By Edith Greenan. Edited with introduction and notes by James Karman. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1998. 102 pages. $14.95.
Robinson Jeffers is an enigma for a biographer. To all but intimate family he seems to have spoken only in monosyllables and in isolated, clipped sentences. He left neither autobiography nor autobiographical notes. What little self- revelation there is comes from his poems, a large irony since he reputedly embodies Eliot's ideal of impersonal verse. Though surprisingly warm and sensitive in his letters, there also he avoids personal resonances almost entirely.
By contrast that is legendary, his wife Una was his opposite: voluble, a letter-writer, prolific and outpouring, full of detail. She necessarily is the key to open their life together, and thus this slim volume's importance, written as it was in 1938 from thirty-year reminiscences focused on Una and bolstered by interviews with her. Jeffers was private to an extreme, an isolate with a family. Besides being protective, supporting, and enabling of his art, Una was controlling; she was the guardian of a national treasure, the willing and indispensable creator of his social life. Tor House was built by Jeffers; its life was Una Jef- fers's creation. The memoirist of Of Una Jeffers is Una's first husband's second wife, Edith Emmons Kuster Greenan, who was invited into the Jefferses' home as a close and adoring friend—as she likes to say as a daughter or younger sister. Una took on an extraordinary place in Edith Greenan's life as ideal woman, wise mentor, idolized older friend. Introduced to Una before the Kuster and Jeffers marriages, she followed Una and Robinson early to Carmel, was hostess to them in La Jolla and through later years in Los Angeles, and returned from the Philippines in the mid-thirties to live on adjacent property.
James Karman provides a carefully written 10-page introduction to the memoir, attempting to sort out fact from impression, or rather to point out both the value of this book, yet its precariousness as biography. Jacques Derrida has taught readers how much every text can be "deconstructed"—word choice, structure of phrases, sentence rhetoric, and simple or complex statement—to be read differently on various levels and to be at cross-purposes with the writer's intent. Of Una Jeffers is an extraordinary example of this textual ambiguity. Some undertones the editor examines; others he lets lie, perhaps judiciously. Edith Greenan's life is biographically intermeshed with the household about which she writes. Confessing her life-debt to Una, she cherishes their constant reconnections. The narrative reads well, though intoned in an ever non-critical, romantic, and idolizing mode. The author provides hard-come-by and colorful details—as of Una in mad temper tearing up late-arriving letters from Jeffers's old loves, of the five-gallon demi-john regularly refilled with Angelica wine from a local wine cellar, of Una's face "masks-in-repose" of sadness and sometimes terror, of Una driving around Carmel and Monterey in a rent-a-surrey from Gould's livery stables on Main Street, of Una's deep love of Carmel and of Point Lobos with all its cabbalistic tales, of Una's menus (oatmeal and coffee breakfasts, bread and cheese lunches, salmon or sea bass dinners sometimes right from fisherman's wharf nets), of Jeffers racing the dunes with housedog Haig, of Una's perennial sewing of shirts, children's clothes, and moccasins, of what she identifies as a Ku Klux Klan fiery-cross meeting at the mysterious stone "altar" that marked the Jeffers north boundary, of Tor House books "piled up on top of everything—everywhere on benches, on window sills, on new shelves reaching to the ceiling."
Karman notes the significance of the memoir in light of its coincidence with the near-tragedy at Taos in which Una Jeffers attempted suicide. In the real-life recovery time of 1938 and 1939, the memories revisited must have had a healing effect—as testified by Jeffers's brief prefatory note—bringing them to recall their beginnings, their love and common fate, and what Jeffers describes as his "undeserved good fortune." The book is a reprint with a difference. The text is identical with that of the original edition but is followed in endnote fashion by 24 pages of excerpts of work-in-progress passages which Edith excised from the final manuscript, some of which are illuminating. There are generous photos and illustrations, increased from five to 23. And the editor provides a four-page double-column index. The memoir's value is in that it joins Mabel Dodge Luhan's Una and Robin as a rare eyewitness insight into the Jefferses' lives, auxiliary to the larger work of Melba Bennett's Robinson Jeffers: Stone Mason of Tor House and, of course, James Karman's own, excellent Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California, which in turn look to a more definitive biography.

© 2005 Jeffers Studies
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