The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State. Vol. 1, “Native Beginnings to 1945.” Edited by Jack Hicks, James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Al Young. U of California P, 2000. 633 pages.

Of the many anthologies of California literature that have appeared over the years, this new collection, the first of a two-volume set, is by far the most comprehensive and ambitious gathering yet, a monumental task of thorough scholarship and skillful editing by four prominent California writers and teachers. A second volume, covering the period since World War II, is now being completed. Published in the year 2000, the 150th anniversary of statehood, Volume 1 chronicles in over 600 pages the rise of California literature from Indian legends, songs, and creation tales to the flowering of fiction and poetry in the early twentieth century. What makes the collection especially useful is not only its far reach (going far beyond all previous anthologies) and its generous coverage of individual writers, but the splendid introductions the editors provide to each of its four sections: “Indian Beginnings,” “One Hundred Years of Exploration and Conquest, 1769-1870,” “The Rise of California Literature, 1865-1914,” and “Dreams and Awakenings, 1915-1945.” Each of these essay-length introductions provides an invaluable framework for the readings that follow, a way of relating writer to writer, work to work, preventing the kind of decontextualization, or fragmentation, that one finds too frequently in anthologies that give us little more than brief biographical notes to each of the writers they cover. Here we do have the biographical notes, but also the splendid integrating introductions.

Readers of Robinson Jeffers should be pleased on three counts with the coverage he gets. First, he is generously represented by seven lyric poems; second, there is ample representation of the writings of those who surrounded him in his years in Carmel-such friends and acquaintances as George Sterling (who wrote the first book on Jeffers in 1926), Hildegarde Flanner, Mary Austin, Jaime de Angulo, Carey McWilliams, and John Steinbeck; and third, the editors in their introduction to Part Four (“Dreams and Awakenings, 1915-1945”) place him prominently in the forefront of both a new regionalism in California (the sense of both being possessed by and possessing the land) and the rise of modernism in Californian and American poetry in these years. “The landscape fed the poet,” they write, “and the poet took such fierce possession of the place itself that one might argue that he still owns it.” They go on: “American poetry came of age in the decade surrounding World War I with the works of Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stev-ens, and e.e. cummings; and Robinson Jeffers joined them as a major figure in the rise of American literary modernism. Almost single-handedly he set California in the national eye. . . . He created the literary region and drew it larger, as myth; and against a background of granite and hawk, winter gales and steelhead, he dramatized remnant families-father and son, brother and sister-in desperate struggle” (393-94).

Jeffers scholars may be disappointed over some minor but persistent inaccuracies in the biographical notes that precede the poems. At the risk of seeming to quibble about minor matters, it seems they should be cited. To begin with, Jeffers graduated from Occidental College at age 18, not 17; it seems less than accurate to say as the essay does that he was born into an educated family: his father was a seminary professor but there is no evidence that his mother was well-educated; on still another point the introduction states that Robinson graduated from medical school, although he ceased his study there after his third year. Finally, it appears misleading to state, as they do, that Jeffers moved to Europe with his parents for his education. True, they put him in various European schools from the 1890s to the opening years of the twentieth century and accompanied him at times especially in mediating the almost yearly changes, but the father returned home each time, the mother remaining from 1899 with their then two sons.

These matters aside, the treatment of Jeffers in the collection-the prominence he receives as California’s premiere poet and the rich context in which he is placed as major regionalist and a force in American modernism-should please Jeffers’s readers. He is the dominant figure in the final section of the volume’s collection. As to his enormous influence on more recent California poets, that will have to wait until the publication of the second volume of this splendid anthology. That should be soon.

© 2005 Jeffers Studies
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