If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant…
Robinson Jeffers had a strong sense of “place,” plus the time, money, and ability to make one himself, building Tor House on the shore of Carmel, California. Oddly, he and William Butler Yeats were influenced by the same ancient Irish tower, Castle Séan at Ardglass — Yeats and his family lived in a similar tower, Thor Ballylee, for a number of years, where he felt “rooted” more than anywhere else. Jeffers said of his own stone house, “We had come without knowing to our inevitable place.”
But the question of “place” remains a thorny one. “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Thus speaks Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604). His point is — and Faustus gets it — that our important places, like heaven or hell, lie within us. This is hard to describe, unlike, say, Dante’s Inferno with its pitchforks, mud, and flakes of fire; but it feels true. The question is, when Hurricane Irma knocks the power out in a poet’s place, does the lettuce wilt and the milk go sour? Or does he or she just stop writing?
One evening we had guests over for dinner, and they were shuffling around, deciding where to sit. Jeanne said, “Well, Peter’s place is at the head of the table, over there.” I pointed out that while I usually sat there, it was a round table, and there’s no “head” at a round table. At King Arthur’s round table, it was said, all the knights were equal. But would Lancelot, Tristan or Gawain want to sit in Arthur’s chair? Maybe chairs can be in our heads.
In 1966 Jeanne and I moved, in our apostolic manner, from St. Paul to St. Petersburg, where I’d accepted a job at Florida Presbyterian College. Florida was not our “place,” geographically, culturally, or politically. As we drove down the ugly elongated strip mall that was U.S. 19 in our wobbly unairconditioned VW bus, our four young children were hot and unhappy. “Don’t worry,” I told them. “We’ll warm up for three years, and then move back to civilization.” Fifty years later, our children have fled, but we’ve found our place.
In the summer of 1968, we took students on a tour of Europe, winding up at Sussex University in southeast England. Midway through our summer we visited the Lake District and the home of William Wordsworth who, with his sister Dorothy, moved there in 1799. I believe all of our students enjoyed and admired this romantic nest — but none of them had their lives changed, except us. We took the cottage’s stone floor, fireplace, oak beams, panels, and picturesque gardens sloping down toward Lake Grasmere, deep into our inner lives. When we returned to St. Pete we — previously contented — weren’t happy with our home. Soon after, Jeanne discovered our cottage in Driftwood. “I’ve found the most amazing place,” she said.
I believe that writers and artists often take an exterior place they love (Frost’s woods, Dickinson’s garden, Jeffers’s tower) and pack it up inside them, carrying it wherever they go. “Stone walls do not a prison make/nor iron bars a cage,” wrote Richard Lovelace in “To Althea, from Prison.”
Today the front yard of our dream house looks different, Irma having whipped through, ripping large limbs and branches off our old oak trees. Miraculously, they missed the cottage, and as we tugged the broken branches toward the pile by the curb, sweating like horses, we shook our heads and said “Pretty lucky, all right.”
My ghost you needn’t look for, it’s probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon…
—from “Tor House” by Robinson Jeffers, both quotes from Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers (Vintage Books, 1965)
This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2018.
