The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts by Robinson Jeffers (review)

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• The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts by Robinson Jeffers
• Cory Willard

Robinson Jeffers, The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts, edited by Tim Hunt and Robert Kafka. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2022. 320 pp. Hardcover, $75.

For an American poet who read at the Library of Congress and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1932, it is a minor marvel that Robinson Jeffers is now largely uncelebrated outside of the exceptions of groups like the Western Literature Association and specific scholars of Californian poets. The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts, published by Stanford University Press, began life in 1970 when editor Robert Kafka discovered a 1926 letter from Jeffers to his editor, Donald Friede (vii). Several decades in the making, this edition, transcribed from Jeffers's own handwriting and a dedicated example of literary archaeology, collects Jeffers's four attempts at exploring the Rev. Dr. Barclay story that would eventually become the basis of The Women at Point Sur (1927). The manuscripts include several features for those interested in the innerworkings of Jeffers's mind and his writing process, including notations regarding unclear words, marginalia from Jeffers, and words crossed out by Jeffers as he composed (produced in strikethrough text).

Each of the four attempts shows the stops and starts of a poet [End Page 292] attempting to explore the depths of big questions regarding power, human consciousness, and the nature of God. The first attempt, titled "Storm as Deliverer (initial version)," consists of forty-four pages; "The Ur-Point Alma Venus," the second attempt, eighty pages; "Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version)," thirty-five pages; and the final "Point Alma Venus," eighty-nine pages. The first two versions were likely written in the yearlong gap between Jeffers's celebrated longform poems Tamar and The Tower Beyond Tragedy (284). The third attempt was likely written between The Tower Beyond Tragedy and Roan Stallion, with the final "Point Alma Venus" attempt being written after Roan Stallion (1926) but before The Women at Point Sur (284). Throughout the versions, the Barclay character who "outgrew his God," is represented at various ages (from fifty to sixty-seven, depending on the version), with each exploring his Zarathustra-like attempts at making sense of a world beyond the human, declaring in one version that "no man can feel God until he becomes God" (222). Whereas Jeffers's more celebrated work The Tower Beyond Tragedy deals with human consciousness through a "death of the self" that allows Orestes to be "redeemed into a oneness with nature and its being" (261), the Rev. Dr. Barclay in The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts becomes consumed by megalomania to the point of believing he himself is God (262). Readers who are familiar with The Women at Point Sur will find a lot that is recognizable in these versions; however, there are notable differences, too. For instance, Barclay's son Edward is a more prominent fixture and the third version (which is the most radically different of the four) includes the character of MacTorald that largely seems to have been refigured as Old Morehead in the final version.

If one must levy a criticism at the publication, it would simply be the relative lack of a present readership for Jeffers's work, generally, and scholars of his work, specifically. It is difficult to imagine a large readership beyond those who are already dedicated scholars or fans of Jeffers's poetry as the book itself represents early, incomplete drafts of one of Jeffers's less celebrated works. The final version of the Barclay story, The Women at Point Venus, was not well received when published in 1927, and an appreciation of the poem has not exactly grown with time. Regardless, for those interested or invested in Jeffers's longform narrative poetry, insights into [End Page 293] human consciousness, and his stature as an important twentieth-century western poet will find much to sink their teeth—or hawk's beaks—into.

Perhaps the real value of The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts is in the way they can be put into conversation with, and perhaps change the context of, Jeffers's other narrative works of the same period. Seeing as the attempts were interspersed in...