The Carmel of Poet Robinson Jeffers

“The breath of the morning hung in the pines, and this we felt was our home. . . .”

California’s poet laureate Robinson Jeffers wrote those words to record how he and his wife Una felt when they arrived on this promontory above Big Sur in 1914 to make their home. Carmel-by-the-Sea then had a permanent population of 350, already including artists, writers and a theater company.

The still-intact Tor House home they built of coastal stones just south of Carmel Village demonstrates what residents can do to save a historic landmark about to be razed for a real estate development.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the poet’s birth. There will be docent-led tours of Tor House, Hawk Tower and the Old World gardens overlooking the view Jeffers called “the pristine beauty . . . of the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.”

Helped Launch Year

Carmel Mayor Clint Eastwood helped to launch the anniversary year on Jan. 10, Jeffers’ birthday. Events continue through the Jeffers Festival on Oct. 2 and 3, which will feature tributes to the poet from such famed poets as Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Jason Miller, actor and playwright, will give a dramatic reading of Jeffers’ poetry.

Dame Judith Anderson, who starred on Broadway in Jeffers’ adaptation of “Medea,” has been here to give readings of Jeffers’ poetry and has been invited to return.

The docents who lead tours read passages from his poems in the rooms where the poet and his wife lived with their two sons.

Nine years ago it didn’t seem likely that the Tor House would be here on Jeffers’ 100th birthday. Plans were under way to bulldoze it for a real estate development.

Volunteers created the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation and led a drive for contributions to buy the property. The foundation is part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Volunteers continue to raise more than $80,000 a year for taxes, utilities, insurance, maintenance and monthly payments until the mortgage is paid off in 1994.

Share With Visitors

It’s a labor of love. The volunteers share with visitors lines from Jeffers’ poems. They show that Jeffers wrote of the drama of the human experience with an uncompromising eloquence and was one of the most controversial poets of this century. He also could ask us to “look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore with foam flying at their flanks” and remember that “beauty is the sole business of poetry.”

Tours of Tor House are conducted every Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Each tour is limited to six people and the cost is $5 for adults, $3.50 for college students and $1.50 for high school and younger students. The fees are a contribution to foundation funds.

After their marriage in 1913, Robinson and Una Jeffers had planned to lived in England, but World War I turned them toward the Carmel coast. They lived for a few years in a rented cabin, then pulled together funds from a modest family inheritance to supplement a virtually nonexistent income from poetry. They built a small stone house modeled after an old Tudor barn Una had seen in England.

“Tor” is derived from a Celtic word for a craggy knoll, which Jeffers described here as a point of land meeting the sea like the “prow and plunging cutwater” of a ship. He apprenticed himself to the building contractor to hold down costs and to learn stone masonry.

Construction began in 1918. The granite stones were drawn by horses from the cove below. The original house is so small that a tour group of more than six would overload it. There are two attic bedrooms, a small living room, tiny kitchen, bathroom and guest room. Jeffers wrote a poem about the guest room as the place where he and Una would each die in peace after their lives of happiness together. They had no central heating and no electricity until 1949.

The year after Tor House was finished, Jeffers began to build Hawk Tower, the visual landmark of this legendary coastal property. Jeffers built the four-level, 40-foot tower in four years, doing the work himself and hauling the stones up from the water’s edge with a pulley system. The tower is a symbol of his love for Una, her private retreat.

Handled Correspondence

Una sat at a captain’s desk and handled their correspondence that came to include publishers, literary critics and fans. She protected her husband’s privacy, putting a sign on the gate permitting no visitors until after 4 p.m.

After the tower was completed, Jeffers planted trees and shrubs around the property. When their sons Donnan and Garth were permitted in the tower, they loved the narrow stone stairways to the turret. For an adult visitor today, the experience is a challenging one of climbing step by step while easing along sideways in a stairway of less than shoulder width.

But you don’t want to be in a hurry anywhere in Tor House or Hawk Tower. Gift stones from friends cemented into the tower walls include inscribed pieces of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, lava from Mt. Vesuvius, green Connemara marble from Ireland and a Babylonian temple tile.

When Jeffers added a dining room and hearth to the original house, the past was also imbedded here among the stones: a Roman fragment from North Africa, bits from Irish round towers and pre-Columbian terra cotta, which were all gifts from friends. Portholes in the tower are recycled from sunken ships.

Depictions of the unicorn, Una’s favorite symbol, and Jeffers’ favorite, the hawk, turn up in the woodwork, pottery, stone and brass. Painted and carved on supporting beams, mantels and doorways are lines that they wanted to remember. Docent guides translate a Welsh epigram that says, “Let the grandchildren gather the apples.”

Before the Broadway success of “Medea,” a wealthy friend and patron made it possible for the Jeffers family to travel around the United States and to Europe, though Jeffers would have preferred to stay at home. He had spent much of his boyhood shifting from one European school to another, moving with his father, a brilliant theological professor.

As “Californians,” “Tamar” and other books of poems were published in New York, friends in the literary and artistic world visited here. They included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, Lincoln Steffens, Dylan Thomas and Edgar Lee Masters. Sculptor Jo Davidson came to create a bust of the poet. Ansel Adams took his photograph.

Student in Los Angeles

Jeffers was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and his poems were recorded for the Library of Congress. For Southern Californians, it is of special interest to learn about Jeffers’ time as a student in the Los Angeles area, when he and his family lived on what was then a farm in Manhattan Beach.

Jeffers graduated at 18 from Occidental College, went to the University of Zurich, then returned to Los Angeles to study medicine for a while at the University of Southern California. There he met Una, an attractive and gifted student who was married to a Los Angeles lawyer. Six years later, after Jeffers had studied forestry at the University of Washington, they were married and moved to Carmel Point.

The tour pauses at the window where Jeffers sat at his desk, alone for a dozen years after Una died in 1950, still writing poems that he felt she was helping him to express: “I and my love are one.” As he had poetically prophesied, Jeffers “slept away” in 1962 at the age of 75.

Jeffers’ opposition to war, his environmental concerns and his refusal to go along with new trends in poetry tended at times to push his poems to the back shelves despite the 1947 Broadway success of “Medea.”

He is increasingly regarded as a prophet as well as a poet. A new edition of his selected poems is being prepared for publication.

In his later years Jeffers built a larger home adjacent to Tor House and Hawk Tower for one of his sons, who has since died.

The foundation’s goal is to enhance the attractiveness of the entire property for visitors by making it a workshop and showcase for promising new writers.