The Celtic Twilight of Carmel, California. Part Two

It is tempting to compare Ella Young's Dublin connection with W.B. Yeats and his elusive love, Maud Gonne, with her later connection to Robinson Jeffers and his wife, Una.  There is, of course, the great-poet-and-his-inspiring-woman connection that links the two couples - but far more important - there is Ireland.

Una Call  - Mrs. Edward Kuster - a young, beautiful and vivacious graduate student, met Jeffers in Los Angeles in 1906. While traveling in Ireland in 1912, to sort out her feelings for both her husband and her new lover, Una wrote a letter to Kuster describing her ancestral land:

"We passed through a beautiful country Emerald - indeed…Meadow lands crossed by little wandering streams and everywhere amidst tall, lush grass great beds of golden iris growing wild. Giant trees and hawthorn hedges break up the fields and very often a crumbling tower in the midst of an utter solitude…"

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2010

A crumbling tower.  Little did Una know then how Irish towers - and their real and symbolic roles  - were to figure in her life with Jeffers.  

In a few short years Una's new poet-husband would build for her a tower of her own in Carmel from stones he hauled up from the beach and shaped into a fitting sanctuary for his beloved bride. In the foreword to his book, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, the poet describes his first view of his new homeland: "A second piece of pure accident brought us to the Monterey coast mountains, where for the first time in my life I could see people living - amid magnificent unspoiled scenery - essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer’s Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions."


I think this poem by Jeffers reveals what he felt while building Hawk Tower:

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.

From Roan Stallion, Tamar and other poems. Boni and Liveright, 1925

Credit:William Brooks Collection, Henry Meade Williams Local History Room, Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, CA

In another letter, from 1927, Una tells her dear friend Albert Bender how much she treasures her inscribed picture of Yeats' own tower and cottage, because, as she writes "Yeats is one of my most honored authors - because its on a coast I love - and because it seems unbelievable that another poet should have a tower and cottage on a western shore!"

In 1929 the Jeffers went to Ireland - staying for the most part in County Antrim but also touring throughout both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. By now Una and Ella Young were very close friends. Ella wrote letters of introduction for the Jeffers to take to Maud Gonne, but cautioned Una about Maud, saying "Hope Maud Gonne won't be in prison or deported when you arrive." Ella goes on to reassure Una, telling her "I know she would enjoy you all."  Ella wrote to Maud prior to the visit, describing Jeffers as "the big poet of America" and Una as "his Irish wife." 

Robinson Jeffers was drawn to the many ancient towers and sacred ruins of Ireland. He wrote several poems while he was there - poems that often merged the local mythos with the land. A theme that was prominent in his California writing, as well. 

The Low Sky

No vulture is here, hardly a hawk,
Could long wings or great eyes fly
Under this low-lidded soft sky?

On the wide heather the curlew's whistle
Dies of its echo, it has no room
Under the low lid of this tomb.

But one to whom mind and imagination
Sometimes used to seem burdensome
Is glad to lie down awhile in the tomb.

Among stones and quietness
The mind dissolves without a sound,
The flesh drops into the ground.

From Descent to the Dead. Poems, etc.  Random House, 1931 

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2010

Una Jeffers met Ella Young in the spring of 1926 when Ella lectured at the Golden Bough Theatre (owned by Una's former husband Edward Kuster). Ella's lectures were entitled "Nature Magic" and "The Celtic Myth of Creation." How I wish I had been in the audience on that enchanted evening!  

Una was there and later she wrote this description:

“Ella Young was like a Druidess that first time I saw her, in flowing gown, against the lovely blue-green curtain of the Golden Bough stage, a wisp of veil about her head, gray eyes shining and hands weaving magic as she named the old Irish gods and heroes and told the deeds they wrought. Since that night I have seen her in many different settings; kneeling to succor a wounded snake; hovering on the seat of my car... [on] that terrible old coast road...peer[ing] into the chasms at our side, following a hawk’s flight as carefree as if she too had wings.”   The Carmel Pine Cone.  December 20, 1935 pg. 9

And so we further explore a little of what made Carmel, in the first decades of the 20th century, such a Celtic and magical refuge for so many people - both ex-pats like Ella Young and those who feel an Ireland of their own possessing their souls. I fall into the latter category and yearn most for what Una perfectly captured when she wrote "an utter solitude…"

The Celtic Twilight of Carmel, California. Part One

In the next few posts I want to share a bit of my research on Ella Young and her involvement with several key people that helped to shape California’s culture in the first decades of the 20th century - Albert Bender, Noel Sullivan, Robinson and Una Jeffers, and John and Mollie O’Shea. In particular, I will show how their lives wove together like a magic carpet - with threads of poetry, music, drama, and art - and through Ella’s unique gifts and vision the Old Ways were once again spoken of and honored. 

It is not hard to envision how it looked and felt in Carmel in those early years and how those drawn to the mystical world of Celtic legends might find here a land pulsing with the same ethereal spirit - with wind-twisted cypresses draped in silvery mist and Manannan, Son of Lir commanding the white-capped waves of the mighty Pacific. 

Ella Young was drawn to the land that hosted Carmel and its neighbors to the south - Point Lobos and Big Sur.  Ella sensed the presence here of a magic akin to what she had left behind in Ireland. In her first lecture in Carmel, in 1926 at the Theatre of the Golden Bough on Ocean Avenue, she spoke on two topics: “Nature Magic” and “The Celtic Myth of Creation.” It was later reported that Ella told her Carmel audience that faeries had found a home at Point Lobos - such was the unspoiled power of this place at that time. Apparently, the following day several women from the village were spotted at Point Lobos peering under ferns and behind rocks all in pursuit of the wee folk. 

One of the first plays performed on Carmel’s historic outdoor stage - The Forest Theater was W.B. Yeat’s The Land of Heart’s Desire in 1911. It was directed by the theater’s founder, Herbert Heron and set in County Sligo, Ireland (not far from where I called home for an amazing year). 

The Herbert Heron Collection, The Henry Meade Williams Local History Room, Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, CA

In 1911, many of the people that would become part of Ella’s circle had not yet moved to Carmel. The village was already preparing itself for her arrival and every year another poet, artist or mystic found their way to the tiny village with the alabaster white sands skirting the sea  - all a-glimmer and so very alive.

I see the performance of Yeats’ play as the beginning of what I call Carmel’s Celtic Twilight and it is easy to understand how, fifteen years later, the village would enthusiastically embrace Ella Young.

The Herbert Heron Collection, The Henry Meade Williams Local History Room, Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, CA

In this excerpt, we see a struggle occurring between the new religion, Christianity, and the Old Ways, personified here in “The Child” - a faery spirit. 

FATHER HART. I will confront this mighty spirit alone.

Be not afraid, the Father is with us,

The Holy Martyrs and the Innocents,

The adoring Magi in their coats of mail,

And He who died and rose on the third day

And all the nine angelic hierarchies.

(THE CHILD kneels upon the settle beside MARY and puts her arms about her.)

Cry, daughter, to the Angels and the Saints.

THE CHILD. You shall go with me, newly-married bride,

And gaze upon a merrier multitude.
White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,
Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him
Who is the ruler of the Western Host,
Finvarra, and their Land of Heart's Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song.
I kiss you and the world begins to fade.

[and as the play nears its end]

(Outside there are dancing figures, and it may be a white bird, and many voices singing.)

"The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away;
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say--
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away."'

The Ballad of the Fiddler

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2010

Found an old book on my shelf today that I think must have been my mother's. She went through a spell of collecting old children's books that reminded her of the ones she had owned as a child but lost in the Depression. This book is entitled My Poetry Book: An Anthology of Modern Verse for Boys and Girls and is copyrighted 1934. The poems are organized by themes and one of the themes is "Have You Ever Seen a Fairy?"  I was surprised and very pleased to see one of Ella Young's close friends has a poem in this section - Seumas O'Sullivan. He was born in 1879 as James Sullivan Starkey and became an editor for The Dublin Magazine. He and his wife, artist Estella Solomons, were nationalists and when I read Ella's letters to him (held at Trinity College Library) I realized they were written in some kind of code - or so it seemed to me at the time.  She called him "Comrade" a name she used for others - those who she felt were aligned with her in her battle for Ireland's  freedom (for Ireland's soul) and for her lifelong quest for Beauty. Ella wrote to Seumas about the High King's Daughter and I puzzled over to whom they might have been referring. Was it Maud Gonne? Or was it the personification of Ireland?

So here is Ella's friend and dear comrade evoking a world they both understood.


The Ballad of the Fiddler 
by Seumas O'Sullivan

He had played by the cottage fire
Till the dancing all was done,
But his heart kept up the music
When the last folk had gone.

So he came through the half-door softly
And wandered up the hill,
In the glow of his heart's desire
That was on the music still.

And he passed the blackthorn thicket,
And he heard the branches groan,
As they bowed beneath the burden
Of the white fruit of the moon.

And he came to the fairy circle
Where none but the wise may sit:
And blindness was on him surely
For he sat in the midst of it.

And maybe his heart went dreaming,
Or maybe his thoughts went wide,
But he took his battered old fiddle
And he took the bow from his side.

And he said, "I will play them such music
As never a fairy heard."
He said, "I will play them the music
I stole from the throat of a bird."

And the sound of his lilt went straying
By valley and stream and sedge
Till the little white stars went dancing
Along the mountain's edge.

And things came out of the bushes
And out of the grassy mound
And joined their hands in a circle
And danced to the fiddle's sound.

And quicker and sweeter and stranger
The notes came hurrying out
And joined with a shriek and a whistle
In the dance of the Goblin Rout.

And all night long on the green lands
They danced in a 'wildered ring.
And every note of the fiddle
Was the shriek of a godless thing.


And when the winter morning
Came whitely up the glen,
The Fiddler's soul fled whistling
In the rout of the Fairy Men.

For My Father

This is Mattie Lee Pamplin Dingler in her later years - probably taken in Texas where she died in 1962. She was my father's grandmother - a woman who could mix any of her herbal remedies with molasses to get him to swallow it. She raised her family on a small farm in Arkansas. I wish I had known her for I think we had many things in common. Instead, I took the stories my father told me about her and wove them into a novel. Some of the threads are truth and many of the threads spun out from my imagination. 

So to honor my father on Father's Day I pay tribute to his grandmother with this excerpt from my novel, Daughters of Time.  Enjoy. 

Chapter Two

Mississippi 1891

Twilight and the road stretched ahead through the tall pines. What was it her ma use to say? Oh, yes—twilight was the most dangerous part of the day—the time when the dark and the light met—the time of in-between.

“Mind yourself now, Mattie—a person can get lost in the in-between time with no sun to guide you and no real darkness to hide yourself in. You mind yourself, child.”

So here she was, alone at twilight on a long road that was in itself about being between things. Or between places, as it were. This road, from her daddy’s farm where she was born sixteen years before to her daddy’s new farm that she had never seen. Here she was in this place between the two in the time of in-between. And no longer a girl, but no one could think of her as a woman, could they? What was she then—just an in-between?

“Life’s nothing but a journey, Mattie-girl,” that was Pa speaking, leaning against the wagon loaded up with all their worldly and not-so-worldly goods, and Ma up front, with the youngsters behind riding on quilts and the feather bed. “A journey has no end, not even in the dying. You just keep on walking to someplace new—leavin’ Mississippi ain’t quite like dyin’ though to look at you all white in the face has gotta make a person wonder…”

That was Pa, all right, his big, rough hand on her shoulder trying to look like everything was fine, though they were leaving her and going off to Arkansas, and she would come later—all on her own. That’s when he gave her the crock of her Ma’s cherry jam and told her to save it for the trip to the new farm. And now here she was at twilight, walking down the dusty road that led through the pine forest and out of Mississippi and into her new life in Arkansas. An in-between, not quite a woman but no longer a girl—some kind of new person. And the gray crock of cherry jam was safely tucked into her knapsack—untouched, because it was all she had left of Ma and Pa and Mississippi.

Invocation

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

In 1995 I owned Raven in the Grove, a women's bookstore and art gallery, and found my world expanding in strange and wonderful ways. My all-too-brief period in the store was the only time I have felt truly myself. I flourished, at least emotionally and spiritually, in an environment entirely self-created. It reflected who I was and who I remain - though that person, Me, is no longer free to be. The importance of the experience remains - reminding me of my own unique potential - and brings me hope.

It was at my store that I discovered the poet May Sarton through her books placed lovingly upon my shelves. She reached me because her poems reflected my own thoughts, desires, and memories.

It was in 1995 that  her publisher, W.W. Norton, sent me a card announcing May's  death.  I felt honored to have been part of bringing her words to those who needed them - as I still need them - and now I share this poem with you. I know that Ella Young would also have resonated with May's words.



Invocation by May Sarton

Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.

Come under the strong wave
Here where the tug goes
As the tide turns and flows
Below that architrave.

Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.

Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor.

Bee-loud glade

Today, I spent a few wonderful hours with my friend Kathy who has recently become a bee keeper. Her land is a-buzz - both with bees and with blooms. Happy bees, happy blooms.  I brought with me Carol Ann Duffy's volume of wondrous poetry entitled The Bees.  I discovered Duffy while living in Ireland - she was being interviewed on the radio and she read a few poems. I was hooked.   I read very, very little poetry written after 1950. I think many "poets" think that writing prose in short lines is the same as writing poetry.  Wrong, very wrong.  Each word should be thoughtfully, consciously formed and perfect in its relationship one to the other. And the words should render not only meaning and imagery but we need to smell them, touch them and hear them - let them buzz among the blooms.


Virgils' Bees

Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.
Bless the beekeeper

                              who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze, 

                                         each bee's body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

                                                 For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

Robert Duncan - Poet

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740 Minneapolis Institute of Arts

 

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I never know when Ella will make herself known to me  - whisper in my ear or take my hand and lead me toward a new discovery. Today was an Ella day. While at work at the college library I decided to take a moment and look at the new book shelf. My eye immediately went to matching volumes by the California poet Robert Duncan who was born in Oakland in 1919.  I knew immediately that there would be an Ella connection.  He was raised by theosophical Hermeticists who undoubtedly knew Ella. Duncan mentions Ella when he is describing his Bakersfield high school English teacher, Edna Keogh - an Irishwoman who knew Ella. This is what Duncan says of Ella:

"She [Keogh] had had a link among her friends [in Berkeley] in a gaunt, beautiful, touched, old woman, Ella Young, whom I in turn as a student in Berkeley once heard tell of those Irish circles, of poets who practiced magic, of women who saw into what was beyond the common sense, of that folk who dwelt upon the margins of fairy."

Duncan discusses his life as a poet and his words remind me of Ella's own words. Kindred spirits, indeed.

"In my conversion to Poetry I was to find anew the world of Romance that I had known in earliest childhood in fairy tale and daydream."

Here is an excerpt from Duncan's poem Ode for Dick Brown...

III

Restore, restore the mystery to the land

and to the hearts of men restore

the mystery. In memory, bright Mnemosyne's

rich tapestry of voices, revelations,

and persisting scenes, the luminous

reasonable and mysterious oak thrives.

The source of our lives makes each man sacred…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Wampum Snake, above, I came across while helping a student. Days like today, thanks to Ella, I remember why I am here. 

Robert Duncan:  The Collected Early Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain.

Robert Duncan: The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman.