Shining Clarity: God and Man in the Works of Robinson Jeffers by Marian Beilke (review)

182 Western American Literature The Reef Girl. Bv Zane Grev. (New York: Harper &Row, 1977. 209 pages, $8.95.) Donald Perth spends a summer in Tahiti with two purposes in mind: to find a literary theme that will revive his declining career as a writer, and to find a romantic environment that will revive his declining love for his fiancee Winifred. He succeeds in his first goal, but the second goes awry: Winifred succumbs to the advances of a muscle-bound Tahitian, and Donald finds true love in the arms of Faaone, the Reef Girl, a dusky native temptress. Everything one expects from Zane Grey is here, from purple prose (Tahiti is a “sunny isle of gold, set in its azure pearl-reefed sea”) to stirring action scenes (Donald’s murder of Winifred’s lover, and his desperate swim for Faaone’s lagoon are masterpieces) to his familiar comparisons of civilized and primitive life. But The Reef Girl is not typical Zane Grey. In the first place, it is not a Western. Only twice before in his major works (The Day of the Beast and Wilderness Trek) had Grey chosen a setting outside of the American West. In The Reef Girl, the choice is fortunate; although there is too much mere travelogue description, Grey does succeed in evoking both the romance and some of the seamier side of Tahitian life. Another unusual feature is the sexual frankness, which Grey regarded as an essential feature of Tahitian life and does not shrink from portraying. Although Grey has acquired a mistaken reputation for prudishness (both Arizona Ames and Under the Tonto Rim contain premarital pregnancies, for example), The Reef Girl is liable to make even veteran Zane Grey readers blush. Harper’s rejected it in the late 1930s for excessive sex; only now, presumably, have American morals sunk far enough to make such a story palatable. GARY TOPPING, Utah Historical Society Shining Clarity: God and Man in the Works of Robinson Jeffers. By Marian Beilke. (Amador City, California: Quintessence Publications, 1978. 300 pages, $20.00.) This is an extraordinary book, entirely out of the ordinary run of scholarly publications. Physically it is wider than it is tall, designed to accommodate the long lines of poetry without break. It is spaced with many extra-literary materials — from the acryllic painting of Tor House by an Australian artist which serves as frontispiece, through the impression of Jeffers’ profile by the author, and the medallion of Jeffers’ head by a Czechoslovakian sculptor, including many reminiscences and testimonials by other authors and friends, and including some unfamiliar photographs of Reviews 183 Jeffers, ending with a final, unpublished poem by Jeffers, “The Last Conservative.” In between come three long chapters of critical text quoting many of the best short poems to illustrate “the flow of his thought,” and to define his poetic imaginings of “God and Man.” Clearly a book of this kind should not be approached in the ordinary way. Although it is a work of criticism, it is also a labor of love — the creation of an amateur in the best sense of the word, to which academic criticism seems almost supererogatory. By conventional standards it some­ times seems repetitious. The explications which define the concepts of God and Man are sometimes illuminating, and the treatment of Jeffers’ Californians is original; but any attempts to rephrase the poetic images in logical prose serve mostly to shadow the “shining” of the poetry. To me the chief value of this book is personal rather than critical. It speaks in many voices to bear witness to the greatness of Jeffers. And when it attempts to define this greatness it sometimes succeeds more by indirection than by logic. For instance, the painting of Tor House by the Australian artist is much too brown, colored by his memory of a drier land than that washed by the fogs of Carmel, yet this very defect seems to emphasize the universality of the poetry. And the author’s own drawing of Jeffers’ head in profile, which is modeled after a 1937 photograph repro­ duced later in the book, is much too smiling. The face is that of Jeffers, but not the smile. The...