“My fingers had the art to make stone love stone,” wrote Jeffers in a poetic tribute to Tor House. His intimate knowledge of rocks came from the years he spent finding, carrying, and placing boulders for his exquisite little home. During the 44 years he lived at Tor House, Jeffers developed what Loren Eisely called “one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural background, that I know in literature.”
Looking toward the ocean from the garden at Tor House
I first saw Tor House and Hawk Tower in 2002 from the road that runs along the water below them. Light green grasses, gray-green shrubs and a few light gray boulders covered the slope leading up to the stone buildings. The house is squat with a narrow row of windows just below a small triangle of brown roof. The tower is square, about half the width of the house, and topped by a square turret with two eye-like windows opening out to the ocean behind me. The structures didn’t appear to be built so much as they appeared to emerge geologically from the hillside, as if Jeffers had used the nearby cliffs, seastacks, and outcroppings for blueprints.
Tor House and Hawk Tower
Up close, the buildings sustained my first impressions of geology manifest as home. No two stones were alike and rarely did stones of the same size rest next to each other. Edges were not perfectly straight but looked weathered and eroded. Barnacles still covered some of the stones Jeffers liberated from the sea. Finger trails ran through the mortar, trace fossils of a man and his passion.
Hawk Tower
His passion and intimacy with rock reveals itself in his poetry. I love his imagery of rocks as the “bones of the old mother” or the “world’s cradle.” Waves are “drunken quarrymen/Climbing the cliff, hewing out more stone for me.” The surf “cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum.” During erosion the “hills dissolve and are liquidated.”
And it is clear Jeffers felt the tremor of at least one earthquake. He wrote:
…the teeth of the fracture
Gnashed together, snapping on each other; the powers
of the earth drank
Their pang of unendurable release and the old resistances
Locked. The long coast was shaken like a leaf.
In a second, haunting description:
The heads of the high redwoods down the deep canyon
Rippled, instantly earthquake shook the granite-boned
ridge like a rat
In a dog’s teeth; the house danced and bobbled,
lightning flashed from the ground, the deep earth roared
yellow dust
Was seen rising in divers places and rock-slides
Roared in the gorges; then all things stilled and the
earth stood quiet.
Jeffers clearly paid attention to the natural world around him. Ever since his childhood he had had a connection to nature but not until he settled in Carmel and worked on the land did he develop the knowledge that gave him a voice to describe place. And this relationship centered on the house and tower he built from granite boulders on a low, barren knoll overlooking the sea.
“The place was maiden, no previous/Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements, Rock, wind and sea,” wrote Jeffers in a poem titled The Last Conservative. How could he build any other type of structure? How could I not love that building? In his ode to Tor House, Jeffers concludes “My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably here, but a dark one, deep in granite.”
Ok that's trippy timing – we were showing off your book (which is GORGEOUS) and talking about this house, in particular, not 90 minutes ago with dinner guests. We even opened the book to the page with the Tor House photo and passed it around! And now I go to your blog and find this!