll be ringing Natalia Before you get down-stairs.” She said “No. There’s too much Used here.” “You know I can call Randal to fill it. Can call over the mountain.” “The bottles are empty.” “You’ll fetch more from your room Natalia.” “By God,” She answered, the intonation just Randal’s, “I’d not Be your slave, father, like Faith”: but did what he asked. He lay on the bed; Faith snored on the floor; the huge sun Edged westward of south. He drew the region through his mind. At the house at Soberanes Canyon pale-fluting Music: waifs of faint sound like rain: the playing Was Audis Barclay playing on a little organ. The girl Maruca Listened; though her shoulders and wrist were marked, they were happy together. She felt at the end of the tune, “Oh yes, he is hateful. Strong and hateful.” It was Barclay up on the hill: “If it were certain The dead live: is that all? Poor end for so much fire to blaze up to. Shadowy continuance. Here’s ocean and rock have solid Continuance. We inferior: pale parasites: humanity: What: the stars last: we to stretch out inferiority forever In the eyes of the stars?” Still it stuck in his mind It was necessary to know everything. “Point Alma Venus: I mean Aumentos: has got a secret For me, on the top of the rock. What do I want then? To understand, to understand? No, to equal The least hill, any stone. To hawk this human nature out of my throat and spit it on the earth.” Yet he ran down and backed his car from the shed, Turned by the house and drove south. The women in the house Heard the motor through the wail of the little organ. 214

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They made it a point of pride, Audis to play, Maruca to listen, without noticing the man. They meant they had built something: a frame of mind, A frame of music: he was outside of, negligible: A something like a fortress: expelled. Willie Morhead was steady in the saddle, The hills reeled in the great glaze of sun, the trail wavered. He came to Cartwright’s And smelt the sea and the pigs. Great calla lilies Growing by the porch, he broke one, stuck it in his coat, Rank white cup and gold tongue, and Myrtle Cartwright Stood in the door. He stumbled on the step. “I’ve ridden Way down from Escobar Flat, ask you to the party.” She smiled, her skin was like the callas, thick whiteness Appeared incapable of age or a stain, And dropping the thick lids over the light eyes, “Oh no, You wouldn’t want the baby at such a party. You stay here, Willie.” He swayed on the porch planks And narrowing his eyes to peer into the doorway, “Abner’s at home?” “Yes: he’s out back.” “I won’t stay then. Rode way down here from Escobar Flat.” He turned heavily. “Why Willie,” she touched his sleeve, “I’d go if I could. He wouldn’t let me. And I couldn’t take the baby, Willie.” He answered solemnly “We could barbeque the baby.” She caught the fragrance Of his breath, like warm spice and sweet wine, and she felt Romance in his life, the reckless pleasure in the hills, Late return from far war, and the whispered adventurous Nights on wild water between the liquor-ship and the shore, the midnight landings, Signals with lights and the wild company: “I’d leave them, Willie. I’d leave them for you, truly, if you’d take care of me. You’d have to take me away.” He answered “Well: come.” She followed down the wooden steps, and his eyes Lighting on the rank lilies, “Your skin’s like them, Myrtle, All soft and creamy. They’ve got gold tongues, Oh Myrtle What color’s your tongue? Open.” She sighed, face downcast, “Open, will you?” He lifted with hard wet fingers Her chin, and forced the tips into the cheeks 215

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Until for pain like a horse taking the bit, She opened her mouth. “The tongue, the gold tongue.” Her senses Darkened, the sun beating her eyes and the fire Of his breath beating her face, and swaying over against him She heard him muttering against her mouth “common red,” And felt despised and joyful. She’d thought he would kiss. He let her go and moved toward the horse and she followed Humbly, still dreaming he would set her behind him, But he gathered the dropped reins without turning and she heard Steps on the porch, and her husband: “Myrtle: come here.” She stood trembling. Willie not touching the stirrup Vaulted into the saddle, and Abner Cartwright: “Get into the house.” She stood. Willie drew sharply On the rein, the horse wheeled, Myrtle stepped backward from the head, Felt Abner’s hand fall like stone on her shoulder And cried “good-bye. Good-bye.” The horseman, above her, Said “Came to ask you to a party Abner, but Myrtle Says you won’t go.” And the other: “Get into the house Myrtle.” “Rode way down here from Escobar Flat: you won’t go.” Myrtle, her head drooping, moved toward the porch. Cartwright stood and was silent, then Willie, “Have a drink?” “No.” “Oh, all right. Well, Abner, got to be going. Finish the party.” . . . “Your eyes roll for that drunkard? We’ve got a boar out back, Myrtle.” Dr. Barclay, driving, had dipped west from the coast-road and crossed the sea-flat Where every three or four years in a great storm in winter the seas rush foaming and Aumentos Point Is two islands, the lighthouse rock and the other, the shallow raging torrent of storm between them And salt streams tearing the sand landward: in the autumn quietness the plain Fenced with loud silver walls of surf seemed level with the ocean. The hills towered east, the two rocks westward; the trade-wind Had cleared the sand from the hard-pan and heaped dunes In lee of the rocks; he drove between them. His son Edward had ridden Here to this house at Morhead Canyon. “Oh,” he said trembling, 216

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“You, Natalia?” “Who else?” The tricky foreign touch of an accent Tipped her words with incredible, he thought, individual sweetness, Though he feared her too; and stubbornly, “It’s you I wanted,” He said, “wanted to see,” she watched his hand Tremble and the stiffness of his lips. In her mind Joy with sharp teeth felt how much stronger she was And under the brown clothes felt the white flesh Trembling, hard slender and immature, to be torn at desire: “Come into the house. You didn’t tell me you were coming. We’re all alone in the house.” “No one?” “The old man Under the roof who can’t walk and knows everything. Doesn’t count, no more than God, he can’t come down here.” “Let’s walk out-doors,” he said shrinking. She moved In the room with leopard softness. “You know I’ve sunk The dream of swimming . . . Come up-stairs, listen at the door, The old man knows everything, I’ll ask him.” “Ask him?” and he drew Back toward the house-door but Natalia following Took his arm like a possession of hers, led him to the stair, And at the landing above: it was like a wave of flame in her mind, in the silent Desertion of the house: “The [flame] is here, O be reckless, The spacious chamber and the prey,” was saying in her mind, But answering the inner voice she whispered, “Come up Quietly behind me and listen at the door, he’ll tell me Whatever I ask.” They went up from the landing Toward the great rafters and black sheathing of the roof. There was no window above, faint light flowed upward The well of the stair. Natalia entered the door Quietly and left it open, the stagnant twilight Was lighted, a rhythmic noise came with the light, A tearing and a sighing murmur; sour perfume Of spilt liquor came also, and he heard Natalia Asking “Where’s Randal? Tell me father,” and he heard The tidal sighing and the old man’s voice across it Too feeble to be understood. The sighing stopped heavily. Natalia asked was Willie with Randal? The old man, “Ah take your pleasure safely,” and Edward wondering What was the measured sighing that had stopped saw motion In the blankets on the floor. The old voice: “He’s crossing Slain’s Ridge 217

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Going back to the Flat from Cartwright’s. Oh you’re safe, take it. They’ll last the night. Drain the young wine.” Edward sprang back from the doorway For the roll on the floor from which the breathing Noise had issued stirred and undid, and the face, The streaming yellow of the hair . . . He saw Natalia Cross the doorway and he heard a new voice, “Who’s out there? I’ll,” it said breaking, “Oh you won’t, I’ll tell Randal . . . ” “He knows that you’re a liar.” It said, “I was dying, I might have been dying you sent for a new lover, This is your love . . . ” Then the old man steadily, “I’ll tell you Why it is you have to be quiet. After she’s gone, Faith, after she’s gone.” It cried answering, “No matter. I gave all that I had. How does she dare to be the man and the woman, If she were dying to-morrow . . . He says that you’ll die,” She cried like one flinging a knife, and Natalia Laughed, “Not of this, don’t fear. Is it true old father, What she says?” He answered slowly “Old age: look at old age on the bed here. What living too long brings you. No: it’s not true. You’ll lie here sixty years from now Natalia And die sleeping in seventy.” “Makes ninety-something,” She laughed, “Oh enough.” Edward had stolen backward And two steps down the stair; he heard no more voices And dared not move on the creaking wood. And he heard Faith sobbing hard and the old man saying, “Suck the green wine Laughing lips from the cup of carved ivory.” Natalia Came from the room closing the door behind her, Like the hawk over the killdeer she overhung him, Fear was his love. Dr. Barclay had climbed the spiral roadway cut in the pillar of the rock, Volcanic stone, the cut faces leprous with lichen; at the flattened peak the driveway circled The walled terrace; he rung the bell in the deep embrasure of the door under the blocks of sandstone.

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XV He said “I think you are right; I think the dead live, More or less; fragments with wisps of memory. That’s not what I want.” “What do you want?” “Besides, she said that a power Put it into her memory: that clouds the evidence. Makes her perhaps the trick of someone behind. It doesn’t matter.” The gross body of the woman Sitting in the stiff room under the pictures of ships, Her hands folded, silent, the filmed black eyes: What tiresome folly had brought him back here . . . a something Not concerned with her ghosts . . . irrational feeling That if there was a trickster behind the scenes Used her, one might feel back to him through the instrument, Find him out through this gate . . . Barclay’d a moment Of detached thought, as if he stood on the hill by himself: jet of analogy: That’s what men want of women, to enter a gate, break through, get behind The parade of the world: “that’s what I wanted of Maruca, vile or stupid’s no matter: The mask appears accessible at that point: what shall I call him behind it? God? To break through And touch him, if there’s someone behind it: or touch the emptiness, be sure of the emptiness” . . . He felt with anger There was someone behind it. He said “Are you unconscious During the trance? Have you any memory afterwards Of what happened, was said?” “None at all,” she answered. “Can’t you, by thinking of it beforehand, control Who’s to speak, choose the visitants?” “I never tried to.” He said eagerly, feeling the moment of time Like a whip out of the blue, “Mrs. Nelson: I’m fifty-one years old: if I seem impatient, That’s why. I’ve cancelled all the world I lived in, Scrapped my life, to grow past it. I don’t know whether you’ll understand: people die ignorant: I’ve heard Enough to think there’s no new revelation 219

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A stone house building at the Highlands, the quake knocks down half a wall. A Spanish visionary far up the valley. Long lines The region in brief concentrating on 1 OM and Faith 2. Ed. and Nat. 3. B, R.N., A.N. The beauty inside the [stone] of the organs inside the body (under the [domes’s])

After we’re dead. And the doors of discovery Will close in two or three years: no one can keep his mind open to sixty: but something in me Says that I’ll break the gate. It’s got to be soon then. You’ll help me? You don’t refuse to help me?” She felt The almost forgotten pleasure of being wooed By a hot lover: no knowing what he wanted: but a joy To warm the hands at his desire a moment Before yielding. “You must say what you want.” He answered “To have you alone, use your powers freely, Control your powers away from pieties, humanities. It might be possible the earth or the ocean to use you, Or the power behind powers. There ought to be something. This time I don’t ask Anything proveable: granted the luck to strike in Anywhere near the quick I think we’d know it.” She answered weakly “You don’t know what you ask. I go down to death Only the little voices of the happy spirits To speak through me. But to give myself up To your guidance, to this inhuman desire: to suffer the spur Of the desire that you yourself have not dared To speak openly: to be the channel perhaps for that lightning, the fuse For the awful voltage of God: I believe that his power Might flow: I have dared to die, but not this.” He smiled and mocked her, “Why here’s the faith more than a grain of mustard-seed: I hadn’t really So much hope as you fear. Oh, we’ll find means. But this adventure expected nothing so important.” He rose, the lighthouse-keeper entering the room, A little old man square-built and choleric, his age About Barclay’s but his face a map of old storms. He looked like a ship’s steward grown out of service, Except a dread of solitude lay in the opaque Small and dark eyes. “You’re here again. How do you do. Well, Rose, has the preacher Driven out your devils: not yet?” She turned from her husband And said to Barclay, “I’ve changed my mind,” and Barclay: “I think your theory of devils, Mr. Nelson, Is too simple to serve.” “Yes,” he answered, “I thought you were fooled

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They’re cunning liars. Except the opaque dark eyes had terror; he dreaded Solitude, and his wife, and the voices of her trances; That he believed not ghosts’ voices, but demons. No man can feel God unless he becomes God.

XVI The beauty of stone and grass and of horses racing, Hawks flying; the beauty of moving interminable water and of skies like banners; The beauty of lustful bodies, of eyes burning, stars burning, the eyes for a little and the other Eyes forever: these are clear seen and stand tangibly, they shine With shapen voices, the cry of a bugle shining in the morning And enough to praise God with: but the same power That painted rainbows in the domes of sea-shells Where only the blind mouth of the flesh touches, deep down out of sunlight, Set beauty inside the body, only the surgeon sees it, he through a blood-mist, he sees it mangled; And beauty in the crystals of the stone that never is opened; and in the electric changing dances, The strain inside the dark heart of the sun’s fire; he set it in the heart, in hidden caverns, as well As dew on the world’s cheek; these are deeper secrets Of the one beauty worked in the essence; untouchable mysteries Of remote contact, chordal sympathies between the arcs of the great circumference, correspondences Between the mind and the rock; radial sympathies between circumference and center: and if the thought Is tortured to conceive it dimly and the tortured words That are the hands and feet of the mind twist out of human recognition only to say it As in a fable: this is the fable. I who have lived it am tortured a second time and live it again in memory. I was this man’s Son; and this other was the father of my mother; two Gods have fought

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Over the strain of the coast, in the air like eagles. I facing him am no man, not Barclay I think the mystery Nor the son of a mother Is that no man can feel God until he becomes God. No man can feel God without [being] God I have known what I say. What other reason Makes me ashamed to remember the active little bodies and the misty brain-fulls Of perplexed passion? Humanity is needless: Humanity is the start of the story: the time I was whole, in the crowned hour, in the hour I was God Even humanity was a sparkle of the star: but now in the off-drop And ship’s wake of the flaming moment I cannot remember the ancient rock under my feet, the hills with their hard roots, the gray ocean Cored with quietness from here to Asia, Except through the squint eyes of the people: their eyes are mirrors, their bodies reflectors, they ache with the powers Unnamed under the sun. It is only for this reason, Because one has no fable to praise God but the fable of humanity: His beauty is glassed in the blind eyes, his power storms up from the bottom Through the round mixing-bowls of fire, the curdle of the brain, the sealed and sutured bone vaults, the shells Brimming with vision: I when I touched him was not a man, not Barclay, Nor the son of a mother: the God touching the God, outside humanity: but I remembering have only The people for images . . . the people . . .

Humanity is the bottle to be burst on a rock and the sharp savor Remember its wings; the seed to be scattered, the tower Builded to fall, the gray bird Flying to be shot in the air: at the hour of breaking, Wisdom: the moment between the match lighted and the loose ashes, between reason and madness, Wisdom, between the leaning tower and the falling: O world’s patience, rock’s quietness, forgive me remembering. For certainly something in the fall of the mass was discovered, some spark from violence; the star, the eye then Of the more sacred darkness.

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The more sacred darkness Draws toward all living, toward the man and his house, the breeding women and the barren ones, the deer on the hillside, The helmeted nations: and these that skip like pygmies in the shine of the sun, like giants in the evening, The shadows-joiner, like giants against the shadow Stride to their ends. Not yet; not yet the dignity; not yet deliverance. It was I That naked like a white bone in a dog’s teeth Suffered Natalia: I had come for that: she intolerably Wrestling entered the temple, drained the cup, mouthed The juiceless remnant, her minion afterwards, her woman, Till even that fury Dulled on the dull image: then out of deep water And pale miseries the victim lifted his faint Head and tormented eyes, she was lying over him Like a summer hillside, white and terrible, white slopes And precipice from the awful upland pastures; Saying, “Unless I kill you what more can I do? The girl up-stairs there had more strength, are you tired My doll, my doll?” He moaned, and through the flaming of the eyes Watched with terror the throat and the jutting breasts, The white mountains of inexhaustible life that had drained His: Oh what more? Faith Heriot up-stairs had wandered Like wild and caged between the door And the light of the room, while ever at the door the old man’s gray eyes Opened and took possession; she wringing her hands like enemies rested On the chair opposite the bed, dropped her head forward; The cut in her lip had opened again and a trickle Of blackening red stained the paper-white face. The eyes like pale fire burned the floor from the downward face, The yellow damp hair hooding her. “Shall I not go down? Who’ll say I shan’t? Old horror on the bed?” She sprang up, But when her hand leaped at the door-knob he spoke, Saying “If Natalia, you love her, wounded to death 223

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Begged water to wet the lips and die. She is wounded to death. Faith, let her drink.” Faith, twisting her hands like enemies’ Throats: “Do the dirty things for a dead body: What I do for you, days, years: then the old horror, Torture me? I hear them,” she strained over the floor For the faint cries imagined or heard. He not answering Said “Is he blundering to the door like a blind man To the door of treasure? All through luck, luck, Luck and desire.” Faith: “Oh, the door. Even you, old dead man And your son can talk about it now it’s made common. It’s not the first time. The first time in this house.” He brushing with a weak stir of the hand Her words from his face, “It’s wanting, wanting’s the great thing, makes the world spite of God. I asked him what he wanted. I was warned enough.” Faith, quietly: “What they’re doing Is more horrible than to sop the filth From a soiled corpse every morning of the world.” He said “I was drunk and forgot, I was thinking of the sacrifice Randal and Willie will be killing for me in the hollow of the hills. And I was thinking that your man Natalia Is going under the sea.” Faith screamed, not loud, but loud enough For ears in the room under the floor. The white boy Lying in hot arms like prey under the tiger: “What was that cry?” And the other “Oh, a bird, a sea-gull In the air: make me cry, me cry out, Edward.” Faith, writhing above them: “Weakness is more horrible yet, that’s worst, to be here Because an old man that can’t move more Than the eyes and the hands makes me: while the needle’s threaded, the thumb Works in the eye.” Old Morhead, while she was yet speaking: “The face of the woman Your man blackens to death: and me, my power, this old immovable [ ], Deputy-God you’ve nursed for years: all that I had More than the twilight life of old paralysis Breaks like a rotten stick: if the sun turned black And the stars fell in a blood-rain you’d still be whimpering Your lover and her pup. Your man blackens to death: that’s nothing: God struggles

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For life here on the bed, I God, the spirit the over-soul of the coast, this old paralysis Will be all that’s left and then the hell of darkness: and you, while God’s breaking Like a dead tree Whine at a woman in heat and what she does for it.” Faith cried and writhed erect, plucking at her throat, It seemed to her that the floor and the house-walls were abolished, she hung in clear air And watched the naked limbs tangled below. While Morhead: “His wanting’s the enormous Force like a wall to save and a wind to drive him To the mountain, ways that he never guessed, God against God. The lightkeeper’s got madness in him, I couldn’t reach the spring of it, the knife was hidden. Your lover’s sucked orange will gather it, but long after sunset. I’ll not die lightly.” Faith set her hands against her jaw to stop the trembling, “You think you’re God,” She said through the clenched teeth, “what am I?” He did not answer, he lay as if dead and through shut eye-lids Watched Barclay coming down from the rock at Point Aumentos, as someone poisoned Watches the waves of cold creep toward the heart. XVII The rocks resemble two breasts but they are called the two Morros; they are different substance, one volcanic And the other the coast granite; from here at the tell-tale verge the old passions of the earth leave trophies Under the judgmentless eyes of heaven; in the opposite hill, layer over layer, granite and lava; The sandstone ledge from which they quarried the lighthouse; the shining band of limestone, the diatomaceous Layers over that; the ancient sea-beds, depth over depth, to make the hill’s height; but the wild world’s logic Faulted into insanity by dead convulsions, that still forever Infect the spirit of the place, and the people . . . the people. . . . 225

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My father Came down the spiral road in the pillar of the rock. He heard voices, turned and looked back; he saw at the road’s turn, Small and black, like a single letter printed on the sky, the lightkeeper with fists extended Raging against his household. Below on the rock Came Mrs. Nelson and her daughter; Barclay awaited them And heard the sea sobbing at the rock’s base. When they came, “You see” said the woman “I can do nothing Up there at home. There’s a place I know On the other rock where power comes over and covers me Even in the shining height of the sun. I’ll do what you want. We’ve not been kind: I thought it was not right to refuse you, for no one Has ever asked what you ask. I will dare to endure All that you dare to call to. I’ve brought April for witness, to tell me What has been said, and if the power’s too great to endure, if anything . . . happens, She’ll know what’s to be done . . .” A certain nobility He imagined in the woman’s decision confused itself In Barclay’s mind with the earnestness and young eyes Of the girl at her shoulder. The three went down to the rock’s foot, passed his car where it stood in the shadow of the rock, And following a dim path that avoided the dune Entered the shadow of the other. Here was black soil bearded with dead white grass-blades. The path led upward Winding amidst the outcrop granite; where the earth had crumbled From rain-cut channels shells and bones were exposed. The whole coast is middened with the shells of Indian Sea-gleanings, but few bones in the heaps: here there were many. The fat woman ahead panted and stopped On the steep slope; her daughter stepped from the path to stand beside her. Then Barclay drew his eyes down from April’s head To question the bones. Her mother panted: “Those? The eaters, Not the meat. They brought their people up here for burial. The great rains of three years ago dug open the graves and now they are scattered.” The yellowish ends were too much crumbled to know. He thought with pain and dreamy exultance of April 226

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That she, the soft pattern of youth, rounded and smoothed, Solid, and with a soul in the eyes, carried inside The moving flesh a skeleton, would leave for relics Fragments like these: the processes and passions of life, the currents of her sex, Having flowed about them like a stream over its boulders. The muscles, all the stresses of intimate, Most intimate actions, passionate gestures, drawn on those dim gray relics. It made her sex and her life Pitiful and real. The fat woman had quieted her breath; they ascended the hill. Barclay still walked behind, and no one speaking The exasperate turbulence of his nerves, pitched up to a crisis, Finding none, cast up images like fever-visions On the thin air. Some shameful thing being done behind him? His son and dirty Maruca? Audis? He thought “But I’ve sunk Both him and her, to focus entire, all power, All desire on one giantess: truth? knowledge? God?” Her stone breasts, the two Morros. Point Alma Venus With the stone breasts. There’s a peaked mass of standing granite, A natural menhir at the top of the rock, And seeing it he thought, “The milk is death from the stone nipple. Bones are strewn on the slope. One’s death.” He thought the lighthouse tower was the nipple of the other. “From the other Light sprays like milk.” We may see in a vision Lyrically what needs pedantic words to say it, the labor of the words Betrays conception. He saw in a mixed vision, in a moment, The two breasts of the giantess, enormous, hard, desirable breasts . . . (as Edward Saw his lover’s body above him a summer hillside, white slopes And precipice from the awful upland pastures) . . . from one breast light Poured, symbol of life, more than of life, of the energy Life’s a least part of, one facet of thousands Of the force that moves the stars, the jewel with the dark foil, the bonfire All the wild stars make in the heart of the infinite night: from the stone dug of the other the giantess Medicined her brood with peace. He thought, “The two poles of the universe, and nothing Not orbital toward them; the twin centers of the ellipse of the world;

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The stone towers of the breasts of Venus.” The slope flattened across the hill-top, at the foot of the stone Grassless gray earth, smoothed rock. They rounded the stone On the sea side; the lighthouse hidden by its mass they saw the long range And wave of the coast hills, the flashing wool of the surf Against their bases, the small white clouds coasting their foreheads, Stream out of sight in the mist southward. A fragment Of rock lay on this side at the foot of the stone, On which the woman seated herself, and panting For breath said “We have come.” Barclay and the girl squatted before her. He said: “Not the dead. Remember Shift back to old Morhead, who answers for God in the bed. He says “___”. The Not to let the dead enter.” She sighed, her eyes closing. woman says “___”.

I also am God and have been at one with him. This touches me too nearly And I forget how it happened. “My son do you mean to kill me?” “I mean to kill you.” “I shall be God first.” That’s not the story, not yet. Oh intolerable sun of autumn, you saw it, you saw everything When you fell westward. Through eyes yellow with blood, a yellow mad-dog trotting in a blue pasture, Der liebe Gott ist Tod. Snapping sidewise. She answered “Through the dead: how else? We that have breath in our mouths All our lives long aspire in vain. But they, if they lead you, guide them. They are elvish, full of tricks and deceits, you must compel them. I felt That power in you from the first hour. Dr. Barclay there’s one among ten million can say ‘Do,’ and it’s done, That man controls, if he knows his own desire; the prisoners in living bodies And the free dead act his desire.” “Mine they will hardly, mine is to know as God knows God,” he thought, “if there’s any. Power in me? To know The power outside me. Pretend faith, let the experiment Have all the faith it can use.” He said “We shall know something Outside the sky: if it hangs on me knowing my desire, I desire nothing

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But the one break-nature miracle.” In the blind vacuum He felt his will lost in, no compression against an object, where’s God? it was something to him To see the girl beside him tremble; she believed; The force of his desire touched something then, not the object, some object sideways, he touched her arm To feel it shaking, he heard her breath stop and resume—(It is not easy for me To twist the knife in the wound, but having known worse When everything in the world was present at me, one violence One time, bruising one nerve, I may remember The knives and the slime, without screaming.) That man Felt his desire’s force edged with having struck something. The woman groaned, swaying on her granite fragment Against the rock behind and a voice Drew outward through her as if from the rock, “I have not complained The bats of the hollow night twitter in this archway Shreds of memory and rag-ends of unfinished desires: I will not be quiet And the house invite rending.” April, the woman’s daughter, Threw her head like a struck deer upward, and softly, “Whose voice? I have never heard you before?” “The watch-dog from the deep bed, lies quiet For bats whistling.” “There’s danger?” Barclay, before it answered, “Mrs. Nelson you came of your own will: this is the experiment You’ll not escape: I’ll not be cheated.” He spoke Like one besieging the deaf, “You’ll wait for the power Beyond humanity, beyond human conception, no voices of your own Nor whimper of what is less than human having been human, this is the mountain Of your life: fail and all’s nothing: unless the power That makes powers makes you its mouth: you have dared: be patient For no passage but that one power’s.” She had seemed about speaking; the fear changed in her face to gray Submission, and leaning with bowed shoulders back against the rock She slackened all the resistances of her body; The knees widened straining the worn wool of the skirt, the belly sagged down On the slack thighs, the pendulous breasts folding the cloth above it; April for shame looked down On the stone beside her hand, the relaxed shapelessness Opposite having become like an obscene idol; but Barclay Watched the loose dark-skinned face, up-turned, slanting backward, 229

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The half-opened mouth, and eyes through shut flat lids Drinking the ache of the sun. He had half convinced himself His force of his will could draw its object . . . through this . . . Out of this female cave . . . desire be hard and intent like a steel Engine; the swollen caricature of sexual Surrender lolling on the stone clouded his edge Of concentration: this girl April’s matrix and source: the bladder Of soft clay split for the fawn? Slenderness, with whom He sat alone in the air over the margin And meeting line of ocean and land: “I invoke power, God if there’s any, power that power flows from,” he muttered anxiously In silence, to sing his mind true to desire— For no one not believes in charms and magic But those who bear no weight of desire—“God I invoke. The God,” he said aloud scorning himself; And his desire coming clean, running shame under, Enforced by the thought that this unwholesome entranced Flesh waits on suggestion, and what’s worth trying Is worth trying to the uttermost, “It is God I am calling, Reality, you here in the rock, and the cold core of the ocean, and the savage runner In the [mountains] beyond the blazing stars, lightning heart of the thick cloud, intolerable eyes Of the masker, come naked once.” April was trembling, That made him happy, and her mother like a hollow sack That takes inflation irregularly, chambered within, Swelled her offensive body, now an arm twitching From shrunk to full, now one of the breasts expanding Under its fold of cloth, the other yet pendulous; So all the body appeared by degrees filled And its parts without accord flung themselves about. No voice issued. Nothing takes place in one place, A murder I know of echoes from star to star, “My son do you mean to kill me? I mean to kill you. I shall see God first.” That’s not the story, Is an old [trick] of the world. 230

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But then by the creased face She seemed enduring agony and suddenly April: “Me, not my mother. Why will you make her horrible before you kill her?” And she turned to Barclay, Who stood now, over the writhing body on the stone, His face like a man’s cutting live flesh though it shriek To learn something: “Ah let her go. Do anything to me. Not her,” and he felt her hands drawing at his shoulder, Her breasts against him. My son do you mean to kill me? I mean to kill you. He shall not die blind, he shall know God first, know God, a little. Faith Heriot under the roof at Morhead Canyon Sat like a stone, old Morhead lay on the bed Like stone all but the face for the eyes and clay lips Were always twitching, Faith stood and hammered on the bed, “They’ve finished, let me go down.” He answered, “I am here.” The fat woman on the granite Morro at Aumentos Composed her body, her face smoothed, the mouth gaped Fishlike and said “I am here.” Barclay, the girl Supplicant clinging to his side: “What power? What I called? We dared something, And what I called is incredible. I am the fool. But I was joking when I said in my heart there’s a God. I was a priest you know, we know better. It’s a game we play, You’ll not trick an old hand at it.” Old Morhead’s eyes Seemed growing aware of the white wedge face and the streams Of sulphur-colored hair, the eyes flame of sulphur Flaming by him, the ivory claws plucking the bed-covers And feebly swaying one hand to the door permitted By gesture what she desired: she leaned to the doorway but his lips Were always muttering, his face so hollow a death-mask, If he’s dying she ought to listen, the unbearable conjuncture Now surely finished, past intervention, how could it last forever, oh white slime, slime. She leaned her ear to the mutterings of the clay mouth 231

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And heard “Not be tricked? There’s another trick yet Priests have been played before: when they’d have lain with knowledge of God; a slenderer to lie with And dream the story, I am not out of hope, Faith listen, I’m not out of hope: we’ve stored fire from the boy And your lover down-stairs, a storm to send over him, unsteady The cup catching the wild stream”: he cried with a loud voice In her ear: “Certainly you will not believe. Is it required? If I came in the power that needs no proving This instrument annihilated from the rock Would leave what mouth to speak and the hearers annihilated What believer to hear?” He believed that he dictated The words: and it was true they were spoken on the rock, By the talking flesh on the rock: they were spoken before he thought them. So a man believes he has snatched his finger from fire, The nerves of sense and will clamoring both ways: but the dark fibers Had done it already: so the dark God under the conscious God spoke, and the flesh on the rock: “This instrument annihilated from the rock Would leave what mouth to speak, and the hearers annihilated What believer to hear?” Barclay, feeling the girl Shudder against him, pleading, answered: “Well then: it needs proving. The quality of God: to need proving.” XVIII Faith Heriot saw like a vision Forms of white slime falling apart, Tired and clinging; her jealousy had fainted of its own excess And as she descended the stair became like pity. “Poor lover, so strong, full of life, not like me, Beating your body against the walls of the world, the male and female, In vain, falling back bruised, now you are hopeless, ah why will you always Dirty yourself with the others? I am not strong enough

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To give you enough?” But at the door she thought, “Death is promised her.” That did not serve pity But lighted anger again for she thought “It is earned. You are proud and you abound in life and you’ll die: Oh thank God. The outrageous furnace of your burning be quiet, Rot after while. The worms prick you already, enter your body, a moment ago A little hard one was working you.” She went to the door, And knocking softly: “Natalia. Randal’s come back. He’s in the yard, let me in to help you.” She heard, trembling, Pad-pad on the floor, the key creak in the lock, the struggle of the key in the lock Was like something unbearable in her own body. The door opened; Natalia was clear and shining in the door, And not a drop of her inexhaustible energy [strained] or diminished. The long clear surfaces, the prominence Of the disk-marked hills under the throat, the smooth belly, the spot of shadow beneath it, Faith saw As a drowning man the hills of the shore, with love and hatred: and Natalia: “I’ll not have the child hurt: I’d face him: come in and help us.” Faith saw the boy Edward Like her own body move on the bed, and pitied with loathing Like her own body: all the same story told over again and over and over, The God never grows tired: and Faith, her thin arms Twitching from the shoulders: “I fooled you, Randal’s not here. I thought it was all right to come in because we’re shameless. The horrible old man,” she cried and feeling herself In a white clearness falling forward, clung back Against the wall of the room, the treacherous floor Seemed pitching inward like the pitch of a funnel To the white pit. Natalia was laughing. The old man in his silence Under the roof gathered this passion with the others. But the eyes of his life at Point Aumentos, the insubstantial Coast flecked with tongues of fire, fibrous with lines and curves of strain in a twilight, alive in his mind, Hung from the rock by the live sea. He said with a loud voice “Though I speak you shall not come up to me,

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Nor come to proof, nor come at all to conceive me. There is one way For a man to break out of himself.” He indeed had found one, But not that way, who while he spoke felt his son Drop from the saddle at Escobar Flat, having returned, And Randal, the other, reel from under the oak-trees Through the blinding yellow storm of sunlight to meet him. The woman on the rock: “There is one way for a man to break out of himself.” And Barclay standing above her: “What way?” It answered: “The way you thought of: that the mask appears accessible At that point. Enter that gate.” Barclay remembered That’s what he’d wanted of Maruca. It is not conceivable That what was to break mine too, my life too at length, break it as a ship Splits, and the sea enters: little measured and framed Work of man’s hands through its agony Grows one with the ocean: it is not conceivable that I However clouded over with shame and weakness, and used and emptied, Lived at all and not felt, not knew: I knew nothing. I have known since. Galeotto for Iddio. He stood where the stream should have fallen. He was tricked out of that place; on the place he was tricked to; Because of the trick, the fall, the folly; felt the stream and filled him. Galeotto for Iddio, The fellow that broke the window-latch in Bethlehem When Joseph was at church, now the world’s changed Broken-backed old fellow pimps for a living. I’d remember If the hawks would scare: I’ve been there myself, known everything, I’ve been that fellow. Clear ice come south, cover it with crystal, the inquisitive mind Wants to see everything before it darkens, But not the [slack] tides, not the sick back and forth, Everything stationed in crystal. Steady, steady, the old bones In the hill never stirred but what had used them Filtered like ants between the rock and the soil,

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Took the shell that he’d left: “We smelled the sage under the oak and the women gathered Acorns: where is the tribe: they brought us food for a little and then they left us? We smelled the waves on the weed, we gathered the great shellfish, where is the people? You gave me nothing, No flint to kill with, no firesticks and my fire died the first night, I was too feeble to come to you, No stones for grinding mast: how did you know there is no oak in the midnight Under the world: thought I’d squirrel teeth? They were worn to the sockets.” Uncalled for voices breaking his revelation. Unheard voices. April was crying, he consoled April With hands full of desire. Quietly I remember. I also have found fountains of power. “You are too pale. Death is not terrible April. Dear child, you are far from it, don’t fear it.” And the voices: “The sun used to be white, it’s red at the end of the world?” “You see it through her blood. Pull up the eye-lids, Let me look.” April cried aloud when the eyes Opened, they had never in the sun, and many aliens Drifting behind. Barclay: “Here’s nothing for us. Come, I have power to make you live always.” The voices: “It is white in the sky, it whitens the people’s faces.” [The final manuscript page for this version has one line of verse only, and the rest of the page is blank.]

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[F R AGMENTA RY BE G I NNI NG 2]

I The Rev. Dr. Barclay outgrew his God; He was not a poor man, he could be honest and pass the salary, he resigned his pastorate. “I shan’t,” he thought, “stand up another time in the carved oak pulpit and tell lies.” He traveled for a year in Europe with his wife and his son; he turned to the house of his vacations Near Monterey, in the woods over Point Pinos, the gray Pacific filled the windows westward. He enlarged the house and lived there. Freedom, he found, had faults, loopholes for terror. The old faith had wrapped him like a chrysalis, keeping his mind tender up to old age; it had crumbled. Now he was sixty-five years old; death was no fable to him; what waited over the wall there? What should he teach his son, the fruit of a young wife and late desires? Latin he taught him,

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Greek he taught him, they read Euripides together; morals would flow out of example; German and French he had passably at command, learned under tutors: . . . religion? . . . the soul’s destiny? . . . Was there a soul? . . .—His son, he could put off with books. For himself, the question. II Books would not serve for an old man. He read avidly in vain, the specter death was with him, Stammerings of mystics, the echoes of the hour that makes amends for life, and more, transfigures Past and future with significance, the white fire of that hour, the fragrance of it, the honey, The sensual pleasure of going home, the drop transfused into the ocean . . . “What, no identity? No person left? Then it is death, you come then, old goblin. He gave his eyes to the other scripture, The conversations of the dead that vocal through the lips of some entranced woman Sift cloudy memories for minute fragments to prove survival . . . or is it some split-off portion Of the medium’s mind, that gathers, God knows how, out of the air, details and memories? The doubt, The doubt, the doubt, no proof. He got up wearily; Gazed from the window. A waning moon’s light. The black pillar of a pine-tree Cloaked with rough darknesses. Space; the lit sea; a great light Shone on the foreland, swept off south: Point Pinos lighthouse, At which he gazed, many pulsations of the light. It would guide ships; but none Beaconed on the reef death. It was like a heart, too, Pumping the frame of the night with jets of light-blood.

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But after he lay down, in the dreams of sleep, the lighthouse Stood with its day-appearance, not for light, for pattern Notable, and form. It is strangely shaped, The house of big squared granite plastered over Is pierced by the tower like a pinned beetle; the tower Holds high above the ridge of the roof its lantern Of glass and bronze. A hedge girdles the house, Circular, the circular tower for center; a circular road Embraces the hedge:—it is like an ancient symbol: The cup-and-ring markings, no one knows what they mean, Found on old stones at Carnac, and north in the islands. So like a symbol, ring within ring, a labyrinth, It stood in his dream, the tower piercing the house, And someone said that in the heart of the rings, At the base of the tower, was the answerer. What? The oracle. If he could win to it. This dream, varying with repetition, Wearied his slumber for three nights in seven. He said to his wife, “Let’s go and see the lighthouse This afternoon, we have never visited the lighthouse.” Audis would not go down, but his son Edward Went; they went down the path in the pines and entered the road Opposite Morhead’s gate, turned north, and came To a graveyard on the right, the lighthouse gateway Stood left. “We’ll go and read the stones a moment,” Said Barclay sadly. They entered the naked graveyard Where marble and granite gather sullen lichen, Naked of trees, hearing the sea both sides. “It is not a pleasant place.” A group of people Stood silent in one corner of the square field By a new stone. “They plant the seed so carefully, And where is the harvest?” Edward looked at his father With wonder and repulsion. The two went out then, And crossing the road entered the white-washed gate Into the driveway that ran down to the lighthouse. The whistling-buoy moaned low off-shore. The old lighthouse-keeper

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Led them the worm-drill stair up into the tower Where glass and bronze, the lamp and the turning shutter Were shown; when they descended, “You’re a minister, sir?” He asked; and Barclay: “Yes.” “I wish,” he muttered, “You’d see my wife. The parsons in the country are fools. You’ll see her?” Barclay regarded him with wonder, Small, withered, sea-faring old man, the face A map of old storms. “Why yes, I’ll be glad to see her. What can I do for your wife?” “Tell her that Satan Sends those voices: she has a talking sickness: She thinks that dead people talk out of her mouth, But it’s the devil. I’ll call her.” Barclay concealed The eagerness in him . . . not read . . . himself examine This organ of far minds and voices . . . the answerer was she? The oracle dreamed of ? “You needn’t stay, Edward.” Who went, and stood outside the hedge a moment Then crossed the circular driveway and climbed the stile Into the dune seaward. He walked across the sand-hills Dreaming his dream; the father was not the only dreamer; his was far off though. Huge Asia beyond the sun-glint plain of sea there. The horses of Mongolia, the old ferocity; it was Edward Barclay Gathered them, the nomads heard him, he spoke of Attila, The glory of Genghiz, the spoils of Timour, the earth desert of grass forever Where the hooves of the host trampled it. “Remember the fury of your fathers, The spears driven through China, the rape of India, the waves of the horses roaring westward,” He cried, he blew up the coals of the old daring courage, he welded the tribes into one weapon; Air-planes for ponies, bought with the loot of the East, shadowed the world with terror; it was Edward Barclay Rode the storm, the double wings of the hawk of Asia darkened America and Europe; He ruled, he scourged the world, avenging his youth upon it. This was nineteen-fourteen, the early summer, when courage, Not come to the act, dreamed in boys’ minds.

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III The lighthouse-keeper Returned to the stiff room hung with ships’ pictures. “My wife, Rose Nelson, Dr. Barclay. I’ve read that King Saul Sought after witches to ask a dead man’s counsel.” “Much,” Barclay answered, “may depend on the mind And motive of the seeker. Wise men study these things. Faith in a life to come is not so common We can afford to ignore evidence.” “Wise fools,” Nelson cried out. “When a man dies He goes one way or the other; the doors of hell Don’t open backward. Do you think the spirit will stoop From up above, what, from the splendor of the Face of God To babble in Pacific Grove to a pack of old women? You make me mad With your wise talk.” Barclay’s face reddened. “You asked me to speak to her, will you let me speak to her? You in your narrow world here by the sand-dune Do you know that almost nobody believes In a future life? Voices that call themselves freed spirits Speak to her: if that is true it changes the world. And I if she’ll give me leave will question and try them . . .” “Not in this house,” said Nelson. “I cannot tell What they are until I hear them,” Barclay answered. And the woman, taking courage: “Where is the harm After I do my work: I’ve always worked hard, I’ve had three children, two have grown up and left me And April’s here still: I do my work: only in the evenings, He dozes in his chair and the foxtail light Circles above in the fog, I give my mind To the true service: I always have had visions, Heard voices: when we lived at Point Conception,

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[F R AGMENTA RY BE G I NNI NG 3]

“It seemed to me others were more worthy. When I was asked again, and they persuaded me, I thought What other? I thought of those I knew, pastors of churches, Which one had not consented These past two years to the great war? I also, with silence. No doubt it was better to be American Than to be Christian. But I was thinking who was worthy to speak before you, so sacred a dawn. And these two years I had felt a contradiction, a certain hypocrisy . . . Creed, always meant little. The spirit, the revolutionary spirit of Christ: I have seen it broken: not broken even, A cobweb, brushed off. I thought: it is time then for a new beginning. I thought: someone must tell them. Who else? So then I answered that I’d speak to you.” Uneasily the crowd on the mountain Stirred, in the gales of level light streaming from the east. Strangest beginning: what next? Then Barclay: 241

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“After all, it’s a much older festival. Men celebrated the springtime and the revived God Thousands of years before he was the son of Mary and was called Christ. A new beginning: The sun breaking the night, the spring breaking the year: the time to call you to a new beginning. I have something to tell you. I owe you something. You’ll hear me If it begins quietly. Listen. I have been a blind man leading the blind. My blindness remains. I cannot tell you what is true. But I can tell what’s false: the books, the Bible, the stories, The church and the faith founded on them: all false, all false, lies of the liar. The story that Jesus Was God and a son of God and died to save us: a myth related to the myth of Adonis. The story that he rose from death on the third day, the tomb in the rock was broken open: The yarns of idle fishermen, the washings of Syria. Listen to me,” he shouted, the astonished people Clustering and moving on the mountain, under the sun-mocked lights of the cross, muttering together. “Stand still and hear me.” Insane or not, he was formidable. They obeyed and stood quiet; they felt a burning Not of the dawn, fire from some other fountain, in the deep eyes Add a year under the brows. He quietly: put it into “You are simple people, glad to be guided. I remember 1920 Three years ago you were all for peace; two years ago Good Friday came command to be warlike: By Easter you were. Less than three days: you changed your natures in three days: an obedient people. You love authority: you’ll hear me.” But in the pause a man who had pushed forward, from the step of the platform: “Dr. Barclay is ill, he is not himself, you must not listen.” Barclay, darkening above him: “You need not, you’ll hear. I tell you it’s time you outlived childhood, outgrew dreams and dead words and the toys

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Of children: the idol uplifted there with the dead lights on it: the cross, that idol. As for me, I tell you I’ve come to myself: no one shall look to me for light nor guidance, I have no guidance to give you, Nothing but a cry. All I can do is to confess that I have spread darkness; and here and publicly Declare that I will not spread darkness again, tell lies, stand up before you in the carved oak pulpit And feed you lies on Sunday mornings.” The man on the platform steps mounted, then Barclay approaching Suddenly and fiercely he descended again. And Barclay above him: “Be quiet will you!” And the people Making an angry stir like the ocean on granite skerries: “Be quiet you mouths,” he said, “be quiet You mouths of twilight. Down there in the valley it’s happy twilight, go home if you will, here on the mountain The noble and clean and dreadful sun beats like a storm. For once you’re out of shelter, you are caught In the hawk sky . . .” A woman in the crowd Suddenly screamed through his voice, cry upon cry, like knives In the high air. Men shouted. The crowd streamed into knots and talking eddies. Then Barclay, “I told you I had no guidance for you,” his voice raised like a wind, “You blind be quiet! I have this, I have shaken you From the opium-sleep, beaten you awake with words . . .” No one could hear him now because the bugles That had sung sunrise all at once began to sound together on the mountain. Barclay stood over The scattering people, they heard him in a pause of the bugles, “The house was rotten, I have pulled it down, Build new!” The motor-horns below answered the bugles. Barclay between the torrents of noise: “Repent, repent!” He stood twitching His eyes like fire in a dead face, and sobbed for breath, and shouted with all his voice, “You sleepers Will noise awaken you?” And once again, “You thought you’d sleep forever?” They streaming two ways down hill

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Passed by the platform, it was like a boat anchored in running water, and Barclay at the rail: “I am casting devils out of you; where the lies go flying, go flying, the truth may come in. To-morrow Remember these things!” Certain young men passing the platform Set hands to the light studding, and having broken One timber used it for a lever to pry with. The drawn nails groaned and the sticks broke, and the planks Reeling to the east, “Break the cross next,” cried Barclay, “Calvary be clean and honest. For me, I’m going To the other mountain.” He descended the steps, He felt the eyes and the laughter of the young men Like hungry birds behind him; no one molested him Except with laughter. Groups of the scattering crowd Whom he passed whispered and turned sideways from him. He came to his car across the shoulder of the hill, And there was no one by it; his wife and his son Must have gone home in some friend’s car. He waited Until the road was clearer, then he drove down. II She, with hard eyes: “I am willing then to believe You have done what you thought right. Now what will you do?” “I have planned nothing. Go somewhere. We’ve means to live. Planned nothing about living; the place is no matter; with a cleared mind Thought for a fresh beginning. I am fifty years old, perhaps I have twenty To fling at the mystery.” His mind, the chrysalis broken, Was confident like a child’s, it hardly occurred to him To doubt that the acid thought set free could bite Through appearance and touch truth. She answered: “You’re thoughtful Of Edward and me! An old man turning traitor . . . Do you remember your last funeral? That Mrs. Martin Fainting beside the grave?” “I remember.” “I was thinking Her tears were very foolish, her husband had died. I must have someone to trust: I shan’t reproach you: Did you plan this . . . this . . . I need someone to trust,

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We shall go live under the hateful hills I was so glad to leave.” “There? You’d be wretched.” “Where not? We’ve no friends now, I must have someone to trust. You hate my people.” “That’s not true, Audis, Indeed you know it’s not true: though human affections Mean less to me. . . . Wherever you like, Audis. Only consider that for you to go home To the hills you hated . . . not the act of health: return To childhood; a shrinking back . . .” “O God in heaven,” She cried shaking, “so calm? Life’s been so good to me I mustn’t think about home?” “We’ll find a house Near by them,” he said, “under the hills. We certainly Shan’t live in theirs. It will be good for Edward To live out of the city. For me: any sky, They are all transparent.” She trembled, “To-morrow, to-morrow. I won’t see anyone here. The papers. This Easter. An Easter Sunday. What have you done . . . on purpose . . . Breaking our house and me and Edward with a cold hand. And the great God who punishes: you struck publicly: I think he is saving something terrible for you, Or they’d have torn you—do I believe anything?— This morning on the mountain. I think you have broken My faith with the rest. . . . Saves a worse end in the darkness To pay you.” He said, “You’re right, Audis, you don’t Believe in a God like that: vendetta chieftain: No, you’ve grown up past that.” “The future’s a cloud, And something frightful folded in the black folds, Whether there’s one or not.” “Oh: we’ll go north To-morrow,” he answered wearily. A sudden weariness Blunted them both; a sense of vacuum about them; Through which they gazed and acted, gathering their goods, Uprooting the household with disinterested minds; And later, on the road northward under a great late-rising moon Saw the oaks and the hills go by like ancient shadows, The incredible stretching whitenesses far down Under a climbing turn: what was unreal before became fantastic. It seemed to Barclay Alone on the front seat, driving, it was like the womb’s mouth 245

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Passage again, unreal rushing and violent Bottle-neck of new birth. On the open valley Nearing remote Jolon rose Jupiter for a morning star, real enough, racing through the oak-tops. Then Barclay hearing a murmur of words behind him Knew his passengers were not asleep: excited By the night shows, “Audis,” he said, “It’s beautiful,” And she not answering: “You must remember Lot’s wife.” She did not answer and he sank into himself Examining the strength inside, stored seeds, packed firm With life untapped for the new time; he alone And aging, but he thought flaming, sufficient. “I need no one, not Edward, let him cling to his mother. My son there.” He thought “I can do that, and that, And drive all night and not tire. Edward,” he laughed inwardly, “I spent little on Edward. Pale and sixteen.” In the begetting, he meant; For he had been jealous of the boy, and himself Tutored him, trusted him after some experiments To no one’s teaching but his own, the boy’s mind Was Barclay’s making; it learned easily, he filled it; And blamed for a certain dreamy irresolution, Unformedness, lack of energy, the material. They ran into sunrise, Breakfasted at Salinas, turned west, before them Towered the immense ramparts of the coast fog, blank-sided precipice, to Barclay The flaming walls—“Edward must read Lucretius with me”—of the universe— to pierce, to break out beyond them: Know the world from outside . . . “I am tired and must not dull intention By straining a tired mind on it.” He drove under the fog, climbed the pine hill; they could see nothing Of Carmel Bay across the fog in the pine-tops; they crossed the Carmel bridge and south on the coast-road, The fog clearing, hills like pointed black flames crowding to the sea. A hawk for each hill hung steadily With beating wings on the steep wind, the beaks northwestward. They appeared to be sentinels, watch-birds, posted 246

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By the region mind . . . “weariness,” he thought, “plays me strange tricks” . . . the brooding dominant mind of the coast . . . III Winds had wizened the planted cypress trees in front of the house; behind them the house Stood high and square, built of thick redwood logs old weathers had blackened; the seams filled with new plaster Barred it across with white fantastic stripes; the brick chimney was propped from the roof Against the southwind. Barclay drove in between the cypresses, Stepped wearily from his place at the wheel, and opening The door of the rear seat: “Sodom’s behind us,” He said, “you haven’t turned salt Audis? We’re at your father’s.” She with pale eyes feeling the desolate look And horizontal stripes of the house-walls: “My father’s. But he is not here.” She felt about in her mind As vaguely as the eyes felt the house, asking her mind What revolution yesterday or the day before Had left white desolateness after calamity? “Oh, the Easter.” And Barclay: “If not, he’ll return soon.” While he was knocking at the door, she to Edward Who stood by the car: “Dearest, dear boy, be good to me. Here I was born, I am frightened to have circled back to it Like the end of a sad book. O believe God’s, Whatever that man tells you, for death’s terrible. What have I done!” She peered from the car; A woman she’d never seen drew open the house-door. “I’m Dr. Barclay. We’ve come up from the south. My wife is Mr. Morhead’s daughter.” “Oh, Audis Barclay? Stephen’s sister: Stephen’s not here: he’s visiting,” She murmured tremulously, “his brother Randal Down the coast; Oh, come in, I’m so glad.” Audis Had come from the car, “Where is my father? Not here?” “He lives up on the mountain,” the woman answered, “He likes it better. You didn’t write you were coming?” She was young and pale, dark hair, frightened dark eyes, 247

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A face that might have been pretty but was abject. “I’m Agnes, you know, Stephen’s wife, Agnes Morhead. [The three-inch space at the bottom of the last page of this fragment suggests it was abandoned at this point.]

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[HARVARD FRAGME NT ]

And I’ve told mine.” “Never since I was married, Not for a moment, not once.” Faith had left the chair And wound an arm about Natalia’s waist, and the hand Fondling her breast through the thin cloth. “If you love him Why did he leave you?” It was Natalia that writhed Her body and choked on the breath. “He was proud and eager. He needn’t have gone,” she said proudly, “he’d never be drafted. I thought he was cruel to leave me.” Faith’s hard small hands Pressed on each side her thighs holding her firmly, Faith’s eyes searched her averse face. “You were perfect too Before you married, you never wanted a man?” “I was only fifteen,” she answered smiling. “I am only fifteen,” Faith answered. “I didn’t know what it meant.” “But I,” Faith answered, “meant to find out.” “I didn’t want to find out. Oh,” she said gravely smiling, “if I search my mind: When I was little I had many innocent lovers. That was down in the south, in Chile. I remember, Now I know what a woman feels, how my eyes Burned for my father even, when he taught me swimming. His great brown shoulders.” She laughed, escaping Faith’s hands. 249

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“I have many strange bloods, German, Italian, a drop of Indian.” “They’re not in the war? I’ll go up with you and help you,” Faith answered, “take care of the old man. Soft innocent loveliness If you’d had anything impure to confess,” She laughed fiercely, “I was ready to strangle you.” They went up-stairs. Natalia stole to the doors and listened to her children’s Breathing sleep; Faith waited on the landing; they mounted The second flight of the stair, feeling each other in the darkness, To the old man’s room under the roof. When they touched in the darkness It was like a great and shining star between them.

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AFTERWORD

In 1938 Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a 600-page volume that gathered about half of the poet’s published work to that point. For Random House, it was a way to signal Jeffers’ status as a major poet. For Jeffers, it was an opportunity to define his creative production for both his current audience and future readers. In the Foreword, Jeffers notes that the length of the major narratives required setting aside poems he would otherwise have included. He characterizes the “omission” of Cawdor, for instance, as “purely arbitrary and accidental; I had finally to choose between this and ‘Thurso’s Landing’; and there was no ground for choice; I simply drew lots in my mind” (CP4: 390). However, he explains the decision to omit The Women at Point Sur quite differently: “The Women at Point Sur” seems to me—in spite of grave faults—the most inclusive, and poetically the most intense, of any of my poems; it is omitted from this selection because it is the least understood and least liked; and because it is the longest. (CP4: 390)

To have included Point Sur (some 275 pages as published by Boni & Liveright in 1927) would, indeed, have required omitting several well-liked narratives, but what is more telling is the other part of the rationale. Eleven years after its publication, Jeffers still felt compelled to assert Point Sur’s value in spite of its generally negative reception, and this gives it a paradoxical presence in The Selected Poetry: It is erased from the contents (except for a single page slipped into the section headed “From Roan Stallion”), and yet Jeffers emphasizes its significance in the Foreword. It’s as if he is accepting the judgment of his audience, yet challenging his readers to turn to this “least liked” poem if they are, truly, serious about his work. Mark Van Doren’s review of Point Sur in the Nation illustrates what Jeffers probably had in mind when he characterized the poem as his “least liked” narrative. It concludes: 251

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If it is madness to consider humanity in itself, as doubtless it is, it is also madness to consider humanity out of itself. Mr. Jeffers thus far has found no way of resolving the great paradox. That he feels it so strongly is evidence of his quality as an artist. That he cannot get round it is evidence that he may, if he keeps on, give us poems we cannot bear to read. The Women at Point Sur is unbearable enough. I have read it with thrills of pleasure at its power and beauty, and I shall read everything else Mr. Jeffers writes. But I may be brought to wonder whether there is need of his trying further in this direction. He seems to be knocking his head to pieces against the night.1

Van Doren’s regard for Jeffers’ poetry is evident in these remarks, but so, too, are his doubts about Point Sur and his dismay at the direction it suggested Jeffers was heading. Van Doren was an important early advocate of Jeffers’ work, and his review troubled Jeffers enough that a few weeks after it appeared, he wrote James Rorty, another key early advocate of his work: You were right evidently about the need of an explanation [for Point Sur]. I have just read Mark Van Doren’s article, and if he, a first-rate critic and a poet and a good friend of my work, quite misunderstands the book, it is very likely that no one else will understand it at present. (CL1: 689)

Jeffers then claims that a “primary” intention of Point Sur was to show in action the danger of that “Roan Stallion” idea of “breaking out of humanity,” misinterpreted in the mind of a fool or lunatic. . . . just as Ibsen in the Wild Duck made a warning against his own idea in the hands of a fool, so Point Sur was meant to be a warning; but at the same time a reassertion. (CL1: 689)2

Jeffers suggests here that Point Sur’s purpose and significance in part derives from and depends on Roan Stallion. Whatever Jeffers felt about Point Sur following its negative reviews, this defense is problematic. Writing Donald Friede, his Boni & Liveright editor, six

1 “First Glance,” from the Nation 125 (27 July 1927): 88; quoted from James Karman, Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers, edited by James Karman (G. K. Hall, 1990), 62. 2

Jeffers subsequently sent Van Doren a letter with this same rationale (CL1: 688–91).

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months earlier when he had just completed the poem, Jeffers characterized it as “being—I dare say—the Faust of this generation” (CL1: 655). While the reviews could have led him to question whether he had written his generation’s Faust, his comments in the Selected Poetry Foreword suggest a different possibility. By positioning Point Sur primarily as a supplement to the three major long poems collected in Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems rather than as a project to be engaged on its own terms, Jeffers offered Rorty and Van Doren a way to continue to regard Tamar, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and Roan Stallion as the paradigm for his work.3 As he would in the 1938 Foreword, Jeffers moves Point Sur to the margin of his canon, casting it as an optional supplement, even as he asserts its significance.

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The recovery of the Point Alma Venus attempts that chart Jeffers’ progress from his initial approach to the Reverend Barclay’s story to its realization as The Women at Point Sur provides a context that helps explain Jeffers’ seeming uncertainty about whether or not to defend Point Sur in spite of its importance to him. In one sense these attempts are, in spite of their substance, a series of failures that document his difficulty in shaping the poem and resolving the implications of Barclay’s story. This raises the question of whether Point Sur as finally completed actually resolves these issues or whether Jeffers more simply found a way to conclude the plot. At the same time, the Alma Venus versions show that his explorations of the figure of Barclay are the context (even to some degree the occasion) for composing Tamar, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and Roan Stallion—the three long poems that made his reputation when published in the Roan Stallion collection and which dominate the first 140 pages of the 1938 Selected Poetry. Rorty and Van Doren necessarily encountered the poems in the order they were published, and for them the Roan Stallion material preceded Point Sur, which troubled them because it failed, in their view, to maintain or extend the promise of the Roan Stallion work. For Jeffers, however, Tamar, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and Roan Stallion had each emerged from (or in relationship to) the attempts at Alma Venus. This compositional sequence problematizes Jeffers’ claim to Rorty and Van Doren that a “primary” goal in Point Sur was to warn against misinterpreting Roan Stallion’s “idea of ‘breaking out of humanity.’” It suggests, instead,

3 Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems also includes two earlier narratives, Fauna (from 1917) and The Coast-Range Christ (completed early 1920), written before Jeffers had fully developed his mature style and stance.

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that Roan Stallion was a further exploration of the Alma Venus / Point Sur “idea of ‘breaking out of humanity.’” The notes that follow the Alma Venus fragment designated Version A in this edition illustrates how Barclay’s story informs, at least in part, the writing of Roan Stallion. This fragment seems to follow Storm as Deliverer (initial version) and to precede The Ur-Point Alma Venus. The notes read as if Jeffers wrote them as he was reviewing the already abandoned Version A and considering how to proceed with his next attempt. If Jeffers wrote Storm as Deliverer (initial version) before Tamar (some of the contextual evidence suggests this could have been the case), these notes would then record Jeffers’ rethinking of Alma Venus and Barclay’s story as he returned to it following the conceptual and aesthetic breakthrough of Tamar.4 They read: I facing him am no man, not Jeffers, Nor the son of a mother Seeing the the [

] and the [

], entrails viscera

Makes me I am ashamed to speak of the active little bodies and the misty brainfulls Of [wishes], of passion, of the desire to dominate And [inflict] rule

____________________ Second Book or Chapter The old rock under my house; the hills with their hard roots, and the ocean cored With sacred quietness from here to Asia: unwasted presence and sufficience Make me ashamed to speak of the active little bodies and the misty brainfuls Of perplexed passion. Humanity is needless. I said humanity is the mould to break away from, the coal to kindle,

4 See Tim Hunt, “‘Tho this is my last tale’: When Did Jeffers Write the First Version of Point Alma Venus?” Jeffers Studies 20 (December 2020): 39–55.

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The Blind mask that needs breaking, the atom to be split. The [atom] [breaking]. I say that the eyes of the people in a poem are mirrors, Their bodies are reflectors, they ache with the powers That have no name under the sun (pp. 43–44)

The opening of Chapter IX of The Ur-Point Alma Venus (its significance underscored by the canceled section title) derives, at least indirectly, from these notes, Second Book

IX

I (Defence of Poetry)

1. The old rock under my house, the hills with their hard roots and the ocean cored With sacred quietness from here to Asia: unwasting presence and sufficience Make me ashamed to speak of the active little bodies and the misty brainfuls Of perplexed passion. Humanity is not needed. I said humanity is the mould to break away from, the coal to kindle, The mask needs breaking: I say that the eyes of the people in a poem are mirrors, Their bodies are reflectors, they ache with the powers Unnamed under the sun. It is only for this reason: Because one has no language to praise God but the stutter of humanity: His beauty is glassed in the blind eyes, his power storms up from the bottom Through the round mixing-bowls of fire, the curdle of the brain, the sealed and sutured Bone vaults, the shells brimming with vision: I facing him am no man, not Jeffers, Nor the son of a mother: a God facing the God, outside humanity: but I Speaking of him must use the words that people have made, and the people for words, Barclay and his household and the others . . . or else be torn with silence: I could endure that also, Having entered the rock . . . He drew me forth out of the rock, he bade me speak of him . . . 255

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2. Humanity is the bottle to be burst on a rock and the sharp savor Remember its wings; the grape for treading, the tower builded to fall, the gray bird Flying to be shot in the air: at the hour of the breaking, Wisdom: the moment between the fire and the ashes, between reason and madness, Wisdom: between the leaning and the falling: O world’s patience, rock’s quietness, Bear with me building; something in the fall of the mass, in the tragic moment Discoverable; some spark struck out by the stones falling; the star, the eye then

In turn, Jeffers subsequently redevelops this material in Roan Stallion (in one of the poem’s most cited passages): Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split. Tragedy that breaks man’s face and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural crime, inhuman science, Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science, Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom, These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For him, the last

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Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the mould to break away from, the coal To break into fire, the atom to be split. (CP1: 189–90)

These notes and passages in turn inform the opening of Chapter XVI in the final Alma Venus attempt (discussed below) and are further developed in Prelude, the brief hybrid narrative-lyric that opens The Women at Point Sur: But why should I make fables again? There are many Tellers of tales to delight women and the people. I have no vocation. The old rock under the house, the hills with their hard roots and the ocean hearted With sacred quietness from here to Asia Make me ashamed to speak of the active little bodies, the coupling bodies, the misty brainfuls Of perplexed passion. Humanity is needless. I said “Humanity is the start of the race, the gate to break away from, the coal to kindle, The blind mask crying to be slit with eye-holes.” Well now it is done, the mask slit, the rag burnt, the starting-post left behind: but not in a fable. Culture’s outlived, art’s root-cut, discovery’s The way to walk in. Only remains to invent the language to tell it. Match-ends of burnt experience Human enough to be understood, Scraps and metaphors will serve. The wine was a little too strong for the new wine-skins . . . (CP1: 240–41)

Moreover, the opening and closing moves in these Version A notes anticipate Chapter XII of The Women at Point Sur, the only unit from that poem which Jeffers actually included in the 1938 Selected Poetry. Rorty and Van Doren had no way of knowing how these notes weave through Alma Venus, Roan Stallion, and Prelude, but this weaving argues against Jeffers having cast Barclay in the role of “fool” or “lunatic” in a cautionary tale, and it suggests the need to take seriously Jeffers’ claim that Barclay was a Faustian figure, or more precisely a Faustian construction deployed as an instrument for discovery—a means to slit the “mask” of “Humanity” and risk “the powers / That have no

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name under the sun.” For Jeffers to defend Point Sur to Rorty and Van Doren would have been to argue that they should subordinate the poems they believed demonstrated he was a major poet to a poem they saw as an imaginative dead end. Instead, Jeffers opted for a strategic retreat, as he would in the 1938 Foreword to Selected Poetry. Yet his comments in the Foreword indicate he continued to believe that Point Sur was “the Faust of this generation.”

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The way the recastings of the notes that conclude Version A extend across Alma Venus, Roan Stallion, Prelude, and Point Sur illustrates the interplay between Jeffers’ attempts at Barclay’s story and the published long poems written in these same years. As published, Tamar is the initiating breakthrough, and The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Roan Stallion, and The Women at Point Sur follow as a series that deepens and expands Tamar’s thematic implications. Incorporating the Alma Venus material shows that Jeffers, instead, wrote these published long poems in and around the Alma Venus attempts. This suggests a different mapping, in which this period’s published and unpublished long poems are an imaginative field with the Reverend Barclay at its center. Tower and Roan Stallion (and to a lesser extent possibly Tamar as well) derive from the work on Barclay’s story, react to it, and then in turn lead to further work on Barclay’s story. The way the failure of The Ur-Point Alma Venus seems to precipitate The Tower Beyond Tragedy, with Tower in turn contextualizing the next attempt at Barclay’s story, Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version), illustrates how Jeffers’ nearly concurrent work on Barclay’s story can complicate our understanding of a poem where Barclay isn’t a character. The final scene of The Tower Beyond Tragedy includes the often-cited passage where Orestes rejects Electra’s incestuous advances in order to reenter “the life of the brown forest”: To-night, lying on the hillside, sick with those visions, I remembered The knife in the stalk of my humanity; I drew and it broke; I entered the life of the brown forest And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have our own time, not yours; and I was the stream Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit; and I was the darkness 258

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Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind also, a moving lichen On the cheek of the round stone . . . they have not made words for it, to go behind things, beyond hours and ages, And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages, in the motionless and timeless centre, In the white of the fire . . . how can I express the excellence I have found, that has no color but clearness; No honey but ecstasy; nothing wrought nor remembered; no undertone nor silver second murmur That rings in love’s voice, I and my loved are one; no desire but fulfilled; no passion but peace, The pure flame and the white, fierier than any passion; no time but spheral eternity: Electra, Was that your name before this life dawned—(CP1: 176–77)

Electra dismisses Orestes’ vision as “mere death,” while Orestes, “hav[ing] fallen in love outward” and “cast humanity,” is said to have “climbed the tower beyond time” and (in the poem’s final words) to have “entered the earlier fountain.” The vision that Orestes attempts to share with Electra has often been invoked as an interpretive key to Jeffers’ work, much as the parallel passage in Emerson’s Nature, where he becomes as if a “transparent eyeball,” is treated as a key to his work. Read this way, Tower challenges us to reject Electra’s incestuous self-regard in order, like Orestes, to love outward and become one with “spheral eternity.” Juxtaposing Tower against Tamar, which precedes it, and Roan Stallion, which succeeds it, enhances this vision’s centrality and its interpretive authority. Orestes’ vision points the way beyond the tragedy that Tamar, in her destructive heroism, enacts, and his vision clarifies what California, in Roan Stallion, discovers through the figure of the stallion and underscores what she sacrifices in killing the stallion. Framed by Tamar and Roan Stallion, Orestes’ culminating vision in The Tower Beyond Tragedy is fully, unambiguously redemptive—its truth unequivocal and absolute. However, The Ur-Point Alma Venus and Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version) are the projects that actually precede and follow Tower, and this alternate framing complicates Orestes’ vision. The final scene of The Ur-Point Alma Venus also presents a visionary moment—one that anticipates, even as it inverts, Orestes’ concluding vision. In the Alma Venus scene, Barclay has “climbed to the peak of the hill whose shadow / Covered his house almost all day in winter,” and from 259

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the vantage of this literal and figurative “summit,” a different “tower beyond time,” he, too, has “cast humanity” in the usual sense and can be said to have entered an “earlier fountain”: He looked down from the summit On the hawk’s red back; it hung below him, hovering the bright wind. Right opposite Hung the south sun. The hawk and the sun were so intensely similar: one power: Two forms, one being. The hill twitched with the distant thud of the blast in the water. The hawk vanished; the sun and Barclay Stood huge over the world; two forms, one being. Symbols of the Power, the eternal God. Symbols? Presences. The God Made fire and made flesh. “Was it always in me or has it entered me suddenly?” The fluid, The serpent, fibrous serpent that slid out in the night and went exploring, Now without effort, without will or desire, answering exultance, went up Like smoke, but from the dome of the skull not from the breast; his very consciousness, Like a vast column, like the trunk of a tree, like a huge fountain, not falling, Towering; a tower taking the sky, from the mid-sky Taking the region. He felt at once, with passion, the hills crowding like cattle down to the water, The little dried-up rivers, the cattle on the hills, the redwoods, the pines northward, the Carmel Valley, All the rock, all the life, all the earth, all the water, Like members of his body, like his hands and his fingers. He was the boatmen laboring shorelong A few miles south, planting their blasts a little clear of the cliff: they raised nothing: he also The corpse they sought; he had washed under a shelving rock, no one should find him. At Point Aumentos

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He was the masoned and the cypress circles, and the house the tower pierced, and he the light-tower; he also The mad old light-house keeper, the dreader of death; he the fat woman; he felt the region his body Shudder with mystic marriage-passion, for he was April, he April, the singing beauty of the child, The white body mixed in his blood, included in him: he failed, fainting, panting, the tower Fell out of heaven; the enemy that had raised it had run lower in the body. Another desire. Another desire had tapped the fountain Of energy. He stood (pp. 112–113)

The visionary “excellence” Orestes perceives results from his renunciation of self—the “cast[ing]” of self-awareness, human connections, and desire. And through what might be termed the erasure of the human, the death of the self, he is redeemed into a oneness with nature and its being. He becomes “all things in all time, in their returns and passages” and attains “the motionless and timeless centre” that is also the consuming flux of “the white of the fire.” Jeffers, here, portrays Orestes as having achieved the vision of “the eye that watched” in “Continent’s End,” which is “Older and harder than life and more impartial” while being simultaneously one with nature’s unceasing flux, the “the tides of fire” (CP1: 16–17). In “Continent’s End” this simultaneity of transcendent, yet materially embodied awareness—being both within yet beyond the ceaseless cycles of destruction and renewal—is something we can only glimpse or briefly experience in a visionary moment. We can apprehend its possibility, even evoke its possibility, but not embody or sustain it, because to achieve it as a permanent state of being / awareness would be to have become God. It is precisely because Orestes makes no claim to being God that the egoless awareness of his concluding vision in Tower can seem an actual rather than aspirational answer to the dilemma of being. Conversely, Barclay experiences his visionary state not as a moment of becoming aware of God or participating in God’s totality of being but instead as having become God’s alternate “form.” In his egotism, he imagines he has moved beyond perceiving God through “Symbols” and beyond mere awareness of God’s “Presences” to becoming “The God / Made fire and made flesh.” As such, he imagines himself replacing the hawk that, as the passage opens, is offered as “one power” and “one being” with God. In simplistic psychological terms, Orestes extinguishes the ego, and, thus, becomes infused with God, while Barclay expands the ego to such an extent that 261

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he, in his megalomania, consumes God and imagines he stands in God’s place.5 Barclay fails to resolve (or even understand) the dilemma of consciousness and being that he is experiencing, but his delusion confronts us more powerfully and unavoidably with this dilemma and its central questions. The visions that conclude The Ur-Point Alma Venus and Tower project the dilemma of consciousness in opposite but related ways and are, I’d suggest, heads and tails of a single coin rather than different systems of currency. Had Rorty and Van Doren had access to The Ur-Point Alma Venus, they would probably have preferred Tower, just as they preferred Tower (and Tamar and Roan Stallion) to Point Sur. Jeffers’ vision of Orestes’ vision of achieving a transcendent union with nature, time, and being (with its biblical cadences and its affinity to Emerson’s crossing a bare commons passage) is more appealing than the Reverend Barclay’s horrific descent (or ascent) into madness. However, the way The Ur-Point Alma Venus leads on to Tower and Tower then leads on to further attempts at Alma Venus argues against reducing Point Sur to a warning. These variations of Barclay’s story derive from, and are driven by, a central problematic. Orestes’ concluding vision responds to this same problematic. In imagining Orestes’ vision, Jeffers attempts to separate what is redemptive in Barclay’s concluding vision in The Ur-Point Alma Venus from what is damning and delusional. This leads to one of the most positive affirmations in his poetry, but Orestes’ vision fails to resolve what is problematic in Barclay’s vision. It elides, rather than confronts, the dilemma of consciousness. In Tower Jeffers envisions Orestes becoming, as it were, permanently post-conscious—a state not only “beyond tragedy” but beyond consciousness and beyond our human terms of being. The dilemma of consciousness, which is necessarily in part self-consciousness, can be momentarily resolved but not permanently so. Orestes’ renunciation of his humanity in order to fulfill his being in and as nature is not, as Electra interprets it, “death,” but neither is it sustainable. It can be glimpsed, even momentarily experienced, but not permanently achieved. In the usual construction of Jeffers’ development Tamar is the origin for the mature narratives; Orestes’ vision resolves the puzzle of being and consciousness implicitly broached in Tamar by proving that transcending the self is possible; and Barclay in The Women at Point Sur dramatizes the consequences of misappropriating visionary transcendence for personal power. The Alma Venus attempts suggest a different construction. They show that Jeffers was already engaging the figure 5

In Emerson’s Nature, the “I” becomes “nothing” and this enables the “I” to “see all.”

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of Barclay before The Tower Beyond Tragedy. And the way The Ur-Point Alma Venus breaks off without resolving Barclay’s vision suggests that Jeffers abandoned this attempt precisely because he was unable to move beyond the partially completed final scene to resolve the dilemma of consciousness. The Ur-Point Alma Venus can, that is, be read as an attempt to extend the exploration initiated in Tamar. This underscores the significance of the dilemma of consciousness evoked through Barclay in it, and it suggests in turn that Jeffers deployed the figure of Orestes in an attempt to resolve what he had, in The Ur-Point Alma Venus, failed to resolve through Barclay. Moreover, the Alma Venus material shows that Jeffers did not move directly from completing Tower to drafting Roan Stallion, but instead began another attempt at Alma Venus, Storm as Deliverer (the MacTorald version).

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The opening of Storm as Deliverer (the MacTorald version) emphasizes the centrality of the dilemma of consciousness for this conception of the poem: Phaedra—but she will be called . . . Eleanor—looked down from the height. Behind her The hammers rang in the thin air; the old lion is building a new den. . . . Mrs. MacTorald Her name is now. What did she know of him? He is wealthy . . . he has strange powers. . . . Love is enough. A love Crossed with terror? “I feel myself a country Mary Who has married God. (p. 127)

By invoking “Phaedra,” Jeffers signals that this Alma Venus attempt would, like the just completed Tower, draw on classical material with mythic implications. In this case, the poem would be a version of the Hippolytus story set on the Big Sur coast with Eleanor as the Phaedra figure and her husband, MacTorald, as Theseus. From the outset, MacTorald “has strange powers”: he has the capacity to enter into the consciousness, and the unconsciousness, of the narrative’s other figures, including Barclay. Moreover, he is able to register the being and modes of awareness of the region’s non-human elements, including the hawks and hills. The way his consciousness comprehends the region, both as understanding and as a participatory possession of its human and non-human elements, makes it as if a kind of geographically delimited collective unconsciousness, as Jung might term it, had been brought into conscious awareness.

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The dilemma of consciousness in the MacTorald version implicitly critiques the treatment of consciousness in both The Ur-Point Alma Venus and The Tower Beyond Tragedy. In the former, Jeffers develops the narrative to the point where Barclay’s heightened and extended awareness of the “one being” of existence could enable him to transcend self and connect to the divine energy termed “God” only to mistakenly take this intensified awareness as proof that he had become God. In Tower, Jeffers imagines Orestes as transcending ego and becoming an element in the “one being” by not only transcending self-consciousness but erasing it. MacTorald resembles Orestes in the way he experiences consciousness as a heightened awareness of the totality (and beauty) of being that transcends the self. But like Barclay, he experiences consciousness as an intensified awareness of self within the flux of being, an awareness that extends to foreknowledge of his tragic fate within the Hippolytan scenario. In the MacTorald Alma Venus, MacTorald’s presence is further complicated by the doubled role he plays in the narrative: He is an actor within the story, and he is a narrator of what is and what is to come as he draws Eleanor into her own extended consciousness and an awareness of what her story will entail. MacTorald is not only the victim in his tragedy but also a witness to it, its apologist, and even in some sense its author. In a typical tragic narrative, the hero progresses to a moment of discovery that precipitates tragic recognition. In The Ur-Point Alma Venus Barclay does progress to discovery but fails to achieve tragic recognition. In Tower, Orestes wins through to discovery, but the terms of his discovery free him from tragic recognition. In the MacTorald Alma Venus, MacTorald knows his fate from the outset and understands its tragic implications. His challenge is to remain fully aware of the tragedy he is to endure and to continue to accept it as the necessary cost to his awareness of God and beauty. Barclay (in The Ur-Point Alma Venus) and Orestes both evade a full recognition of the cost of consciousness. MacTorald, though, suffers this cost, and this seemingly would have led to him presenting Barclay’s story as a story within his own—perhaps with MacTorald’s acceptance of the tragedy of consciousness implicitly (or explicitly) counterpointed to Barclay’s damning misappropriation of the tragedy of consciousness or perhaps with Eleanor as both witness to this and (in her guise as character) the figure who would have to choose between these possibilities or discover an alternative to them. Storm as Deliverer (the MacTorald version) is the only Alma Venus attempt where Barclay is not at the center of the plot. Yet, it is critical for understanding how Jeffers’ approach to narrative as a creative mode was shifting in this period, and it is pivotal for understanding the progression from Roan Stallion (the poem Jeffers 264

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turned to when he abandoned the MacTorald version) to the fourth and final Alma Venus attempt, and then finally to The Women at Point Sur. MacTorald is not only a character acting a role in his own tragic destruction, he is implicitly a figure for the poet. In the later part of 1925, having completed Roan Stallion and probably having already begun the final Alma Venus attempt that follows the MacTorald version, Jeffers wrote “Apology for Bad Dreams,” an ars poetica in which he attempts to explain the tragic narratives he had been writing and which in part recasts material from Alma Venus. The chronology of the Alma Venus attempts suggests that it may also be a meditation more specifically occasioned by his attempt to develop Barclay’s story in the final Alma Venus attempt. The fourth and final section of “Apology for Bad Dreams” begins: He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents victims, is only the ape of that God. He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with fire in the red crucible, Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself: the spirit flies out and stands naked, he sees the spirit, He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom is broken, the power that massed it Cries to the power that moves the stars, “I have come home to myself, behold me. I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth, Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments, And here am I moving the stars that are me.” (CP1: 210–11)

Implicitly the “He” that opens this passage is God, and the poet, through the process of imagining tragic “victims,” imitates God. Both God and the poet are, as Jeffers terms it in the final scene of The Women at Point Sur, heautontimoroumenus, which is to say, self-torturing (“I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me /. . . . I tortured myself, I flew forth . . . / And here am I moving the stars that are me”). MacTorald is, similarly, conscious of these terms of existence. He accepts self-torturing as the cost of being fully aware of the beauty of existence and the terms of his being within it. He, too, is “aping” (i.e., imitating) God, and he is, as such, an analogue to the self-torturing figure of the poet in “Apology for Bad Dreams.” 265

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In the MacTorald Alma Venus, the poet both projects and enacts the figure of MacTorald, participating in the character’s self-torturing as he attempts to reflect on it. In one way, MacTorald is more fully God’s ape than the poet because (in the “reality” the poet constructs for him) he suffers directly in his own being. In another way, he is less fully God’s ape because he is the poet’s imagined projection, which places him at a further remove from God. Either way, the dynamic of the poem and the function of MacTorald as comprehending consciousness positions him not only as a character within the invented narrative but also as a surrogate through which the poet self-tortures—experiencing in the process of inventing the poem and discovering through this experiencing. Or perhaps it might be said that MacTorald is figuratively a mask that the poet puts on in order to be an actor within the poem’s ritual action and thereby to be acted upon by the poem while acting upon the poem by inventing it.6 As an experiment in narration, the MacTorald Alma Venus shows Jeffers attempting to approximate the simultaneity of the transcending “eye that watched” and the participatory immolation in the “tides of fire” and being that he projects in “Continent’s End.” This model may seem overly convoluted and even implausibly experimental for Jeffers. But “Apology for Bad Dreams” helps clarify the nature and function of this complexity. In the opening lines of Part II, Jeffers evokes the Big Sur coastal region as more than a physical setting, characterizing it as not simply a presence but a dynamic organism—one that “cr[ies] out,” he asserts, “for tragedy like all beautiful places.” The “coast,” he says, takes the “passionate spirit of humanity” as “Pain for its bread,” and he then explains that he has chosen to “imagine victims” to feed the coast rather than have his “own flesh be chosen the agonist” (CP1: 209). Jeffers’ purpose in constructing tragic narratives populated with invented “victims” (as he is developing it here) can be understood in two ways: Near the end of Part II, he notes, “Pain and terror, the insanities of desire; not accidents but essential / And crowd up from the core.” Representing tragic actions in the poems brings this “essential” dimension forward as therapeutic catharsis and warning. This essentially Aristotelean rationale for tragedy is plausibly part of what Jeffers has in mind, but neither tragedy as psychological release nor tragedy as warning fully addresses the fundamental power that drives the need for tragedy as Jeffers projects it here. “The coast crying out for tragedy” is implicitly a hunger, and for the “coast,” “Pain” is “its bread.” The hunger Jeffers

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Jeffers’ April 24, 1926 letter to Donald Friede is suggestive in this regard (CL1: 563–64).

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imputes to the coast isn’t a figurative humanizing of the coast for poetic effect (an instance of the pathetic fallacy). Instead, it reflects his apprehension of the coast as a being rather than simply a backdrop or scene. The coast contains its human figures as participating elements within it, and it is more comprehensive and fundamental than its human figures. The coast as dynamic being demands more than aesthetic contemplation to be fed. Even if the “bread” is figural, the “Pain” must be real. As such, engaging the “coast” as Jeffers is here experiencing (and conceptualizing) it requires more than representing tragic action. It requires tragic participation, and this requires that the narratives function as sacrificial rituals, and for these sacrificial rituals to be efficacious they must derive from the poet’s self-torturing participation in the self-torturing he creates for, and through, the figures within the poems. “Apology for Bad Dreams” (in the context of the Alma Venus material) shows that it was no longer sufficient for Jeffers to represent a tragic story enacted by fictional counters. Instead, it had become necessary for writing narrative to be a means of creating a tragic ritual that one enters into and experiences through. This shift from narrative as representation to narrative as enactment underscores the full risk of what Jeffers was attempting in the MacTorald Alma Venus and how MacTorald is not simply a presentational device but is instead a means for the poet to participate in the poem through creating it in order to undergo a visionary self-torturing to feed the hungry coast. In the context of the MacTorald Alma Venus, “Apology for Bad Dreams” is more than an explanation of the need to invent tragic victims. It elaborates the need to become (through the writing of the poem) the tragic victim, the “agonist.”

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Why Jeffers stopped work on Storm as Deliverer (the MacTorald version) is unclear. Perhaps sustaining the intricacy of its narrative strategy proved untenable. While MacTorald is the poem’s overarching consciousness and narrates the actions of the subordinate characters (including Barclay), Eleanor is actually the primary character. We perceive MacTorald through her attempts to understand his “strange powers” as he attempts to initiate her into them. This creates a narrative oscillation that alternately foregrounds and attenuates MacTorald’s role as selfwitnessing agonist. It is also possible that Jeffers became dissatisfied with how the Hippolytus plot displaces Barclay from the center of the narrative. What is clear is that Jeffers stopped working on this version and turned to writing

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Roan Stallion about the time Boni & Liveright proposed publishing an expanded version of Tamar and Other Poems.7 The Alma Venus version that Jeffers attempted after completing Roan Stallion may at first seem a retrenchment from the MacTorald experiment. In this final primary attempt (the one Jeffers still expected to complete for publication as late as April 1926), Barclay is again the focal point, and the narrative voice seems again to be primarily the more conventional, distanced omniscient third-person voice of the initial versions. But, even so, this most nearly completed version of Alma Venus continues the more radical approach to tragedy as ritual enactment proposed in “Apology for Bad Dreams” and reflects the narrative complexity of the MacTorald version. Chapter XVI, near the end of this final Alma Venus attempt, brings Jeffers’ continued commitment to ritual enactment to the fore and suggests that he was still searching for how to make this commitment immediate and real enough for himself to be effective as ritual participation while maintaining enough narrative clarity and immediacy to make the poem available to the reader. The chapter opens with a lyric unit that celebrates natural beauty, declaring that this beauty is “enough to praise God with.” As the passage continues, it develops into another elaboration of the already-quoted notes from the end of Version A, while also echoing the rationale of “Apology for Bad Dreams”: these are deeper secrets Of the one beauty worked in the essence; untouchable mysteries Of remote contact, chordal sympathies between the arcs of the great circumference, correspondences Between the mind and the rock; radial sympathies between circumference and center: and if the thought Is tortured to conceive it dimly and the tortured words That are the hands and feet of the mind twist out of human recognition only to say it As in a fable: this is the fable.

7 Enthusiastic reviews of Tamar and Other Poems, which Jeffers had paid to have privately printed in 1924, led Boni & Liveright to propose publishing an expanded edition. In Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, the new work is the opening section, and Roan Stallion was, thus, the first poem many of Jeffers’ original readers first encountered.

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I who have lived it am tortured a second time and live it again in memory. I was this man’s Son; and this other was the father of my mother; two Gods have fought Over the strain of the coast, in the air like eagles. I think the mystery Is that no man can feel God until he becomes God. I have known what I say. What other reason Makes me ashamed to remember the active little bodies and the misty brain-fulls Of perplexed passion? Humanity is needless: Humanity is the start of the story: the time I was whole, in the crowned hour, in the hour I was God Even humanity was a sparkle of the star: but now in the off-drop And ship’s wake of the flaming moment I cannot remember the ancient rock under my feet, the hills with their hard roots, the gray ocean Cored with quietness from here to Asia, Except through the squint eyes of the people: their eyes are mirrors, their bodies reflectors, they ache with the powers Unnamed under the sun. It is only for this reason, Because one has no fable to praise God but the fable of humanity: His beauty is glassed in the blind eyes, his power storms up from the bottom Through the round mixing-bowls of fire, the curdle of the brain, the sealed and sutured bone vaults, the shells Brimming with vision: I when I touched him was not a man, not Barclay, Nor the son of a mother: the God touching the God, outside humanity: but I remembering have only The people for images . . . the people . . . (pp. 221–222)

In this passage, the visionary moment of being “outside humanity” (and freed from one’s ego) that allows one to “touch[] the God” cannot be expressed from within the visionary moment. Trying to recall it after it has passed creates the need for mediating images, which leads to using “fable” to evoke what is beyond expression and beyond conceptual formulation, so that even to “conceive it dimly” in “fable” requires “thought” to be “tortured” if one is to recuperate something of the visionary moment and not just assert that it occurred. 269

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Although the term ode doesn’t occur in this passage, it is so clearly lyric praise that labeling it an ode becomes extraneous. Still, it is helpful to recall that Jeffers, in the Version A notes, proposes transforming narrative from “fable” (a story presenting an already determined, even summarizable meaning) into “ode” (lyric praise). Also, a later page of notes that plausibly relates to this final Alma Venus attempt (or perhaps the MacTorald version or perhaps even Roan Stallion) concludes “That this is ode, not story.”8 As with the question of “tragedy” in “Apology for Bad Dreams,” narrative as “ode” can be understood in several ways. The more conventional view would be that Jeffers is proposing intensifying “story” to such a degree that it becomes an aesthetic object suitable to offer God in praise. This is perhaps how Jeffers understood fable becoming ode in The Ur-Point Alma Venus, but the experimentation of the MacTorald version and the sense of narrative as ritual enactment in “Apology for Bad Dreams” suggest that he had come to view the process of making as itself the praise. Instead of casting poetry as the act of constructing an aesthetic object to then be offered in praise (which ironically elevates craft but treats the actual labor of shaping the object as not only secondary but irrelevant once the object is completed), this casts the invention (and psychic risk) of generating the imagined victims as intrinsic to praising. Instead of the poet portraying sacrificial consciousness (a fable), the poet experiences sacrificial consciousness by becoming the self-torturer of “Apology for Bad Dreams,” who imitates divine self-torturing through imaginatively initiating the story, experiencing through elaborating it, and suffering its tragic trajectory. Transforming narrative from fable into ode in this manner requires that the creator of the poem be not only emotionally engaged in the process of praising but be as well its origin and at its center, which in turn requires that the mode of presentation (the point of view, the narrative voice) be more than a presentational device and become, instead, a means to participate in the story that the poet is inventing. In this more radical approach, lyric energy and risk drive narrative, which in turn enables lyric awareness through narrative. For Jeffers, then, transforming fable into ode entails the poet’s ritual self-sacrifice through the poem’s material, and it requires that the poet’s participation in the violational actions of his imagined victims be psychically actual in order for this ritualistic 8 This sheet of notes (p. 163) references the September 14, 1924 oil tank fire in Monterey (an episode Jeffers develops in the Prelude to The Women at Point Sur). The notes, then, are later than The Ur-Point Alma Venus but could be early enough to refer to the MacTorald version or to Roan Stallion. However, the phrase “Second Chapter or II” echoes “Second Book or Chapter” in the Version A notes. This suggests these notes relate to an Alma Venus attempt focused on Barclay’s story, which points to the final Alma Venus attempt.

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self-torturing through imagined creation to become the bread to feed the coast’s hunger—a hunger that is analogically a localized manifestation of God’s hunger. In the approach to narrative poetry Jeffers projects in “Apology for Bad Dreams,” the poet begins with a set of fictional elements, then experiences through them. The poet is both authoring the fiction and authored through it. In “Apology for Bad Dreams,” the tragic poet is the priest inventing and presiding over the sacrificial ritual and is simultaneously the sacrificial victim. Instead of staging “the fable of humanity” to praise God, the poet subjects himself to the “fable of humanity,” participating in it through the narrative, and discovering through his participation. Instead of the poet being the puppet master standing behind the show as he performs the puppets performing what he has scripted, the poet is on the stage within the show, experiencing it as he interacts with it, praising God through the self-torturing participation and, on his lesser plane, aping God in order to praise God. Through much of the final Alma Venus attempt, the tension between the poem as fable (represented narrative action) and the poem as ode (the lyric I risking, discovering, and praising through imagining narrative) is obscured by the way the omniscient third-person narrative voice seemingly foregrounds the story as fable—as if Jeffers were reverting back to the inherently allegorical treatment of his first attempt at Barclay’s story in Storm as Deliverer (initial version). However, the abrupt shift from narrative to lyric that opens Chapter XVI shows that he was, even so, still seeking to develop story as praise rather than fable. And the fluidity or complexity (or even confusion) of voice in this passage further complicates the narrative dimension and helps demonstrate that he is using narrative in this final Alma Venus attempt because “one has no fable to praise God but the fable of humanity.” The passage that opens Chapter XVI includes several shifts in narrative voice. The first is when Edward addresses the reader directly, taking control of the story and declaring that the seemingly omniscient third-person voice that has primarily presented the story has actually been him recalling, possessing, and fictionally projecting his father’s story from a time after he has killed him. This casts the earlier scenes presenting Edward as, in effect, Edward’s covert retrospective self-presentation. His revelation that he has been ventriloquizing the omniscient third-person voice converts him from a character within the narrative to its source and consciousness. But as the passage progresses, Edward as the confessing I becomes, instead, the I of the creating poet and then seemingly to being Barclay or to Edward subsuming himself into Barclay, as if the soon-tobe-dead father (within the temporal frame of the plot) is (within the temporal 271

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frame of the narrating) the already-dead father possessing and speaking through the living son. These abrupt shifts from third person to various incarnations of first person could be seen as confusion or lack of aesthetic control, but they echo and intensify other momentary shifts to first-person narration earlier in the poem, and they signal, I’d suggest, a decisive transition from narrative as a constructed presentation of the actions of externalized figures into narrative as a field for lyric subjectivity enabled by projecting, then internalizing, and performing through the imagined figures. In conventional narrative the writer is the source for each of the projected characters and their actions. In narrative as fable transformed into ode, the writer projects the characters and initiates their actions but then enters into the fictional world, becoming the characters and suffering through them, and the characters’ voices are, as a corollary to this, different registers of the poet’s simultaneous being in and through the characters. The notes that conclude Version A mark, it seems, the point where Jeffers explicitly recognizes that narrative as fable will not suffice. If so, The Ur-Point Alma Venus, Storm as Deliverer (the MacTorald version), and Point Alma Venus can be read not only as successive attempts at Barclay’s story but also as successive attempts to fashion an approach to narrative that would elevate fable into ode by casting the poems (as “Apology for Bad Dreams” suggests) as his “bad dreaming” rather than a belated (aesthetic) representation of story/fable derived from “a man having [had] bad dreams.”

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In his April 24, 1926 letter to Donald Friede (written a few days before he abandoned this fourth attempt at Alma Venus), Jeffers makes it clear that he understood he was attempting something other than conventional narrative, when he notes that, thematically, the “attempt” in Point Alma Venus is to “get beyond humanity” and then likens the poem to “the ceremonial dances of primitive people; the dancer becomes a rain-cloud, or a leopard, or a God.” He then adds, The protagonists are a paralytic old farmer, a preacher who has renounced his faith, a weak imaginative boy who kills his father. The episodes of the poem are a sort of essential ritual, from which the real action develops on another plane. (CL1: 564)

These remarks underscore how much Jeffers’ conception shifted over the four primary attempts at Point Alma Venus—from story as fable to fable functioning as ode to ode as “essential ritual.” 272

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In the first Alma Venus attempt, Storm as Deliverer (initial version), the poem is largely story as fable. The plot and characters seem chosen to present a kind of inverted version of the Christian mythos. Instead of God the father sacrificing the son to redeem mankind, the poem will, it seems, have the son killing God the father to free both himself and mankind from God’s control. The characters do not become (as they would in “a sort of essential ritual”) their allegorical antecedents. Instead, they enact the allegorical pattern that assigns significance to their actions. If developing the allegory had remained Jeffers’ focus, he might well have completed Storm as Deliverer (initial version), since it is similar in approach to The Coast-Range Christ. Instead, as he developed this attempt his focus seems to have shifted from developing the allegorical implications of the parricide plot to probing Barclay’s loss of Christian faith and his quest to understand whether identity and awareness continue beyond death. This shift undercuts the allegory of the parricide, reduces Edward’s significance, and intensifies the focus on Barclay as a nexus for engaging the dilemma of consciousness. The notes that conclude Version A in which Jeffers proposes transforming narrative from fable into ode seemingly lead to the second attempt at Barclay’s story. In The Ur-Point Alma Venus, he retains the parricide plot but from the outset emphasizes the psychological and theological dimensions of Barclay’s (implicitly Faustian) quest rather than its allegorical dimension. Two factors may explain why Jeffers abandoned this attempt. For one, he may have been uncertain about what to do with the problematic nature of Barclay’s vision where he imagines he has become God (the point where he abandons the draft and turns to The Tower Beyond Tragedy). For another, he may have been starting to sense that the global, distanced perspective of omniscient third-person narration worked against the intensity of participatory risk (as the source and product of lyric praise) needed to transform fable into ode. (It is suggestive that Tower, a dramatic poem, largely eliminates the need for fictional narrative voice, while the MacTorald version that follows Tower experiments with first-person narrators.) The third Alma Venus attempt shows Jeffers moving toward the view of tragedy projected in “Apology for Bad Dreams.” In it, he casts MacTorald as simultaneously a ritual agonist within the Hippolytus story and as a witness to his participation in the story. He is, in effect, both presiding priest and one of the ceremonial dancers, and from this doubled position he is able to perceive the tragic pattern of the story he enacts while also perceiving—and celebrating— the redemptive awareness it offers of the “real action” of being that operates on “another plane.” In MacTorald, Jeffers imagines a figure who transforms fable into ode, but the oscillation between Eleanor and MacTorald as narrators as well 273

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as the back-and-forth between their emerging story and the subsidiary stories MacTorald calls up for Eleanor’s contemplation work to limit the poet’s own ritual participation. The fictional world Jeffers constructs in this third version more fully records the dilemma of consciousness and more openly registers the simultaneity of the redemptive dimension of Orestes’ vision and the damning dimension of Barclay’s, but the poem remains more a representation of imagined pain than the pain of imagining that might feed the actual hunger of the “coast.” The first three primary attempts at Alma Venus trace, I’d suggest, stages in Jeffers’ realization that he wanted (or needed) to reimagine narrative so that it would function as ode rather than fable, and they show him, as he worked to accomplish this, developing an approach to tragedy in which the poet projects a ritual space, initiates the ritual process, then participates directly in the unfolding poem as if one of the dancers. The relevance of this approach to the fourth and final Alma Venus attempt seems clear. Jeffers seems to have written “Apology for Bad Dreams” after the MacTorald version and after Roan Stallion as he worked on this fourth version, and he wrote his April 24 letter to Friede where he declares that the “episodes of the poem are a sort of essential ritual” after having drafted nearly all of this fourth version and at a time when he believed he was nearly finished and would have the poem typed up for publication as part of Boni & Liveright’s fall list. The question is why Jeffers abandoned this fourth attempt when he was so close to completing it. His April 30, 1926 letter to Friede both explains and does not explain the decision: Every story that ever occurred to me had got wound up into this one poem, and it was too long, too complicated, and, from the attempt at compression, neither clear nor true. I should have discovered this a year ago, but was still hoping that the end would justify the earlier part. (CL1: 566–67)

The word “story” here suggests that Jeffers’ dissatisfaction with this final Alma Venus attempt came from trying to weave together too many plot lines. Yet this attempt is still largely a presentation of Barclay’s quest entwined with Edward’s parricide—the same plot situation as the initial version. While there are additional subplots (the relationship of Natalia and Faith, for example), these are offset by other subplots and narrative digressions having been eliminated. Jeffers’ comment doesn’t quite make sense if we take “story” as indicating plot action, but it becomes more plausible if we read “story” as indicating mode 274

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of presentation. This fourth Alma Venus attempt retains aspects of the first attempt’s allegorical logic as well as Barclay’s Faustian quest from the second. And to further complicate matters, MacTorald is brought forward and recast as the paralyzed rancher, Old Morehead, with the poem apparently to build to a confrontation between Morehead (for whom extended consciousness occasions contemplation) and Barclay (for whom extended consciousness is a temptation to power) with Edward (the son of one and grandson of the other) caught between them. These multiple registers and perspectives are evident in the passage that opens Chapter XVI, where Jeffers, suddenly, disrupts the third-person voice when Edward declares himself the narrator and this firstperson voice is further layered with Barclay’s and the poet’s own. The poem is alternately allegorical fable, drama of consciousness, ode, and ritual. And as Jeffers moved on from Chapter XVI toward the climax of these competing positions and voices, he might well have come to think the poem was unraveling rather than cohering. There is one further issue, and Jeffers’ strategy in The Women at Point Sur, the published version of Barclay’s story, suggests it may have been the most important one. In his April 24 letter to Friede, written when he thought he was about to finish Alma Venus, Jeffers likens it, as noted, to a ritual in which “the ceremonial dances” transform the “dancer” into “a rain-cloud, or a leopard, or a God,” and he identifies the “protagonists” of this poem-as-“ritual” as Barclay, Edward, and Old Morehead. While the emphasis on ritual reflects “Apology for Bad Dreams,” the comments suggest the poet is (as in the prior Alma Venus attempts) still more the author of the ritual than a participant in or through it, which is to say that he is more a presiding priest than a dancer. If so, this suggests that Jeffers was still trying to determine how to move beyond presenting his characters in a poem to becoming a participant within the poem. In the fourth Alma Venus Jeffers hoped, it seems, to move beyond the MacTorald version and participate more directly in the poem’s ritual dimension by setting up Barclay and Old Morehead as competing domains of extended consciousness—Barclay the Faustian figure seeking to become God and Morehead the contemplative counterpart whose suffering is entwined with his heightened awareness of the divinity of natural process and beauty and his participation in it—and then immersing himself within the dialectical tension between the two. What remains unresolved and seems to have led to abandoning the draft is how to bring this psychic and theological conflict back in contact with Edward as a third center of consciousness and with the parricide plot that was to bring Edward, in some manner, to the fore, and these problems seem 275

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to leave the poet still more a presiding figure regarding his dancers than having fully entered into the ritual and having become a participating dancer.

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When Jeffers returned to Barclay’s story in the later part of 1926 to write The Women at Point Sur, Edward is no longer an active figure (he has been killed in World War I), and the parricide plot no longer competes with Barclay’s quest.9 Similarly, the action is consistently narrated through an omniscient third-person voice. Even the brief first-person interruption of Chapter XII (the unit included in the 1938 Selected Poetry) where the I (seemingly Jeffers) comments on the poemin-progress registers more as an aside than a subversion of the narrative voice. In this passage, Jeffers criticizes these “new idols” that he has made to “praise” divinity for having gone “mad,” then adds, “I made glass puppets to speak of him, they splintered in my hand and have cut me” and ends, “stammer the tragedy you crackled vessels” (CP1: 288–89). And having judged the narrative, he then resumes it. These adjustments to plot and narration suggest that Jeffers finally completed Barclay’s story by casting Point Sur more simply as fable without attempting to treat it as ode and turning away from the more radical agenda of “Apology for Bad Dreams” where “tragedy” is to be participatory ritual. However, Jeffers’ assertion in Chapter XII that his “idols” (i.e., characters) have been created in order to “praise” suggests that he was still seeking to move beyond tragedy as presentation of tragic figures and events to tragedy as self-sacrificial imagining to feed the coast’s more than figural hunger. The way that The Women at Point Sur extends Jeffers’ attempt to transform narrative from fable to ode and ritual rather than retreat to fable is clearest in its opening section, Prelude, where Barclay doesn’t figure as a character. Jeffers wrote Prelude’s opening two verse paragraphs as a poem titled “Preface” sometime between abandoning the final Alma Venus attempt in April 1926 and sending these two verse paragraphs to Friede on June 13, 1926 (CL1: 587). The title suggests he wrote it as he was considering the next iteration of Barclay’s story, and he quotes the “Humanity is the start of the race” passage from Roan Stallion that builds from the Version A notes and then declares that “fable” is to be left behind and that “discovery’s / The way to walk in” (CP1, 240). In “Preface,” creating story isn’t an end in itself but a means to “invent[ing] the language to tell it” (i.e., the discovering). In “Preface” he extends “Apology for Bad Dreams,” reminding himself of his continued commitment to narrative as ode and ritual tragedy. 9 The way April imagines that she is Edward as she contemplates killing Barclay, her father, before committing suicide, functions as a muted echo of the parricide plot in The Women at Point Sur.

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The rest of Prelude seems to have been drafted as a separate unit. Jeffers initially titled it (like several of the Alma Venus attempts) Storm as Deliverer, then Storm as Galeotto, and may have expected it to become a poem in its own right before adding “Preface” to it and using it to open Point Sur. Whatever the case, Prelude shows that he was, as he approached composing The Women at Point Sur, still intent on moving beyond fable and casting the inventing of narrative as the self-torturing aping of God imagined in “Apology for Bad Dreams.” In Prelude, Jeffers’ declaration to risk discovery and invent the language to express it leads to an invocation of storm. Indicting himself, the speaker declares, “You are tired and corrupt,” needing the storm’s literal and figural violence to be cleansed and renewed. As the force of storm (seemingly both a literal storm and the storm of the speaker’s visionary participation in the characters of the region who are responding to it) hits, Jeffers introduces the figure of Onorio Vasquez, a “young seer of visions” who watches his brothers torment a broken-winged hawk that they have “crucified” on the barn wall. As the passage progresses, it is (purposefully, I’d suggest) unclear when Onorio is addressing the hawk and when the imagining and vicariously participating speaker is addressing it: O crucified Wings, orange eyes, open? Always the strain, the straining flesh, who feels what God feels Knows the straining flesh, the aching desires, The enormous water straining its bounds, the electric Strain in the cloud, the strain of the oil in the oil-tanks At Monterey aching to burn, the strain of the spinning Demons that make an atom, straining to fly asunder, Straining to rest at the center, The strain in the skull, blind strains, force and counterforce, Nothing prevails . . . Oh in storm: storm’s kind, kind violence, (CP: 244)

What is clear, is that the storm’s violence and the hawk’s pain lead to, as if generating them, a triad of narrative miniatures that include Myrtle Cartwright taking a lover and the exploding of the Monterey oil-tanks in addition to Onorio worshipping the crucified hawk. These intertwining strands express and extend each other as the speaker’s voice weaves in and out, participating and reflecting, so that, I’d suggest, fable becomes ode and does so because 277

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Jeffers is imagining through Onorio’s visions. Implicitly, it is Onorio’s immersion in the hawk’s pain that reveals the other two narrative strands, but what drives them (and what they each express) is the inherent ecstatic strain within nature and being that is seeking release and which fuses in the penultimate verse paragraph: In the north the oil-tanks Catch from the first, the ring-bound molecules splitting, the atoms dancing apart, marrying the air. The marriage-bound thighs opening, on the stiff white straw, the nerves of fire, the ganglia like stars. (CP: 248)

This visionary apprehension is not Onorio’s (not, that is, a fiction contained within the fictional frame) but is rather the discovering poet’s own visionary apprehension enabled by inventing Onorio and experiencing through him. This fusion of narrative and lyric marks a shift in how Jeffers relates to his material, which the contrast between MacTorald (in the third Alma Venus attempt) and Onorio helps clarify. MacTorald’s comprehensive consciousness enables him to apprehend the lives and being surrounding him and to narrate their stories; he is, in this sense, an analogue to the poet but remains a character operating within a fictional system. The opening lines inform the reader from the outset that the poem will be a telling of the Hippolytus story. The “fable” is a culturally known, predetermined pattern in which “Culture’s” to be renewed and relived rather than something that’s “outlived.” In Prelude, the invocation of storm that follows the “Preface” unit shows the poet invoking “storm” directly rather than approaching it through a mediating myth or culturally predetermined pattern. In calling forth the storm, he is simultaneously revealing his own suppressed psychic storm and immersing himself in storm in such a way that the external and internal storms fuse and become symbolically energized. This draws forth Onorio and the crucified hawk. In the MacTorald Alma Venus, MacTorald is a simile for the apprehending, creating poet. In Prelude, Onorio is a metaphorical extension of the invoking and experiencing poet and draws the speaker (the poet) directly into the ritually saturated world that is being enacted, so that the poem becomes the invented language of discovery rather than language deployed to represent an already formulated fable. The full significance of this transition enacted in Prelude is evident in its culminating move. As the storm subsides, the hawk dies; or perhaps as the hawk

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dies, the storm dies (within the visionary logic of Prelude these options are one and the same). Onorio is then asked if he “see[s] any vision” and responds: “No, for the topazes Have dulled out of his head, he soars on two nails, Dead hawk over the coast. O little brother Julio, if you could drive nails through my hands I’d stand against the door: through the middle of the palms: And take the hawk’s place. . . . He [Onorio] smiles. “You’d see the lights flicker in my hair”. . . . He chatters his teeth. “It is necessary for someone to be fastened with nails. And Jew-beak died in the night. Jew-beak is dead.” (CP1: 248)

The narrative logic suggests one of Onorio’s brothers poses the question, but the absence of quotation marks means it could also be the narrator, which is to say the discovering poet, who responds to the hawk’s death by asking his projected character, the metaphor through whom he is both discovering and experiencing, if he sees “any vision.” And this in turn suggests that the belief that it is “necessary for someone to be fastened with nails” to renew the connection to the world’s dynamism is both Onorio’s (who perceives it literally within the scene) and the poet’s, who perceives it both literally and metaphorically (and also historically, in the way the hawk’s crucifixion and the death of its catalyzing pain suggests the death of the Christian mythos in the years following World War I). To become the “pain” that might feed the coast’s “hunger,” one must envision “tak[ing] the hawk’s place” and psychically enact it—not merely represent it. The poet as ritual priest must be a dancer within the ritual and must become through this participation, as Jeffers put it in his letter to Friede, “a rain-cloud, or a leopard, or a God.” In The Women at Point Sur as Jeffers completed Barclay’s story and published it, Onorio’s lament that “Jew-beak is dead” concludes Prelude and leads directly into Barclay’s story: “The Rev. Dr. Barclay outgrew his profession” and the relatively straightforward narration of his quest that follows. One way to understand this radical shift in mode and material is to view Prelude as a separate poem. Its listing in the table of contents allows for this. Another is to mine it for thematic anticipations to Barclay’s story. The problem with the former is that the title Prelude suggest it is in some sense introductory. The problem with the latter is that it casts Barclay’s career as a kind of allegorical “fable,” 279

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in spite of Jeffers’ declared goal of leaving fable behind. A third option is to understand Prelude as the way Jeffers transitions into the psychic space where he becomes the discovering (as he phrases it in “Apology for Bad Dreams”) “ape of that God.” The story of Barclay that follows is then the “invent[ed] language to tell” what is experienced and discovered from within this psychic space. In this third option, Prelude is metaphorically the poet/speaker’s selfcrucifixion and Barclay’s story is the vision this generates. As such, Prelude carries forward, and brings to fruition, Jeffers’ successive attempts across Alma Venus to transform fable into ode. In the Alma Venus attempts Jeffers sought to leverage visionary participation through engaging Barclay’s story. In Point Sur visionary participation (in and through Prelude) enables a telling of Barclay’s story where what might be termed ode generates narrative rather than narrative transforming into and becoming ode.

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The preliminary versions of The Women at Point Sur gathered in this volume are important in at least three ways. First, they provide additional contexts and alternative conceptions that can enrich our understanding of the completed poem, and they do this in ways that help clarify why Jeffers continued to believe that Point Sur was (as he put it in the Foreword to his Selected Poetry) his “most inclusive” and “most intense” long narrative poem, even if it was not generally “liked.” Second, incorporating the Alma Venus attempts into our account of Jeffers’ production across these years makes it clear that Tamar, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and Roan Stallion, his major published long poems from this period, were entangled with the attempts to write Barclay’s story, and this opens new ways to read and explore these poems. Both of these matters deserve fuller and more detailed treatment than they’ve been given in this Afterword (in spite of its length). The series of attempts at Alma Venus also reveal Jeffers’ ambition (and need) to develop an alternative approach to narrative poetry, one in which narrative is less the poet’s presentation of what he has come to know and is instead the poet discovering through the enacting of narrative (and the reader discovering through participating in the narrative). In typical accounts of Jeffers, the emphasis is on what is said, as if the poetry, the expression, is primarily a container from which ideas are to be retrieved. The Alma Venus attempts suggest that for Jeffers changes in his approach to narration and his understanding of narrative as a mode were inseparable from his deepening and shifting sense of the experiential and thematic implications of the material. 280

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In his letter to James Rorty following Mark Van Doren’s puzzled review of Point Sur and again in the Foreword to the Selected Poetry, Jeffers signaled his belief in his most ambitious long poem but chose not to defend it. Perhaps, most crucially, the Point Alma Venus material shows that it is now necessary for us to engage The Women at Point Sur seriously and gives us ways to do so. In the process, we will, I’d suggest, come to a more adequate understanding not only of Point Sur but of Jeffers’ career, the dynamics of his artistry, his achievement, and his place in the story of modern American poetry. Tim Hunt

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CHRONOLOGY

While the Point Alma Venus material cannot be dated with absolute specificity or complete assurance, approximate dates can be plausibly proposed. Jeffers’ September 4, 1925 letter to Benjamin De Casseres helps document that there were four primary attempts at Alma Venus. After offering to send De Casseres a copy of the forthcoming Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Jeffers adds, You complain of “psychic dumps”—my trouble is mere dummheit, psychic or other. I have begun a story four times, and each time but the last it has turned into a novel on the way, and been scrapped. It’s perhaps because I’m trying to write about more or less educated people this time, and it’s hard to set fire to too much thought. Ideas and passions don’t live together willingly. However, I hope it’s coming out of the nebula at last. (CL1: 509)

Jeffers, here, is contrasting the “story” he’s begun “four times” with Tamar and, perhaps even more so, Roan Stallion. Describing the characters as “more or less educated” identifies these attempts as Alma Venus. Similarly, Jeffers’ April 24, 1926 letter to Donald Friede (quoted in the Preface) helps position the Alma Venus attempts in relation to Jeffers’ published long poems in this period. In it, Jeffers specifies “Point Alma Venus” as the long poem he is writing, then adds: I began it quite cheerfully, soon after Tamar was written. I put it aside because it was too exciting, and ever since has been a struggle to keep it out of my mind by writing something else. (CL1: 563)

This suggests that Jeffers worked on Alma Venus in and around Tamar, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and Roan Stallion—the three mature long poems featured in Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925)—rather than starting work on Barclay’s “story” only after he’d finished those poems. Since it is unlikely that he would have worked simultaneously on two long poems, the probable periods for him to have worked on versions of Alma Venus are the gaps between writing these other long poems.

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Jeffers began the narrative Tamar no later than spring 1922 and probably completed it early in 1923 (certainly by August 1923). He apparently began The Tower Beyond Tragedy late summer or early fall 1924, completing it no earlier than November 1924 and no later than January 1925. And he began Roan Stallion no later than May 1925 (perhaps as early as April), completing it no later than sometime in June (for additional context and evidence for the dating of the poems in this period, see CP5: 50–73). If Jeffers’ claim to Friede that his attempts at Barclay’s story all followed Tamar is accurate, then he probably worked on Storm as Deliverer (initial version) and The Ur-Point Alma Venus in the yearplus gap between Tamar and Tower; then worked on Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version) between Tower and Roan Stallion; and worked on the most fully developed preliminary version, Point Alma Venus, in the almost year gap between Roan Stallion and late April 1926 when he sent Friede a telegram, announcing that he was discarding this attempt, even though only days earlier he’d written Friede that the poem was nearly completed and could be announced for publication in the fall. It is also possible that Jeffers’ first attempt at the Reverend Barclay’s story preceded rather than followed Tamar and that it was the project he attempted following The Coast-Range Christ, a transitional narrative completed summer 1920, eighteen or more months before he began writing Tamar.10 Although a number of lyric poems included in Tamar and Other Poems (when he paid the printer Peter Boyle to issue this collection in 1924) date from this period, Jeffers would have had ample time to have been working on a narrative project in these months. If Storm as Deliverer (initial version) is from this period, it would help explain why its phrasing, diction, and sense of line seem a regression from Tamar and why it seems less fully realized dramatically than Tamar. Conversely, “trying to write about more or less educated people this time” (as Jeffers put it in his letter to De Casseres) could account for this seeming regression. Jeffers’ comments indicate that he made substantial progress on, but never completed, four attempts at Barclay’s story (grouped in this volume as “Point Alma Venus”) before successfully composing the fifth attempt under the title The Women at Point Sur from summer 1926 through February 1927. The stray bits of dated material in the drafts; the way working notes and passages in one version are subsequently elaborated in another; Jeffers’ evolving handling of verse line; his shifting conception of Barclay’s story; and his evolving conception of 10 For an examination of this possibility, see Tim Hunt, “‘Tho this is my last tale’: When Did Jeffers Write the First Version of Point Alma Venus?” Jeffers Studies 20 (December 2020): 39–55.

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narrative poetry as a form suggest that he worked on these attempts as they are ordered in this collection: Storm as Deliverer (initial version), The Ur-Point Alma Venus, Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version), and Point Alma Venus. The entries that follow summarize details relevant to dating the Alma Venus material, both the four primary versions and the related fragments: Spring 1919: Jeffers composes the unpublished narrative poems Sea-Passions and Peacock Ranch (the plot of the latter prefigures Faith Heriot’s backstory in the final Point Alma Venus version). Spring 1919 (or perhaps fall 1919): Jeffers composes the unpublished lyric “Metempsychosis”; several Alma Venus passages seem further developments of this poem. Summer 1919: Jeffers works with the stone mason and crew constructing Tor House on a headland on the south edge of Carmel, California (completed in August), where he would live the rest of his life. Late 1919 or early 1920: Jeffers submits a collection (title unknown) to Macmillan that included four longer poems. Peacock Ranch and Sea-Passions were probably two of these, along with two from 1917: one alternatively titled A Woman Down the Coast and Storm as Deliverer (a title Jeffers would later recycle for several of the Alma Venus attempts) and Fauna, which Jeffers eventually included in Tamar and Other Poems, when he published that collection in 1924. Late 1919 or early 1920 through spring 1920: Jeffers composes the narrative poem The Coast-Range Christ. December 1920: Jeffers composes “Salmon Fishing,” which initiates the set of distinctive mature lyrics (“Natural Music,” etc.) featured in Tamar and Other Poems. Spring 1922–probably late winter or early spring 1923: Jeffers composes Tamar, the narrative poem that would lead to his discovery as a poet when he featured it in Tamar and Other Poems (a collection he printed at his own expense in 1924). June 1922: Jeffers composes a Preface for an unpublished collection (perhaps to be titled Continent’s End). The surviving fragment includes this comment: Poetry is more primitive than prose. It existed before prose and will exist afterward, it is not domesticated, it is wilder and more natural. It belongs outdoors, it has tides as nature has; while prose is a cultured interior thing, prose is of the house, where lamplight abolishes even the tides of day and night, and human caprice rules. The brain can make prose; the whole man, brain and nerves, muscles and entrails, organs of sense and of generation, makes poetry and responds to poetry. (CP4: 375)

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The concluding lines of Section IV of the Version A fragment read: The rhythms; innumerable rhythms; The pulse-beat in the brain to vitiate thought in the very fountain; the rhythms of night and daylight That we have invented lamps to abolish; the rhythm of the years, inexorable, sweeping me away.” In general, Jeffers seems to have worked out observations such as this one in the creative process of generating his poems, which suggests these lines from Version A predate the June 1922 Preface, in which Jeffers also comments, The greatest dramatic poetry in English is not rhymed, the greatest narrative poetry is not rhymed. It may seem strange, in view of my belief, that the narrative poems in this book of mine are rhymed; it is because until quite lately I was unable to discover any rhymeless measure but blank verse that could tell a story flexibly, without excess of monotony. Blank verse I could not use, because it has been so much used by such masters; it carries their impress and inflections. I think I am at length discovering rhymeless narrative measures of my own; but the poems are not finished, and not included in this series. (CP4: 376)

This indicates that the most recent narrative poem in this collection would have been The Coast-Range Christ, that Tamar was either not yet quite completed or recently completed and being held back until the other of the “rhymeless” poems in “measures of my own” could be finished to pair with it (and presumably to be featured, with Tamar, in a collection to follow this one). That other “rhymeless” project is presumably one of the Alma Venus versions. 1924: The Good Housekeeping Institute publishes the first edition of Good Housekeeping’s Book on the Business of Housekeeping: A Manual of Method, edited by Mildred Maddocks Bentley. A page from the last part of The Ur-Point Alma Venus is drafted on the recto of a form letter from Good Housekeeping that offers a new recipe book and mentions Bentley’s Manual of Method as having been “recently published.” Late summer 1924–January 1925: Composes the dramatic poem The Tower Beyond Tragedy. The first page of the draft starts with a note for a conception of Alma Venus that Jeffers seems not to have developed: Audis B. Nelson Edward B. Mrs. Nelson Dr. B. Audis Nelson dark yellow hair sallow throat April B. that the to the world goes to the altar is nothing to me

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Below this unit (separated by a line across the sheet) is, “One of your Greek beauties[?]—power—the fellow that was struck by lightning” (CP5: 348). The word “Greek” may mean this note relates to The Tower Beyond Tragedy, but Jeffers seems here to be noting how to present one of the characters from the preceding list and a possible incident for that project. September 14, 1924: A lightning strike ignites an oil storage tank in Monterey, leading to uncontrolled fires and explosions in nearby oil storage tanks. Jeffers uses this event in Prelude and refers to it in a page of Alma Venus notes that may precede Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version) or be transitional between it and Point Alma Venus (see the headnote for that version for a transcription of this page of notes) or may come after April 1926 when Jeffers stopped work on Point Alma Venus and was working to figure out what the next stage of the project might be. November 19, 1924: Movie producer Thomas Harper Ince dies after being William Randolph Hearst’s weekend guest on Hearst’s yacht. The official cause of death: a heart attack following acute indigestion. Evidence suggests this was a cover-up and that Hearst may have shot and killed Ince. At the time it was rumored that Hearst had poisoned Ince. A marginal note toward the end of section III of Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version) alludes to Ince’s death as if Jeffers was considering mentioning it in the narrative or incorporating a fictionalized version of the episode. November 22, 1924: Jeffers writes the poet George Sterling (CL1: 471) that he has “made, though not completed, a poem about Clytemnestra and her family” (i.e., The Tower Beyond Tragedy). January 21, 1925: Jeffers sends Sterling The Tower Beyond Tragedy manuscript (CL1: 478). April 8, 1925: Having received The Tower Beyond Tragedy manuscript back from Sterling, Jeffers writes to him that he is “horribly involved with another long thing” already twice as long as Peacock Ranch” (CL1: 491), which suggests he had been working on this “long thing” (presumably an Alma Venus attempt) for at least several months. April 11, 1925: Jeffers writes Benjamin De Casseres (CL1: 492). The conclusion to section II of Fragmentary Beginning 2 includes an abandoned start to this letter, suggesting this unit was abandoned about the time Jeffers shifted his attention to Roan Stallion. April to perhaps June 1925: Jeffers composes Roan Stallion. May or early June 1925: On the final page of the Roan Stallion manuscript Jeffers writes a draft of an undated letter to Boni & Liveright, which begins,

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Mr. Boyle was kind enough to forward your letter, received yesterday, in which you express a wish to see other work of mine, to consider it in connection with “Tamar.” I have had two works in hand; one of them will probably be finished to-morrow; and give me five days for typing and revision I’ll send it on to you next week. The other is a story somewhat analogous to “Tamar” but wider in range and thought; I expect it will be a greater poem; but it is only half written and will not be in a state to show to anyone for several months. (CP5: 67–68)

The poem that Jeffers here expects to have “finished to-morrow” is almost certainly Roan Stallion (Jeffers dated the manuscript of it “May–June 1925” when he later gave it to Donald Friede). The “greater” narrative presumably refers to an Alma Venus version. June 1, 1925: Una Jeffers mentions in a letter (CL1: 495) that Jeffers is discussing an expanded version of Tamar with Boni & Liveright to include two new longer poems—presumably The Tower Beyond Tragedy and Roan Stallion. September 4, 1925: Jeffers writes Benjamin De Casseres (CL1: 509). The letter (quoted above) shows that Jeffers returned to working on Alma Venus (presumably the fourth primary attempt) soon after completing Roan Stallion. November 10, 1925: Boni & Liveright publishes Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. December 1, 1925: Jeffers writes Sterling, urging him not to abandon his “more metrical manner” and admitting his own “thoughts” might “tend that way again, if I could ever work free of the tiresome story [presumably the fourth Alma Venus attempt] that won’t be finished for months yet” (CL1: 524). December 31, 1925: Jeffers writes Sterling that he has “visited the Point Sur light” and that this has “brought me awake and I went back to that long story and have been rather productive” (CL1: 527). Late 1925 or early 1926: Jeffers composes “Apology for Bad Dreams,” an ars poetica that in part recasts some material from Point Alma Venus and can be read, in part, as a reflection on it. February 19, 1926: Jeffers writes Friede, in response to Friede’s apparent request for short poems that could be placed in magazines, “There may be a few. Lately I haven’t written anything short, so taken up with the long story I hope to have ready this summer” (CL1: 553). The “long story” is presumably Point Alma Venus. April 24, 1926: Jeffers writes Friede, The poem is called Point Alma Venus. I began it cheerfully, soon after Tamar was written. I put it aside because it was too exciting, and ever since has been a struggle to keep it out of my mind by writing something else.

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The story, like Tamburlaine or Zarathustra, is the story of the human attempts to get beyond humanity. But the superman ideal rather stands on top of humanity—intensifies it—ends in “all too human”—here the attempt is to get clear of it. More like the ceremonial dances of primitive people; the dancer becomes a rain-cloud, or a leopard, or a God. The protagonists are a paralytic old farmer, a preacher who has renounced his faith, a weak imaginative boy who kills his father. The episodes of the poem are a sort of essential ritual, from which the real action develops on another plane. (CL1: 563–64)

At the end of the letter Jeffers suggests his comments could be edited for Boni & Liveright’s catalogue. April 30, 1926: Jeffers writes Friede, after sending a telegram that apparently said he was abandoning work on Point Alma Venus: I was in a fine state of mind about having to send you that second wire; but when I gave a whole morning to reading the manuscript considerately it became dreadfully clear that it would not do. Better for me to discover this than you, or the public at large. Every story that ever occurred to me had got wound up into this one poem; and it was too long, too complicated, and, from the attempt at compression, neither clear nor true. I should have discovered this a year ago, but was still hoping that the end would justify the earlier part. One has to try experiments, even costly ones. Now I must pick this thing to pieces; and I promise a book for spring publication, if you want it then, that will make up for all this nuisance. (CL1: 566–67) May 1926–June 13, 1926: Jeffers composes the shorter narrative Home. Summer 1926–February 1927: Jeffers, probably after first composing Prelude, proceeds to compose The Women at Point Sur.

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TEXTUAL NOTES AND APPARATUS

The State of the Manuscripts With a few exceptions (noted below) the manuscripts for the versions and fragments that led to the composition of The Women at Point Sur are held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC) of the University of Texas at Austin. These versions are here referred to as the Point Alma Venus material, from a phrase that occurs in some late versions and which Jeffers employed as a working title in his correspondence, though it does not appear as a title on any of the manuscripts nor in the HRHRC index. Melba Berry Bennett, Jeffers’ first biographer and volunteer secretary, organized Jeffers’ manuscripts during the last years of Jeffers’ life and in the years immediately following his death. Jeffers scholars will always be deeply in Bennett’s debt for her protective care of the archive. But the size of it, encompassing most of the manuscripts that the Jefferses had not sold or donated, would have challenged a trained archivist, and Bennett had no such training. While she accomplished much of the cataloging with reasonable accuracy, she was at a loss when confronted with unpublished material, notes, and sections of incomplete narratives, including the Point Alma Venus material, and she saw no harm in rearranging sheets to impose her own sense of order upon them. As a result, we do not know the arrangements of these manuscripts when she first encountered them. While two versions were apparently intact, the others must have been in some state of disarray. This would explain why she rearranged some of the material—oddly, to us who come later—by episodic subject matter from various versions and assembled other clearly disparate units into three “versions” (labeled C, D, and E below) that do not constitute continuous texts. When the HRHRC acquired Jeffers’ manuscripts and papers in the early 1970s, the catalogers appropriately classified and described the material as they

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received it—and for the Point Alma Venus material, that was largely as Bennett had organized and labeled it, not Jeffers. In the HRHRC catalog, the 266 pages of Point Alma Venus material make up most of the material in the folders entered under the top-level rubric of “[The Women at Point Sur].” • Cards 1 & 2: Storm as Deliverer, Ams/fragments with A revisions, [24pp] • Card 3: [Notes and fragment], Ams/fragments, [2pp] • Card 4: Storm as Deliverer, Tms with A emendations, [20pp] {previously titled “A Woman Down the Coast”} • Card 5: [Version A], Ams/inc with A revisions, [13pp] • Card 6: [Version B], Storm as Deliverer, [31pp] • Card 7: [Version C], Ams/inc with A revisions, [20pp] • Card 8: [Variations of Audis Barclay’s Mental Derangement], 4 Ams/ segments with A revisions, [20pp] • Card 9: [Version D], Ams/inc with A revisions, [67pp] • Card 10: [Version E], Ams/segment with A revisions, [31pp] • Card 11: [Variations of the Easter service section], 3 Ams/segments with A revisions, [18pp] • Card 12: [Variations of séance section], 4 Ams sections with A revisions, [31pp] • Card 13: [Variations of section on Barclay’s visit to the lighthouse], 3 Ams/segments with A revisions, [11pp]

The typescript described on Card 4 is a self-contained early narrative from 1917, which William Everson published in Brides of the South Wind under its earlier title and is included in Volume 4 of The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers under its later title. Although the main character, Myrtle Cartwright, plays a minor role in Barclay’s story in The Women at Point Sur and a more major one in the Prelude section that introduces Barclay’s story, this early narrative is a work apart and unrelated to the Point Alma Venus material. The material designated Versions A and B on Cards 5 and 6 are cohesive, though incomplete, units that were evidently sequential when Bennett encountered them. The rest of the Alma Venus material has been, it seems, rearranged by Bennett. In some cases (especially with Versions C, D, and E) she found other sequential groupings, which she kept intact but grafted onto other pages or groups of pages that did not belong with them. Most unfortunately, in some instances she combined groups of pages based on episodic content (Cards 8, 11,

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12, and 13), thus divorcing about one third of the material from the arrangement that Jeffers had presumably left it in. This further confounds the arrangement that doubtless already had its own confusions. Three additional manuscript pages have been found outside of the HRHRC collection: one each from the Occidental College Library Special Collections, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. None of these pages seems to belong to any of the reconstructed versions. Recto-Verso Collation One hundred fifteen pages of the Point Alma Venus material are written on the versos of pages of the typescript of the abandoned 1917 drama The Alpine Christ, which was typed on legal-size laid paper of a single watermark. Twenty-four pages are written on the versos of typescript pages of The Coast-Range Christ and fifteen on those of Fauna (both published in Tamar and Other Poems). The rest of the pages were written primarily on versos of other transitional-period typescripts, except for the last thirty-two pages of the final version, Point Alma Venus, which are written on both sides of 8.5” x 11” wove paper. All of The Alpine Christ and many of the other typescripts were typed with an unusual indigoinked ribbon (or perhaps these were carbon copies made with that distinctive color) which bled through to the verso, adding another obstacle to deciphering Jeffers’s already difficult chirography. A collation of the recto and verso contents reveals what might have been expected. These typescripts of mostly unpublished material were kept in their individual page-number order in Jeffers’ desk, but facedown. When he needed fresh writing paper, he pulled out a manageable stack of typescript, in order to write on the blank versos. Thus, in general, earlier pages of the Alma Venus versions are written on the latter pages of one of the typescript poems. The Alpine Christ, published by Everson in 1973, is missing pages throughout, but the largest lacuna occurs in the fourth and final book, where there is a gap (except for a single page) of fifty-two pages. It seems likely that the versos of those missing pages were used for the manuscript of the narrative Tamar: the length is about right, especially considering that these pages were legal-sized, and Tamar is the only mature poem of significant length whose manuscript does not survive. The pages after the gap are all at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and in light of Jeffers’ compositional method noted above, it might be supposed that versos of those pages contain poetry that was written before Tamar. But it

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is not so. Instead, we find later material, manuscript pages of The Tower Beyond Tragedy and Roan Stallion, mixed among earlier tables of contents, a title page for Tamar, and so forth—but nothing related to Alma Venus. This suggests that the sequence of the typescript pages of The Alpine Christ was already partially disturbed as it lay in Jeffers’ drawer awaiting reuse, or that Jeffers disturbed the order as he used it. Further, it does not suggest an earlier date than Tamar for the commencement of the various attempts at the Reverend Barclay’s story— though neither does it rule it out. The evidence of the recto-verso collation is mute on this point. Because there are lacunae and because some orphaned pages turn up out of sequence, the collation does not offer a reliable guide to the proper sequencing of the Alma Venus pages. Watermarks are of even less help. Therefore, after transcription each page was viewed as a single unit, and locating its preceding and succeeding pages was primarily a matter of textual coherence. In most cases, this was sufficient. In a few, corroborating physical evidence was used, and in a few others (especially the first two chapters of the final version) some uncertainty remains. Chirography Jeffers’ handwritten letters are for the most part quite legible. His manuscripts, however, present numerous challenges. A scrupulously honest editor would have to admit that far more words in a manuscript are technically “illegible” than have been marked so. Likewise, comparison with a published text of the poem, when available, leads the editor to exclaim, “Oh, that’s what this word is!” The test of this would be to judge each word in isolation, without a surrounding context or published version. Ideally this would be the basis for establishing a text from a manuscript. But this method would be wholly impractical. With Jeffers’ manuscripts, the context must be part of the solution, else the result would be so fragmentary and tentative as to be useless. For instance, the words “would” and “could” are usually indistinguishable in the manuscripts. For practical purposes, the editor must make a choice, informed by related published passages where available. Editorial Procedures The goal of this edition is to create a readable record of the Point Alma Venus material, the series of uncompleted drafts and workings that precede and lead to The Women at Point Sur. To better realize this goal, not all cancelled phrases or

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lines and not all marginal notes have been included. Where this material adds to the record of Jeffers’ developing sense of the specific version or to Alma Venus as a more general conception, it is included in the transcription. Where such material is simply a preliminary presentation quickly superseded by a more final iteration, rather than an alternate conception, it has been, for the sake of clarity and readability, omitted. While the goal has not been to create a comprehensive record of every “um,” “er,” and momentary hesitation, these transcriptions do present the bulk of the cancelled material and working notes. Textual analysis of Jeffers’ published long poems shows that, in general, the final readings of a handwritten draft and the subsequent typescript Jeffers prepared from it are nearly identical in both wording and punctuation. Even though Jeffers abandoned each of the Alma Venus attempts without completing them, this pattern indicates that the completed material would have changed little had he prepared final typescripts of these attempts. For this reason, these drafts have been treated as, essentially, final drafts, and this edition follows the same procedures as those used for The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers for handling spelling (preserving Jeffers’ preference for British forms), for punctuation, for representing verse paragraphs, and for other presentational matters (for a full discussion of these matters, see Evidence and Procedures [CP5: 139–232]). In particular it should be noted that Jeffers tended to omit marks of punctuation, especially commas, where the sense is clear without the comma and where omitting the comma contributes to the momentum of the line and seems to have been omitted for that purpose. Conversely, he would occasionally use a period to create a sentence fragment for dramatic purposes. In general Jeffers’ punctuation in these manuscripts has been preserved and adopted, since it is consistent with his approach elsewhere and because doing so better preserves the cadences of the verse lines and better conveys his control of dramatic inflection (an underrecognized aspect of his practice).

l

l

l

The following adjustments (in total a handful) have been categorized as routine and made silently: • supplying an opening or closing quotation mark where the sense of passage clearly calls for it and the mark is (presumably inadvertently) missing; • shifting a capitalized letter to lowercase when a revision moves what had been the capitalized opening word of a line farther into the line

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and Jeffers neglected to adjust the copy but (judging from his practice elsewhere) would have presumably made the change when typing up the manuscript.

The Emendations section lists other anomalies in the manuscripts and documents how they have been resolved, including, where needed, a brief rationale for the emended reading. In The Ur-Point Alma Venus a problem with the numbering of sections has also been adjusted silently. In the manuscript the numbering of chapters and sections is consistent and clear up through X.2. The next section number is X.4. The way the draft unfolds across these pages strongly indicates that this anomaly is inadvertent. Following this, Jeffers begins indicating major divisions simply with the word “Chapter” without a corresponding roman numeral, while (within the chapters across the rest of the version) continuing to number the sections within the chapter using arabic numerals. Section “X.4” has been renumbered “X.3,” and the roman numerals for chapters following Chapter X have been supplied.

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EMENDATIONS

Ms. reading

Emended reading

Storm as Deliverer (initial version) 14.36: council 19.15: gallopping

counsel galloping

The Ur-Point Alma Venus 52.12: fancies^ 55.14: spirit.

~, [ms. reading retained]

[What seems the period after “spirit” may have been an unintentional mark. Conceptually, omitting the period to create the sentence “to cast it out in spirit / One must know something” is plausible. Retaining the period, however, places emphasis on the unit as dramatic speech: “In act I cast it: to cast it out in spirit. / One must know something” (emphasis added). These lines are part of a monologue in which Barclay is “groan[ing] to himself.” Treating the lines as dramatic speech is, thus, plausible, and the manuscript reading has been retained.] 67.13:

self-sufficient^

~,

[When Jeffers revised “are self-sufficient / And are not moved” to “are selfsufficient / Have no wants” he neglected to add a comma after “self-sufficient.” 68.36:

beast and my boy a fool.

[ms. reading retained]

[In reworking this phrase Jeffers canceled “and,” wrote “makes” above it, then canceled “makes” as well. He neither, that is, completed the revision nor reverted to the original, leaving the line in the manuscript indeterminate and ungrammatical. Rather than invent a resolution, the transcription reverts to the original reading.] 73.40: 297

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they

They

Emendations

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75.15: 75.23: 76.3:

outside^ come^ mother,

~. ~. ~^

[When Jeffers revised the original reading of “Demeter, the stone-eyed mother” to “The stone-eyed mother” he neglected to delete the comma after “mother.”] 76.19:

pain wonder

pain and wonder

[Over the course of several revisions to this phrase, Jeffers seems to have inadvertently omitted the “and”.] Fragmentary Beginning 4 88.31: Pittsburg

[ms. reading retained]

[“Pittsburg” was the spelling for the Pennsylvania city when Jeffers was a boy there, but not when he wrote this fragment. This may explain the ms. spelling. It’s also possible, though, less likely, that Jeffers here has in mind “Pittsburg, California” or “Pittsburg, Kansas.”] Point Alma Venus 123.18: bird’s wings

[ms. reading retained]

[Jeffers here seems to be treating the alternating beams of light from the lighthouse as, metaphorically, the wings of a single bird.] 123.37:

lantern-glasses

[ms. reading retained]

[Jeffers might, in typing this, have added an apostrophe, as in “the wild fire of the lantern glasses,” but he could also be expressing the “lantern-glasses” directly as a “Wild fire” rather than an element possessing the “Wild fire.”] Fragmentary Beginning 2 172.11: rim / plain

plain

[Jeffers did not delete the original reading of “rim” when he wrote the revised reading of “plain” and may have been undecided on which reading to use. The latter has been adopted, in part because it is a revision that seems to fit the imagery of the following lines.] 172.38: 298

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let speak

let me speak

Emendations

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