By Theodore Ziolkowski. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 196 pages. $29.95.

Theodore Ziolkowski has extensively explored the conservative cultural re-sponse to modernity and the Great War, and in this new study he takes it down an arresting byway: turriphilia, or the mania for towers. From Babel to the Gothic spire to the modern skyscraper, the tower has been an overdetermined symbol of divine aspiration, secular vaunting, and spiritual withdrawal in Western consciousness. Late Romanticism and Symbolism, especially in Germany, fairly teemed with tower symbolism, and the twentieth century's most famous poetic sequence, Rilke's Duino Elegies, was the product of two profound tower experiences separated by the Great War—his residence in 1911– 1912 at Castle Duino above the Adriatic, and at the Chateau de Muzot in the Valais in 1921–1922. When Ziolkowski discovered that Carl Jung was living in a tower of his own design close by Muzot at Bollingen, his interest was pricked. When this led him in turn to consider Yeats's residence at Thoor Ballylee and Robinson Jeffers's Tor House, he knew he had a theme. As Ziolkowski puts it, "Once is an instance. Twice a coincidence. But three times, for the student of comparative literature, becomes the grounds for comparison" (xii).
Rilke and Yeats found their towers ready-made; Jeffers and Jung both built theirs, slowly and deliberately over a period of years. Rilke was of course famously peripatetic, and for him the tower was ultimately a symbol of transit between higher and lower states of consciousness, the "angelic" and the human. Nonetheless he settled in Muzot for the last years of his life when an admirer purchased the castle—actually a three-story building of medieval provenance—for his permanent use. Yeats first encountered Toor Ballylee on a walking tour in Galway in 1896, saw it often on his visits to Coole, acquired and restored it in 1917, and used it as a retreat during several critical periods beginning in 1919. As with Rilke, tower imagery had long been a feature of his poetry—he described the tower as one of the five principal symbols of his verse in 1921—and his later volumes of poetry, The Tower (1920) and The Winding Stair (1933), used it as subject, springboard, and mise en scene. For Yeats the patriot, the tower was a beacon in Ireland's quest for its "ancestral home," the reconciliation of the Gaelic and the Anglo-Irish heritage that he saw as crucial to its modern identity as a nation; for Yeats the poet, it was the bastion from which space and time alike were held in a single imaginative grasp, and the images coined that reconciled Being and reality, the knower and the known.
Robinson and Una Jeffers's own Irish ancestry, their interest (Una's particularly) in Irish round towers, and their admiration for Yeats, led them naturally to build Hawk Tower, which ultimately (though Ziolkowski does not mention this) incorporated a stone from Thoor Ballylee. As for placing Jeffers in the company of Rilke and Yeats, by common consensus (including, in the case of Yeats, Jeffers's own) the master poets of their tongues in the twentieth century, Ziolkowski makes in one sentence the argument that Jeffers critics, including the present reviewer, have advanced in many pages:
It should be self-evident that I do not share the often mindless denigration of Jeffers by the Marxist critics of the thirties and the New Critics of the forties: I am in sympathy, rather, with such recent poets as Gary Snyder, William Everson, James Tate (in his poem "Failed Tribute to the Stonemason of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers"), and Mark Jarman (in his poetic narrative Iris, 1992) who see in Jeffers, the leading heir of an American tradition extending back to Whitman. (xiii)
A comparative study of Jeffers and Yeats still awaits us, but clearly in their aversion to mass society, their sense of pervasive political and cultural decay, their premonition of violence, and even their interests in the occult, they share many characteristics with each other as well as with the wider climate of cultural conservatism. For both, too, the tower became an emblem of personal refuge in a darkening age, and one which was to recur again and again in Jeffers's verse to the end of his life, though less schematically than in Yeats's. As Ziolkowski notes, the one poem in Jeffers that uses the tower as a structural element rather than a focus of meditation, "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," de-scribes no actual place but rather a state of mind. Whereas Cassandra laments that there is no "tower with foundations" anywhere in the world, Orestes invokes "the tower beyond time," that is, a mode of personal transcendence beyond the compulsive cycles of historical process, as the only refuge from tragedy. Ziolkowski calls Jeffers's attitude "Horatian," a not inapt description though one that undervalues the mystical element in Orestes's rapture. He is quite correct, though, to stress the primacy of Jeffers's attachment to stone as opposed to edifice; no tower would stand, nor, despite the pride he took in the one he actually built, was any worth more than the integrity of its ma-terials.
In Jeffers's later poetry, Hawk Tower did become a symbol of sanctuary in ways that related it to Yeats as well as earlier Romantics, though Jeffers continued to look forward to the (posthumous) day when it would be reabsorbed into the coastal shore from which it had been quarried. Ziolkokski's emphasis on Jeffers's alleged political withdrawal, however, ignores the extent to which he strove to honor the commitment he declared in "Meditation on Saviors" "not to seek refuge . . . in a walled garden" against the shocks of the world (CP 1. 396). If Jeffers eschewed Yeats's political commitment he did not lack for social concern, and perhaps suffered it in ways no partisan could; nor did he indulge in the aristocratic nostalgia of which Yeats's politics on one level consisted and to which, as the career of Eliot showed, American poets could be susceptible too.
Carl Jung might seem an improbable fourth among Rilke, Yeats, and Jeffers, but Ziolkowski makes a compelling case for relating him to his trinity of poets, particularly to Jeffers. It was Bill Everson, of course, who first noticed the link between Jung's thought and Jeffers's, but Ziolkowski makes a much more personal association through their shared experience of tower-building. Both men had a deep and multivalent response to stone; for Jung, it was the sym- bol of transformative understanding (the philosopher's stone). Just as stonemasonry was for many years a part of Jeffers's working day, so Jung in moments of crisis hewed stone. He called the tower complex he began in Bol-lingen in 1923 and continued to decorate and expand until the last years of his life "a confession of faith in stone." Like Jeffers, he came to regard it not only as an extension of himself but as his most personal expression. Jung was, of course, an omnivorous gatherer and synthesizer of symbols, our foremost modern mythomane. On one level, the Bollingen complex was an image of the psyche, growing in response to the needs of Jung's own maturing self; on another, it represented the collective unconscious that each individual psyche manifested and participated in. As for Yeats, the tower connected "self" and "soul," and for Rilke, "angelic" and human states of consciousness, so for Jung, Bollingen was conceived as not merely representing but in some way effecting a higher synthesis of individual and collective consciousness. This led him away from the Platonism of both Yeats and Rilke and toward the Heideggerian notion of habitation, with the sinister overtones that both Dasein and the collective psyche acquired during the Nazi period. Ziolkowski does not pursue this issue, but he does mention Jung's preoccupation with the self-aggrandizing figure of Faust during World War II, which Jung saw as having eclipsed that of Christ in modern civilization. One might note in this context Jeffers's ambition to write in The Women at Point Sur the Faust of his generation as well as his preoccupation with Christ; but this begins to lead us far from towers.
In a final chapter, Ziolkowski explores other Modernist (and anti-Modernist) examples of tower symbolism, and considers its decadence in contemporary Postmodernism and kitsch. Certainly any symbol that has spawned such a parody as the prayer tower at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa is in need, at the very least, of a good rest; but I would point rather to the inverted tower image of the buried monoliths in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 as a last, exhausted grappling with it. Kubrick's dark, featureless panels radiate energy from an unknown source toward an unseen receiver; they stand at the beginning and the end of human experience, meaning everything and nothing. Such a symbol is, finally, only a commentary on the absurdity of symbolism.
Like any good study in thematics, Ziolkowski's essay points in more directions than it can go. He has sketched an important chapter in the intellectual history of the twentieth century; others will find it profitable to explore further the ground he has staked out.
Robert Zaller, on the faculty of History and Politics at Drexel University, Philadelphia, is author of The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers, editor of Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers and The Tributes of His Peers: Elegies for Robinson Jeffers, and a frequent contributor of conference papers and articles on Jeffers.