Jeanne D’Orge, Carmel, and Point Lobos

B E R T A L M O N University ofAlberta Jeanne D’Orge, Carmel, andPoint Lobos The small town of Carmel-by-the-Sea has a rich and complicated cultural history. The modern community was the work of Frank Powers and James Devendorf, who began development in 1905, as Harold and Ann Gilliam explain in their popular history, Creating Carmel The early days, when George Sterling and Mary Austin dominated cultural life, have been chronicled by Franklin Walker in The Sea Coast ofBohemia. By 1915, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Atherton and Van Wyck Brooks had lived in Carmel, and the painters included William Merritt Chase and John Cunningham. The major creative figures in the later history of the town were undoubtedly a poet and a photographer: Robinson Jeffers and Edward Weston. Their friend, Jeanne D’Orge (1879-1964), is a familiar figure in Carmel and the Monterey Peninsula but is little known outside it, though her friend François Martin liked to call her “ancient and honorable citizen of Carmel in the tradition of Weston, Jeffers and Austin.” She was a pioneering modernist poet, an extraordinary painter, and a phenomenally generous patron of the arts. Only one ofher books is in print, Lobos, a chapbook of 1927 reprinted in facsimile by the Carl Cherry Foundation. While the poems in Lobos are uneven, they serve as a key to her vision, one that expressed itself more fully in her paintings. D’Orge was born Lena Yates in Stockport, Cheshire in 1879. She was the daughter of a seed merchant who deserted the family. After growing up in Edinburgh, she seems to have moved steadily westward. She met a distinguished American geographer, Alfred Burton, the dean of M. I. T., on a walking tour in France in 1906, and they married not long after. She immigrated to America to live with Burton in Newton Center, Massachusetts, bringing along her mother. She had written a number of children’s books under the name “Lena Dalkeith,” one of several pseudonyms that expressed her shifting sense of identity over the years. Dalkeith was a village she knew from her childhood days in Edinburgh, where her mother took her after the father deserted the 240 Western American Literature family. (In her old age she wrote unpublished plays under the pseud­ onym of ‘Juniper Green,”a name whichJane Wilgress, who is writing a biography of D’Orge, has traced to a village near Edinburgh.) In 1913 her Prose Chants appeared, privately printed, signed Lena Dalkeith Bur­ ton, and issued by the Webster Court Press, named for her street in Newton Center. They were feverish prose poems, mostly addressed to God, and archaic in style. By 1916, when she made her debut asJeanne D’Orge in TheLittle Review, she was well on the way to a modernist style. Her new name suggestedJeanne D’Arc, one ofher childhood heroines, and was suggested by the Orge River, whichjoins the Seine near Paris. Her poetry appeared most often in Others, the magazine founded by Alfred Kreymborg and the great art connoisseur, Walter C. Arensberg. The poems were written in an austere, dryly ironic style, and they generally take a disillusioned look at marriage and the ideology of Romantic love. The forty-five poems she published from 1916-23 rarely deal with nature. Carmel and Point Lobos would change that. Suffering from ill health, she settled in Carmel in 1920 at the suggestion of Marsden Hartley. She brought her three children and built a house. In 1921 Dean Burton retired from M. I. T. and followed. The Burtons worked nicely into Carmel, which managed to be both a bohemian and an academic community—professors liked to retire there—and Dr. Burton built sets and acted in at least one play in the famous Forest Players. His wife’s play Crazy Ann was produced by the Arts and Crafts Community Theatre. Daisy Bostick and Dorothea Castlehun describe the Burtons in their Carmel at Work and Play (1925), mentioning Lena Burton’s instigation of spontaneous Commedia dell’ Arte sessions in Carmel homes (45-46). Commedia dell’Arte gave her house its name, Casa Comedia. The Burtons come up frequently in the local...