A POET FOR OUR TIMES John Howard Being a literary person, I find that literature can have as much influence on me as people. A first encounter with what will turn out to be a special book or poem can be like the beginning of a firm friendship. Like with someone who gradually becomes a friend, companion or lover, a first acquaintance with a special book can deepen and mature as the years go by.
I find that there are a select few books, mainly in American Literature, that have become part of me, and effect how I think and act, and how I try to live.
Works like Walden (Henry David Thoreau), Leaves Grass (Walt Whitman), Light in August (William Faulkner) and Shadow of Light (August Derleth) come to mind in this respect. In English Literature - the poems and novels of Thomas Hardy, and two incredible novels from the 1930s by the philosopher Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men and Starmakes.
Some books are somehow always with me. I get insights from them, and constantly discover new things in them. Like people, they are multi-faceted and always open to new interpretations and discoveries. They can make a life very different. I feel very lucky if I discover one book a year like this !
I suspect that I have found my 1991 book. It is The Double Axe and Other Poems (Liveright, pbk. £5.95) by the American author Robinson Jeffers (18871962).
First published in 1948, The Double Axe caused an outcry at the time, because its author had a message to put across which was not at all popular either then or now. The publishers printed a disclaimer that while they disagreed with Jeffers' political views as expressed in his poetry, nevertheless they recognized his right to express them. Whether over forty years has changed this, is one question. But I feel Jeffers' views are as relevant now as they ever were, as I hope to show.
Robinson Jeffers was a pacifist, an extreme opponent of United States involvement in World War II, or any other political and military activity outside of its borders. He was an uncompromising exponent of 'isolationism' - a self-explanatory American viewpoint popular between the wars. Jeffers regarded US involvement in international warfare as tragic and unnecessary, and believed that the destiny of the United States was to steer clear of the 'witches' brew' that he regarded a 'decaying' Europe to be. In the poem Historical Choice he wrote, prophetically I feel :
We shall have to hold half the earth ; we shall be sick with self disgust, And hated by friend and foe, and hold half the earth - or let it go, and go down with it. Here is a burden We are not fit for.
After the destruction of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the entry of the US into World War II, isolationism became very unpopular indeed. It was considered necessary that the US go to war against the Axis Powers, and be fully involved in warfare and politics outside its borders. All of this Jeffers abhorred. In the poem Pearfflarbor he wrote :
The war that we have carefully for years provoked Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant.
Our warships are shot like sitting ducks and our planes like nest-birds, both our coasts ridiculously panicked, And our leaders make orations. ... Here the prehuman dignity of night Stands, as it was before and will be again. O beautiful darkness and silence, the two eyes that see God ; great staring eyes.
Jeffers' isolationism and hatred of involvement in war are closely interlinked with what he called his doctrine of 'Inhumanism'. Inhumanism, as Jeffers explained it, was about "a shifting of the emphasis and significance from man to non-man ; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems that out race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person." To Jeffers, warfare and suchlike were symptoms of the human race's egocentricity and insanity : a sobering thought and a justifiable one considering the constant bloodshed in war in the fifty years since Pearl Harbor. To say nothing of the destruction of the environment that has accelerated since then. Jeffers believed that we had to turn away from ourselves, and come to terms with the wider perspective of reality. Hence, in the poem Pearl Harbour above, the two extracts show the contrasts between how things are, and how they should be. Jeffers thought that by a contemplation of the magnificence of the world and the universe, and of our very minor place in it, the human race could begin to get its priorities right, and be cured of its selfishness. In the poem Quia Abs.urdum he wrote :
Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless Pool of the stars. (Expose yourself to it : you might learn something.) There is a strong religious feeling in Jeffers' work. He was strongly influenced (not to say obsessed) by a kind of Calvinism, which emphasises the human race's apparent inherent and total sinfulness, and its inability to save itself by anything that it can do for itself. As far as Jeffers was concerned, something has gone terribly wrong with humanity, and it has turned in on itself, and away from the `transhuman beauty'. This 'fall' could be described as Original Sin : the Christian doctrine that tries to explain the apparent inability of people to live the way they should.
In his original preface to The Double Axe (replaced by a shorter one when the book was first published) Jeffers described his thought in Christian terms :
A man whose mental processes continually distort and prevent each other, so that his energy is devoted to introversion and the civil wars of the mind, is an insane man, and we pity him. But the human race is similarly insane. More than half its energy, and at the present civilized level nine-tenths of its energy, is devoted to self-interference ... self worship. ... The rest we discharge onto each other - in conflict and charity, jealousy, hatred, competition, government, vanity and cruelty, and that puerile passion the will to power - or for amusement....
But we have all this excess energy : what should we do with it ? We could take a walk, for instance, and admire landscape : that is better than killing one's brother in war or trying to be superior to one's neighbour in times of peace....
To sum up the matter :- "Love one another" is a high commandment, but it polarizes the mind ; love on the surface implies hate in the depth ... as the history of Christendom bitterly proves. "Love one another" ought to be balanced, at least, by a colder saying - this too a counsel of perfection, i.e. a direction-giver, a guide though it cannot be a rule - "Turn away from each other" - to that great presence of which humanity is only a squirming particle. To persons of Christian faith, if any should read this, I would point out that Jesus himself, intuitive master of psychology, invoked this balance. "Love your neighbour as yourself" - that is, not excessively, if you are adult and normal - but "God with all your heart, mind and soul." Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity.
This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.
In his work Jeffers presents his diagnosis of the world's problems, and offers his solution. How we want to contemplate the 'transhuman beauty' is up to us. However it is, I find Jeffers' work relevant and thought-provoking. We need constantly to be finding out how we can picture 'God', and how whatever we choose can live in our lives. Robinson Jeffers' work has a power and integrity about it, whether or not we agree with it. It is the product of someone trying to come to a genuine encounter with he world and its people as he perceived it, and not remain indifferent to it.
We need more people of such vision.
JOHN HOWARD is a priest in Berkshire.