The Item of the Month
Contributed by Peter Quigley
The Carmel group is a fascinating part of Jeffers' life still needing to be looked at in detail. The following excerpt is from:The History of Experimental Music in Northern California at http://www.o-art.org/history/
The artistic circles of San Francisco and the academic communities of Berkeley
and Menlo Park blended in the third of the region's locales of significance
to Cowell's career: the resort area of Monterey and Carmel. Settled first
by writers George Sterling and Mary Austin in 1905, other artists soon arrived
from San Francisco, many escaping the unlivable conditions after the earthquake.
When the art colony became known elsewhere, members of the new literary movement
in other parts of the country began to migrate to Carmel. In 1908 Upton Sinclair
and his group from Helicon Hall in New Jersey arrived. Sinclair Lewis came
in the winter of 1908-9 and William Rose Benet in 1909. The Little Theater
movement was represented by the opening of a pioneer workshop in the Forest
Theater in 1910, and the new poetry movement came to Carmel with the arrival
of Robinson Jeffers in 1914. Van Wyck Brooks came to get married in 1911,
stayed for several months, and continued to visit frequently while teaching
at Stanford. he described what he experienced there:
Carmel was a wildwood with an operatic setting where life itself also seemed
half operatic and where curious dramas were taking place in the bungalows
and cabins, smothered in blossoming vines on the sylvan slope....This Arcadia
lay, one felt, outside the world in which thought evolves and which came to
seem insubstantial in the bland sunny air.