Volume 3, Number 4

Frederick Mortimer Clapps "Figures in a Coast Range Dance of Death (For R.J.)":

The Evolution of a Poetic Tribute

Kathleen Mackin

Lawrence Clark Powell opened his seminal study of Robinson Jeffers with the image of Tor House and Hawk Tower; Melba Berry Bennett entitled her biography of Robinson Jeffers The Stone-Mason of Tor House. Other writers follow James Karman, who begins with the significance of California in Jeffers work in his critical biography, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California. Few critics can entirely disengage their examination of the poetry from a consideration of the setting in which it was produced. In 1936-7, this relationship between the Carmel landscape, bearing the distinctive product of Jeffers stonemasonry skills, and Jeffers poetic accomplishments provided the inspiration for a complex, meditative poem written by his friend Frederick Mortimer "Tim" Clapp. Entitled "Figures in a Coast-Range Dance of Death (For R.J.)," this poem was included in Clapps 1938 collection Said Before Sunset. At a memorial service for Jeffers in November of 1962, Lawrence Clark Powell quoted from the poem (given here in its entirety):

Thrown up against the mountains and the clouds

by your eyes light

they sway like shadowy giants

wrestling with death and passion on an ages precipice;

they quiver with pain

become one with wrenching spasms in the headlands

and, through their self-imprisoning trance,

hear, under the grinding

slow scouring-away of the shore by the tides,

the impotent surge and suck-back of their fate.

Change cannot reach them in their separateness

whose kinship is with eagles and the sun

benign inbreeder of their agony.

And, when the granite tower your hands have made

lies splintered,

they still will press their eyes against the windows of mens minds,

phantoms, but firmer than the subsiding hills

that jolt into the mutter of the rising sea.

The poem is representative of Clapps spare, hard style which is always at once imagistic and abstract. The honorary dedication "For R.J." and the reference to the "granite tower" point to the poems source of inspiration. However, a richer understanding of the poems referents and the relationship between the two stanzas is greatly facilitated by a consideration of the twenty existing manuscripts which document the poems development. These drafts enable us to appreciate more fully the artistic vision that first prompted that symbolic linking of Jeffers majestic tower with the equally somber majesty of his verse, and the artistry which resulted in a poetic tribute constructed as carefully as was Jeffers tower. Further, as it reflects Clapps painstaking writing process and his demanding and precise use of language to capture an intellectually experienced material world, "Figures in a Coast-Range Dance of Death" is a fitting introduction to the work of this gifted, though neglected, poet.

At the time of the poems composition, Clapp had known Jeffers for over twenty years. In fact, Robinson and Una Jeffers were perhaps indebted to Clapp for their arrival in Carmel. In his unpublished autobiography "The Lamellated Shell," Clapp writes,

Clapp himself had first arrived in California as a lecturer on Russian novelists and British literature for the University of California Extension program; he met Una Call Kuster through a mutual friend. A native of New York City, Clapp was widely travelled and was educated at Yale and the Sorbonne. 1916 saw the publication of both his first book of poetry, On the Overland and Other Poems, and his thesis on a then little-known Italian Renaissance painter, Jacopo da Pontormo: His Life and Works, by the Yale University Press. Although he published seven additional volumes of verse, Clapps vocation remained that of art historian and museum curator. He retired as director of the Frick Collection in 1950, an association that had just begun in 1936, while Clapp was chairman of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Indeed, it is on the back of an envelope addressed to him in Carmel, bearing the letterhead of the Frick Collection as a return address, and postmarked April 9, 1936, that Clapp wrote the twenty-line fragment which was the genesis of "Figures in a Coast-Range Dance of Death." Its opening line, revised three times in this draft alone, reveals his initial preoccupation with the materiality of Hawk Tower: "Stones <rolled> pounded <to roundness> and rounded by the lunge + broken stumbling of the tide by <the> high tides." The poem operates as an apostrophe to the stones and Jeffers is cast in the third person: "He has placed you each by each and one over another for a tower. . . He did this that his hands and eyes might know / permanence as that prison of the gods." Clapp then immediately introduces Jeffers poetry as a counterpoint to Hawk Tower: "Then with his mind and <his> inner sufferings power / He made unseen another monument / Of <harder>sounds that mocked the seas / for majesty." Three lines later the poem trails off, incomplete, a few pencilled notations reflecting Clapps uncertainty about where the poem was going.

With the exception of its obvious subject matter, this draft bears little resemblance to the published poem. As it underwent numerous changes in the composition process, several dominant movements emerged. In the first, Clapp developed his portrayal of Jeffers building of the tower in great detail, a process involving several drafts which clearly influenced the final imagery of the poem, although he ultimately completely excised the resulting description. Meanwhile, he began to elaborate on an intricate motif of "eyes" and "visions." These images become central to his depiction of Jeffers fatalistic narrative poems and his resolution of the seeming disparity between the content of Jeffers poems and their transcendent quality.

In the five drafts which follow the first, some written in pencil and others in ink with pencilled corrections on notebook paper, Clapp continues to develop the imagery of the tower. The opening lines variously speculate on the concreteness and source of the stones, as in, for example:

This imagery combines with that of the actual erection of the tower:

In the third draft, the image of permanence as a "prison of the gods" gives way to a more positive description: "He did this that his hands and eyes might know / the dense deep iron roots / <how> of permanence <is <a> the prison of the gods>." (3)

Having insisted on the material strength of the tower, Clapp then subverts the description by introducing a hierarchical relationship between the tower and the poetry. Altering the description of the poetry from an "unseen monument" to "an unseen house / of sounds / and thoughts," Clapp then characterizes Hawk Tower as "his lesser monument" in the closing line of the poem. This use of "monument" may not be entirely incidental; in the conclusion to his study, Powell writes, "Robinson Jeffers has builded several monuments that will carry his name on I do not know how many centuries" (209). His book had been published in 1934. Clearly both commentators on Jeffers were captivated by these symbols of permanence and immortality.

The final significant change in this selection of drafts is the shift in address. In the first four drafts, the stones are addressed in the second person and Jeffers is addressed in the third. Draft 5 abandons the apostrophe: "He took these grey stones from the beach." And in Draft 6 occurs the first direct address to Jeffers: "You took them from the thin-lipped whispering of the beach and laid them / one above another. . ."

These alterations are consolidated in the next draft in the sequence (7), the only existing typescript with the exception of a page proof of the published version of the poem. At the top of the page Clapp offers an interim self-assessment, indicating in pencil, "Best so far Dec/36." It is also the first draft to bear a title, "<The> Hawks Tower and <the> Tower Beyond Tragedy." There are four stanzas: a description of the stones and the building of the tower; a short meditation on permanence; the reference to the poetry, now described as "another stronghold against time" rather than as a "house"; and the vision of the "eyes of terror and pity." Both the title, with its references to Jeffers tower and his narrative verse drama, and the stanzaic breaks reflect Clapps conceptualization of the poem as a dramatic juxtaposition of two terms.

The privileging of the poetry is clear, but in the final stanza Clapp draws on conventional readings of poetry as being the result of the poets vision and explores the conceit of poetry as having vision. The evolution of this passage suggests that Clapp is speaking about something more than, or other than, Jeffers himself having poetic vision. In the earliest versions of the poem, the "house of sounds and thoughts" was the creation of Jeffers "mind and an inner sufferings strength" (1-4), while the tower is meant to satisfy the need of his "hands and eyes" for permanence. Draft 6, with its change in address, includes an important transition (slightly altered, these lines form stanzas two and three of Draft 7):

You laid them one upon another, upward from the living rock,

that your hands and eyes might know

the dense, deep, iron roots of permanence;

And you<r mind> grown quiet as these stones, you turned your grey eyes

on life, the pain of life, the hard grey face of death;

And, with that vision living in them, made

Yourself another stronghold against time -

A house of sea-like sounds and sea-deep thoughts.

Here, then, Jeffers himself is figured as being both of or associated with the same substance as the tower (grey stones) and as being the source of the poetry. The ambiguity of the source of the vision itself, however, lies in Clapps choice of pronouns in the subsequent passage. From an insistent "you," "you," "your," and "yourself" in the above lines we find that indeterminate "eyes" are gazing from "its" windows upon "your" tower:

In a pencilled draft pinned to the typescript (#8) we find Clapps revisions of this section, confirming the shift. The eyes are now attributed to "the creatures of your mind," which are "Phantasmal on a foundering continent"; although the "creatures" are of Jeffers making, the eyes are no longer his and thus their vision cannot be attributed directly to him. The fatalistic vision remains, in a phrase describing the tides which survives to the final version, "the impotent surge and suck-back of their fate." In conjunction with this image emerges the first recognizable version of the second stanza of the published poem, "Change cannot touch them in their separateness / Whose kinship is with eagles and the <stars> sun." In this context, "they" are clearly "the creatures of your mind." The phrase echoes Jeffers own description of the characters of his narrative poems in the "Foreword" to Powells book, "the persons of his imagination" (xvi). However, subsequent changes in the poem make this referent for "they" indeterminate.

&Clapps incorporation of these revisions and additions into the existing poem marks a decided shift in intention and emphasis and perhaps even prompts the dramatic cuts which follow. But first Clapp wrote out a clean copy of the poem to that point, six stanzas long (9), still bearing the title "Hawks Tower and Tower beyond Tragedy: For Robinson Jeffers." He marks eight lines to be cut (including the meditation on permanence) and copies out the poem again (#11), this time with no title but rather bearing the notation "Condensed form Dec 26/36." This is a crucial draft.

Granite slabs from the floors of earlier oceans

toughened by the crashing of seas that gnawed

these shores before a cypress writhed from its rocks --

round grey stones rolled and ground in the sands of the ebb

of dying age after dying age

you took them from the thin-lipped whispering of the beach

to make a tower that will stand

as long as the grey sea seethes foaming

against this fog-chill land.

Then you grown quiet as these stones you turned your eyes (10)

on life, the power of life, the stone-grey face of death

and with that visions embers in them made

yourself another stronghold against time.

Out of its windows gaze the creatures of your mind.

Phantasmal on a foundering continent

they listen with glazed eyes to the grinding

slow scouring away of the shore by the tides

in their mouths is the crawling dark hiss of the tides

the impotent surge and suck-back of their fate.

Change cannot reach them in their separateness (20)

whose kinship is with eagles and the sun

benign inbreeder of their agony;

And when your granite tower when it <will> lies splintered <lies> they still will press

glazed eyes against their windows

gazing at the debris of other shores

mere phantoms still <but> yet still unshaken even at finding

another age begun.

The body of the poem is written in ink; in pencil Clapp has bracketed lines 1 - 3, 4 - 9, and 10 - 13, then diagonally slashed the three sections, effectively eliminating all reference to the stones, the building of the tower, and the depiction of poetry as "another stronghold against time," with its accompanying reference to Jeffers eyes. He also brackets the next line, "Out of its windows gaze the creatures of your mind" (in pencil) and its successor, "Phantasmal on a foundering continent" (in blue pencil). In the margin are pencilled notations which contain the elements which will come to comprise the opening stanza of the poem: "<Projected> Thrown up against the mountains & the clouds/ by your eyes light / Phantoms still wrestle on <a> lives precipice."

In fact, all the remaining drafts begin with the line "Thrown up against the mountains and the clouds / by your eyes light." Clearly, Clapp had arrived at the opening he sought. But the question for his readers remains: to whom (or what) does the "they" of the published poem refer in this instance? Has Clapp returned to the notion of the "lesser monument" and recast the seemingly permanent Tor House and Hawk Tower as "Phantoms" which "wrestle on <a> lives precipice" and are doomed to the inevitable encroachment of the tides? A later version, dated January 3, 1937, which still bears the title "Hawk Tower and Tower Beyond Tragedy" suggests that that comparison was still operating in Clapps vision of the poem. Or, perhaps Clapp had abandoned his original project of commenting on the transience of the seemingly permanent tower and decided to begin by conjuring the "creatures of your mind," that is, the characters and personae of Jeffers narrative poems. In this case, the later appearance of the original title appears to be more an artifact than a comment on the content of the poem at that point. In addition, the simple phrase "by your eyes light," with its echoing of the earlier relationship between Jeffers eyes and his minds creations, strengthens this reading.

Quite possibly the poem succeeds specifically because of this ambiguity. Abstracted and anthropomorphized, the buildings, which while "wrestling with death and passion on an ages precipice" remain rooted in "their self-imprisoning trance," symbolize Jeffers material achievements and the philosophy of Inhumanism which avows an eternal universe even as it removes man from any particular significance within that universe. However, Clapps insistence on images of vision and seeing places particular importance, even in its ultimate absence, on the "creatures of your mind," a phrase which cannot be attributed to the material constructions. The initial portrayal of these creatures as "phantasmal" (8) probably suggested the "phantoms" which initially "still wrestle" (in the pencilled sidebar of Draft 11). But Clapp had already used the attribution of "phantoms" to describe the possessor of the eyes of the second part of the poem which were transcendent enough to witness the disappearance of the "lesser monument" (9). So, although "phantoms" is faithfully transcribed into Draft 12, it is there excised, replaced in Draft 13 with "they sway like shadowy giants," resulting in the first version of the poem which provides no clear or limiting referent for the subject of the first stanza.

We return now to the emergence in Draft 8 of a recognizable second stanza. Previously, the poem has ended with Clapps reference to Jeffers as "eyes of terror and pity" which "watch the slow scouring away of the shore by the tides / and, <seeing it,> know / how your unshakable, sea-scanning granite tower is / your lesser monument" (7). This incident becomes transformed to "when your granite tower <has crumpled> <crumbled> is dust." Written of any other poet, the concept is trite; written of Jeffers, it is a necessary meditation. As Karman notes in the conclusion to his biography, Jeffers himself had reflected on the inevitable ruin of his handiwork in "Post Mortem" and in "Tor House" (147). In the latter poem he writes, "My ghost you neednt look for; it is probably / Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite" (CP 1: 408).

However, for all his concern with images of "phantoms," Clapps attention was not with Jeffers spirit but with the poetrys legacy. A number of illegible, crossed out lines on the manuscript reflect Clapps struggles to rework the section. At the bottom of the page we can read the phrase "yet still unshaken at finding / another age begun." Clapp retains this phrase for several drafts, meanwhile reworking the middle portion of the stanza. Although the "eyes of terror and pity" have become subsumed by some indeterminate presence identified as "they," (and, as previously noted, associated with the "creatures of your mind") the faculty of sight remains important. Draft 8 reflects Clapps uncertainty as to how to express the result:

And, when your granite tower is dust they still will press

for their eyes to see

glazed 9; 9; unseen

dark faces eyes against the windows

^your

Draft 9 is scarcely clearer:

and, when your granite tower lies splintered, stones, they still will press

for other eyes to see,

glazed eyes against their windows

Something approaching the final version first appears in Draft 12: "they still will press <their> glazed eyes against the windows of mens minds." The ambiguous "glazed" is cut in Draft 13, and other minor adjustments are made in Drafts 14 and 15, dated January 3 and 4, 1937. The result is a reintroduction of the notion of permanence previously eliminated; despite the "splintered" state of the tower, here exists something lasting: paradoxically, yet appropriately, "phantoms."

Yet Clapps dissatisfaction with the closing image of his poem becomes apparent on Draft 16. Originally a clean copy written in ink, geometric pencilled doodlings litter the margins. Clapp altered the final two lines of the poem several times, and below the stanza he listed columns of what are apparently rejected options, many so darkly scratched out as to be illegible. As early as Draft 12 Clapp had circled his description of the "phantoms" of the second stanza, "but still unshaken even at finding / another age begun" and, in the margin, had substituted "but <older> firmer than the <rocks> hills / <and still unshaken <unaffected>as> or the tide bound muttering sea." By Draft 13 this had evolved to the cleaner "but firmer than the subsiding hills / more elemental than the mutter of the rising sea."

However, clearly the image of the sea in this context detracted from the power attributed to it in stanza one. On the notebook page facing Draft 16, Clapp tried again, and among his three attempts finally arrived at one that worked; it appears in the published version only slightly altered: "firmer than the subsiding hills / that jolt + creak into the mutter of the rising sea." He apparently found the effort worthwhile; in a 1962 letter to Leland Roloff, who had requested a copy of the poem, Clapp wrote, "I appreciate the opportunity, for Robin liked it very much, particularly the closing line. So did Una."

For all intents and purposes, the poem was finished. But Draft 16 reflects Clapps final struggle: how to title the poem? Three possibilities appear at the top of the page:

Robins Coast-Range Anima

------------------------------------ <= Totentanz on the Coast Range

Symbols of Destiny

For RJ

The left hand side is scrawled out, and on Draft 18 appears

a Dance of Death

Figures in Your Coast-Range Totentanz Dance of Death Totentanz

The manuscripts provide no further clues as to the origins of the title. "Robins Coast-Range Anima" evokes Jeffers own "persons of his imagination," particularly in its echo of Jeffers "The Coast-Range Christ," one of his earliest narratives of the Carmel coast. At the same time, "Symbols of Destiny" may identify Tor House and Hawk Tower, representative of Jeffers "inevitable place." Both characters and buildings are captured in "Figures." By uniting them in a Dance of Death, Clapp acknowledges a theme which plays throughout the works of both men. For this poem in particular, reference to Jeffers belief that in death mans constitutive elements returned to their inhuman source helps to frame the scope of the discussion.

Whereas the first stanza captures the tragic, doomed struggles of man and woman as portrayed in Jeffers poetry, in this second stanza Clapp details the transcendent vision of the poetry itself. As were few other poets of the time, Clapp and Jeffers were alike in seeking answers to ontological questions not in the fashionable humanism of their day but by locating man somewhere outside the center of an impersonal, indeed incomprehensible, universe. For Clapp, that incomprehensibility would dominate his poetry. However, in celebrating Jeffers art, and by privileging not its content, with its depiction of transitory human emotion and life, but its own immutability in the face of mans transience, Clapps "Figures in a Coast-Range Dance of Death" points not to pessimism or misanthropy (characteristics with which both poets were charged) but rather to a deep-seated faith in the mediatory power of art.

Jeffers received Clapps tribute gracefully, if modestly. Responding to Clapps volume Said Before Sunset, he wrote, "And of course the Coast-range Death-dance, . . . is very beautiful poetry besides the friendship." He continued, "Press their eyes against the windows of mens minds is so fine that I wish you had been speaking of Shakespeare" (Letters 267-8). Yet it is possible that Jeffers occupied a higher place than the Bard in his friends personal and critical estimation.

Works Cited

Bennett, Melba Berry. The Stone Mason of Tor House. N.p.: Ward Ritchie P, 1966.

Clapp, Frederick Mortimer. "The Lamellated Shell." Unpublished manuscript. Za Clapp. Box 39. Beinecke Library, Yale U, New Haven.

_____. Letter to Leland H. Roloff. Za Clapp. Correspondence. Beinecke Library, Yale U, New Haven.

_____. Said Before Sunset. New York: Harper, 1938.

_____. Foreword. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. By Lawrence Clark Powell. Los Angeles: Primavera P, 1934. New York: Haskell, 1970.

_____. The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Ann N. Ridgeway. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins P, 1969.

Karman, James. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California. Brownsville, OR: Story Line P, 1995.

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. Los Angeles: Primavera P, 1934. New York: Haskell, 1970.

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