This only confirmed my suspicions that the man was obsessive and unpredictable if not outright stubborn.
Who was this guy? He had rolled boulders, some weighing as much as 400 pounds, several hundred yards uphill, through coastal scrub, and then had set each one by hand - alone. The story about the tower was as provocative and unsettling as the deathbed poem. Once the house was finished, Jeffers spent nearly four years building a forty-foot-high tower on the property, hauling boulders from a nearby beach and hoisting them into place by himself using only a block and tackle.
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He apprenticed himself to the builder so he could learn how to set stone himself. The article recounted how Jeffers had purchased an uninhabited plot of land on Carmel Point and had hired a stone mason to build a house for him. I knew the house was in Carmel but knew little of its history. Several days before I found myself standing in Jeffers’ bedroom, and nearly a year after I had bought the anthology, I was staying in Big Sur and came across an article in a local magazine about the building of Tor House, Jeffers’ home. For some unexplained reason, I felt compelled to buy the book, though it wasn’t long before it was abandoned on a bookshelf and I had put Jeffers out of my mind.
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If Whitman was a Telemann concerto, full of trumpets and bright brass celebrating the world, it seemed to me that Jeffers was a melancholy cello solo played mournfully in a dim, candlelit room. The ruggedness of the language, the starkness of the imagery - Jeffers prowled like a lone wolf or, more accurately, a rangy coyote skirting the edge of civilization: hungry, suspicious, and angry. Still, meditating on death in a poem was one thing anticipating a lingering death in the distant future while still a young man, and building a room in which to die, was quite another.Īs I read through several more poems, the voice, at times, seemed almost feral. With neither dislike or desire rather with both, The bed seemed to be a fetish of sorts for him as he worked through his feelings about his own mortality.
It wasn’t as though Jeffers had used death in a gratuitous manner it wasn’t a cheap, dramatic device. More than eerie - it was downright creepy. I picked up the book and, by chance, opened it to “The Bed by the Window.” It was an eerie poem. There was often some degree of awe or reverence ascribed to these occasions, but very little mentioned about the man himself. Noted authors and bohemian celebrities were always dropping in on Jeffers when passing through Carmel.
I knew little about the man but kept bumping into him in other writers’ work.
I had first read the poem while browsing a Jeffers anthology in a bookstore, a volume entitled The Wild God of the World. Many years later, he had indeed died in the room, thereby fulfilling its destiny.
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Robinson Jeffers, 1937 By Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia CommonsA chill rippled across my skin as I realized that we were standing in that very room and the bed before me was the subject of the poem - the death-bed in “The Bed by the Window.” Robinson Jeffers had written the poem as a young man shortly after building the house.
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