Phis

ROBABLY no writer ever keeps his work wholly consistent to the medium to which his hand is most subdued. He must, if only to validate his final choice, try himself out in another vehicle, fortunate if he can so far succeed with it as to make one hand wash the other. But George Sterling was, by the necessity of his nature, bound to select for his alter opus a medium the least likely to win him either audience or recompense. What he would have liked to do when he was not doing what he did, would have been to produce tales of romantic fancy. He could have done with "Treasure Island," but would have preferred some of the less micabre tales of Poe or Hewlet's "Love of Proserpine." Born to the American. scene, however, and to a decade given over to the romantic realism of Jack London, Sterling's impulses in that direction failed to put forth more than a tender leaf or two. I doubt, indeed, if any beside myself gave him an encouragement, though Jack loyally translated one of George's ideas into "The First Poet" and tried to sell a short story, the manuscript of which may still be in existence. It was called, I think, "The Dryad," and was the story of a man who had seen a veritable dryad in Carmel woods, and managed somehow to get through into the dimension in which dryads and all such have their being, though at the cost of a total disappearance from this. It was my sympathy with the idea rather than with the story as George had written it, that had consequences, which, since they have already attained the dignity of book publication may have some interest still for Sterling's friends. But first I must go back a little to explain how "Outland" came to be imagined before it was writ

ten.

One of the poet's endearing traits, which he shared with all creative workers and most children, was a quick capacity for entering into an imagined situation and "playing" at being whatever at the moment most interested him. His favorite play, reminiscent of his boyhood in Captain Kid's country, was the "lost treasure" game in which I had so lively a sympathy that by the end of our first summer at Carmel we had between us created the whole of the "King's Treasure," and brought it to the coast in the hold of a strange Chinese seeming craft, which the Japanese abalone fishers reported as lying sunk off Point Lobos. Of the treasure, which

By Mary Austin

Author of "A Woman of Genius," Etc.

you will find partially described in "Outland," which George and I hunted as happily as though we really believed it, there were many more explicit items, of which the crown of opals and the ruby necklace were of the poet's exclusive creation, as the King's cup was mine. It was George's idea that the place where the treasure had first been

got together, was a burial cave of kings, but of the other incidents not even I can now recall the original author; for by the time the book was written practically every one of our group had had a hand in it.

It was Vernon Kellogg who gave us for though he is now head of National the first suggestion of the "Anthers,"

Research and was then Professor of Bionomics, or something equally imposing, at Leland Stanford University, he wasn't above playing with us, provided there were no other scientists about to be mystified by it. That was the morning after the severest storm any of us had known at Carmel, and we were exploring the beach toward Mission Point, strewn with the many colored treasure of the deep. Along the tide mark drifts of yellowish sea-scum piled or broke and skimmed the opalescent sands like great birds, overhead a scum of cloud veiled the foreshore; seaward the liquid turquoise of the bay splashed and cradled. In the tide shallows unfamiliar purple sea-snails wallowed clumsily and it was while we deep water that Vernon suggested that were helping them back to there might be other helpers about, gerni loci as invisibly incomprehensible to us as we were to the murex-tinted creatures of the sea bottoms. Didn't we after all feel this to be so? Well, it so easy to believe as archangels, easier than for a sea snail to believe in a Professor of Bionomics. Thus as we discussed how such creatures might live and herd together the Anthers and the Far Folk came to figure in our play, though never so explicitly for the others as for George and Mary. Only if we walked in the wood and fell on that singular sense of presence lurking unseen in the world, or found a seeming human trace that could have had no human origin someone would say "There's your word people!" Or, if we spun adventures for entertainment, the Anthers became lay figures of wish fulfillment in everybody's favorite adventure.

was

Often it was suggested that these adventures should be written; but they were so varied and unrelated, so uncreate, that it was not until two or three years later, when I was lying ill in a Pension in the Rue d'Assars in Paris that it occurred to me definitely to do so. I was homesick and in pain, and while the first condition made for vividness in recollection, the second makes always, in my case, for beauty, but beauty rather of form and detached unreality, debarred from all the pharmacetic aids, since by a personal idiosyncracy I am and Beauty is my only anodyne. So the story came out, as one of the English reviewers said, "enclosed within a rainbow film of unreality." For which reason chiefly it failed to find an American audience.

Johnwho admitted later that he accepted the book unconditionally on reading that "literature is produced not by taking pains but by having them," published "Outland" in England under a pseudonym, and several years later Boni & Liveright brought it out with the author's own name, in New York, with scarcely any more popular result. However, the reaction that interested me most was Sterling's. He was disappointed at first that I had really begun the story in the middle, omitting the part in which he had figured as the discoverer of the treasure, and commander of the ship, now deep under weed off Lobos, that brought it to our shores. Although the part of villain in the struggle between Anthers and Far Folk had preferred to figure for the first printed been of his own choosing, he would have venture, in the more heroic role, and for years after would urge upon me another volume in which his own favorite adventure would be made to appear. But the fortunate conjunction in which I could afford to do that never came about. It is perhaps because I still hope to find the opportunity, say in my Christmas stocking, that I do not relate it in any incompleted fashion. And perhaps because it comes to me more and more that there is a profound significance in this unpremeditated revelation of the poet soul, a significance in reference to the unachieved creature endeavor that should receive only the most considered handling. For the part Sterling chose to play in the adventure of the "King's Treasure" was in a larger, more sophisticated, intellectually more creditable way, the part he played in "Outland" as (Continued on Page 351)

I

·NSTEAD of a full year, it might have been a month, or just yesterday, that George Sterling quitted these haunts and life itself. He went out of it in that careless, abrupt way he had. His last expression was a wry smile. I think of that stanza by Hardy:

"So now, that you disappear
Forever in that swift style
Your meaning seems to me
Just as it used to be:

'Good-bye is not worth while!'"

He was such a very viable fellow that the report of his death seems even now to be an error, and that he must be somewhere about. Perhaps down the next street, moving about in the fog, with his coat collar turned up and that extraordinary small hat perched on the top of his head, and going into some booth to telephone a friend to join him in some waggish frolic. And if the hour is too late, then he must be standing under a corner lamp, wondering what to do so as to make the most of life before morning. Most of us have the curious sense that he is still alive. He has not yet become a legend. Aye, a year is too short a time for that.

The news that he was gone seemed incredible. It was like an unicorn dying, or an amoretto, or one of those sinewy and eternal children of Pan. It came like a shock, as if a calamity had happened not to us but to Nature itself. There was an eternal quality in him, and his passing disturbed our feeling of the essential durableness of things. And yet, a short while after, we became adjusted to the change in our ideas concerning him. He was one of those few men that became while still in the flesh half fabulous, and when they do come to die the feeling that they were fabulous after all is a sort of consolation. And this is particularly so with your genuine Vates who, by the nature of his being, is extra-human.

Well, Sterling was. He was extrahuman in his friendships. He was extrahuman in his sense of duty. I remember once that he had promised me, as soon as it came off the press, a copy of his poetic play, "Lilith." It was slow getting printed, because the job was being done on a hand press far up in Ukiah. Finally, after weeks, it was finished. Quite unworthy was the paper, which looked like the kind butchers use to wrap up meat in, and the typographical errors ran thirty to the volume. He spent all day and half the night correcting

King of Bohemia

By Idwal Jones

Author of The Splendid Shilling, Etc.

them with pen and ink, and it was midnight before he was through. He carried a volume at once to my room, two miles away from the Bohemian Club, and arrived at midnight, both querulous and apologetic over the delay.

And to do this, he had to stave off for an hour going to a masquerade party for which he was already dressed. He

GEORGE STERLING By WITTER BYNNER Author of The Beloved Stranger, The New World, Etc.

ONC

NCE, when no war had caused companion souls

To sicken, parching for new happiness, A poet at Carmel, where the great sea rolls

Its warning at the shore, was sad no less Laugh though he might at the ways of man. Perhaps

Where nature is too beautiful, man's height

Lessons as nothing. The ocean's thunderclaps

Have too much meaning for a poet at night.

Often he would take up an ocean-spear And, stripping naked, poise against the sky,

Dart over barnacled rocks, and reappear Bringing an abalone caught while the high

Surf waited. But even then, he would as lief

Have let those waves cover his agelong grief.

came to me dressed in a monk's robe and cowl. How well it went with his Savonarola profile! The only other time I saw him fittingly dressed was at some artists' ball, when his garb consisted in a small leopard skin and a wreath of violets. He was priest and Pagan at the same time. He was a very superb Pagan when he died. It has never been stressed enough that he was a sensualist. His ideas on morality were not interesting. A poet has no need to trifle with them, else he injure his chances of immortality. All that one needs to know about a poet are his concerns with beauty.

He loved flagons and gaiety, and robustious argument on politics as well as quips and badinage. It was surprising how well he could argue when it was necessary. Time and again a group of us, so overheated with talk that we had to remove our coats and vests and turn up our sleeves so we could pound the table with greater freedom, would turn loose and demolish his arguments. He loved the excitement of thinking at high tension. In the awful din, that wailing nasal Yankee voice of his threaded its way through the storm, like a dory through a hurricane, and arriving without the loss of a spar.

As fixed as letters carved in adamant were certain beliefs in his mind. The greatest genius of modern times was Dr. Abrams of electrotonic fame. Chaplin was the greatest American after Lincoln. (That Chaplin was a cockney was of no consequence). Gaylord Wilshire, one of the early Fabians, an adventurer, gold-mine exploiter and real-estate gambler, and later a sort of John Law promoter of an electric belt, was an intellect of the first dimensions. Garlic was a deadly poison, ranking next to arsenic. Whiskey was unfit to drink unless diluted with warm water and heavily sugared. San Francisco was equal in culture to Florence. The noblest dish for human beings was steamed clams, and next, baked beans with mint sauce on them. Japanese were a people of big brains, because they ate custard with tiny raw fish tied in knots cooked inside it. Opera singing was the most bestial of human cries.

These postulates he delivered ex cathedra. And the more furiously we tried to rebut them, the more convinced he became of their soundness. He believed in them as whole-heartedly as a Yankee farmer believed in the efficacy of Peruna or Swamp-Root. At least he believed in something. I think he was sounder in the realm of beauty. He was an incarnation of some ancient Greek, aflame with love of beauty, and yet a stern logician. Even in his lightest sonnets there was a fool-proof hypothesis, developed into an argument that was as logical as it was poetic.

And yet he was always kindly and tolerant. He sympathized with the underdog, even if the under-dog was getting all, as the saying goes, that was coming to him. He never graduated from that school of political thought that went to pot in 1914-soap-box socialism, and of

which Jack London, Ben Reitman and Daniel De Leon were leading exponents. They had engaged his sympathies in his salad days, and he had a terror of alienating himself from their frame of mind. They were in touch with realities, with the bed-rock of life. He dreaded to become hardened, less highly sensitized as time went on. And to retain that charming responsiveness to emotions, to pain as well as pleasure, he kept himself always young. He had never any fear of death nor of any man nor of any contingency-save that sad one of failing to respond instantaneously to the mystery of life.

That staunch friend of ours had another admirable trait. He had a certain

healthy toughness of fibre in his being. He was no shouting rhapsodist. The psychopathic fallacy of nature was not in him. He might write about the moon. But he didn't hold that the moon was young Maneata, sterile and subject to convulsions, and a worshiper before a red-and-vermilion shrine. Nonsense, the moon was an orb of poetic uses but also of deep astronomical interest. In fact, he used to look at it for hours through a quite expensive telescope, and could cover reams of paper with sines and cosines in the laudable effort to determine its correct trajectory. Like all right-minded poets, he was also scientist. Poetry was the artistic presentation of what was going on in the world, up in

the heavens, and in the heads of his fellow-beings.

There are mealy-mouthed apologists now that take it upon themselves to lament his deviation from the accepted norm of conduct. Into the ditch with these Pharisees! When he lived with us he was a gorgeous companion, a high priest of revelry, youth and happiness. There was always a glow, a magic light on that cameo-face of his. A father-confessor who always understood. The town-ah, my merry lads-has not been the same since he has gone. When he lived he was the King of Bohemia. Now that he is dead, he is still its despotic

master.

T

HE poet was one of five judges in

a verse competition for three prizes. To ease his task we did not call him in until the contributions had been sifted down to what might be read in the course of an hour.

Before as much as glancing at the selections he spent half the morning turning over the rejected verses to feel sure that no injustice had been done.

That he indorsed the verdict of the other four judges is a small matter. What remains is the impression of his infinite patience, his sympathy with all effort to express itself in song.

"Poor devils," he said, "I know how they feel; how some of them must suffer. Those that write better than others suffer just that much more. They know how far short they fall of what they want to say."

"I have come to make a confession. I have sinned in permitting myself to write these lines to a man who has done me an injury, and done it intentionally. I have said what I think of him, and I am sure it is all true, but the plain truth is so damnable that no man should be told it this side of hell-and I don't believe in hell. We get hell enough here on earth, but I am not going to send him this."

Why had he shown it to me? To confess the sin and forget it.

After reading the rhymed letter I could not forget it, but I am sure that he did. Tearing it into little bits and dusting his hands he said: "I am absolved. We can't afford to hurt ourselves by hurting other people."

*

A room thick with smoke. Four of us seated on boxes at a big table that Idwal Jones has promised to give me when he goes to Italy. Nothing on the table but ashes, glasses, bottles and books.

The bottles were pre-war pints each neatly inscribed on its white label "To George Sterling."

The books were inscribed "To Charles Duncan from George Sterling."

It had been a bargain-a book for a bottle-and when the last volume had been inscribed the bard regretted that he had not published more books.

The bottles were soon emptied-the books now seem fuller than ever.

W

E WERE in New York when the word reached us that George Sterling was dead. Months later we came home, hoping that long familiarity with the fact of his death. would ease the pain of returning to a locality of whose abundant beauty he was so integral a part.

It was a vain hope. For though April, deep-rooted in the heaviest winter rain. of many years, was, in return, deluging with bloom all California from Los Angeles northward to Los Gatos, our destination, we found it impossible to look upon it with the old gladness. We had seen these landscapes again and again through George Sterling's eyes and those eyes were closed forever. We stared out of the car window at poppied hillsides and meadow lakes of lupin as "through a glass darkly."

Our first visit to San Francisco was another revelation of how a highly sensatized individual can heighten or decrease the intensity of objective beauty by his presence or absence. In Carmel this experience was repeated. Now I better understand Adonais and realize with Shelley how Nature, though apparently the same in form and color, wears a cloak of mourning for her dead lover -a cloak invisible to all eyes except those who also loved the lover and saw Nature through his eyes.

I have not yet assimilated the ache of loss enough to turn it into literature. All I can do now in tribute to this Poet is to ease my heart of some intimate memories that were carried like petals during his life but are now death-heavy. During the last years of George Sterling's life he was a fairly frequent visitor at our former home on Russian Hill. He called the place "Mt. Olympus" because of the presence there of "Zeus," his chosen name for Charles Erskine Scott Wood. One evening he brought to the house a celebrated poet who was a visitor in San Francisco. Frederick O'Brien and a few other friends were there, too, and my Mother who was making her home with us that winter was one of our company. My Mother was an exquisite person so tiny in stature that she awoke the protective instinct even in strangers; a Quaker with early Victorian views on religion and morality but tolerant, courteous and wholly without antagonism toward those who differed. The deep sorrows life had brought her and the fact that she was near her journey's end were lightened for her by her unquestioning orthodox

By Sara Bard Field

Author of the Pale Woman, Etc.

faith. For her this faith brought the peace beyond understanding. Of the perfection and godhood of Christ she had no slightest doubt and in her simple, child-like, unworldly way she had tried to pattern her life on Christ's teachings.

Somehow, without explanation, the friends who gathered at our house, all of them free-thinking radicals, intuitively felt all this. Unconsciously they paid tribute to her gentle charm, to the pathos of a dependent and slightly crippled old age and to the simple sincerity of her faith, by cloaking any agnostic utterance made in her presence in inoffensive language, so that my Mother, though often in complete disagreement with our friends, was never pained or shocked.

This night, the poet whom George brought, oblivious of my Mother's age and the obvious implication of beliefs belonging to her period, made a brutal attack on the character of Christ, saying he would show from his own words that he was "the meanest man that ever lived." He asked for a Bible. The rest of the evening he sat thumbing its pages, finding his references and continuing his denunciation. During this performance George behaved exactly like a mother bird whose ground nest has been surprised by a too heavy human foot. He flew in and out of every silence, trying desperately to change the subject. He uttered cries of distress, sotto voce, to his friend who never seemed to hear them. He pulled poem after poem out of his pocket and read it in his slow, fumbling way during the pauses in which the prosecutor relentlessly combed the Bible for further self-incriminating evidence against Christ.

My Mother had never before heard even the most unorthodox lips speak of Christ except in terms of love and admiration. She was pale with intense suffering. George understood as well as I did what was happening. Something as solidly sustaining, as firmly unquestionable as the earth was being undercut. Seeing he could do nothing else to relieve the situation, George rose abruptly and took his friend away. My Mother who died last Fall in the same November that called George, was aware of his sensitive interference for her sake and I wish he had known how she loved him for it.

Another evening when George came

to see us, Ellen Van Valkenburg Browne was a house guest. She took a pack of playing cards and said gayly, “Come, Mr. Sterling, I'll tell your fortune." "Do" George responded with a strange look of sudden concentrated interest. As Mrs. Browne dealt the cards in small

piles according to a scheme of her own, George never took fascinated eyes from

her. I felt worried. I saw at once that she who dealt the cards was playing a game. He who looked on was gravely expectant of some intensely real revelation.

Mrs. Browne who is as disciplined an actress when playing a part off as well as on the stage, told George many things in cryptic language, gazing the while, sibyl-like, straight before her so that she did not once see how George's eyes snatched at her words. Whether by clairvoyance or from accident she told him things which I could guess from his expression, crept dangerously near the locked room of secret and haunting troubles. When she finished George was nervous and excited. "You have said more than you yourself know" he earnestly assured her. Not until then was I aware of George's believing attraction for the occult. Twice after that night he referred to Mrs. Brown's card reading. "She was damn right, too," he would add meditatively. But what it was she was "damn right" about I do not know.

In the cynical and disillusioned age that has succeeded the world war, one's sick thought turns gratefully to the uncompromising human beauty of the friendship between George Sterling and Robinson Jeffers. Ardently, even wistfully, we have contemplated such a literary friendship as that of Byron and Shelley ripening between the walls of the Lanfranchi Palace or in the dark Dante-haunted forest of Ravenna or on Venetian waters. Right before our eyes there has blossomed another such friend

ship at Tor House beside the Pacific. Nor has any other historic friendship included more tender humility in the giving and in the taking than this. Not since John the Baptist pointed to the young Christ "whose shoe latchets I am not worthy to unloose" has there been so large a gesture of exalted devotion as that with which George Sterling pointed to the luminous star of his own discovery.

have asked that question a thousand times to as many people in the months to come. "Tamar. No, unless you mean the story in the Bible."

"You don't know Tamar?" The question was a rebuke. "It is unquestionably the greatest poem of our time." "Indeed, who wrote it?" I asked meeting his enthusiasm with such skeptical tones as would have irritated any one less gently forbearing than George. "Robinson Jeffers. He lives at Carmel. He is a Titan of a poet-perhaps the great

est living poet. Tamar is an amazing performance its theme, its handling loud thundering lines with a ground swell in them. I will see that you get a copy." These, I believe were his exact words impressed forever on me by the flushed enthusiasm which

was over

whelmingly convincing and by my reverence for George's limpid admiration in which was no minutest particle of the green scum of envy.

And again the voice crying in the wilderness. This time at our house on Russian Hill where a brilliant group of poets, artists and professional men and women of many nationalities from all the Bay cities had gathered to celebrate the host's birthday. I had asked George to read some of his poems and to say a few words.

...

He spoke feelingly of The Poet In The Desert and of its author, dutifully read one of his own poems and then. "We have another great California poet living in Carmel who is as yet all too little known. I am amazed at the obscurity in which he still writes. Those of you who have not read Tamar have missed an acquaintance with what I believe is the most powerfully original work of our time." George was off on what became the favorite theme of his last years. His face which could be so sadly old, so oddly weary and gray, was

the face now of an eager boy talking of his favorite sport. I never saw a clearer illustration of finding one's life by losing

it.

IT.

'T SEEMS to me that the feminine element in George-an element which made him so attractive to women and at the same time made strong friendships with men indispensable, was never more manifested than in this abandonment of himself to a friend in whom he believed. His joy in friendship was always proportionate to the spiritual and intellectual worth of his friend since large worth brought him the opportunity to give himself utterly in devotion and praise as women do. Doubtless these important friendships with men were a substitution for the deficiency that Mary Austin tells us always existed in his relationships with women. He never achieved one that brought him full satisfaction. I doubt if he could have done so. The feminine side of his nature was not nourished by the love relation. It fed, rather, on friendships with great men wherein giving was more important than getting and praising and admiring more satisfying than being praised and admired.

We left for the East in the October preceeding George's death. The last time I saw him was on a shining September day that betrayed autumnal wistfulness only in an indefinable golden urgance. We were at Montalvo, Senator Phelan's estate. After luncheon the guests scattered, talking here and there in small, congenial groups. I wandered off to look at all the loveliness of flower and grass and tree. As I passed through the patio I found George sitting between two pillars of the loggia, facing the Santa Clara Hills that wall Montalvo. There, as I lingered beside him, we had the most satisfying hour of all our many

friendly communions. We talked of the loneliness and fear of the poppied beauty of California that drove so many brilliant writers to New York. "Beauty has never lulled me to sleep," George said. "It has been fire in my veins. It has forced me to write." We talked of his own poetry and he speculated in a detached manner about the reason his Black Vulture was year by year monotonously selected for every anthology. "I think that's a good enough poem," he said, "But"-with a fleeting, shy, apologetic smile "I think I've written as good or better poems, don't you?" and then, quite suddenly, "What do you think is my best poetry?" "To a Girl Dancing," I told him. That poem is to me your most typical and your most beautiful work. Like Shelley you are at your best when dealing with a beautiful object in motion. And do you know why you are?" "No. Tell me." "Because Beauty and Transiency together haunt you more than any other theme and a beautiful object that is in motion-that is passing, so to speak, gives you the chance to play on two strings at once and you get a music and a content that is a perfect combination of the two ideas -'the twain become one'." And I quoted:

"How soon the wreaths must go
And those flower-mating feet
Be gathered, even as flowers, by
cruel Time."

George looked off at the hills where the evergreen mingled with the passing gold. "There is beauty on the wing" he said. "I guess you're right. I can't get away from it. I don't know that I want to even though it hurts."

tumn

In the last month of that very Au"on the wing," the living presence and companionship of George Sterling was also beauty that had passed.

I

HAVE been asked by the editors of Overland to contribute to the number dedicated to George Sterling. And sitting down gladly to what promised to be a delicious task, I find myself strangled by a strange impotence.

I want to write of George Sterling, and I will some day. But I am not ready: I will not be ready for a long time: the subject set before me is as heavy and massive as one of the pyramids, or the Hymalayas, and at the same time delicate as an iridescence, muffledgentle as the flutter of a moth at night.

This I can say. It has been my good

The Martyr

By James Hopper Author of Gaybigan, Goosie,

The Freshman, Etc.

fortune to be very close to a Poet for many years, and I know now what a Poet is. He is a martyr.

A concentrated fury drove George Sterling to a distillation of beauty for our careless delectation, and that beauty -this seems to be the law-must be distilled out of the vinegar and bitterness of acrid living. The same implacable urge which drives the Poet to the fashioning of the cool opals of perfect

beauty hurls him periodically into the lonely and terrible depths where alone exists the material for his mysterious transmutations.

And George knew this, and accepted perfectly. His was not the austerely stoic nature that appeared to some, nor was he the gladsome child others believed him to be; he was a compact of exquisite nerves agonizingly sensitive. And that quivering sensibility, raw and palpitant, he unhesitatingly plunged again and again—for us, for the fashioning of his opal and pearls and emeralds (Continued on Page 347)