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Again, Jeffers
The Story of a parson outgrowing his profession, turning bitterly on his congregation with the news that Christianity is outlived, that God has left his church and returned to the fire and whirlwind, is one that might, almost any day nowadays, provide a sensation for the outspoken U. S. press. Particularly if there were violent or sexual details would the public be served to surfeit, until a very real crisis in one man's life became a vulgar byword, grossly misinterpreted.
Poet Jeffers unfolds just such a story,* with the high seriousness of a prophetic pantheist. He follows the Rev. Dr. Barclay, a man of 50, from a deserted pulpit southward down the Pacific coast from Monterey. Common sanity is dropping from him like a cloak that he may carry or not. His spirit runs naked to the spirit of the hills, of the "iron wind" on the sea promontories. He will be possessed of a god beyond the old ethic, "good and evil."
The region around Point Sur is already crowded with psychic disturbances. While dry winds blew, followed by a night "striped with lightning" and a day of yellow floods, two boys crucified a hawk; their brother, a visionary, saw the Virgin walking on the sea, mountain tall, mourning her lover; a ranch girl fled to her man to slake her fear of death; the lighthouse keeper's daughter, Faith Heriot, went in a famine of unnatural love to Natalia Morhead, whose husband's act unsexed Faith Heriot two years before. Morhead is not back from the War. Faith nurses his crippled father under the old rooftree, moving about the house "like a restless fire." Natalia mistrusts everything but her child.
An unseen multitude surrounds Dr. Barclay approaching Point Sur—his disciples; minds at any distance aware of his power. The women at Point Sur,—even Maruca, the squat half-breed whom he uses as deliverance from a 15-year chastity—vaguely understand his announcements: "God thinks through action .... Nothing you can do is wicked."
His complete deliverance lies through an act for normal men the most unthinkable. When his young daughter, April, comes to Point Sur to fetch him for her mother, he forces her, passing through incest to the full exaltation of godhood.
People follow him into the mountain, their campfires lighting weird scenes of license and ecstasy. He moves above them, brooding on the dark ridges. There is an earthquake.
Down at the house, Morhead returns, made more bestial by War. The women are drawn to the God, "the black maypole," on the mountain, which now is scourged to the north by fire from the camps. Natalia smothers her child to preserve its innocence. April, informed with her dead brother's spirit, smuggles out a pistol to kill her father but quails at sight of him, shoots herself instead. He roams back into the burnt hills, fasting, escaped from human automatisms, inexhaustible, thirsting to create. . . .
The Significance of Robinson Jeffers as a poet is, by critical consensus, that of one to rank with the greatest poets of all generations. Homer and Sophocles have not been held too lofty comparisons for him—yet he remains distinctly a product of this continent. Inhuman in his intensity—he says "Humanity is needless"; calls men "the apes that walk like herons"—he repels people who seek comfort in poetry. He takes the race as a starting