CHAPTER TWELVE

The Depression, the Sea, and the Redwoods

The great worldwide depression, beginning in 1929, cast few immediate visible reflections in poetry. I was but one of many who had no idea of letting our crumbling economic foundations undermine their poetic foundations. Like others, I continued writing verse, gratified whenever any magazine saw the light clearly enough to open its doors to me.

The names of some that did open their doors--_The Bookman_, _The Independent_, _The World Tomorrow_, _Shards_, _The Wanderer_, etc.--read like a list of the bygone and forgotten. But even then, as more recently, I sent a majority of my offerings to the metropolitan newspapers. And why? First, as a matter of convenience. The typing of poems, the keeping of records, the very selection of manuscripts to send, require more time and effort than you would suppose. And when one is preoccupied with multitudes of duties, it is sometimes impossible to find time for repeated submissions--particularly as manuscripts, when they come back, are usually dogeared, soiled, dented with paper clips, or even burned by cigarettes, though not many of them may suffer the fate endured by one of my book manuscripts, which was dropped down an elevator shaft. In most cases, poems must be retyped: that is, unless one wishes to say to the editor, in effect, “Others didn’t think these worth keeping, but maybe you’re an easier target.”

Because of such difficulties, the poet naturally submits where his chances are greatest. And if his chances are, let us say, anywhere from about twenty-five to ninety-eight per cent or more with newspapers where his work is known, but perhaps no more than two or three per cent with large magazines that use but few poems and hence reject more, the decision may be automatically made for him. In the course of the years, I contributed literally hundreds of poems to the New York _Sun_ (a luminary that, unfortunately, has long gone out), while the editors of the _Times_ and other papers were very receptive.

You may say, of course, that newspaper publication is ephemeral--come today, gone tomorrow! And this no doubt is true, but it is likewise true to a degree of all periodical publication. And, besides, there is always the possibility of reprints; and many people will clip the poems they like and preserve them for years. I do not, in any case, share the supercilious, the almost snobbish contempt which some poets profess toward newspaper publication; no means of distribution that reaches a wide general audience should be disdained. And knowing what I do of poets, and of literary sour grapes, I may perhaps be pardoned for wondering if those who cry out loudest may not have built their scorn on a deep foundation of rejection slips.

But to turn back to the depression era. During this very period my own work, as if perversely ignoring the world’s dejected state, burst forth in new veins, and with a character which, in my own biased opinion, it had not had before--a character that arose largely from my new contacts with nature.

To begin with a transient phase, there was my response to the sea during a particular voyage--a voyage whose exceptional circumstances were directly concerned with the depression. There are millions who will never forget how President Roosevelt, almost immediately after taking office in 1933, closed the banks of the country, and thereby averted national catastrophe. There are also millions who will remember how, even if they had money in theory, they had none in practice except what their pockets contained, since they could not draw upon their bank accounts. That such a situation, with all its painful accompaniments, could have had any connection with the writing of poetry, and

## particularly of poetry of the sea--this, surely, would seem among the

most fantastic of impossibilities. Yet the connection, at least in my own case, did exist.

It happened that Flora and I had elected March of that very year for a badly needed vacation, and decided upon the extravagance of a cruise into southern waters. We had reserved, but still had not paid for, accommodations on the Swedish liner _Kungsholm_, and were expecting to leave sometime in the second week of the month ... when lo! the bombshell exploded. The banks faced us with shut doors! For all practical purposes, we were penniless! I remember counting all our available cash, which came to no more than twenty dollars. As for paying for the tickets--that was impossible; checks could not pass through the clearing house, and therefore, for the time being, were worthless. Under these circumstances, most travelers did the obvious, and cancelled their passages. But Flora and I did not quite so easily give up our precious vacation; I telephoned the steamship line, and was informed, to my surprise, that the _Kungsholm_ would sail at the scheduled time; the company would accept my check in payment of our passage; and would cash any further checks for any reasonable amounts so that we might have pocket money _en route_.

Flora and I, accordingly, were among the passengers--the very few passengers--who stood staring shoreward from the _Kungsholm_ on that bitterly cold morning when she sailed. The vessel, a capacious liner of around 30,000 tons, was all but deserted; it was possible to stroll completely around the promenade deck without encountering a soul. And this, though it did not make for sociability, was ideal for poetry; one could read and muse and dream, undisturbed as if one were the steamer’s sole owner, while day after day she made her way across the glorious cobalt-blue Caribbean. I remember that my almost constant companion was A. E.’s _Collected Poems_; and the lyrical and mystical mood of these verses helped to put me into the right state of mind for writing. The fruit of the voyage, therefore, was a series of _Sea Sketches_, eleven of which were to appear in my book _The Merry Hunt_. The mood of these poems, though no two are alike, may be illustrated by the opening of the ninth of the sequence:

A sadness rises in my breast, I cannot answer how nor why, When, low against a shoreless sky, A ship goes down into the west Beneath the day’s red closing eye.

Slowly it turns from dusk to dark, With dwindling masts and hull a-gleam, And, where the firelit hazes stream, Fades in the vastness, spark by spark, And passes softly as a dream....

Such stanzas can be written only in a mood of detachment. And detachment is not possible amid the chatter of crowds and the riot of merrymaking. Therefore I have always held that the great depression, culminating in the national financial disaster that forced the closing of the banks, was responsible for something seemingly so remote from economic affairs as my lyrics of the sea.

But deeply as the sea has moved me, my poetry found richer sustenance in the great earth-world of growing things, of hills and mountains, forests and streams. These, ever since I have come to know them, have seemed my natural domain; more than once, coming west on the train after a long stay in New York, I have glowed at my first glimpse of the great snow-line of the Rockies as at the sight of approaching home. Strangely, though I lived in a mountainous state, I did not know the mountains in childhood--not until, just before my seventeenth birthday, I registered as a student at Berkeley, and almost immediately headed for the hills, and took long walks, companioned or alone--though more often alone--to the far-looking eminence of Grizzly Peak and its rolling neighbors.

But while these invigorating strolls did result in some attempts at poetry, nature reserved her greatest gifts until the years beginning with 1930, when Flora and I came every summer to Mill Valley (where we finally settled in 1938). Our daily routine, enforced only by our own desires during those charmed months when we were free from the grind of a great city, was ideal for verse-writing. Nearly every morning, after two or three hours which I devoted to various writing tasks, Flora and I would set out with a bag containing a lunch of sandwiches and fruit, one or more books, and a second bag holding paper, pens, and pencils. For an hour or two we would wind in fog or sunlight or beneath the shadow of leaves along one of the many trails looping among the redwoods or across the bush-grown slopes to Muir Woods or to some point high on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where we might have lunch in some sheltered ferny grotto to the purling music of clear waters, or stare across wide vistas of tawny hill and blue sea and bay, or up at the two-hundred-foot towers of the sequoias, with their cinnamon-brown boles and down-slanting scented limbs. The clear exhilaration, the shining joy of those walks, is something I have tried, perhaps not successfully, to put into verse. And the many sights and sounds of the wayside offered material for poetry--a dragonfly, a crested bluejay, a crawfish in a stream, a water Strider, a mountain flower, a rock, a weed, a redwood grove.

My poems of the woods, in the vast majority of cases, were written in the woods, with my eyes on the objects described. Many a day, while Flora sat not many feet off with a book or with pen and letter paper, I lay stretched out beneath the trees, in a state of relaxation in which I was as close as possible to being unaware of my physical being; and let the lines of a poem form themselves in my mind--lines which I would never put down until the complete composition had come to me. Whatever the quality of the resulting verses, I know that I could reach into depths rarely if ever plumbed in the city, and could write with an undistracted absorption that made it possible to call upon the inmost reserves of my being.

Among the products of those summer strolls, I number the lyrics in _Songs of the Redwoods_, and most of the poems of nature in subsequent books. In those poems there is a simplicity that may be deceptive, a simplicity my earlier work had not always possessed, as when I express my gratitude and relief at returning to nature:

I have been long an exile from the sod, The firm gray earth that dusty feet may tread, The earth where one may lay a tired head As on the lap of God.

My sense of the timelessness of the woods and hills, in contrast to the impermanence of man, is expressed in various offerings, as in the lyric from _Green Vistas_, beginning:

The woods shall not be lonely When man has slipped away, Leaving no token, only Dark timbers that decay,

and in the sonnet that opens:

These hills, where silence with her ancient humming Speaks to the green-plumed ridge and picture-sky, Echo no creeds of getting or becoming, No Parliaments that shout, no men that die.

Amid the gratifying vastness of nature, I have often had the sense of the loss of personal identity in a greater, more meaningful identity:

Firm-pillowed on the earth, with head to grass, And all the hot sky arching over me, Almost I seem to merge with the great mass Of root, and rock, and pinnacle, and tree. Almost I seem to lose the “I,” the one, And blend with currents of the bush and stóne, And with the flowing air, the soil and sun, And be no more self-clouded and alone.

The reader will, I hope, bear with me for thus quoting my own verses, since these lines express the nature of my experience and the sources of my poetry much more vividly than my prose could do.

For eighteen successive summers, during some of which my time was absorbed by long poems--from 1930 to 1947--Flora and I took those long and stimulating, almost daily walks into the hills; in the latter years we were accompanied by our romping black-tan-and-white toy shepherd dog, “Sheppie,” herself the unwitting source of more than one poem. Only with our removal to a home higher in the hills and further from the hiking trails did our regular pilgrimages to the woods come to an end; and then my poems of nature, while not ceasing, became much less frequent.

There is today, I realize, a movement away from poetry of nature--a movement only to be expected in a world which is itself withdrawing from nature, a world of concrete strips and macadamized landscapes, a world of super-highways that rip down the wilderness as a gardener pulls out a weed, a world of power-madness symbolized by the bulldozer that slashes out the very soil and makes deserts of once-blossoming fields and green hillsides. What communion with nature can be expected by the worried dweller in an apartment house, who sees nature at most for two or three weeks a year through the windshield of a sixty-mile-an-hour car on a six-lane freeway, or in the overcrowded camps of one of our national parks? How much of nature is observed by the dweller among the skyscrapers of New York, Chicago, Houston, or St. Paul? How much of nature even among the methodically trimmed lawns and neatly curving concrete roads of our suburban districts? Lovers and viewers of nature there may still be, but they are a dwindling minority. And that is why city sophisticates, bleary-eyed with gazing at neon lights and television screens, increasingly tend to scoff at poetry of nature as something unreal, unfelt, sentimental, or derivative; they do not realize that no man has the right to deny another man’s experience, nor that in a world where color-blindness was the rule, the majority would consider themselves wise for mocking the viewers of rainbowed tints.

But poetry of nature is real, and will continue to be real, because it is built upon realities that antedated man and will no doubt outlast him; we can no more forbid it by critical mandate than we can proscribe poetry of joy or sorrow, religion or love. What we have a right to ask of the poet of nature, as of all writers, is that the impulse behind his work be genuine; that the poems be based upon actual experience, actual observation, actual feelings, and not be drawn from his readings of other poets. But whether or not he is able to communicate the impressions that come to him, whether his incentive is equalled by his skill, or whether his message is acceptable or even understandable--these are questions to be decided by that great eventual arbiter to whose judgment all creators must yield themselves.