Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was 26 years old when he found his place in the world.

The son of a Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar who took the family on frequent research trips to Europe, young Jeffers attended boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland. His father made sure he got thorough training in classical languages and the Bible. He began his undergraduate studies at Western University of Pennsylvania and finished them at Occidental College in Southern California, where he graduated at the age of 18.

In the fall of 1905, he began graduate school at the University of Southern California with a somewhat vague focus on language study: Spanish, Old English, Oratory and Advanced German. It was in his German class that he met Una Call Kuster, the 21-year-old wife of an ambitious young attorney, who “indulged” her desire to complete her college degree, interrupted when she married him at age 18, as long as it didn’t interfere with the social engagements that helped advance his career.

As classmates, ‘Robin’ and Una began a friendship that ultimately turned into an on-again off-again love affair, while they both struggled to ‘do the decent thing’ – she, to save her marriage, and he, to let her go because he couldn’t support a wife. He restlessly pursued studies in Philosophy, Old English, Dante, and Spanish Romance Poetry at the University of Zurich, then returned to UCLA for Medical School, but switched again, this time to Forestry at the University of Washington.

In 1912, two things changed: Jeffers came into a family inheritance; and during a trial separation from Una, Ted Kuster met sixteen year old Edith Emmons, daughter of another attorney, and fell in love.

Jeffers self-published his first collection of poetry, Flagons and Apples, and sent a copy to Una with a love note. In spite of the scandal still attached to divorce in the pre-WWI years, the Kuster’s divorce became final on August 1, 1913 – both sets of lovers were married on the following day.

In 1914, the newly-married couple came to Carmel, California. Jeffers wrote of their first sight of a promontory overlooking the sea, “The breath of the morning hung in the pines, and this we felt was our home. . . .”

They didn’t buy land until 1919, but Robinson Jeffers had found his place in the world. As the years passed, he would feel the weight of humanity as a threat to its pristine beauty, and he became an ‘environmentalist’ before the word had been coined.
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To the House

I am heaping the bones of the old mother
To build us a hold against the host of the air;
Granite the blood-heat of her youth
Held molten in hot darkness against the heart
Hardened to temper under the feet
Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow
And march from the remotest west.
This is the primitive rock, here in the wet
Quarry under the shadow of waves
Whose hollows mouthed the dawn; little house each stone
Baptized from that abysmal font
The sea and the secret earth gave bonds to affirm you.

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