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Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s
“Strange Hunting”

Terry Beers
Volume 3, Nr 3a

1. In 1940, Walter Van Tilburg Clark published his best-known work, a slim novel called The Ox-Bow Incident. Set in Nevada cattle country, the novel tells of tragic consequences when normally law-abiding men let frustration, anger, and blindness unite them into a revengeful lynch mob led by a charismatic, morally-flawed ex-soldier. The book earned for Clark lasting recognition as the author who had reinvigorated the western novel. Yet for many readers, good as it is, The Ox-Bow Incident is not the most notable of Clark’s three published novels. That distinction, says William Everson, belongs to the 1949 work, The Track of the Cat, a book in which Clark manages “the real reduction of [Robinson] Jeffers’s narrative verse to prose fiction” (102).

2. Although Clark worked on several other projects before his death in 1973, The Track of the Cat would be his last published novel. In it, he tells the story of the isolated Bridges family, whose Nevada ranch falls in the shadow cast by the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. During a winter storm, a mountain lion raids the Bridges’ livestock, a predator familiar to Joe Sam, an aging Paiute man long haunted by dreams of a malevolent “black painter” (23–24) and to the second son, Arthur, who also feels a panther’s mysterious presence in his own dreams (3–5). The conflict thus set, the story works to conclusion as three brothers stalk in turn a real-life threat and two of them fall prey to some mysterious, vital, natural force drawing power from something elemental and wholly inhuman. What Everson no doubt responded to is Clark’s unsentimental depiction of the failure of human beings to recognize that elemental force, akin, perhaps, to what Jeffers once called the world’s God who “is treacherous and full of unreason; a torturer but also / The only foundation and the only fountain” (CP 1.371).

3. That Everson finds Jeffers in Clark is not surprising. In 1934 Clark completed a University of Vermont Masters Thesis on Robinson Jeffers, a project he worked on after he had met the California poet at Tor House during the summer of 1932. During the time he was completing this scholarly work, Clark was also working on another project—a narrative poem in long lines that eventually filled almost sixteen pages of typescript. He called the poem “Strange Hunting,” and though he did not publish it during his lifetime, he turned to it for material appearing in the third and final section of The Track of the Cat. The poem’s long lines, the spare character descriptions, and the mythic, arche- typal cast of plot seem wholly in sympathy with Jeffers’s own narrative works; however, readers should also acknowledge that Jeffers’s influence is not ab-solute. Max Westbrook says that “Clark came to Jeffers as one comes in an unexpected place to a sudden friend. There may have been more recognition than influence” (31). Still, “Strange Hunting” clearly shows Clark’s respect for Robinson Jeffers, how he was working out of similarly held attitudes, some of which appear in Clark’s Masters Thesis.

4. In his thesis, Clark offers a good overview of Jeffers’s poetry up to Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Other Poems, the most recent volume Clark had available at the time. He finds similarities between Jeffers and Wordsworth; he distills Jeffers’s philosophy from the poetry; and he explores the influence of Swinburne and the Greeks upon Jeffers’s poems. According to Westbrook, however, Clark’s affinity for Jeffers is most clearly expressed when in his thesis he describes the values one should find in Jeffers’s poetry. These include a recognition of an “inherent force” or a “scientific pantheism.” Clark also be-lieved that “. . . Jeffers must not be conceived as going beyond this conception of God to any belief in mystic unity of the individual with the central source, any unity, that is, beyond like physical basis. Death is death, with Jeffers, and the personality is disintegrated, though the physical components continue to exist” (qtd. in Westbrook 31). And so Clark’s thesis can be read as an appreciation of Jeffers’s literary values as they are derived from a personal experience of natural landscape, as a testimony to a shared belief that human beings need to see themselves as integral to the physical natural world—not apart from it.

5. Most memorable in the work, though, is not so much the academic analysis as are the descriptions that Clark offers of Jeffers and the central Californian coast, as if the sensibilities of the artist were eclipsing the analytical perspective of a scholar. Of Jeffers he writes:

He is a tall man, broad-shouldered, proportioned for power, and spare of flesh. His hands are large, well shaped, hardened with working earth, and his face avoids handsomeness only in favor of strangely contained masculine strength and intensity. His hair is dark and course and thin over the crown of his head, flared back in brief white wings at the temples. His gray, almost emotionless eyes, examine one with grave directions from within their deep setting. His bodily movements are so slow and even as to pass almost unnoticed, the movements of a man accustomed to watching birds and animals for hours at a time without startling even their tense alertness. He speaks little, and that little in a very low and almost uninflected voice, though each word is exactly enunciated. A sense of great will and considered restraint dominates his presence. (2)

6. Clark’s description of the central coast is just as memorable, transcending the academic tone that often marks the work of apprentice scholars:

That same summer also gave me a chance to know the scenes of Jeffers’ poetry, the California coast from Monterey to the south end of the Coast Range, a gigantic and still unhumanized beauty of pine woods, sand dunes, granite cliffs rooted with wind-bent Monterey cypress, offshore islands of stone where the seals and sealions sound in the fog or the white sunlight, and the gulls and cormorants eddy with sharp crying. The Coast Hills themselves go up bare and beautiful from the Pacific, sombre under cloud-run, shining in the sun, their deep gorges and back-canyons filled with strong green growth, and the shoreline constantly shot with spray where the great rollers ride in. (2)

7. Obviously the flesh and blood figure of Jeffers and the beauty of the landscape hit Clark’s imagination even harder than did Jeffers’s Inhumanist philosophy.

8. This early regard for Jeffers never left Clark, and he continued to think about Jeffers’s poetry throughout his life. In a 1968 film interview, Clark described Jeffers’s work as a vision “of oneness, but what concerned [Jeffers] most,” said Clark, “was to be himself a proper part of that oneness, to be able not only to envision it but to feel it.” Clark saw Jeffers’s poems aiming at Aristotelian catharsis, a literary project that he valued and respected (Film Interview). But given his belief that “old truths take on new strength and meaning in changed circumstances when they have been rediscovered honestly and expensively out of one’s own experience” (“Credo” xi), Clark could feel free to share many of Jeffers’s themes while finding his own mode of expression and drawing upon his own experience of the natural world. Clark was too imaginative an artist to adopt whole cloth someone else’s perspective, no matter how much sympathy he felt for it, a point that critics—notably Ann Ronald, Gerald Haslam, Susan Baker, and Westbrook—have clearly established.1 Yet despite the differences—some of them already apparent in “Strange Hunting”—the similarities are worth remembering, especially for readers of Robinson Jeffers, accustomed to hearing all too often the tired and untrue tale of Jeffers’s lack of reach.

9. Despite the importance of “Strange Hunting” as material for The Track of the Cat, not much has been written about the poem other than to note its relation to the novel. Perhaps the best commentary is offered by Robert Morse Clark, in a preface to a posthumous edition published in 1985. There, Robert Clark discusses his father’s use of the mountain lion in other early poems that “seem a more willful effort to appropriate Jeffers than does ‘Strange Hunting’” (viii). Robert Clark also points to an additional literary resource for the poem, two stories by Ambrose Bierce, “The Boarded Window” and “The Eyes of the Panther,” concluding that “Bierce’s panther has many of the attributes, as well as the effects, of the black cat in ‘Strange Hunting.’ In both works it is the shining eyes that are the most malevolent and hypnotic aspect of the creature” (x). Though he doesn’t develop the point fully, Robert Clark still finds “Jeffers behind the irregularity of the unrhymed lines, the imitations of Anglo-Saxon alliteration, the austere imagery, the humorless intensity, and even in the attitude of the poet, prophetic, tough-minded, and unshrinking in the face of cosmic bleakness” (viii).

10. For his part, Jeffers himself was apparently drawn to the work of the younger artist. In a letter to Raymond J. Pflug, whose main business seemed to be granting a request for permission to quote from Jeffers’s letters to George Sterling, Jeffers mentions Clark approvingly:

Walter Clark’s work interests me. I didn’t know about his thesis at Vermont. I met somebody a few days ago who said Clark’s latest book was not good—“He can write stories about animals, not about human beings.” I said, “The Ox-Bow Incident”?

11.. The book referred to in the letter was probably the collection The Watchful Gods and Other Stories, which had appeared in 1950 and presented together Clark’s finest short fiction, including the 1940 short story “Hook,” told from the point of view of a red tail hawk living in the Santa Lucia Range above the Central Coast. Jeffers must have seen that Clark—through his particular use of Jeffers’s landscape and totem bird—had paid him a remarkable literary complement.2 Though the two writers never met after Clark’s 1932 visit to Tor House, their regard was apparently mutual. We can only speculate what Robinson Jeffers might have thought had he the opportunity to read “Strange Hunting.”

ENDNOTES

1 . See especially Baker, who writes “that in reading Clark’s poetry one is less interested in looking backward to influence on it than in looking ahead to its role in his development as a writer of fiction” (127). While it would seem that Clark’s interpreters have hashed out for their purposes the relative importance of Jeffers’s influence, the fact of that influence remains important for assessing Jeffers’s true place within American letters.

2 See Henry Nuwer’s analysis of “Hook,” which notes most of the symbolic resonances between the short story and Jeffers’s work, but does not develop fully the thematic implications that they present.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Susan. “The Poetry of Walter Clark.” Laird. 126–46.

Clark, Robert Morse. Foreword. “Strange Hunting,” by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Reno: U of Nevada Reno Library, 1985.

Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. “Credo.” Laird. xi–xiii.

_____. Film interview. “Give Your Heart to the Hawks: Conversations with Dame Judith Anderson and Walter Van Tilburg Clark.” 1967.

_____. “Strange Hunting.” Unpublished typescript. Special Collections, University of Nevada, Reno. NC527/1/21/1. 16 pp. 1934.

_____. “A Study in Robinson Jeffers.” MA thesis. U of Vermont. 1934.

_____. The Track of the Cat. New York: Random House, 1949.

_____. The Watchful Gods and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1950.

Everson, William. Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as Literary Region. Berkeley: Oyez, 1976.

Haslam, Gerald. “Predators in Literature.” Western American Literature 12 (1977): 123–31.

Jeffers, Robinson. “Birth-Dues.” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 16–17.

_____. “To Raymond J. Pflug.” [195?] The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Ann N. Ridgeway. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1968. 347.

Laird, Charlton, ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1983.

Nuwer, Henry. “Jeffers’ Influence Upon Walter Van Tilburg Clark.” Robinson Jeffers Newsletter 44 (1976): 11–17.

Ronald, Ann. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Brave Bird, ‘Hook.’” Studies in Short Fiction 25:4 (1988): 433–39.

Westbrook, Max. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. New York: Twayne, 1969.

Terry Beers, author of “. . . a thousand graceful subtleties”: Rhetoric in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1995), has been co-editor of Jeffers Studies since its inception.