I tremendously admire Jeffers’ asceticism, tireless labor, and love for solitude, beauty, and the land. Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth, who hardly suspects When we built the house, it is ready waiting, “I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed Thirty years before, he’d written “The Bed by the Window.” He, too, died in the guestroom bed, a conscious choice. They moved her to the downstairs bedroom, where she died in 1950. Una had a tiny aerie, high above, where she could remove herself from the fray, have tea with her girlfriends, and no doubt give thanks for such an artistically creative spouse.Īround 1948 Una got sick. The view and the Old World, hand-crafted space were worth it. I consider myself fairly spry, but climbing the stone steps to Hawk Tower I practically had to hoist my legs by hand from step to high, winding step. (What eventually became the family’s upstairs living quarters, with his workspace and desk, are off-limits to visitors).Then he lunched and did hard physical labor for several hours. Jeffers wrote each morning from 9 till noon. The stone walls and clay-tiled floor exuded a penetrating cold and damp on a January day. The kitchen, featuring a spinning wheel that belonged to Una’s mother, was added in 1935. Guests shared the one bathroom with the Jeffers. The guest room, directly off the living room, is small. They were also, mostly by necessity, frugal. The place didn’t have electricity until 1948. Its smallish fireplace sufficed to heat the whole house. For years, the living room-Oriental rugs, wood floors, Steinway piano-was also the dining room. Inside, all the furniture and fixtures are original. A child’s grave marker, stones from Una’s family farm in Michigan, and shards of green glazed tile from the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, and are set into pathways, walls and cornices. A slab of granite from the underside of the officers’ billiard table at Ford Ord has been fashioned into a bench. Friends brought “items of interest” from all over the world, and the Jeffers incorporated them into the house and grounds. Wikipedia notes that Jeffers’ philosophy of “inhumanism” was based on the belief that “transcending conflict required human concerns to be de-emphasized in favor of the boundless whole.” Neither of the Jeffers were “religious ” rather they were “spiritual.” Una, for example, was drawn to unicorns. Here, you can learn all about the Jeffers’ backstory, which began with a scandal (Una was married when they met her ex-husband, an LA lawyer, ended up building his own stone house right down the street). Today you can take a docent-led tour of Tor House and Hawk Tower on Fridays or Saturdays, reservations required. Tor House he called it, “tor” being a Celtic word meaning “outcropping of rock.” With no written plans and no formal training in architecture or construction, he built an English garden-style cottage (later expanded) and, from 1920-24, an adjacent tower of granite.
Jeffers began hauling stones up the hill from the beach by hand. There were no paved roads, no trees, no neighbors. After their twin sons were born in 1916, they bought land on an isolated, wind-swept promontory. He and his wife Una came to Carmel in 1914. Six years later, he was on the cover of Time. He toiled in obscurity, then hit it big around the age of 37, when “Tamar and Other Poems” became a best-seller. He was known mainly for his epic Greek-style poems, modern-day tragedies based on the California’s central coast. In his day, Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was one of the nation’s best-loved poets.
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