The Celtic Twilight of Carmel, California. Conclusion

Carmel. Photograph © Denise Sallee 2012

There was one very important and central point from which all of Ella Young's California connections sprung - Albert Bender. Bender, born in Dublin in 1866, arrived in San Francisco  at the age of 16 - working as an errand boy for an insurance office.  By 1890 he was an insurance agent - owning his own company and becoming very wealthy and influential.  But most of all, Albert Bender was a discerning patron of the arts with a deep love of books, literary manuscripts, and Ireland. And he was kind and generous. It was Bender who arranged for Ansel Adams' first portfolio of prints to be published and also took him to Carmel to meet the Jeffers and the O'Sheas. 

When Ella arrived in  San Francisco for the first time her manager, Jessica Colbert, told her  “There are two people in San Francisco that I hope you will meet, one is Albert Bender...the other is Noel Sullivan...”  (Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately. Ella Young. Longmans, Green and Company, 1945).  Both Bender and Sullivan became long-lasting friends with Ella - they were her admirers and her patrons. 

Bender adored Ella and she him. He was instrumental in her struggle with the U.S. government to remain in America and he introduced her to his closest friends who immediately became her closest friends. This, indeed, was the power of social networking. It was through Bender and Sullivan that Ella became a part of the Carmel community. She was soon a central figure in the art and literary scene of the small village. It was not only Ella's poems and folktales that drew many Carmelites to the Irish immigrant. Her deeply magical consciousness and passionate love for Ireland fueled many a soul on the western edge of America. She inspired established poets, such as Dora Hagemeyer and Sara Bard Field and encouraged others, such as Ansel Adams and John O'Shea, to explore in words and images, their own connections to the natural world. 

How fitting it was when in 1935, Una Jeffers, splendid in a new black velvet gown, spoke at the opening of the Yeats exhibition at Mills College, where Albert Bender was a trustee and benefactor. Robinson Jeffers also attended the event  - important, I think, in linking the two great poets known so well by Ella Young.  

Credit: Special Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College

The exhibit was organized by Bender, containing many items from his own collection.

Credit: Special Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College

Ella spoke at the University of California - as revealed in this newspaper article from the Berkeley Daily Gazette of October 23rd - the following month as part of the ongoing Bay Area Yeats celebration. 

In December of 1930, Ella wrote to Albert Bender:

The top of the morning to you and a hundred thousand thanks. There is nothing in the world like a good friend. (Albert H. Bender Collection. Special Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College)


Carmel, Ireland, poets, mystical seekers,  and Ella Young.  A truly magical connection!

Sara Bard Field

Ella Young's close circle of friends, or as she would say "comrades," in California were as eclectic and as interesting as her circle had been in Ireland. They shared a vision, often expressed in poetry or in paintings, of a world deeply connected to the power, the beauty, the creation and the destruction of nature. They called each other by secret, magical names. They honored the turning of the great wheel with rituals on the wind-swept sands of the beach and in the leaf-shadowed twilight of the redwood forests.

Sara Bard Field (1882-1974) was one such comrade - a courageous and passionate woman whose home in Los Gatos she shared not only with her husband, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, but with the cultural "movers and shakers" of the San Francisco and Monterey areas. The great photographer, Ansel Adams, sought Sara out for questions of spiritual importance even as he sought out Ella's advice in his quest to be a poet.

Palo Corona 

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

So here is a poem by Sara Bard Field written after the tragic death of her son, Albert.

The Windy Hour

I walked a little while alone
Upon a wind-wrapped hill
And suddenly, as by command,
My soul grew listening-still.

Listening like the deaf and dumb
Who hear with haunted eyes
Fearful of learning life, half-true
And learning life, half-lies.

And this is what was softly said
Upon a wind-wrapped hill:
"Tomorrow shall you, like your soul,
Lie motionless and still.

Lie motionless and old and numb - 
Closed your ears and eyes
For death shall make an end of truth
For you - and end of lies. 

"For death shall make an end of truth
Save the one truth of sleep;
No ear need hear that silencing
No eye need watch it creep."