AN HOMAGE TO JAIME DE ANGULO: A NORTH AMERICAN OVID by

Barry Eisenberg A thesis submitted to Sonoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS

in

English

Dr. Gerald Haslam, Chair

Dr.

Dr. ~-"'-I1_;c-+-'1_l.~?+-1_,_, 8 , Date Copyright 1989 By Barry Eisenberg

ii AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION of MASTER'S THESIS

~I grant permission for the reproduction of parts of this thesis without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide ~proper acknowledgement of authorship, _____ Permission to reproduce this thesis in its entirety must be obtained from me.

DATED #

iii AN HOMAGE TO JAIME DE ANGULO; A NORTH AMERICAN OVID Thesis by Barry Eisenberg ABSTRACT Purpose of the Study: Linguist, story-teller, poet, novelist, illustrator, scholar, homesteader, vaquero, wild-man, sorcerer's apprentice, Jaime de Angulo was a legendary figure in his own time. The scholars and artists he associated with and influenced, such as Carl Jung, Franz Boas, Carl Sauer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Robinson Jeffers and Ezra Pound, make up a veritable "Who's Who" of the first half of this century. But, because of his fame as a linguist rather than an author and poet, his eccentricities, and a self-imposed public silence between 1936 and 1949, his literary achievements remain relatively unknown. The purpose of this study is to collate the various and disparate biographical material written about de Angulo, separating fact from legend where it's possible, presenting the reader with an accurate chronology, and to present the first major book-length critical examination of de Angulo's literary wriiting. Procedure: To present a biography of Jaime de Angulo, as well as a serious critical examination of his literary work, all available biographical material concerning de Angulo, along with pertinent anthropological, historical and critical materials relevant to the many contexts from which de Angulo's work derived, was researched. Findings:

Jaime de Angulo was one of a kind. He was a brilliant scholar and extraordinary writer who lived the most colorful of lives. His work, study and life with American Indian societies, especially those of northern

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California. led to a unique contribution to North American letters. His novel. The Lariat. has been compared with The Scarlet Letter. and justly so. And the quality of his entire oeuvre is comparable with the most notable writings from the twentieth century Big Sur-Carmel milieu, literature of the North American West. and the internationalist Modernist movement of his era. Conclusions:

A close examination of de Angulo's life and literary work leaves an even stronger impression of extraordinary quality than a first glance, even at the remarkable cast of characters, European, European-American, an American Indian, associated with him. His virtuosity and passion as a writer simply

Signature

Date M. A. Program: English Sonoma State University

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis is dedicated to my sister, Diane Marilyn Schochet, who originally encouraged me to return to the university and pursue an academic career. I would like to thank my thesis committee for their help and support in the writing of this thesis. In particular I wish to thank and acknowledge Gerald Haslam for his expertise in the fields of California and Western Literature; Jonah Raskin, for his challenging and insightful comments on the critical essay; and Francisco Gaona, for his close reading of the work and his suggestions which led to a clarification of a great many issues. And I would like to thank each of them for the intelligent and humane examples they have set before me and all their students.

I would like to thank, as well, the entire English Department at Sonoma State University for their instruction, support and conversation during my graduate study. In particular 1 wish to thank Martin Blaze, who, despite an untold number of difficulties with a quarrelsome student, never gave up on me; David Bromidge, for his wonderfully sensitive "ear;" Robert Coleman, who is "the boss" as far as I'm concerned, and one of the most intelligent, instructive and hard working men I know; Helen Dunn, who made me fall in love with Romanticism and is one of the most understanding and supportive teachers I have ever had; Deidre Lashgari, who for one year brought this place up to date with her contemporary multi-cultural, feminist, poetist point of view; Bill Lee. a simply brilliant teacher to whom 1 am indebted for my understanding of The Scarlet Letter, which was so necessary for this thesis, and whose appreciation is especially valuedj Don Patterson, for his affectionate sense of humor; Gerald Rosen, who has taught me more about fiction than he knows; Nirmal Dhesi, Elizabeth Herron, James Kormier, Hector Lee, Allan Sandy, Gene Soules, J. J. Wilson, for their support and enlightening conversation: to you all, this compound, complex sentence of thanks. 1 would also like to thank other members of the faculty for their instruction and assistance: George Jackson, Le VeIl Holmes, William Morehouse, Pablo Ronquillo, and in memoriam, the remarkable Rosa Vargas-Arrandia.

vi _;~ ____~,~g;~ .... ______.. __ .... ¥.. ______.. ma_=~R

I would be remiss if I failed to thank my fellow students, especially my fellow graduate students, who have instructed me, turned me on and listened: without you there is no university.

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PREFACE Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein. (Zora Neale Hurston

174) The purpose of this thesis, this homage, is to present a comprehensive biography of Jaime de Angulo and examine his literary work, with special attention given to his novel, The Lariat. De Angulo was a unique character and his work has mUltiple correspondences. It is the purpose of this preface to argue for strategies I have made use of in order to address compositional problems arising from the extremes of de Angulo's personality and experience as well as the numbers of contexts from which his work can be regarded. In doing so I hope to e.pand. however modestly, formal possibilities for other budding artist/scholars and encourage them to make use of the thesis form to do significant work with a contemporary appropriateness to their own particular study. I also hope that I've uncovered, in my presentation, a multitude of thematic possibilities for others to expand upon.

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At the very least I hope I can point others in a helpful direction. Knowledge, after all, is a collaborative affair. Accuracy is the major problem in presenting a biography of Jaime de Angulo. Accounts of his life conflict. Although I generally followed de

Angulo's daughter, Guiomar, for the chronology of events, many, many people have written about him.

Where there are conflicting versions of the same

event I try to present as many of those versions as are germane to the incident and de Angulo's

character. There are, unavoidably, times when I weight the evidence toward a particular version

that I feel/think is truest to the composite

picture I have of him from my research. The sheer volume of colorful writing about

about de Angulo presents, albeit fortuitously, another problem. Everything written about him is tremendously colorful. It's hard to restrain oneself from writing about every single incident, quoting every fabulous turn of phrase about the man. Well of course that simply wasn't possible. Some things had to be left out so that the biography might not dissipate into merely an overlong list, however fabulous. I especially regret, however, the exclusion of Rosalyn Sharpe

ix Wall's delightful account of the de Angulo-Boronda feud. It was, as I say, simply impossible to fit it in along with everything else. The third and final problem posed by the matter of de Angulo's biography was the fact that new material continually popped up at different times. And from not altogether likely places: an introduction to an Achumawi (Pit River Indian) dictionary; a book found in the Sonoma State University bookstore that was originally written in lieu of a master's thesis for the English department here. As a result, the biographical essay has undergone a number of revisions. And I am certain that I have not uncovered all the literature concerning de Angulo's life. I do have enough material at hand, however, to present the reader with a flavorful chunk. The problems arising from an examination of de Angulo's writing are another matter entirely.

I have placed a special emphasis on his novel, ~ Lariat, because I think it is his most significant and best work. I am not alone in this appraisal. Both Ezra Pound and de Angulo's second wife. anthropologist, L. C. Freeland, have expressed the same opinion. However, I frequently refer to de Angulo's other work in both the biographical and

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the critical essays. At the very least I hope to intrigue the reader as well as illuminate whatever matter is at hand. One difficulty in dealing with de Angulo's work, however, is that there is Burprisingly little critical response available. My approach to this problem was to follow up and elaborate upon suggestions from existing critical material. Thus what might have been a limitation became a number of possibilities to bring to bear my own interests and insights into the matter. I was forced to investigate the text more deeply on my

own than I might have if the critical response to The Lariat had been somewhat more proportionate to the literary response to de Angulo, himself. In

dOing so, I fell in love with the charms and

sorrows of research. I hope that I communicate that affection throughout the thesis. And it wasn't as if I went unarmed into the fray, eo to

speak. I did have the advantage of a handful of brilliant observations made by critics and an appropriate aesthetic bias. The Lariat is a novel that makes use of many modes of telling, ancient and contemporary, European, European-American, American Indian,

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Western. Californian. local and international. Its creation summoned de Angulo's wide range of skills as a story-teller, scholar, linguist, illustrator,

vaquero, sorcerers' apprentice. I approached the work therefore through a wide variety of lenses.

I realize at times in doing so the writing may appear digressive. Trust me and be patient. Any

discussion of de Angulo demands complexity but I raise each new issue only to amplify de Angulo's meanings to their proper measure. At the same time

I use de Angulo's work to remark upon the mUltiple

contexts which I present because I see in his work a possibility for consideration and consolidation of a number of historical implications and artistic ideas.

Even when I joke I am attempting to invoke de Angulo's spirit, his sense of irony and anger at

narrowness of thinking. Am I speaking of invoking

spirits in an academic setting? Why not? Any discussion of de Angulo that does not make such invocation, in my opinion, misses the entire point of his life and work. Everyone who has written about Jaime de Angulo seems to have been confronted with conjuring something of the man's magic. And that is due, in no small measure, to the inspiration he has given us. This thesis is, after

all, also an homage.

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If the portrait appears, at times, out of focus, as if it were a cubist painting, abstract expressionism, in order that it might be looked upon in many ways, all at once, I believe that this method of appraisal, in fact, provides a larger, truer focus than if my discussion were to remain one or two or even merely three dimensional. Early in the critical essay I present a

rather close retelling of the first two chapters of The Lariat. I do this to provide the reader with enough information about the text so that he or she will understand my ensuing arguments. At the same time, I refrain, it's true, from giving a recapitulation of the entire work. I believe, however, if the rest of my thesis does not pique the reader to venture forth, no mere retelling will prove successful either. There is a lot of ground work in this essay, there are a lot of clues--I want to leave some of the joy of discovery to the reader, whomever you may be. In addition, I realize that my extensive use of quotation may be problematic for some. However, I have several reasons for arranging my thesis in this manner.

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First of all, as regards de Angulo himself, I wish to present the flavor of the man. Nothing I could write would quite equal his own writing and the inspired flamboyance of those who knew him and wrote about him. I also wish to present the reader with the flavor of his work. I believe no amount of critical analysis or historical context is so persuasive (nor should it be) as the work itself. In order to examine de Angulo's work from a multiple of contexts I have made wide use of historical and critical source material. It has been for years my opinion that primary sources are the most reliable. Rather than paraphrase an especislly telling or eloquent passage I would give the reader the originsl. Finally, in terms of composition itself, I use quotation, or series of quotations, as a strategy for an economical presentation of ideas and information upon which I also build my own discussions of the man and his work. Jaime de Angulo's work stands in relation to

so much history, so many nineteenth and twentieth century scholarly and artistic investigations and creation, so much of what appears to be on the threshold of world-wide contemporary life. His work is multi-cultural and multi-temporal. I

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regard this thesis, therefore, as the barest of beginnings. It essays perhaps, hopefully, more

inquiry than it satisfies. I encourage others to take up these inquiries in their own complex of study. I would especially like to encourage a wider investigation into the

oral literature of the California Indians, as literature. All of us living in this place need,

more than we know, to connect with the literature

of its past. One final note. Any contemporary examination of multi-cultural reality is confronted with the problem of giving name to various groups of people and thereby making some kind of semantic gesture. People tend to think of themselves as folks.

Those other people have a name. Personally I think any general label can betray the individual

person or situation. To name is to wield power.

I hope I use names for people that will not

offend. If I do give offense I plead ignorance, not intention, and ask to be properly

illuminated.

In closing, most of all, I would give you the remarkable person and work of Jaime de Angulo.

xv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ...... ". viii I. Jaime's Saga: A Biography ..••...... 1

Introduction ...... to. 2 1. The Early Years; Academia; Literati ...... 5 2. De Angulo and American Indian Culture .... 17 3. De Angulo and Big Sur; The Final Years ... 23

Afterwor d ..... "...... III ..... It •••••••••• III .... " 35 II. De Angulo's Voice: .•...•...... 37 1. An Introduction to The Lariat, Saturnino and Fray Luis ...... ".... 38 2. An Introduction to the Matter of Big Surf Carmel; Fray Luis's Diary: and an Introduction to Other Characters..•...••. 47 3. "The Senores of The Brush;" the Psycho­ logical Dimension of Timej Seducing You, Leading You On .....•.••••..•••••.....•... 58 III. The Lariat and The Scarlet Letter ••..••.. 72 1. Embroidery and Lariat-Making; The North American Romance; At a Border Between Past and Present...... 73 2 . The Border Between California Tale- Telling and North American Magic Realism 82

3. Spitting It Out ...... , . + ...... , ., • • 91 IV. The Matter of Big Surf Carmel: Archetypes: 95

1. liThe Seacoast of Bohemia tt til ...... , ..... 97 2. John Steinbeck and Al Clarke ••••...•.•.. 108 3. Robinson Jeffers .••.•••••••..••..•••.••• 113

xvi V. Mary Austin; The Sacred; and the Literature of the North American West ..•.....••.•...• 121 VI. De Angulo, Modernism and Modernist Primitivism ...... "' ...... 138 1. Internationalist Modernism ...... 139 2. Modernist Privitism ....•....•... , ...... 144 VII. The Sacred Borderlands ..•...... 154

Introduction ...... 155 1. Indian Tales and the Accretive. Ahistorical Historical Moment ...•...... •. 161

Works Cited ...... 181

Works Consulted ...... 189

xvii I. Jaime's Saga: A Biography

* Those are coyote's bones, grandchildj the lightning never strikes over them. (de Angulo, Coyote's Bones 86) * 2

Introduction •.• a man, dear Jaime de Angulo! A beloved, hated, detested, endearing, charming, cantankerous, pesky, devil­ worshipping son-of-a-bitch of a man with a proud heart and a defiant soul, filled with tenderness and compassion for all humanity, yet cruel, vicious, mean and ornery. His own worst enemy. A man doomed to end his days in horrible agony­ -mutilated, emasculated, humiliated to the very core of his being. Yet even unto the end preserving his reason, his devil-may-care spirit, his defiance of God and man--and his great impersonal ego. (Henry Miller 347) Jaime de Angulo was a man other men and women spoke of in words like, III've heard it said that Jaime ••• " did this and thus and when. Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, wrote, "in fact, I have heard it said that he was the only human being that Robinson Jeffers would let into his house any time of the day or night." (Snyder, "The Incredible ••. 260) 3

lIve read it said that it was rumored that de Angulo and D. H. Lawrence were lovers (Sanfield

97). I find this an interesting rumor since both Jaime's Taos papers (49-51, 54) and Mabel Dodge Luhanls descriptions of the meeting between the two men at her salon in Taos during the twenties (153-187) point to one of the more humorous antagonisms between writers in this century (Lawrence saw de Angulo as a hopelessly degenerate man; Jaime found Lawrence hopelessly preposterous and obtuse). Story-teller extraordinaire, linguist, illustrator, romancer; wildman, poet, drunkard, Californian renaissance artist, Jaime de Angulo said of his own stories, in which animals speak, sometimes trees, " ••• don't ask me if these stories are true. Of course they are truer u (Jl..li. in Gifford, Rev. of Shab.gok ••. 162) He was a man that a man of the stature of CarlO. Sauer would call, uA rare, rare spirit.•• ignored almost completely by his own contemporaries, Jaime de Angulo was one of the most insightful men I have ever met.1t (ill. in de Angulo, JDA Reader back cover) 4

The people who found themselves attracted to (or repelled by) de Angulo make up a veritable Who's Who of his life and times. Who was Jaime de Angulo? His biographers blur him, almost into phantasm; dates, interesting details, differ. His life and legend, intertwined, come into our present day from a tectonic collection of magically real fragments: de Angulo's own writings, his daughter's biography, his editor's chronologies and commentaries, his admirers' apocrypha and flamboyant descriptions. Much material is still unpublished and sequestered away in libraries at U. C. Santa Cruz and U.C.L.A. (Leeds-Hurwitz).

And with a character like Jaime, it's not difficult to speculate that half the story will never be told. One thing is certain, Jaime de Angulo was some hombre. 5

1. The Early Years; Academia; Literati Jaime de Angulo, born in 1887, was the son of wealthy Spanish expatriates living in Paris (de Angulo, Gui 1). At the age of ten he was already going by himself to museums, investigating Asian culture and ancient Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt and Greece. "That's how I discovered to my great relief that not all religions were as flat, as absurd, as dead and boring as the Catholicism of my people. That was the beginning of my rebellion." (de AngUlo, COlote's Bones, 1) As a youth he was fiercely rebellious and became particularly embittered because his father, Don Gregorio, at a loss at what to do with a precocious and intractable son, had Jaime confined to a Roman Catholic parochial school (de Angulo, Gui 1). His anger with Catholicism ultimately became a fierce sorrow as the mature de Angulo attempted to confront the Spanish Catholic sin against Native American societies in his novel, The Lariat. Jaime de Angulo was to become one of those charmed and damned souls, who, for the sake of his or her own spiritual survival, wage a lifelong war with the blindness of their familial, religious milieu. He was a twentieth century pilgrim on a 6 quest to recover his most primitive being, to assume his most contemporary, complex, world­ honoring sensibility. And, ultimately de Angulo had to face his own blindness and cruelty, the cruelty often self-inflicted, in order to achieve his most compassionate humanity. This quest was to inform all of de Angulo's writing, whatever its various tones, styles, or formats. At eighteen, Jaime convinced Don Gregorio to send him away to North America. To find his fortune or his destiny or both, Jaime was off to the North American West, Wyoming--to become a cowboy. The miserable conditions of his work, bad food and lack of sleep from riding nightherd didn't suit the young adventurer's fancy for long however (de Angulo, Gui 2) • ••• one night-wrangler •.•• whom they call the "night-hawk"--and it's a darn lonesome job riding round and round the dam critters all night and singing so they won't get scared and stampede and the sagebrush looks weird in moonlight and the nighthawks. i mean the real ones, the birds, come plummeting down out of the darkness overhead and they straighten out just over your head with 7

a whooosh that's enuf to scare the pineal gland out of the bravest jesuit­ bred lad of 18 •••• (de Angulo, Coyote's Bones 18) He would return to cowboying again and again in his life but just then, he was off for Tierra del Fuego from the port of San Francisco (de Angulo, Gui 2). San Francisco, if you can imagine, nineteen­ five, Basque and Spanish and French in the streets. San Francisco, where he would live, near the end of his days, teaching Chinese, the door to the Orient, people from China in the streets and the music of their language (2). But Jaime was on his adventure, off to Tegucigalpa, where he intended to do some mining ••• or cattle ranching •.• or banana planting. In fact he wound up digging ditches, leading a work gang. Don Gregorio's money was ott its way ••• but, by way of Tierra del Fuego (2). Jaime rearrived in San Francisco in time for the great earthquake. His first days back in the city he spent fighting the ertsuing fire. Then he began his study of medicine, in San Francisco at Cooper Union Medical School and, later, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he would 8

meet his first wife, Cary Fink, and receive his medical degree (2-3). Cary Fink was a Vassar graduate and, at the time, was soon to become one of America's few women doctors (2-3). Later, after her divorce from de Angulo, as Cary Baynes, she would go on to translate into English what is still considered the definitive English rendering of the I Ching, from Heinrich Willhelm's German translation (Callahan, JDA Reader 8). Stanford University hired de Angulo to do genetic research, but he quit after a year (de Angulo, Gui 2). He taught psychiatry at the University of Michigan during World War I. He taught anthropology courses at U. C. Berkeley. He was a player in the great anthro!ethnopologic renaissance that went down in Berkeley during the twenties and thirties 1 and included such scholars as Sauer, the Kroebers, Paul Radin, Robert Lowie (6). Branislaw Malinowsky was often a visitor to the de Angulo home in Berkeley (10).

Who ~ Jaime de Angulo and how did he attract to himself such lively thinkers? He was a self-taught linguist and scholar who delighted in teaching others. He gave lessons to his second wife, Nancy Freeland, in Chinese calligraphy. 9

botany, mathematics and astronomy, when the two of them first met in Carmel (4-6), She was fresh from an Eastern university. He, " ...with his Arab horse and his red sash and El Greco beard" (Brooks 191), was still married to his first wife, handsome, I've heard it said, as the devil, and cutting quite the figure among the local Carmel bohemia (4-6), He encouraged Freeland to begin her graduate studies at Berkeley in the anthropology department there and it was she who would ultimately introduce him to many of his contacts at the university, including Alfred Kroeber. In 1920, Nancy and Jaime's love affair became the scandal of the Berkeley academic community (4-6), Cary, who remained de Angulo's lifelong

friend, divorced him, and went on to study ~ith Carl Jung in Switzerland. TheiT marriage had already disintegrated and Cary left de Angulo for the new love in her life, Jungian analyst, Josepb Baynes. (Callahan, JDA Reader 10). 10

Nancy Freeland de Angulo was to become a noted linguist and anthropologist. She did many studies in collaboration with her husband and had many other studies published on her own, under the name of L. S. Freeland (de Angulo. Gui 6). During Jaime's early years as a linguist he was hired, on Kroeber's recommendation, by the Mexican government to translate several Indian languages (6). Carl Jung financed some of de Angulo's studies (9). It was also through Jung that de Angulo placed his first novel, Don Bartolomeo, in four issues, in the WeeklI Independent (Callahan, JDA Reader 10). They met when Jaime had come to Switzerland to visit his daughter, Ximena, who was living with Cary. And they met again, when Jung came to the United States, in Grand Canyon. A fit stage for the meeting of two such individual minds and characters. Carl Jung and Jaime de Angulo with two billion years of stratified geologic history at their feet! And off they drove, together, toward Taos, to meet Jaime's Taos Indian friends, discussing the civilizations of humanity (de Angulo, Gui 7,9). 11

Later Franz Boas found money to fund de Angulo's work. Often he worked on several languages simultaneously (9). Often, when there was no funding, de Angulo paid his own way. Even during the tragic years of de Angulo's demise in Big Sur he never wavered from his linguistic studies and writings. It is unfortunate that he was never able to bring to completion his major linguistic work, What Is Language? (12) ••• without formal linguistic training or an academic post ••• , the work became professional and often pathbreaking: twenty-eight papers before 1933, four of them in French, on the language, music

and religion of more than a do~en Mexican and California tribes. (Peck 183) Rosalinde Sharpe Wall, a Big Sur neighbor, wrote that de Angulo accidently burned "his manuscript on the Chinese language, said to be tbe best of its kind in the world. He re-wrote the entire book, but evidently it got loat as it never turned up among his papers." (155) Despite his extraordinary scholarship, for 12

most of his life de Angulo shunned academe; something in him would always chafe at the institutional bit. And "the Academy," likely as not scandalized by the roguish Don Jaime, shunned de Angulo as well. The real scandal during the time de Angulo taught at Berkeley took place the day he came to his eight 0' clock class wearing a tuxedo and then later got drunk, took off all his clothes and climbed up a campus flagpole. (Wall 158) Da-da in BerkeleYt eh1 As Jaime himself said, "Decent anthropologists don't associate with drunkards ~bo go rolling in ditches with shamans." (Peck 183) And, according to Gui de Angulo. due to a misunderstanding, Alfred Kroeber regarded de Angulo with a lifelong enmity (7). One was likely to find the de Angulo's Berkeley home, during the twenties and thirties. in the midst of a drunken revelry. a place where local jazz musicians would come to jam t or one or many of his Pomo or Shasta friends from northern California would stop in to visit ••• or anyone of a number of bohemian poets might drop by, all of them there to party and talk with each other and the de Angulo family. Often the parties and 13

discussions went on with Jaime holed up in his

study, working (de Angulo, Gui 10, Callahan, ~

Reader 251). De Angulo was a good friend of poets and, by all accounts, an inspiration to them. Jeffers was but one of many who wrote of Jaime de Angulo (Snyder, "The Incredible .•• " 260). Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote of Jaime and his visits to Taos in her Lorenzo in Taos, a kind of spiritual autobiography which included letters to Robinson Jeffers, letters to and from D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Luhan's poetry, and photographs, many of which were taken by Edward Weston. It was through Luhan's friend, Spuds Johnson, who edited Laughing Horse, a literary review out of Berkeley and Taos, that de Angulo's first literary works were published (Callahan, JDA Reader 252). Jaime carried on a correspondence with Ezra Pound near the end of his life and it was Pound who helped place de Angulo's reminiscence, Ipdians in Overalls, and many of his Indian tales in the Hudson Review. 14

Indians in Overalls contains a dedication to the Swiss-French poet, Blaise Cendrars. Like de Angulo, Cendrars was born in Paris in 1887. Three years before Jaime took off for America, Cendrars had run away from home to Moscow. He lived in Moscow, Peking, Paris and New York and wrote poems about the life in these cities and his travels as well as essays about contemporary civilization. Some of his early writings are considered "milestones in modern lyric poetry." ("CENDRARS ••• " 216) De Angulo also corresponded from time to time with Marianne Moore. " ..• only a serious stroke prevented William Carlos Williams from writing the introduction to [de Angulo's first booklength publication] Indian Tales." (Callahan, JDA Reader 174) Robert Duncan was, for a time, Jaime's personal secretary. Jack Spicer studied languages with him (174). How many renOWn or unknown poets fed upon the person of Jaime de Angulo is information beginning to be lost now to the life of the mysterious past. Two manuscripts of de Angulo's poetry have been discovered since his death. The first manuscript contains poems used in de Angulo's Indian Tales. The second manuscript was written 15

during his last years (173). Selections from this manuscript, a handful of Lorca translations, along with several short prose pieces, including an uproarious letter to Ezra and Dorothy Pound, can be found in the Turtle Island Foundation publication, Coyote's Bones. These poems were published for the first time twenty-four years after their author's death. Indeed all of Jaime's major work appeared in book form after his death

(Leeds-Hurwitz 134-135). What are you planting, grandfather,

So carefully, in the spring: Will it come, grandfather, with the crocus And the lily?

It will come, my child, it will come With the crocus and the lily, With petals scarlet and anthers of gold, It will come in the spring. Give me that hoe.

And what are you planting, Grandfather, in the spring? 16

My child, r am burying, give me that hoe, r am planting, give me that hoe,

r am burying my heart,

Give me that hoe. (de Angulo, Coyote's Bones 84) 17

2. De Angulo and American Indian Culture For all de Angulo's scholarly and bohemian European-American connections one can say that, until his hermit years, he was most at home among the peoples whose languages he studied. From my reading of and about de Angulo it seems to me that he was especially attracted to the unpretentiousness of his Achumawi friends. and their ability to move among and be at home with the unseen forces of nature. Certainly Native American languages, story-telling, shamanism and the confrontation between whites and native societies became the dominant influences and themes in de Angulo's work. It is for this reason that Pound called him the "American Ovid." (ill.

~ de Angulo, JDA Reade~ back cover) De Angulo's Taos journals, taken as a whole, reveal that he was far more interested in Tony Luhan, who was a Taos Indian, than Mabel Dodge or the Lawrences. He was quite proud that through Luhan he was allowed to translate the Taos language into English. And, as the Taos were very secretive about all facets of their cultural life, de Angulo had reason to be proud (de Angulo, Jaime in Taos 56, 63, 79, 82). 18

His feeling for native peoples and sensitivity toward their cultures can best be demonstrated by a letter he wrote to a young anthropologist who asked him for a "contact" among the Taos so that she could study their religion. As for helping you get an informant, and

the way you describe it "if I took him with me to a safely American place" ... "an informant who would be willing to give tales and ceremonials" ... oh Godl Ruth, you have no idea how

much tha t has hurt me. I don I t know how I am going to be able to talk to you about it because I have a sincere affection for you. But do you realize that it is just that sort of thing that kills the Indians? I mean it seriously. It kills them spiritually first, aDd as in their life the spiritual and the physical element are much more

interdependent than in our own stage of culture, they soon die of it physically. They just lay down and die. That's what you anthropologists with your infernal curiosity and your 19

thirst for scientific data bring about.

(91) Later de Angulo would study with Lake County Pomo basketweaver and storyteller, William Ralganal Benson. Benson would appear in many of de Angulo's "old-time stories" as Turtle Old Man. These stories were eventually published by Turtle Island Foundation under the titles, Shabegok and How the World Was Made (Shabegok was originally the name of a Porno village) (Gifford, Rev. of Shabegok ••• 163). De Angulo made friends with all the Indians he lived with whether it was Luhan or Antonio Mirabal among the Taos or Benson, the Porno. But it was among the Achumawi, or the Pit River Indians, Jack Folsom, Old Blind Hall, and Sukmit, that Jaime was most at home. Comparing the Aehumawi's world view with that of the Pueblo tribes of the Southwest, Jaime wrote, They have no pottery, nd blankets, no houses, nothing to put pattern into, not even dances or ceremonials .•• They do not till the soil. They just collect what the soil grows ••. Why, they are hardly differentiated from the trees and 20

brushes and the deer and the antelope and the rain and the snow and everything that is Nature. Where is the line of demarcation between a juniper tree and the Achumawi Indian? What's the difference? Not much. But there is a hell of a lot of difference between a Taos Indian and the corn he has planted and raised! He already controls nature (or tries to control it)--he is no longer nature itself •.• The Achumawi •.• is in constant relation with the living part, the "spirit" part of every tree, every rock. every cloud, every shrub, every toad, and every deer who lives around. (Jaime in Taos 78) This primary relationship with nature, along with their incredible story-telling and general palaver compelled de Angulo. He first met the Achumawi just after he left the employ of Stanford University and had purchased a ranch in the Alturas range of northeastern California. Later, in 1921, he would Ao back to study their language and it was those visits with his Pit River friends which he went on describe in Indians in O~eralls (de Angulo, Gui 7). In the preface to Shabegok, 21 de Angulo claims that during that time "I became an Indian myself" (1) although that is a matter his character argues with Indian friends all through Indians in Overalls. The Jaime de Angulo who met and lived among California Indians was quite a different kind of Spaniard than those of de Angulo's novels, Don Bartolomeo and The Lariat, which took place during the California mission period. Jaime preferred the Indian way of being in the world. He respected them and passionately understood the white North American's need for the Native American. Don't you see the meaning of it all? In Europe we can go back to our mother the earth through the spirits of our own ancestors. They inhabit the soil, the trees, the rocks. In America the soil is teeming with the ghosts of Indians. Americans will never find spiritual stability until they learn to recognize Indians as their seiritual ancestors. (de Angulo, Jaime in Taos 93). He listened to the shamans and priests but 22

did not reveal their secrets. Instead he delivered their essential power through his fictional narratives. He listened to the tale­ tellers and became one of them. Though he did not stoop to plagiarizing and only rarely made use of exact literal translation, de Angulo brought the flavor of the "old time stories," and often their original linguistic values (Peck 183), into his own tellings, American English, the written word. Gary Snyder said that Jaime was a man "who listened patiently to gossip, could sit still, eat acorn-mush with the rest and remember for years •.. " (Snyder, Earth House Hold 30) 23

3. De Angulo and Big Sur; The Final Years * beetle on the trail, have you seen my child?

I do not travel far, 0 man, ask the deer

deer, have you seen my child?

I live in the brush, 0 man, ask the condor in the sky

condor in the sky, have you seen my child?

I have not seen your child, but ask the cloud

cloud, have you seen my child? the cloud drifted away on the wind (de Angulo, Coyote's Bones 68) * The other major influence on de Angulo's life and writings was the Big Sur landscape, especially that of his homestead, Los Pesares, The Sorrows. 24

At his request, a couple of vaqueros led him out there on horseback from Carmel in 1915. For Jaime, it was love at first sight. the ocean, the blue Pacific, was there, practically under us (not more than a rifle shot awaY)t sixteen hundred feet below ... and gulls flying, and we looking down on them so far down that they were the size of white pigeons. What a scene! Yes, I lost my heart to it, right there and then. This is the place for the freedom loving anarchist. (de Angulo, "La Costa ••• " 60) He returned again and again to Big Sur throughout his life. He built houses there, ranched. There was a brief time in the late nineteen thirties when Jaime tried to open a dude ranch on his land. Unfortunately, the flyer he sent out to advertise the dude ranch did not make it a very attractive vacation spot ••• If you expect good hunting, do not come herel There are plenty of deer, but they run too fast. If you expect good fishing, do not come herel The streams back in the hills are so full of SMALL trout that it is no 25

sport. But to get there •.• I It takes a whole day's riding to get there, over an abominable trail. In fact it's not a real trail. Nobody goes there. We will take you there anytime you like, and cheerfully. We are used to it ••• but you aren't. Saddle-weary and tired, you will have to sleep on the ground, in a weird canyon. You won't be able to sleep, you will get the heebie-jeebies, and you'll spend the night feeding the fire. The caba11erango-guide is as crazy as the cook, and furthermore he is bad­ tempered. His language is awful. So, if you are squeamish, bring some cotton for your ears. (de Angulo, "El Ranchito •.. " 110) So much for dude ranching. The Big Sur landscape served de Angulo as a vivid backdrop, as primordial organic presence in his novels. The wild and haunting "Sorro~s" was also to become a Promethean stage for de Angulo's personal tragedy in later life. 26

One night in 1936, returning home, de Angulo went off the Torres Canyon bridge in his car, into the creek at the canyon's bottom. De Angulo lay there overnight with a broken arm and leg and his son A1var, who had been killed, was pinned beneath him (Greensfe1der 107-8). One account of the accident has it that de

Angulo was living with a mistress and had taken A1var that night without Nancy's permission (Gifford, Rev. of Don Bartolomeo 73), but this is in no way corroborated by other accounts. Jean Greensfelder, a personal friend of Jaime's, wrote that de Angulo was returning from a party that the entire family had attended. Jaime drove his car with Alvar in it and Nancy was driving her car with Guiomar, their daughter. This version of the story leaves open the question as to why it was until the next day that de Angulo was found. Greensfelder admits that hers is a second hand version of what actually happened.

The story of Jaime's son's d~ath was told me by several people ••• One person told me the boy had drowned in the creek, unable to get out from under hie

father ••. another told me that a broken 27

rib of Jaime's had pierced his son's heart. (108) Whatever actually occurred, Jaime de Angulo was forever altered by his son's death. What followed were the years of alcoholism, madness, feuds. Nancy moved back to Berkeley with Guiomar while Jaime remained on the "Sorrows." Eventually she divorced him. Henry Miller described the de Angulo of this period as A lone wolf, divorced from all he held dear, waging a perpetual feud with his neighbor Boronda. another Spaniard, poring over his books, his dictionaries (Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, to mention but a few), raiSing a little fruit and vegetables, killing deer in season and out, forever exercising his horses, getting drunk, quarreling with everyone, even his bosom pals, driving visitors away with the lash, studying in the dead of the night, coming back to this book on language, the book on language, he hoped it would

bel 28

... a renegade and a reprobate ..• spending his days and nights comparing, classifying, analyzing, dissecting roots, declensions, prefixes and suffixes, etymologies, homologies, affinities and anomalies of tongues and dialects borrowed from all continents, all times, all races and conditions of man ••• this Angulo, the savage, the scholar, the man of the world, the recluse, the idealist and the very son of Lucifer. (Miller 345-7) "He had a black patch over one eye," Rosalind Wall wrote, "and was wearing a green eyeshade; otherwise he was stark naked except for a filthy pair of jeans and a wicked looking knife stuck in his belt." (153-54) And Van Wyck Brooks commented, "There was never" a figure more fantastic than Jaime de Angulo came to be in those days when, living alone, looking out at the Pacific, a decayed Don Quixote, ragged and mad, he boxed with a pet stallion and carved his meat with [that] great knife that hung from his middle. (191) 29

One can imagine the half-drunk hermit coming out of his cabin, papers and books upon the furniture and floor, onto the "Sorrows," half-mad with his memories, half-mad with knowledge/ power, onto a landscape he had described in The Lariat as, "so remote, as if holding a secret, brooding under the sun .•• at the edge of the water, rising like a wall, gazing moodily over the same ocean .•. How can a thing be so wild that is so full of life and charming variety, of young trees and deer grazing in the gay clearings, the chatter of blue jays, and the red trunks of the madronyos. And yet it is so wild in there that you cry with the loneliness of it. You feel a creeping panic in your heart. Perhaps it is because we are civilized and do not understand these things. We have other gods, and we can no longer pray to the tree. (The Lariat 107-8) Bob Callahan, de Angulo's posthumous editor and publisher, uses the Pit River, Achumawi, concept of "wandering" to describe Jaime's final

Big Sur years (JDA Reader xiii-~). De Angulo also wrote about "wandering" in The Lariat. A young shaman's woman has left him because he was 30

too careless with his power around her. Not only has he been abandoned by the woman but his power has abandoned him as well and he wanders from place to place, aimlessly, The "wandering" begins with a personal loss, that is described in psychic terms, "People will

probably say of such a man: ~He has lost his

shadow. "'(xiii) The wanderer goes off into wild places. Sometimes the wanderer will die from hopelessness, as the young shaman in The Lariat dies. In any case, wandering is accompanied by physical hardship. Lear on the heath is wandering. Oedipus wandered. Sometimes the wanderer will become so crazed and wild that he or she succeeds in losing their "humanhood" (xiii) enough to attract the somewhat whimsical powers of the forest. If one of the powers, or Tinihowis as the Achumawi called them, befriends the wanderer,

he or she comes back a shaman (~). Poverty and illness drove de Angulo out of the forest and back to San Francisco where he taught languages to support himself (de Angulo,

Gui 12). Callahan says that de Angulo may have still been mad at that time and lived as a drag-queen in Chinatown (JDA Reader 252). Guiomar de Angulo's biography, which was written after Callahan's 31

chronology, neither denies nor in any way corroborates this. I have heard this story,

several times, third and fourth hand ("there's a story about grapefruits ..• ") and something about the story never rang true. I wanted first hand information.

In her "When the Coast Was Wild and Lonely,"

Wall recalls a conversation with de Angulo on his homestead. Apparently it was during the time he

was living in Berkeley and teaching at U. C. that de Angulo decided that he wanted to see if he could discover what it felt like to be a woman. He grew his hair long, wore women's clothes and had Nancy show him how to walk and sit. Only his voice gave him away. Even then there were rumors that de Angulo took the ferry over to San Francisco to pick up men. (Wall 157-58) De Angulo must have been at times impossible to suffer but his life reads like a necessary breath of fresh air to our own contemporary world full of people afraid of their own shadows. Perhaps I have erred in the inclusion of such a story and should have honored Guiomar de Angulo's reticence. Too much can be made of such a thing and perhaps, even the dead have a right to 32 privacy. But in another sense, there's no denying that Jaime de Angulo was a kind of coyote. The more one reads, the more one supposes that there wasn't a woman born whom de Angulo wouldn't proposition. Tragic, devil-may-care, Jaime de Angulo. Even as an old man, bearded and grizzled ... , without that spectacular beauty which, as a young man, had made him a romantic figure, he had a beauty that outshone his age and raggedness.

(156) Finally de Angulo became so ill that Nancy took him into her Berkeley house so that she could take care of him. During this final period of his life, de Angulo worked on his literary writings. His poetry, some sketches of his father, Don Gregorio. The Lariat, Indians in Overalls were all finished. All this, while dying with cancer of the prostate gland. So that he could keep working with a clear mind, Jaime refused medication or pain killers. Robert Duncan was hired to take care of Jaime's typing chores (Callahan, JDA Reader 252, de Angulo, Gui 12-13), 33

In addition, he put together a collection of stories that he had originally written for his

children, about the travels of one particular young family, Bear, Antelope, Fox boy and the baby, Oriole girl. It was a mish-mash of northern California tale-telling styles and subjects and,

sick as he was, he read and recorded those stories for KPFA radio station in Berkeley, By that time

the stories were called "Indian Tales." His readings became the most popular program in the station's history (Callahan, JDA Reader 252, de Angulo, Gui 12). And as a published work, Indian Tales has been translated into French, Italian and German, published in London and Melbourne (Leeds­ Hurwitz 134-135). It remains today de Angulo's best known work. De Angulo became so ill finally that he had to be hospitalized. He wrote to Nancy, I have had my fill of both the Borrows and the joys of life and I am quite ready to join the dance of the atoms in interstellar space •••When I contemplate this dance of the atoms over such a fantastic range in time and space .•. I am filled with such a quiet emotion that all the sorrows and disappointments of 34

my life dwindle almost to a vanishing

point (~. in de Angulo, Gui 13). Jaime de Angulo died in October, 1949. 35

Afterword Who was Jaime de Angulo? He came riding down our hill to Rainbow Lodge on a black stallion, wearing black chaps, a black shirt, and a black sombrero, along with a huge turquoise­ studded Indian silver conche belt from New Mexico. His long black hair flowing in the wind, his blue eyes flashing, he was beautiful rather than handsome and was given to passionate gestures, speaking with his hands as well as his tongue. And he talked rapidly, brilliantly, usually about linguistics, the American Indians, or Freud. He tried to make love to my mother and called her a bourgeois when she refused. (Wall 144) * ••• a bright headband around his forehead­ -his dirty snotrag, probably. Brown as a walnut, gaunt, slightly bowlegged, he was still handsome, still very much the Spaniard--and still utterly unpredictable. (Miller 344) 36

* There was a feeling, especially when he talked of anthropology, linguistics, mathematics, physics, psychiatry, philosophy, fields he knew well, of extraordinary lucidity--rather like a pure gem in whose center existed a deep, still, quiet pool, rather like a crystal. The feeling one got at such moments was of pure beauty; and it was at times such as these that those who knew Jaime felt to the fullest the purity of his genius which, when so directly contacted, was akin to music, poetry, the stars, flame, the cosmos, (Wall 154-55) * But one thing more. Jaime's smell. I never knew him to bathe. He ate meat, drank alcohol, smoked and didn't wash his clothes. But his body had a sweet and lovely odor, like ripening nuts, or

8 pine tree warmed by the sun. (Greensfelder 107). II. De Angulo's Voice: 38

1. An Introduction to The Lariat, Saturnino and Fray Luis *

"Well, this work is no good. Have to do it over again. That dirty little mongrel came here to make me angry, and I got angry inside, and I spoiled this part. See, look how it's all crooked. You see, Padre, you must have peace inside to work right. Look at those strands, all crookedl And the very end of the reata, too. Almost finished. About two armlengths more. Damn that boyl And now what am I to do? Those strands will never plait straight again, not now that they have been twisted once. The end of the reata, too! You are not a vaquero, Don Luis, so you

don't know what it means, but you see, this is the end they wrap around the horn of the saddle. Some say the end of the reata near the honda is the most important part. But I say: Nonsenset Look at all the vaqueros who have a 39

thumb missing. And where is that thumb: Cut off by the reatal Look at all the vaqueros with a limp. And why do they limp? End of the reata jammed the horn. Can't turn Mr. Bull loose. Pulls down Mr. Horse. Mr. Vaquero under horse. Leg broken. And whose fault? Who made that reata? Old Saturnino! ...... Oh, damn that conceited puppyl And what do you think, Fray Luis, but he had the impudence to ask me to give him this reata, to hunt bears, he said. Hunt bears! I hope the bear hunts him, and gets him, tool

"He is an Esselen anyhow. They are all like that, in his tribe, bad people, witchesl You yourself, you don't like him, you know very well you don't like him. Why don't you get rid of him? What's the use of your being a priest then? Our priests, they know how to kill people •.• 40

That boy is going to take your girl away, and you hate him as much as I do, and you know itlH (de Angulo, The Lariat 140-142) * Although there are many biographies and biographical sketches, not to mention the miles of biographical yarn, available concerning Jaime de Angulo, I do not really know much about the year, 1928, in which de Angulo first wrote his brooding novel, The Lariat, about the sinister Fray Luis and his pact with the devil which backfired. Whether de Angulo was living in Berkeley at the time, or Big Sur, is information unavailable to me. What de Angulo's other pursuits were during that year are, as far as I can discern, also unknown. Alvar, his son was still a very little boy, Guiomar, his daughter, couldn't have been much more than an infant. I infer this from what I do know: de Angulo began his Indian Tales, stories written for his children about the travels of Bear-Man and Antelope Woman, Fox Boy and Baby Quail, in 1929. (de Angulo, Gui 10) 41

During 1928, the forty-one year old de Angulo had four pieces of writing published; a tale, entitled "The Sun," a review of Bronislaw Malinowski's study on the psychology of myth in "primitive" cultures, a tribute to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. and an article, written in French and published in Paris, on the religious psychology of the Achumawi of northeastern California. (Leeds-Hurwitz 132) D. L. Olmstead's introduction to his Achumawi Dictionary, a de Angulo biography. provides some information about the years surrounding the initial writing of The Lariat. The Introduction has, as its frontispiece, a photograph taken of de Angulo "about 1929," in which Jaime does not appear to be a day over twenty-five. Olmstead's sketch of Jaime says this: During the midtwenties, Angulo made records of American Indian music and continued his field work, usually aided

by research grants provided by Jung. With a prototype of the modern "camper," a small house built on the chassis, the AnguloB visited the Karok in 1926 and returned to camp in Eureka in 1927, when 42

Jaime worked on Shasta and his wife on Karok [languages]. During this time, he continued work on Achumawi, Pomo ••. In 1927, [Franz] Boas, temporarily living in Berkeley, was lecturing at Mills College in Oakland. No one thought of how he was to get there. Angulo volunteered to drive him and was rewarded, each day, with encouragement

and instruction ••• (Olmstead 4) We know from Olmstead, therefore, that de Angulo was living in Berkeley during the year which preceded the novel's conception. * The past is a mIstery to me. What can really be known? even about a man whose recent life is more well known than his truly remarkable work? Metaphors that come to mind are de Angulo's own stick drawings. the barest marks. his Fray Luis. quill in hand, and a balustrade behind the intent friar at his journal--the evidence of any life. * Bob Callahan, in his introductory note to The Lariat which appears in A Jaime de Angulo Reader, says, The idea for The Lariat came to de 43

Angulo upon reading a Bancroft edition of the diaries and journals of the early Mission priests of Spanish California. (Callahan, JDA Reader 87) Among the many "voices" de Angulo employs in this, among other things, fascinating collection of voices, is the written voice from the diary of his Fray Luis. "Who was Fray Luis?" chapter 1, in which "Fray Luis comes West to worst the Devil," begins. We are given then an obscure entry from an obscure record, which perhaps reveals something of the Franciscan's obscure heritage. We are told that, in any case, Fray Luis' identity must be obscured by the fact that "like many friars of that time he was known only by his nom de religion •.• " (92) We are informed, quickly, of all to befall our hero, his quest, temptation, his sin and fall. Struggle, struggle, Fray LuisI the monsters are pulling, pulling you down ••• Ahl it is useless, Fray Luis. You gave them your soul. Down you go. (93) De Angulo opens his novel with this cautionary note: 44

Beware, white men, of playing with magic of the primitive. It may be strong medicine. It may kill you. Ye, sons and daughters, foster children of the cities, if ye would go to the wilderness in search of your Mother, be careful & circumspect, lest she lure you into her secret places, whence ye may not come back. (90) Parisian-born, de Angulo spoke with a French accent, made slightly strange or exagerated by the fact that his parents' native tongue was Spanish. Since I have already introduced the matter of voices in The Lariat, I would like to 8uggest-- if the reader can imagine such a voice--De Angulo is almost always his own narrator, a highly educated Spanish, French, American who studied story telling with people whose social cohesion depended, during long rainy winter months, on story telling. De Angulo describes northern California Indian telling in the Appendix to Indian Tales-­ A regular speech, among Indians, requires a specialized kind of talent. A regular speech must be in stilted, archaic talk, delivered in a high, 45

unmodulated voice, in rapid sentences broken by short silences. Only some people know how to do this. (de Angulo, Indian Tales 242) I would like to suggest that de Angulo's phrasing, his "voice," reflect all of his phonetic influences--"Be-wehrrr whhite mahn ... " De Angulo labels The Lariat with a skull and crossbones. How much of this is melodrama? how much truth? how much does the reader really care? warnings can be phrased in such way that they become temptations. He begins chapter one by throwing down the gauntlet--here is my tale he says, Fray Luis came to Monterey in California, in the days of the Indians. He came to save their pagan souls, but as we shall see, he used the powers of sorcery, once, and lost his own. We may find some excuse for his sin in the violence of the passion of a man surrendered to God, in his agony as the day drew near when he would be forced to witness the profanation, the rape of his own soul. For, was not that Indian girl 46

part and parcel of his soul. He himself had redeemed her. He himself had poured the waters of baptism over her lovely head .•. The water had trickled down her throat, and a drop ran between her breasts. They were full and goat­ shaped, like most Indians', and he associated them vaguely in his mind with the aroma of chocolate scented with vanilla. (de Angulo, The Lariat 92) Angulo takes but three more paragraphs to paraphrase the central action of what must be the most complexly written eighty-one page novel in North American letters. It's as if de Angulo hands The Lariat to you, finished and coiled, a given myth for the enactment of tragedy, a rite for the North American landscape--"Who was Fray Luis? Who he was appears best from his own curious diary: (93)". And with Fray Luis's diary entry the action begins; the play of voices; The Lariat begins its unwinding. 47

2. An Introduction to The Matter of Big Surf Carmel; Fray Luis's Diary; and an Introduction to Other Characters * ••. that country was always known to the paisanos of Monterey as "la costa del

Sur," the coast to the southj a wild,

little known land ... But to go back to my story. It was

around Christmas time of ' 15, and I was loafing in Carmel (which at that time

was not much more than two score houses

or so); and so one day, as I was riding

my horse along the road, I saw two vaqueros on horseback. But these two were real vaqueros •••

Since they were paisanos I needed

no introduction and I stopped them: "Where do you come from?" "AlIa, de la

costa del Sur, AlIa lejos al diablo ••• from the coast to the south, from down there to the devil •••••• "ls there free land down there?" "Plenty of it, hermano, but too wild, too steep, too far from everywhere ••• nothing but

coY0 tes and deer ••• 11 "Fine!" I said, "that's just what I am looking 48

for .•.Will you take me down there, when you go back?" And that!s how I made the acquaintance of EI Mocho, as we used to call him (like so many vaqueros he had lost a thumb in the coils of the reata), the best horse-breaker I ever knew, and the most reckless, dare-devil plenipotentiary whose laughter could be heard half-a-mile away. (de Angulo, "LaCosta" 57) * Five thousand years without any advance in material culture. Five thousand years of living on the shores of the [San Francisco] Bay, always the same--hunting, digging for clams, reciting the old tales around the campfires; ••• (de Angulo, "Five" 6) • In 1925, at the suggestion of Carl Jung, de Angulo contacted the editor of The Independent. "Five Thousand Years," from which the immediately above quote is taken, was accepted for publication. The Independent, that same year, published Don Bartolomeo, de Angulo's only other 49

finished novel, and the companion to The Lariat,

in four parts. (Callahan, JDA Reader 10, Leeds­

Hurwitz 131) And the narrative voice in Don Bartolomeo begins, about one hundred years after the action of The Lariat has finished, I am the last Indian of my tribe, the

last of the Surenos. There are some

Indians around Carmel, but I don't

understand their language. All the Indians are bound to die, now that you people have killed our protectors, the eagles, the lions, the bears .•. the masters of the mountains, the senores of

the brush. (11) The Mission Indians in The Lariat, the Rumsen­ speaking Ohlone tribelet, were first named Runsienes in 1792 by the Spanish explorer Jose Espinosa y Tello, were a "Monterey dialect [sic] of the larger Costanoan 'Tribe lll (Howard 11). A shell mound site on Carmel Bay indicates that the Oh10ne people were living there four

hundred and fifty years before the immaculate conception of Christ, before he changed water into wine, walked on the ocean waves, raised the dead or was seen in a vision after his death by that 50 woman of the street, Magdalene (Howard 10) . Cabrillo was the first white Christian to see the Monterey Bay in 1542--but he .did not land there (Broadbent 46). Cermeno followed Cabrillo, in 1594. He did not stop in Monterey but is believed to have anchored farther south by Point Sur (46). The Sebastian Vizcaino expedition, 1602­ 3, in search for a "suitable spot on the coast of California for a harbor for the ships from the Phillipines" (46), was the first to leave written descriptions of the Indians of Monterey. In a letter to Virrey dela Nueva Espana, conde de Monterrey, for whom the port was named, Vizcaino described them as "gentle and peaceful people; they say with signs that there are many villages inland" (.9J:J!. in 47). Another important account from the Vizcaino expedition was written by Carmelite Friar, Fray Antonio de Ascencion. He wrote of the California coastline, perhaps Cape Mendocino, perhaps, more likely, the Sierra de Santa Lucia, and commented ••• slopes all reddish, covered with 51

brush, this called the Sierra de Santa

Lucia. which is ordinarily sighted by ships which come from the Phi1ppine Islands. Of the Indians, Fray Antonio wrote, "They go naked at this port" (.9..!.!!.. in 47),

Angulo's Fray Lui~' first journal entry finishes in an apotheosis of passionate self­ loathing in the name of God. A vain man, filled with hungers, he despises his Superior, Fray Bernardo. He despises Bernardo's bureaucratic lack of imagination, his singular lack of passion. "Fray Tallow," he dubs the Father Superior. Ah, Fray Luis--as in the histories of the infamous Junipero Serra (Marogolin 159), we are informed of your habit of se1f-flagge1ation to scourge this never-ending indulgence in fleshly vain glory, Then, at the end of chapter one, "Well," Fray Luis wrote--a second journal entry-­ there, just on the other side of the rocks, there was an Indian girl bathing and all naked. What a scolding she got

from Fray Tal1owl" ••• Didn't that hussy know that it was strictly against the rules? She would get the lash for that! 52

Shameless wench, why didn't she go back among the gentiles ••• " all of this in mixed Rumsen and Catalan. The poor little one was standing before us, with tears in her eyes, very much distressed at all the violence, but quite plainly not understapding a word of what he said ....she belonged to a rancheria of Esselenes, back in the hills ..• she did not understand the language of the Rumsen Indians, nor the language of the whitemen, why was this man so angry, was he a powerful sorcerer, and would I please ask him not to give her the evil eye? .• At first she didn't understand. She looked at me incredulously. Then she seemed to comprehend, and she began to laugh, but she suddenly checked herself, and slowly the blush of shame crept allover her dark skin. And I who had been innocent of any thought up to this moment felt myself blushing by contagion. Seeing this, the girl turned and fled toward the rocks where she had left her zarape. 53

At supper we had a visitor, a young vaquero, the son of a settler who lives way down the Coast. He was one of the leather-jacket soldiers in the first expedition with Captain Portola .•. (95) * The Portola party, searching overland for Monterey in 1769, came to establish a Spanish settlement there which would provide them with the harbor. After overshooting the mark by as far as Drake's Bay, they returned south and camped by the Carmel River. They found only a few of one Ohlone tribal community (Broadbent 50). The Indians became confused and afraid, ran off in all directions, "and the women burst into tears" (ill. in Margolin 157). But in the area of the Sierra de Santa Lucia the Indians they met appeared to one diarist as the roughest, and most "savage" native people from San Diego to north of San Francisco (Broadbent 50). Nonetheless, in 1770 another land expedition, including Fray Junipero Serra (Walker 1) along with an expedition group which arrived by seat returned and established the Mission San Carlos Borromeo. 54

The Indians, that they found on this occasion, were generous to the Spanish, providing them with fresh game. "Their good disposition has given the missionary fathers well-founded hopes of speedily winning them over to the faith of Christ"

(~. !rr Broadbent 51). In 1771, the mission was moved to the Carmel River. By the beginning of The Lariat, the mission, under Fray Bernardo's effecient hand, was thriving. The leather-jacket soldier-deserter, "old Esteban was hardly a white man any more" (de Angulo, The Lariat 102). At an age-old rancherie site, back in the canyons of the Sierra de Santa Lucia, by a spring, he had built, long years ago, a cabin for his Esselen wife and himself. They had one son, a Ru1z who spoke in Spanish with his father, a Kinikilali ("Who-Is-That?") who spoke in Esselen with his mother. As an actor in the play of events which unwind in the narrative, Ruiz-Kiniki1ali is a devil-may-care hUnter, horseman, lover and friend. He seems to embody all that is most spirited from his two heritages, the first Big Sur Californio. 55

Esteban, his father, brought cattle back into those hills from the mission, once amnesty was granted to the Portola deserters--he was the first Big Sur vaquero. Esteban had hunted bear in those hills, too, with the lariat. He could hold a grizzly in its hoop, coiled around the horn of his saddle, long enough for his Esse1en companions to kill it with bows and arrows. It was because he helped them, hunting bear with his lariat, that only a few of Esteban's wide ranging cattle ever fell prey to bear, animal or shaman. And Esteban taught Ruiz how to hunt bear with a lariat. None of the other boys in the Esse1enm rancheria knew how. They all still lived in the hills and were not of the mission. n ••• the Esse1en Indians ••• spoke a language having no connection with that of other tribes in California or elsewhere in America" (Miller, Big Sur 4), What could they have known of 1a reata? The Esse1en did not raise cattle. And Fray Bernardo did not allow any Indians to learn how to ride a horse. But Esteban and and his half-Indian son had hunted the bear together. on horseback. And now Esteban Berenda was getting old and did not hunt bears any more. He sat in the sun in front of his house and 56

watched the sea. Maybe the Phillipine galleon would appear soon on its way south. He sat in the sun and blinked at the sea. He was thinking of his dead wife. She had been fat and silent .... He had never gotten to know his wife. He had loved her very deeply, and after she died he always felt lonely. (106) De Angulo's portrait of Esteban is that of an old man whose losses outweigh the need for vanity. And if he remained a stranger in this coastal mountain home to the end of his days he never forgot whose home, the people and their customs, the land actually was. He was simply a man who had run rather than live serving a cruel military master, an infamous Lieutenant Fages

(102).

Esteban was a merely minor player who had found himself befriended by strange people, thousands of miles away from his place of birth, La Mancha. Soon he would be no more than the hills themselves. And if his son was at the age in his youth to think of his father as nothing more than a useless old man, what did he care. Esteban spent his 57 afternoons "looking at the ocean, dreaming"

(107).

The second chapter of The Lariat, "And finds him entrenched in the Wilderness," in which, among other things, the reader is introduced to Esteban, begins at dawn, sometime during the first, or, at the very latest, second decade of the nineteenth century, A. D. 58

3. The "Senores of the Brush;" the Psychological Dimension of Timej Seducing You, Leading You On * Though young, geologically speaking, the land has a hoary look. From the ocean depths there issued strange formations, contours unique and seductive ..•. At dawn its majesty is almost painful to behold. That same prehistoric look. The look of always. Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity •.•. Dreamers, outlaws, forerunners. Advancing toward the other world of long ago and far away. the world of yesterday and tomorrow. The world within the world. (Miller 7-8) * ••• the tale of Yayali the Giant; the tale of how "He Who Walks Alone" made the world and Coyote helped himj the tale of how the fire was stolen from the people who had it. It was Lizard who first saw the smoke, and he said: "Smoking below, smoking below, smoking below. My 59

grandmother starts a fire to cook acorns. It is very lonely." And they sent Flute-player, the Mouse, to get the fire. He took with him four flutes. He put the people to sleep with his music and he stole their fire. He filled hie flutes with coals and brought them back to his people. And another time they stole the Sun. It was Coyote who stole the sun ••.. (de Angulo, "Five" 6) *

De Angulo J a master of innuendo, never wastes his words. A brilliant man himself, he demands enough intelligence from the reader to fill in the spaces

which he has artfully blended and woven through the story. It is as if the June fog from de Angulo's Big Sur has been wafted between the pages of the book,... (Pendell, "A Coyote" 115) * Barry Gifford's review of The Lariat places the novel in another time. 60

•.. the moment men and animals stopped talking to one another must have only recently past, for the animals still discuss comings and goings of men, observe them closely for more than their own personal welfare-- ..• (Gifford, Rev. of The Lariat 145) In fact, some men still spoke with some animals. Pawi, Kiniki1awi's cousin. for example, spoke with animals as powers of the known world and had, as his personal hunting ally, weasel. Much of the time the animal-god gave the dreamer some good advice .•.. Other times, though--and this is what the vision-seeker generally hoped for--the animal-god offered itself as a helper. (Margolin, The Ohlone Way 138) Alfred Kroeber, de Angulo's contemporary, who made a life's work of the study of California Indian culture, states that in central California, as in central and eastern United States, many

Indians had gua~dian spirits, animals or supernatural beings, with whom they communed (Kroeber 300). But clearly gone are the days when Coyote stole the sun. 61

The sun rises, peeking over the top of the furthest ridge on the orient. A wild country is revealed, a maze of ridges and canyons filled with fog. The silence is broken. The birds twitter everywhere. The bluejays greet one another. (de Angulo, Lariat 97) Anyone who's lived back in the California coastal hills can tell you what awful gossips and complainers jays are. A neighbor (when I lived five miles back a dirt road in the west end of the Mayacamas in Mendodino County) once commented, "Blue jays are the clutchplate between the worlds. n The commonest of wild creatures I jays are also the most verbal. De Angulo sucks the reader right into this dialogue of birdtalk. One complains about the wife's misery. The other complains about the responsibility of having children. The two share a worm. Gifford correctly points out, "no false importance or wisdom is granted them" (Rev. of The Lariat 148). But, all of a sudden one of the jays starts talking about a white man who just passed through the other day, De Angulo doesn't come right out 62

and say it but the white man was none other than Fray Luis. De Angulo has laid out, like a scent, the hint of context. The scene takes place in Esselen country where the whites rarely travelled. Fray Luis got lost on his way to the mission, tried to take a short cut through the Esselen country instead of taking the normal, more roundabout route. One blue jay says to the other that the white man split himself in two once. The other blue jay replies, "What d'you mean split himself in two?

(99)" Then the first blue jay says, Yes, he split himself in two ••. that's what they tell me, and one half looked like a doe, with long eara, but it had a tail like a puma, and the other half had only two legs and no tail, like a wildcat, and the white man's head went with that. But I don't believe it do you? What's going on here? de Angulo is familiar, truly strange, surrealistic, and funny by turns. A guide into the forest of collective 63

consciousness--collective, meaning to include sentience of any or all sorts. "You can't tell," the second blue jay says. And then, as if de Angulo spreads open the branchwork of a pine tree onto the edge of a sunlit, if unfamiliar, opening, comments how old Esteban did the very same thing when he was a white man, new to the neighborhood, so to speak. This leads to a general discussion of white men. A buck deer and a couple of foxes join in. The deer says that Indians are harder on deer than whitemen. But the old fox remembers when he lived near many white men and how many animals were killed then. He warns them all, "If they ever come here it will be our endl" The Senores of the Brush have become extinct: grizzly bear and condors, not to mention the Rumsen-speaking Ohlone people, are gone now, from the California landscape into a mysterious past. Anybody who's lived back in the California hills will tell you that blue iays are the sentinels for all the wild creatures, one human footstep w~ll set them off squawking. 64

"'Tschakl tschak! tschak! ,n they callout. "'Run everybody, all of us! I see two Indians coming this way along the ridgel '" (de Angulo, The Lariat 100) And so the tableau is drawn to a close with an understated and unimportant bit of magic realism which fades into description of the scene itself: a little Indian rancheria, the ocean below. The ocean off Big Sur, it's distant sound. A condor soaring, seagulls below. The ocean, its horizon. beyond. This fade dissolves into another discussion: between, this time, as we meet for the first time, Ruiz and Esteban. They talk together while they are eating. They bicker about the new friar, whom Ruiz does not like. Old man and spirited youth, they bicker about cattle and bears. When Ruiz merely mentions the name of Saturnino, Esteban flies into a rage. Why Esteban gets so angry at the name of Saturnino is never explained. But because de Angulo is such a master of foreshadow and texture in his writing he is able to both create atmosphere with his characters and descry, episodically, so much information, 65

with such economy. By the end of the second chapter all the players will be in place. Indeed the second chapter of The Lariat is an exemplary piece of writing. The first four pages of chapter two present the reader with one scene after another, with the minutest of descriptive context, animal dialogue, father and son. Set up, the reader is then given a narrative history of Esteban, his wife, Ruiz-Kinikilali; we are introduced to Kinikilali's "cousin and chum" Pawi-mailay-hapa. We are told that Iinikilali is secretly teaching his cousin how to ride horses. Here the narrative is told in a matter-of-fact way, by a loosely formalized but easily followed, associated series of incidents and reflections graced with the thinnest presentation of scene, Esteban gazing at the ocean. De Angulo also begins, in chapter two, to make a statement about the nature of time and consciousness. At the time de Angulo wrote The Lariat one narrative technique in vogue was called "stream of consciousness." I think an apter, and more inclusive term to describe an objective of a great many artists of that era, would be: a 66

composed representation of the processes of conciousness in, over, through time; a kind of time-consciousness continuum. We all experience that certain times of our every day, and our lives, are more pregnant with quality than other times. This subjective fact is the basis for choice for any artist in any medium. If de Angulo achieves strange effects he is able to do so because he makes of use of age-old, familiar. story-telling magic; dramatic phrasing, innuendo, mysterious tableaux, silliness. What he adds to the picture, or rather, composes his picture with is the psychological dimension of time. And he does this by interjecting into his tale, three differing cultures (Esselen, Rumsen­ speaking Ohlone, and Spanish) and a landscape that hints at eternity by its atmosphere alone, and by the use of many, seemingly tangential, voices, all juxtaposed against one another. Here is haunting Big Sur. There is Fray Luis on his donkey (which he has mistaken for a mule). How did you pass the rancheria without seeing it. Fray Luis? How did you miss old Esteban's house? the first time you rode through this ~ay? 67

Here! the idea of psychological time. There, in chapter two, de Angulo refers to Fray Luis' ride to the mission in Carmel, already presented to the reader through Fray Luis' journal entries in chapter one, the novel's action, itself, slips backwards into a speculative past . •.• perhaps it was in the late afternoon when he passed, that strange time when the spirit of anguish is abroad, leading fear by the hand, and he was looking for a good camping place, hurrying, oppressed. That time in the late afternoon, when the sun is low over the water and the deer come out of the canyadas to graze ••• (109) Then, of all things, de Angulo invites the reader to go there (where? Big Sur of coursej de Angulo's Big Sur, near twilight, which, like dawn, is a doorway between the worlds of light and dark with its own history of pathetic fallacy), lay down under a tree and just listen. Is this a novel or an enchantment? Is this Mouse about to steal fire from us for Lizard's grandmother, or what? What time in history is this? Now? as it is being read? When de Angulo 68

lived in Big Sur? Or is it in the old time, back then, when the animals were still people in the minds of human beings?

Henry Miller said that de Angulo II really craved ... a virginal world, a world unspoiled by man" (Miller, Reader 77). What's going on? Animals are chattering. Blue jay invites a squirrel to walk right on over you if you're going to lay still and play dead like that. Hi there Mr. Deer, he saya, greetings, Chief Woodpecker. A jingling of spursl run deer! ••• A vaquero passes by. And then blue jay, coyote, weasel, cricket, puma and beetle carryon a confabulation. Puma and cricket talk about an old blind IIdoctor,t who is their "father" who knows their "songs," and has a lot of power (The Lariat 111). They gossip and talk about people as if they, as Dale Pendell comments, the animal kingdom, were the earth's true gaurdians ("A Coyotell 115) or animal-gods as Malcom Margolin has named them in The Ohlone Way. For us animism is a fringe phenomenon, but for the Ohlones and other Indians it was central to their understanding of how the world worked. Everything 69

had intelligence, willfulness, everything demanded a personal relationship. (Margolin 141) And pine tree talks down to the beetle. And the redwood explains about the pine. And the hills address the mountain-top, the Ventana, Pico Blanco, where Coyote, in the sacred time, created all the people (Margolin 134). And the Ventana tells them all to shut up. Maybe the mountain is old and wishes to sleep, but listen ••• a broken-hearted shaman is out there, crying in the night. He's lost his power, he's lost his shadow, he's lost the woman he loved. The pacing of the novel is unrelenting. But de Angulo has now, in chapter two, finished the formal groundwork for the rest of the work, just as he loaded the reader up with important end necessary information about his main character in chapter one. The rest of the novel's movement echoes the movements in chapter two. Chapter breaks are used to move from one large motif or place of scene to another. Within the chapters, themselves, de Angulo refuses to stint on information about his varied cast, clues which, 70

adding up, allow him to accelerate and vary his drama, present complex motives, symbols, drive home the Big Sur tragedy and finish in an apotheosis of death followed by death followed by Fray Luis' surrealistic, hallucinatory, inevitable demise before Amomuths, an old blind, were-bear. Pendell claims that, "As the drama" in The Lariat unfolds, one finds that one has, through some extraordinary good fortune, been admitted to a secret society, the circle of shamans and power-doctors, and that for those with ears to hear, nothing has been withheld­ -by the end of the book one is an initiate. ("A Coyote" 115) I do not pretend to know much about the technical particulars of Esselen shamanism but I find de Angulo actually very reticent to present actual shamanic technique beyond what is available in the anthropological monographs of his era. Certainly we are told nothing of Fray Luis' apprenticeship in the wilderness, later in the novel. However, I cannot deny that De Angulo orders, disorders, redescribes time, perception. He renders realistic description darkly, but often 71

in a way that is vivid and beautiful, often in a way that makes you laugh ••. and believe. Anything is possible; there are more ways than one for percieving the world. And yet even as The Lariat takes one wild twist after another there is always something familiar in the telling that rings with the authority of time. seducing you, leading you on. III. The Lariat and The Scarlet Letter * The host of native powers finally comes

to redress a balance disturbed by the invader and his custodial friars, and part of that redress is a restoration of voices, birds and weasels as Indians

might overhear them, whimsical chorus, marginal and not so marginal, to the fates of both the violent Fray Luis and the bear hunter Kinikilali. (Peck 183) * 73

1. Embroidery and Lariat-making; The North American Romancej At A Border Between Past and Present * His stu~ies of Indian healing and intuition, and notably Pit River shamanism issue from the same powers of observation that inform The Lariat--the most impressive of de Angulo's short novels picturing Spanish Catholicism in California much as Hawthorne represented certain faces of Puritanism: an intrusive cultural force whose domination of native powers could not escape the influence of those powers, a "satanic" seduction as inevitable as it was natural and just. In the narrow sense, this tale addresses those distortions of spirit and intellect in the culture of his father from which de Angulo had fled. But more largely it is one of the few effective historical romances on California's cultural miscegenation (a reflection on Hawthorne seems unavoidable), and de Angulo was 74

uniquely equipped to write it, for he came to each element of Californiats past as the place itself had absorbed them, with a particular force in each case. (Peck 183) I find David Peck's connection between The Lariat and The Scarlet Letter illuminating for a number of reasons. First of all, I like ideas that, however obvious, are previously unthought of. Secondly, Peck's suggestions bear elaborating upon and there are number of ways, beyond those Peck mentions, in which a comparison between the two novels is profitable. The very familiarity of The Scarlet Letter, in addition, brings to bear a shared and established knowledge against which a relatively unknown The Lariat, and its "glow of passion", may be perceived as if lit upon beneath a full moon, say, at midnight. The Scarlet Letter has as its essential metaphor, metonymy, symbol, an embroidery, The novel itself is written in a complexly embroidered text-ure. The Lariat has .•• the lariat; la reata. An embroidery in one, art, without which spirit fails, without which Hester Prynne and her precious Pearl would starve. 75

And in the other, life itself for certain men, hunters, vaqueros; at the very least their thumbs, a part of their essential humanity, depend upon the art with which a lariat is constructed. A traditionally (and in fact of context, a particular) woman's art in one is given its full, heroic measure; a revolution in literary values. An old man's work is given measure in the other; simple, unornamented, strong; filled with the power of his sagacity and bile; an entire industrial revolution, an entire overthrow of a way of life; a metonymic trace; a metaphor for the introduction of herding upon a civilization with centuries of successful hunting and gathering and grooming the hillside forests with fire for the production of acorns and pinenuts. At night in the acorn groves the dancers dressed in their finest feathers and body paint and repeated the ancient sequence of steps. As they danced, a chorus of men chanted the word for "acorn" and then the word for "plenty," often breaking the words up inoto separate syllables and chanting the syllables for a time before once 76

again restoring the words to their original forms. (Margolin 42) Although it was a land of plenty to the Oh10ne, for the Spanish, unwilling to adapt to the land as the Indians had, until food crops and cattle were imported from Mexico, "starvation was an everpresent threat." (Murphy 14) * Within the embroiderer's ornate skill and Hawthorne's open admiration for her and it, civilization's capacity for projective sin and its singular lack of appreciation for the creation of

art are to be transcended. The lariat, on the other hand is a herding tool, adapted to the hunt, adapted to shamanic power: the way nature adapts detritus for its own usages. The lariat becomes a fetish to the world in which evil is percieved as something/ someone that upsets the continuing balance among living beings, and is used to redress that imbalance, an ensorce11ed rope; a life-line between a dying culture, a culture already dead, and the culture that in turn will die of the very disease it sees as salvation for the rest of the world. 77

Both works are sent to us as warnings and ritual, cultural cautionary tales. I will elaborate on this point later but for now I think it is also necessary to point out ways in which each novel can shed light on the other novel's flaw. In Hawthorne's romance, the land embodies a transcendental attitude and it is by that transcendental attitude that the narrowness of the Puritan outlook is revealed. De Angulo, however, presents a first people's landscape. He presents the settlers' landscape as well. And he presents a landscape that has carried on through his own time into the future-­ Go there someday and sit down with your

back against a tree. Keep quiet, do not move, keep very quiet. Just sit

there, still as a stone. (109) His use of varied psychological attitudes toward the land creates a compositional depth of field. And depth of field is certainly associated, psychologically, with that reality defined as landscape. In this sense, The Lariat

truly surpasses The Scarlet Letter. Big Sur t its 78

inhabitants a part of its own wild nature, the earth, in its inhabitant, might be the true protagonist of this novel. I, like many North Americans, especially living in the American West, find the idea of landscape as hero a fitting answer to the landscape's passions and the intensely felt human passions which echo and reverberate the landscape here. On the other hand, Hester Prynne is the one of the most vividly drawn characters in North American fiction. De Angulo's heroine, unlike many of the male characters in the novel, even minor characters, is barely rendered. We are never even given her name and yet it is she for whom the whole hoopla of the novel takes place. She is not only Fray Luis' prodigy and Kinikilali's lover, but she is, as well, the young, mad shaman's ex-wife. Yet her death is barely felt. Like Esteban's wife, we never really get to know her. She is, seemingly innocent and sensual but •.. the woman who sends her husband into the wilderness, raving; the woman who must die, as the young shaman Hualala, Ruiz, Saturnino and Fray Luis must die: that woman is not presented. In my opinion, it is only de Angulo's failure to give 79

us any real coherent interior for her character which flaws The Lariat. But, given this flaw, one can easily argue that The Lariat is also implicitly charged with a feminist's point of veiw. Among the Esselen the curse began when a shaman misused his power around his wife. And Fray Luis betrays the young woman as well. Paula Gunn Allen makes the argument that the very structures of Native American life are roots of contemporary European-American feminism

( "Wh 0 11 13- 2 7 ) • Once, camping with my daughters near the California-Oregon border, we heard a lecture on the local basketmakers. I do not remember which tribe or tribes sshe spoke of. The woman, a forest ranger, made the point that every basketmaker put one flaw into their basket, so as not to offend the gods with the presumption of perfection. The Tao Te Ching says, "Great perfection seems chipped." I suppose I am arguing throughout this thesis for the idea that de Angulo's work be taught and so I find the comparison with Hawthorne prOVidential. And when I finish my The Scarlet Letter or The Lariat, then please. come to me and listen while I sit in judgment. 80

Both novels present to a critic innumerable possibilities for speculations upon self, culture,

and the relationship between the two. I would also like to comment, before continuing, that nowhere in de Angulo's own writing do I find any reference to Hawthorne. And other than the inference from the fact that de Angulo was a highly literate man and was educated,

in his undedrgraduate work, at an Eastern university, I have no idea if he even read The Scarlet Letter. There is no place in my research where I find that de Angulo regarded Hawthorne as literary predecessor, let alone an influence on his writing. Nonetheless, the shared motifs of the two novels place The Lariat in the context of a historical American literary tendency, the Romantic novel. Richard Chase, in The American Novel and its Tradition, elaborating upon Hawthorne's introduction to The Scarlet Letter, calls "Romance," •.. a kind of "border" fiction, whether

the field of action is in the neutral territory between civilization and the wilderness .•. or whether ••• the field of action is conceived not so much as a

place as a state of mind--the borderland of the human mind where the 81

actual and the imaginary intermingle. Romance does not plant itself, like the [British] novel, solidly in the midst of the actual. Nor when it is memorable, does it escape purely into the imaginary. (19) I believe de Angulo might argue that the

American Romantic novel derives itself from the far more ancient literature of orally transmitted tale-telling. 82

2. The Border Between California Tale-Telling

and North American Magic Realis~ * "No Tony. I dontt want to know just for curiosity. I want to know because I think the whites have lost their soul and they must find it again. Some of the things the whites have lost, the Indians have kept. 1t (ill. in de Angulo, Jaime in Taos 38)

* I have been taught that beginning with the Christian era, humanitl, under its influence, has Rercieved time in terms of history alone, as a linear progressive occurance, separate from any spiritual eternitl (Morris 23). I have also been taught that Aristotle, through his hierarchical compartmentalized examination of Greek Drama. with its special emphasis on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, has had an overwhelming influence upon the way we gather and express knowledge about ourselves and the world around us (Adams 47). 83

That linear perspective, with all its rational familiarity. and hierarchical compartmentalization, with all its wonderful windows into intellectual understanding, tend to

~resent the history of art and literature. the history of culture, as a steady progression of formal innovation, made up of discretely identifiable components. However. a linear and compartmentalized presentation of time. with all it's illusory conveniences does not seem to me to adequately accomodate any attempt to comprehensively understand the nature of culture. This approach alone to knowledge is vulnerable to complete collapse when its inadequacies are brought to light. Logic that rests on fallacy will ultimately betray itself in real experience. This has been especially true today, now that(l) there has beeg an intermingling of cultures from the earth's four corners. the inevitable upshot of world-wide war, oppreSSion, economic and ecological disasters; (2) the discoveries of modern science have. for the most part. replaced religion as the dominant descriptive mythology in Western culture; and (3) the access to information has been 80 dramatically 84

expanded by heretofore unthought of advances in media technology on a world wide basis. In an essay appearing in Grey Wolf Press's Multicultural Literacy, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a visual artist, points out that the art of the borderlands, because of this worldwide contemporary situation, has become an urgent, artistic imperitive. And it is the function of the border artist, Gomez-Pena says as well, to contribute to a greater shared acceptance and support for the varied achievements of each other's particular culture(s). The border artist prOVides, against a contemporary, rapid and imposed cultural amnesia, the possiblity for a new, revitalized, cultural collaboration which offers shared histories as an antidote. ("Documented/ Undocumented" 127-134) Ideas and structures of thought, often no longer applicable to one's own time and place, can and do profoundly influence the human perception of what is real. One example of such an idea might be Plato's conseption in The RepubliC ,that censorship on behalf of the state is a valid prerogitive. Plato remains with us but how many Platos, how many nations of Platonic thinkers, have had their lives which can be said to be the 85

very essence of culture scrubbed out by the Empire? American Indian poet, author and scholar,

Paula Gunn Allen in an essay on "American Indian Fic tion, 1968-1983," states, Certain changes had to occur in American writing before American Indian

thought and culture could become realistically accessible to non Indian

readers. Until non-Indians could think and write in non-linear, non­ chronological, associative, synchronistic, and non-rationalist modes, American Indian ritual literature in contemporary forms was not publishable, even if it could be transmitted by more usual methods within American Indian communities. For while ritual literature, either of the old time, traditional variety or the new literary kind, is accretive rather than associative, achronistic rather than syncronistic, is ritual rather than mythological or historical, the new fiction of Europe and America

provided a close enough analog to 86

tribal literatures for writers to begin developing a new tribal literary tradition. ("American," 1058) When the Spanish came to California they not only conquered and colonized, determined which rituals and techonologies culturally ascended, they also imposed a Christian, linear and mundane historistic psychology toward time upon the

landscape. And, as I have already stated, the structures of agriculture were imposed upon the land and its people because the ruling Spanish colonists were incapable of adapting to what was

already there. There is an implied sense of censorship which accompanies a psychologic temporal monoperiphery. Dale Pendell points out that Fray Luis is not satisfied by the mere enslavement of the Indians. Indeed, to his favor, Fray Luis finds the physical oppression of the Indians somewhat distasteful. But Fray Luis passionately desires to impose his cultural psychology upon them. It would certainly surprise me, despite all 87

that has been done to Indian life in California since the first Europeans arrived, if all traces of North America's first peoples could be erased from contemporary culture. It would surprise me if local landscape could be so paved over as to completely disappear from cultural awareness. Wayne Ude suggests that magic realism has become a contemporary tendency in North American literature. Citing Richard Chase's critical examination of the North American romantic novel, Ude argues that this magic realist tendency derives itself from the nineteenth century "border" writing of Hawthorne, and Melville. Magic Realist novels and stories, as they exist today in both South and North America, and as their precursors existed in 19th century North America, seem to me to include the following elements: (1) They reject the narrow confines of traditional realism for a multi-dimensional, metaphysical reality; (2) They depict the mythical

or legendary -- as well as the historical -- past as an actual presence in contemporary life; (3) They reveal an acute sense of esthetics, 88

achieving -- or at least seeking -­ poetic re-creations rather than mere imitations of reality ••• ; (4) Their versions of human psychology tend to be based on Jungian archtypal theories rather than on either Skinnerian behaviorism or Freudianl surrealist notions of the single, isolated agoniziing psyche; and finally, (6) They demonstrate a firm belief in the validity of the realities they present; their persuasive, matter of fact tones and use of everyday details of commonplace realism, mixed with magical or mystical -- elements are designed to produce in the reader an equally firm belief. (Ude 23) To this list I would add that these novels seem to take place on a border between Greco­ Roman, Judeo-Christian European cultures and any number of cultures from other parts of the world or other European civilizations. I believe that what Ude defines as North American Magic Realism is the kind of writing which Allen is referring to that has opened the door for North American Indian writers to make use 89

of the novel in the spirit of their traditional culture. For example, Margolin points out that for the

Ohlone, magic was an everyday affair, as real to them as the mundane materiality of an airplane is real to our contemporary world-view (140-1). There is often more than merely Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" in Magic Realist writing that owes its believability to someone's real experience rather than the imagination. The Lariat, by in large, satisfies Ude's definition of Magic Realism. And it is a novel which incorporates, quite openly, California Indian lore and tale-telling strategies. The Lariat is not only a forerunner of North American Magic Realism; de Angulo's novel is also an open demonstration of how North American Indian ceremonial telling, thousands of years old, has become, at the very least, a significant influence in the making of the North American novel. And this, despite a severely imposed cultural censorship, despite the fact that traditional and contemporary American Indian oratory, poetry, autobiography, criitical essays are often still catalogued in our university library as 90 anthropology only and not as North American literature. Something nonetheless, by the very truth and profoundly related quality of this literary heritage, slips through. In any case. The Lariat presents an alive geographical, cultural, spatial, temporal, mental and spiritual borderland. 91

3. Spitting It Out

The Euro-American world-view from Hawthorne's time to de Angulo's had expanded considerably. Discoveries in the fields of geology (often in the American West), anthropology (animals are our ancestorsl), psychology (Freud and Jung) and 2 physics (E-mc , The Heisenberg Uncertainty

Principle), not to mention the formal breakthroughs in the arts, expanded the cultural foundation for a more varied compositional approach in literature. In addition, the European invasion of North America had reached across and held dominion from "sea to shining sea." And in that interim, a body of North American literature arose, and continues into the present day, reflecting upon that historical landscape just as The Scarlet Letter reflected upon New England and the era of the Puritan invasion. Like The Scarlet Letter, The Lariat is a brilliantly written, historically significant novel. Hawthorne invokes, on behalf of his ancestors, he [I] "take shame upon myself and pray that any curse incurred by them--may now henceforth be removed." And if there is any sorcery in The Lariat, that sorcery derives from 92

de Angulo's yearning to heal an imbalance in nature, by sucking out the Spanish Catholic poison in the New World, to use a Pomo doctoring term (Freeland 59), from/at its place of origin. A. E. Kroeber has pointed out, "The primary function of the California shaman is the curing of disease." (Kroeber, "Elements" 299) Pendell comments, "an ancient and basic law

of magic says" that it is the magician, the one who uses sorcery, who is then the most susceptible to it--that in order to hurtle the hate-poisoned spear of witchcraft on must drop one's own shield ever so slightly, thereby revealing a pink, soft, and flesh-like slit of vulnerability. (114) A surgical kind of magic. To achieve this end, Johns Hopkins alumnus, Dr. De Angulo invests his Fray Luis with more than a bit of himself. Like de Angulo, Fray Luis despises mediocrity. Like de Angulo, Fray Luis is a linguist. Like de Angulo, Fray Luis regarded the Indians as individuals, spirits, with their own knowledge, intelligence, and powers, share of humanity, not merely drones

to do his bidding. 93

Indeed, despite his hideous, nature­ destroying lusts, and his arrogance, Luis is a far more complex, and even likeable, individual than Roger Chillingworth whose own inquisitorial nature is thoroughly despicable (one of Hawthorne's major devices, against which Hester Prynne is brought into full relief, is the depiction of all that is despicable in the underbelly of the North American male character--Chillingworth's sadism, Dimmesdale's wimpery). De Angulo does not entirely confuse his protagonist with himself. But he seems to identify that the European curiosity, ego, and intelligence is borne by a greed that he percieves as phenomenonally destructive, phenomenonally self­ destructive, and in need of healing in its soul. While Hawthorne's novel has become a kind of North American academic initiation ritual reading, de Angulo's novel presents to California an answer to its all-too-familiar need for a connection to some kind of first hand sacred experience in its soul. While Fray Luis strives to understand Indians in order to further his own ambitions and desires, de Angulo, like Hawthorne before him, desires to restore the world to its original power. 94

Fray Luis desires possession of the young Esselen woman1s soul. The crazed shaman, Hualala, her ex-husband, desired to possess her spirit. The woman--a wild spirit, California, was caught in a seizure of history wrought by the Spanish exploration and Mission colonialism. And Kinikilali, the young man she loves, the Califorinio, is kindred, vital, innocent.

Saturnino--the old Rumsen, corrupted by long years of Mission living, makes lariats to sell; capitalism (to possess money) and in the service of agriculture (private ownership of land, domestic animals) and the Spanish. Bitter as bile, Saturnino has a Spanish name; obviously, therefore, given to him (by Fray Bernardo? by de Angulo? we do not really know). A Spanish name with a specific implication. He despises the vivacious Ruiz-Kinikilali who is free to move among the Esselen, Saturnino's traditional enemy, and free, too, to move among the Spanish missionaries. We can perhaps understand, therefore, that the old man fixes the pain of his dislocation upon Kinikilali. TI:;\~r~~':'..... II' '. 95 i: "

In any case, Saturnino baits Fray Luis with the promise of shamanic power. Power to keep the Esselen woman in Fray Luis' kinky, fantastic, possession. Power to kill Kinikilali. Power, a curse against nature that demands healing, a balance; nature cannot be possessed. The sacred is no one's privilege to possess, The basic law of sorcery in The Lariat has a cosmological imperitive and must derive its power from striking a balance. The Lariat is a spiritually political novel; a prophecy about exploitation and the upshot of exploitation. And it is also a passionate plea for a way of life that Angulo admired and rendered with affection. The tension in the novel arises because de Angulo identifies an upset in the balance of nature. The hunter becomes the hunted, inevitable as nature. Against the destruction of so much native to California, de Angulo has spit out the poison with one literary Custer's Last

Stand. IV. The Matter of Carmel/Big Sur: Archetypes:

The Violation of California--An innocent, sensual young woman; the priest/minister--the lecher/the devil; the hermit--seer of visions; the deranged poet/shaman; the suicides; the supernatural beings­ -what could be more archetypal?; the one, one with nature; animal worship, animal love--California; its landscape, language, literature, lore * Feuds were frequent in the coast hills,

as were tales of murder, insanity, suicide, adultery, etc. (Wall 5) * Wise Mary Austin, who was a true prophet of the Land of Little Rain, held that "no man has ever really entered into the heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects"; until he has achieved a sympathetic understanding, based on both knowledge and feeling, of the land's features, animate as well as inanimate. (Dobie 21) * 97

1. "The Seacoast of Bohemia" * There are two elements, at least, that

are essential to Bohemianism. The first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts; the other is poverty. Other factors suggest

themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as ...radical in their outlook on art an life, as unconventional, .•• (S!i. in Walker 10) * When Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in Monterey, "plagued with poverty, tuberculosis, and the love for another man's wife, •.. " (Walker 2), in 1879, the Carmel Mission was in ruins. Stevenson was taken with the rugged coast landscape as far south as Point Lobos. His walks there, along the Carmel beach and across the river and into rockier coves and cliffs, led to his descriptive use of the landscape in Treasure Island. Franklin Walker. in The Seacoast of Bohemia, claims that this was the initial literary appearance for the Carmel coast (2). 98

In 1880, " ... David Starr Jordon, conducting an ichthyological survey for the 1880 census, came upon the Carmel Beach .•• (2)" (an ichthyological surveyl salmon were doing better in those days, I'll bet; and contemporary censuses, I imagine, report few Republicans or Democrats among them). Jordan was so enamored of the landscape that he later wrote a flattering article about the area, published, in Scribner's Monthly. In his article, Jordan described the area as sparsely populated, a Chinese-American population, some Portuguese-Americans. Mrs. Leland Stanford, who was soon to help set up Stanford University with Jordan as its first president, was busy

putting an ugly high pitched roof on the neglected misSion ••• (Walker 2) In 1888, a man named Duckworth bought up some land, established a Carmel City, and tried to create a "Catholic summer colony" (3). It was a bust. "After all, a sun-tan was still looked upon as a blemish" (3). Duckworth's scheme was about as likely as de Angulo's own venture in dude ranching during the late 'thirties. 99

Meanwhile, in the eighteen eighties and nineties, Gertrude Atherton of San Francisco wrote a series of romances about the Spanish colonial era in Monterey. In her more contemporary, Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, the tragic matter of the Carmel Coast in literature is addressed for the first time. Her main character, Patience, is the adolescent daughter of a farmer who had accidentally shot himself to death. Her mother, once a beauty, had become a bloated drunkard who had allowed the family farm, which existed close to the mission ruins, to also fall into ruin. Patience finds her mother in a tryst with one of the farmhands and unsucessfully attempts to strangle her. During the course of the novel Patience, who was also treated as an outcast by the other children, wanders along the Carmel beach and among the rocks of Point Lobos at night. Her favorite haunt, however, was the tower at the Carmel Mission by moonlight with her familiar, a grey owl, named Solomon (Walker 6-7). During the nineties, Atherton, Frank Norris and Jack London, along with others, were establishing a literary community in northern 100

California. At the same time a phenomenon known as "Bohemianism," after Brett Harte's Bohemian Papers, arose in the Bay Area. Walker suggests that this Bohemianism was merely a revival of "Murgerism," which swept the area in the 'sixties and 'seventies. Parisian, Henri Murger had written a book in 1848 which described the lives of "garret-dwelling artists and writers" (9). When the land around Carmel was further developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the developers made a conscious appeal to artists and university professors, from Berkeley as well as Stanford. George Sterling, the poet, originally a San Franciscan, was to become the center of a literary cadre around Carmel. Soon after the arrival of Sterling, photographer Arnold Genthe arrived and novelist, autobiographer, critic and translator, Mary Austin. Sterling's importance is greater as a personality who attracted other writers such as Joaquin Miller to the area. Miller was a poet who cut quite a romantic figure. He appropriated the name Joaquin from the legendary California outlaw, Joaquin Murietta. 2'," , ; i ~ ;;, {L: i ;. 101

His fringed-buckskins style of dress, "wide red sash, bowie knives, long hair and shiny pistols" (Pendell, "New" 123) was adopted by Buffalo Bill and other late nineteenth century Western performers. During the 1860's Miller attempted to unify the Shasta, Pit River and Modoc tribes in their fight against the whites. Dale Pendell remarks:

Joaquin Miller's place in California

history and literature needs to be recognized. It is significant that the first [white male] poet who spoke for California lived and fought with the Indians, and risked his life trying to arm them. Miller's aspirations, in the end, were greater than his talents, but he planted a seed that continued to grow­ -far beyond his own life and work. It affected the whole course of California poetry--not in technique or style, but as William Everson points out, in an archetypal way. Right through Robinson Jeffers, the San Francisco Renaissance, and into today. ("New" 124) In 1905 Sterling arranged for Miller and original editor of the Overland Monthly, Charles 11'7 i a::; .: ;1;; Ijl< ;.i·' 102

Warren Stoddard to give a lecture together in

Monterey. Stoddard, after retiring from a small Catholic university post in Europe, made his headquarters in Monterey and worked, during his final years, on a series of articles about the California missions for Sunset magazine. "Perhaps he felt it appropriate to die near Serra's grave" (Walker 22). On the day of the lecture Sterling, Stoddard and Miller became inebriated. Sterling later related, Being in that state of benevolence, we were convinced that it was our pious duty to visit the old Mission at Carmel. A two seater was chartered, and with my friends in the back seat, I drove proudly to my home among the pines. Here Stoddard was, figuratively,

gathered to his fathers, and we laid him on a bed in my work cabin, he meanwhile feebly moaning that he wanted "his baby," whoever that was. Joaquin and I

went on to the Mission. 103

There he would, no doubt, have been impressed by the shadows and relics of California's golden past, but the old Portuguese sexton's daughter, who accompanied us with a great key, was a most attractive young imp, and Joaquin devoted his entire attention to trying to catch her off her guard. She was, however too alert and active for him, and we had to leave without his

obtaining the required kiss. (~. in Walker 22-23) Many other writers and artists drifted through or settled in the Carmel area. Sinclair Lewis lived there a for a few months--we11 before he achieved fame as a novelist. Sterling's friends, Jack and Charmian London, returned again and again to visit. Then there was the case of the Sterlings' friend, poet Nora May French. French was a beautiful blonde woman, known to all her friends as Phyllis. She had two married men passionately in love with her. One was a wealthy British timber baron who owned a ranch in Santa Cruz. The other was Harry Lafler, known as "Fra" Harry 104

Lafler, "the shaggy-haired Bohemian who was literary editor of the San Francisco Argonaut, •.• "

(32). Although both men were in the process of divorce, neither wound up marrying French. In autumn of 1907 she came to Carmel from San Francisco, poverty stricken and despondent. The romance of bohemian life always has had its grotesque side: poverty quickly can become squalor; unconventional sexual relationships, if they are unsuccessful, with the onus of society's narrowness of thinking branded onto them, often end in tragedy. Although her timber baron came for her, sailing across the Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz and promised marriage in the following spring. she was back with the Ster1ings within a week's time. According to Walker, French and Jimmy Hopper. a friend of the Sterlings', a fellow bohemian and writer, were having a love affair (Walker 55). At a Hallowe'en dinner at the Sterlings' in Carmel, Mary Austin spoke about her plans for the heroine of her ongoing novel to die of suicide from potassium cyanide poisoning. A fortnight later, Nora May French, Phyllis, who had wandered the Carmel coast all year in fits of depression, w

105

committed suicide by drinking potassium cyanide. (56) Years later, Sterling, a well-known philanderer, was abandoned by his wife, Carrie, who had become fed up with the man and his low­ down ways. Sterling was never the same. He wandered the Carmel coast for a brief period, falling into alcoholism. Eventually Sterling returned to San Francisco,

•.. his drinking approached dipsomania and his insatiable philandering in time suggested satyriasis. Finally, on

November 16, 1926 [nineteen years and two days after Nora May French's suicide], he swallowed the cyanide he had long carried with him everywhere he

went, ••• (121) The French story is a bit of a legend in its own right. I've been told the Nora May French story another way from another California writer. Cherchez 1a George he saysl And the cyanide Sterling died from? one of the vials French had purchased and gave to Sterling before her tragic end. Of course Sterling's diary entries, as they appear in Walker's Seacoast of Bohemia, seem to describe a woman whose distress was beyond pity, 106

if not to be somewhat disgusted with, rather than enamored of--if that adds anything definitive. Wall writes that French had fallen in love with Sterling unrequitedly. And at a picnic "she offered him a poisoned sandwich •.• , then snatched it away and ate it herself" (98). The Carmel-Big Sur area was a place where doom and the darker paSSions of sexuality reared in life and the literary creations of its inhabitants. Sterling's beat poetry heralded that of Robinson Jeffers whose brooding epic-length poetry unleashed the power of those kinds of passions against the coastal tides, and the inland, fog-driven canyons. Although Henry Miller's Big Sur And The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, written of the Big Sur bohemia in the early forties, is one of the more upbeat works written about Big Sur, its creation was surrounded by tragedy. Miller later said that he would have devoted a greater portion of the book to de Angulo, "because, even in his lifetime, he had become a legendary creature ••• " (Miller, Reader 77), but for the fact that his mother was approaching death at the time. 107

And at the core of Miller's memoir is the disintegration of Miller's Parisian friend, the drug-addict, Moricand, who comes to stay with Miller and his family in their cabin. This section of Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch is lifted from Miller's A Devil In Paradise. Moricand's one brief bit of happiness, incidentally, is his encounter with de Angulo. Exactly who is the devil in Miller's Big Sur is ambiguous: Moricand? de Angulo? Miller himself? we do not really know. Anyone familiar with Beat Generation writer

Jack Kerouac's autobiographical saga is familiar with his brooding, doom-haunted, Big Sur, written about his retreat in Lawerence Ferlinghetti's cabin there. If ever a book was written about the collapse of an individual, Big Sur is that book. The novel includes a long stream-of-consciousness poem which is an invocation of the "voice" of the ocean breaking onto the Big Sur coastline. What mighty falls, like old redwoods before the bedwarved logging crews, this Big Sur literaturel what ker-booms of passionate and human, surf and furyl 108

2. John Steinbeck and Al Clarke * One day he [AI Clarke] promised to bring me some marbles. I was excited, visualizing rainbow colored agates. To my great disappointment he arrived with a big bag of acorns. "See all the lovely marbles," he said. (Wall 84) * Considering its out of the way location, the Carmel-Big Sur area has attracted a number of well­ known and not-so-well known artists and writers to its shore, including Upton Sinclair. photographer Edward Weston, and John Steinbeck. And the area has produced a body of significant literature unique in American writing, with a distinct mood to it. John Steinbeck's first novel, To A God Unknown, is about the Wayne brothers who migrate from the east coast to the east slope of the mountains which separate the Salinas Valley from the coast. Robinson Jeffers told Rosalind Wall that John Steinbeck's mother, when she was teaching in Big Sur during the 1890's saw "little dark people" 109

there. And Wall, herself, reports seeing them. Armine von Temski, a "red-haired Hawaiian novelist" saw them at Point Lobos and Ed Rickets, Steinbeck's "Doc" in Cannery Row also told Wall that he too had seen lithe little dark people" (Wall 111). In To A God Unknown Joseph Wayne has a vision in which he sees the ghost of his father inhabiting an oak tree. From this vision on Wayne identifies himself with land and its spirits. One of the Wayne brothers, Burton, a Christian revivalist who regularly attends camp meetings on the Coast, girdles the oak tree which he considers his brother's profanation. What fo110ws--your typical Big Sur-Carmel doom tale:

Joseph Wayne's wife is killed in an accident by a spirit-inhabited spring; Joseph, in an almost ritual mating, commits adultery with his brother Thomas' wife, Rama; a killing drought blights the land, leaving thousands of cattle dead and rotting; and finally Joseph Wayne martyrs himself at the spring where his wife had died in order to restore the land to health. Steinbeck began work on the novel in 1928. It was published in 1933, not before a later '!j ,:

110

manuscript, CUR of Gold was published (French 175). Although one can say that To A God Unknown is clumsily written first novel, the clumsiness may be due to the fact that Steinbeck was attempting to write a Romantic epic poem which a realist novel form could only awkwardly contain. In any case there is one minor character in To A God Unknown who presents a pertinent echo to my discussion of de Angulo. When the first serious effects of the drought are making themselves known, Thomas and Joseph Wayne, having what only can be called a thirst for the sight of water, ride over the coastal mountains to the ocean. There, down through a winding path in the redwoods, the Waynes meet an old hermit, living five hundred feet above the sea. The old man tells the brothers, "I am the last man in the western world to see the sun. After it is gone to everyone else, I see it for a little while." (143) And every night the old man sacrifices an animal he traps to the setting sun. Joseph seems to come to an understanding about the nature of the drought through his encounter with the old hermit. He tells Thomas, "There was some kind of 111

accident that made this [the drought]. Next spring the ground will be full of water again"

(150). * An old hermit named Al Clarke died in Monterey at the age of ninety-four in 1936. Clarke, a Harvard graduate, had undergone an utter disillusionment with western civilization while obtaining a Ph.D. at Columbia University. He came to la costa del sur and pretended to be illiterate and daft. He lived a hermit's existence in the hills around Big Sur until a few months before his death. Early on in Big Sur, Clarke disappeared for almost a year. A good friend was sure that Clarke had gone to live behind Pica Blanco. When Clarke returned, posing as a madman, he claimed to have found some sacred hidden Indian gold. Of course the Spanish came to California, looking for gold and were disappointed when they found that the Indians there had no use for treasure. But it is said that Stevenson got the idea for Treasure Island from the legend of the lost Indian gold (Wall 90). 112

And no history, no literary history, of northern California can overlook the impact of the mid-nineteenth century gold rush. Although Walker does not comment about this there are always reasons why Bohemian artists choose poverty as an option against the upshot of crass materiality. Clarke's discovery of the gold coincided with

the discovery that civilization had, in Clarke's opinion, in its misuse of gold destroyed itself. Gold, he claimed, had spiritual essences that were far more valuable than its material properties. Al Clarke knew where the Indian gold was hidden but would never use it or tell of

it. He preferred to live without possessions, wandering around in the Little Sur, living on the wild honey plus a rich gruel made of wheat and honey, and occupying himself taming the deer and giving them names. He would call each one to him individually. "He was psychic," Doc Roberts repeated. "He always knew when I was coming." (Wall 86) at

114

* In a phone conversation, Gary Snyder said to me that Jeffers included de Angulo in Bome of his longer poems, as the Spanish cowboy, Qnorio Vasquez. From what I know of de Angulo it strikes me, reading "The Women At Point Sur" and the "The Loving Shepherdess," that Vasquez may be a character somewhat suggested to Jeffers by de Angulo but there are distinct differences between the fictional Vasquez and real de Angulo. Jeffers' Vasquez lived with several brothers and was a Californio, for example. De Angulo had several Californio buddies and perhaps the chumminess and quarrelling that went

on among them may have suggested to Jeffers the idea of a family of brothers--a speculation. Nonetheless any examination of de Angulo would be an incomplete one without a look at some of Jeffers' longer work. To this purpose I would like to take a look at the lesser known "The Loving Shepherdess," in which Vasquez appears. The narrative concerns itself with a beautiful and somewhat daft shepherdess, Clare Walker, who wanders the Big Sur J ;' '" : 'J

114

* In a phone conversation, Gary Snyder said to me that Jeffers included de Angulo in some of his longer poems, as the Spanish cowboy, Dnorio Vasquez. From what I know of de Angulo it strikes me, reading "The Women At Point Sur" and the "The Loving Shepherdess," that Vasquez may be a character somewhat suggested to Jeffers by de Angulo but there are distinct differences between the fictional Vasquez and real de Angulo. Jeffers' Vasquez lived with several brothers and was a Californio, for example. De Angulo had several Californio buddies and perhaps the chumminess and quarrelling that went on among them may have suggested to Jeffers the idea of a family of brothers--a speculation. Nonetheless any examination of de Angulo would be an incomplete one without a look at some of Jeffers' longer work. To this purpose I would like to take a look at the lesser known "The Loving Shepherdess," in which Vasquez appears. The narrative concerns itself with a beautiful and somewhat daft shepherdess, Clare Walker, who wanders the Big Sur 115

canyons and mountains, day and night, with her sheep. Along the way she meets several men and boys who either scorn her or attracted to

her beauty, pity her and offer her assistance. Vasquez, a man of visions, is one of those men, but he also seems to recognize a familiar other­ worldly quality to the girl. She remains with no one, always wanders. One of the men she meets, she has sex with in a house where a preacher, who called himself God, had once lived and where "God's" daughter had killed herself. One cannot escape the incestuous innuendo of that passage. And there is a larger implication, throughout the poem, that Clare Walker is something of a nymphomaniac or thought of as something of a nymphomaniac, and mad in a way beyond pitying. Clare reveals to Onorio the cause of her wandering. Her first love had impregnated her, but she miscarried. Her lover abandoned her and friends accused her of aborting the unborn infant. A doctor had told her that her pelvis was too deformed to bear children; it would be fatal to become pregnant again. 116

She fell in love again and didn't have the courage to tell the man about her problem. Walker was pregnant and determined to wander until her death. Vasquez suggests abortion but she will not. She wanders the hills and endures the elements and her fevered consciousness, and dies in childbirth, in the hills, inland from Carmel. * Poet William Everson says, The Californian himself ••• ,tends to think of formal art and formal religion as themselves the substitutes, surrogates for their root-force in the human soul, stand-ins for the primal and more deeply authentic impulse of these things that live behind and support their formalizations. Furthermore, he feels that this pantheism is not only the basic Californian or Western point of view, but is essentially American, is indeed characteristic American religious and aesthetic feeling. Whipple confirmed it as a prime ingredient in our national religious attitude, but he placed it as deriving from European 117

romanticism, where it was masked under a "love of nature" .•• (Everson 7) In Jeffers' poetry there is an attempt to fuse the landscape and the passions of its inhabitants into something containing that root­ force, that primal state Carl Jung defined as archetypal, to use the word Everson suggests in his book, Archetype West: The Pacific Coast As Literary Region. Even from this cursory examination, the real events which have taken place in the Carmel-Big Sur region and the literature which has emerged from that region indicate a kind of fusion between art and reality in which the power and "archetypal" significance of actual experience has a kind of primal ascendancy. The problem presented to the Big Sur writers by their confrontation with such impassioned content has been in discovering an appropriate form to match their themes. With Jeffers. even in the "Roan Stallion," in which the main character is a Californio woman named California, one always has the feeling that European myth, ritual and cycles. poetical forms, are being imposed upon the landscape and dictate the poetical drama while what was native to Big 118

Sur no longer exists. It's an Americanized, Western version, secularized and anarchic, but distinctly European-America. In "The Woman At Point Sur," a Reverend Barclay, posing as an avatar, pays an Indian woman, Maruca to prostitute herself. He tells her that he does not desire her, indeed he says he despises the idea of the coupling but that it is necessary for some holy consummatory reason. Jeffers by his boldface is plainly sympathetic, but if California Indians appear in Jeffers work, their world no longer remains. And, as Everson, who regards Jeffers' poetry as a primary teaching for his own work as a poet, points out in his discussion of "The Women At Point Sur," while Jeffers presents the reader with an anti-Christian tract, his work is fundamentally grounded in Christian ritual, Greek drama, and the English Romantic's fascination with the Prometheus myth in which the Greek and Christian elements of European culture are fused. (Robinson 132). Jaime de Angulo's unique set of living circumstances and interests, his enlarged sense of history, and his willingness to embrace influence of native story-telling literature, in conjunction 119

with that peculiarly somber and powerful Big Sur atmosphere, enabled him to fill us in and connect us with a telling of mythical Carmel-Big Sur from the time when the Spanish had first settled among the Ohlone people. This, The Lariat seems to say, was that time in history where the roots of the tragedy could

still be seen in their simple beginnings. At the very least de Angulo and Jeffers' work segue, admirably, into one another. And in my opinion, de Angulo overcomes the formal thorns that both Steinbeck, in To A God Unknown, and Jeffers, in his longer work, are ensnared by. The Indians in de Angulo's novels speak in speech patterns that are, as Olmstead points out, grammatical English representations of Achumawi, as spoken in the early part of this century (5), and not nineteenth century Rumsen or Esselen. Nonetheless, I would argue that the use of California Indian phrasing in a novel written by a European-American, was at the time, and remains, a major breakthrough in the creation of an appropriate formal response to the California landscape. 120

In addition, de Angulo's use of California Indian tale and telling styles present us, in an archetypal way, with a root understanding of the development of English as it as been written, spoken and thought in California. To propose that the impact of language which has developed, at least in part as a response to, and experience of, landscape, over the course of thousands of years, could be structurally dismantled in two centuries, is an error in judgment which de Angulo, the linguist, attempts to rectify. V. Mary Austin; The Sacred; and the Literature of the North American West * There is crass and inexcusable ignorance among our intellectuals of these things. and in our universities the traditional preoccupation with Greek and Roman

antiquities leaves no attention free for equivalent phrases of cultural assimilation going on between our own Achaioi and Barbaroi. (Austin 44) * The experience of sacred time will make it possible for religious man periodically to experience the cosmos as it was in principia, that is, at the mythical moment of Creation. (Eliade, The Sacred 65) * 122

Mary Austin's The American Rhythm was originally published in 1923.

"In this connection," she begins, "we begin at once to think of rhythm as experience" (3).

She later expands her definition of rhythm as

1!basic motor impulses" (11) modified by the land

(14) which underlie the poetic gesture.

Austin assays to trace the rhythmic impulses brought to North American poetry from Europe, how those impulses had been altered by the North

American experience and examine those impulses as they exist in American Indian Bongs.

The second section of The American Rhythm contains a series of "re-expressions 11 of Indian poems, dance songs, personal lyrics, spell formulas and narratives.

My method has been, by preference, to

saturate myself in the poem, in the life

that produced it and the environment

that cradled that life, so that when the

point of crystallization is reached, I

myself give forth a poem which bears, I

hope a genetic resemblance to the

Amerind song that was my point of

contact. (38) 123

In 1989 some of Austin's assertions appear questionable. Her statement that "Poetry is a man's game" (12), for example, was obviously an observation made of a phenomenon due to a cultural censorship. Perhaps this is more easily discerned today than it would have been in 1923.

And her commentary that "the underlyi~g thought pattern of all Amerind tongues is the same" (39) needs, at the least, to be qualified. But whether one agrees with Austin's conclusions throughout, there can be no doubt that her essay struck a blow for the inclusion of

native literary traditions as sources for twentieth century North American writing in general. And she made a crucial argument for a contextual (deeply linguistic, body language)

understanding of poetry. De Angulo mentioned Austin in a letter to

Mabel Dodge Luhan-­ I had never heard of the Laughing Horse before. I thot that everything in that number was good (except May Austin's which I confess I was too prejudiced to read). (Jaime in Taos 19) 124

i . ~

Austin, like de Angulo, was a personality outlandish apocrypha rose up around. And it is hard to imagine what those two made of one another. But that is not really the point here. Certainly it's true that Jeffers was de Angulo's friend; good friend from what the literature allows. The year he began work on The Lariat, de Angulo published a tribute to Jeffers' poetry (Leeds-Hurwitz 132). I have no doubt that the content of Jeffers' longer work influenced de Angulo. But de Angulo's openness to the Indian influence on his writing and his awareness of the significance of North American Indian literary forms have a lot more in common with Austin than they do with anything in Jeffers. Austin and de Angulo also held in common a fascination with the real people of the American Vest. Her Land of Little Rain and de Angulo's Indians In Overalls are both thoroughly unromanticized memoirs of rural, early twentieth century California. Austin had fanned something that was in its early stirrings, which gave the West a real history in literature--nonetheless legendary despite its seemingly ordinary, tawdry even, 125 reality. The people who de Angulo fell in love with were not romantic primitives. They were Indians in overalls, the Achumawi, who had little material culture, were great story tellers. He was especially fascinated by the "doctors" and the "gamblers." At an intertribal get-together a preacher

.•. speaks by turns in Pit River and in English: "This here Jesus, he and his wife Mary, and they had a little boy with them, they travelled allover the

world, they made mountains and trees, they made springs everywhere, teegaade

toolol •.• This here Jesus he was a great man; he was the best gambler in the

who Ie Uni te d States. (de Angulo,

Indians 216) The others patiently listened to the old man and then returned to a gambling frenzy in which a large, heavyset Modoc woman, singing and swaying, hid her bones in a bandanna and fooled the guessers, game after game. De Angulo and Austin shared an interest in the drama of the American West and its landscapes, the Pacific coast and North American Southwest, 126

its varied peoples and rhythms, its familiar strangeness. Kin to writers like Mary Sandoz, John G. Neihardt, and Frank Waters, but Californian, they were Western writers. * Hyperbole is a Western literary convention. Acorns: marbles. Against the Western landscape and experience, hyperbole seems often to be understatement. If, like all conventions it has its limitations, used well it can become a rhythmic story-telling device for breathing life into work that is more or less serious in tone. Austin used hyperbole so that her readers might be aroused beyond mere mentation (Henry Miller, a Murger if there ever was one, was very good at that, as well). De Angulo was funny, and could be wonderfully melodramatic and ironic about it at the same time. But this is mere, old-fashioned, narrative technique. There is a passion in the literature of the North American West that defies a technical examination, confronted, as it is, with an immense landscape and fascinating histories of varied peoples: ancient tribal cultures, sheepherders, Californios, cowboys, tragic, heroic women, immigrants from the Orient and the East, form the 127

Midwest, the Occident, from south of the border, from Africa, to that strange collection of bohemians and artists with their varied ancestries who have populated the California coast for almost an entire century, The literature, because it was bound to reflect this diversity, could be hyperbolic and very realistic at the same time. The different languages brought different stories, perspectives, ways of telling, with some fundamental common denominators, and those, like Austin and later de Angulo, who were attentive to what they were hearing, struck ore. These variances, this semblance, against that backdrop, which seems to take on the character properties of a mythical and God-like sentience, give Western writing its magical, beyond real, quality. At the same time, although much of Western writing is imaginative, it also expresses an intensely sacred and necessarily real sense of experience, individualized and collective. Jeffers' characters, for all they might embody Blakean or Shelleyan energies, were also a good deal of the time a seedy lot, appropriate to the hard-boiled, bare-bones writing of a James M. 128

Cain. Rural Americans in the twenties and thirties. The writing is grounded by the landscape which, even in its most mundane form, has a marvelous quality to it. If the characterizations in Western writing also seem larger than life, it is because the very real land is reflected in

those characterizations. The combination of cultural values in which real experience seemed larger than life and was continuingly confronted by different ways of perceiving the world, time, nature were bound to find resonances with both Romantic and realist literary tendencies. But they also contained the seeds of a new kind of multi-cultural hybrid which includes that state of consciousness which Everson, a half-century after Austin, named "the authentic impulse of these things that live behind and support their formalizations" (Everson 7). Conjunct with Everson's idea of "the authentic impulse," and Austin's equivalence between rhythm and experience is Mircea Eliade's concept of the sacred. 129

By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to

participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. (Eliade, The Sacred 12) * In 1951, two years after de Angulo's death, his essay on the religious psychology of the Achumawi was excerpted in the French edition of

Mircea Eliade's book-length study, Shamanism. (305­ 6) In 1959, an English language edition of Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane was published in the United States. I was introduced to Eliade's work by Professor Gerald Haslam in a graduate seminar on the literature of the Western migration in North America. The use of the word "sacred" to describe the experience of this literature owes a 130

tremendous debt to Eliade's work. Eliade, himself, refers to Rudolph Otto's Das Helige (The

Sacred), published in 1917. However, like all critical terminology, even were the word "sacred" not to exist, the experience it describes is the crucial matter.

For Eliade sacred space where "the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence"

(63). The word "sacred" is often associated today with traditional American Indian literature and sense of time.

Rosalind Wall writes that the great Ventana peak, Pico Blanco, was considered to be the center of Creation by the Esselens and the place where they held their ritual ceremonies. It is probably only a coincidence that ventana means window in

Spanish but it is no coincidence, I am sure, that the action of The Lariat takes place with Ventana peak in the background.

Echoing Eliade's sacred and profane poles of experience, Max Westbrook, contemporary Western critic and professor of literature at the

University of Texas, has written in an article, published by the South Dakota Review, 131

... the Western realist--who owes no

allegiance to what he considers an

intellectual and bifurcating concept of

the real, who associates the reason with

mere practicality and not with ontology-­ moves between fact and dream according

to the sometimes voice of his dark and

inner self.

This willingness to accept the

authority of the anima suggests to the

profane realist that the Westerner is an

escapist type of romantic. The

Westerner argues, however, that it is

the other way around, since he can

accept facts that do not fit his theory,

while the profane man restricts the

world to Buit his theory. (18)

Westbrook argues for that which I am calling a Sacred Realism. Sacredness is an experience of regenerative power. not a dogma imposed upon one culture by another. The difference between sacred experience and religious dogma is best exemplified by de Angulo's description of the Achumawi as he knew them in the early nineteen twenties: 132

• •• the reader will ask, if they have no religious ceremonies, no priesthood, no ritual of any kind, and not the slightest approach to any conception of [god] how can one speak of their having spiritual or religious values? .. I must answer that ••. the life of these Indians

is nothing but a continuous religious

experience ..• To them, the essence of religion is ••. the 'spirit of wonder' ... the recognition of life as power, as a mysterious concentrated form of non­ material energy, of something loose about the world and contained in a more or less condensed degree by every object­ -that is the [way] of the Pit River Ind ians. (ill. in Beck 9) The Western novel taking place, as it often does, on sacred ground, even with its generous capacity for renewal, has a tragic and violent quality to it as well. The tragedy and violence reflects, as it must, the destruction of the land's inhabitants and then the land itself. All in the name of that seemingly self-destructive abrazo referred to as the settlement of the North 133

American West, which exists today for the most

part in its sub-urban phase. The awful irony that

we destroy what we love and long for most is the

tragic matter of the West. Fray Bernardo's favorite, Californio Ruiz Berenda, the Esselen

woman Fray Luis conceives of as his very soul, are

killed. The Lariat is an ancient tale with a

modern twist to it, set in a comparatively recent

past. This is no myth. This is real. Just as

the old myths were real to the ones who made them.

In an essay de Angulo wrote just after

leaving Big Sur for the final time in the forties,

he said,

Alas, nothing is impossible to modern

man and his infernal progress: they came

with bulldozers and tractors before very

long, and raped the virgin. Roads and

automobiles, greasy lunch-papers and

beer cans and their masters. ("La

Costan 60) * Two summers ago, in August, I was on the road between a beach cam~8round, north of Santa Barbara and northern California. It was about the calendar time that Berkeley New Age writer, Jose 134

Arguelles had called "The Harmonic Convergence." The event had its origins in Aztec cosmology and represented a cyclical shift in the nature of reality as perceived by humanity. En Los Estados Unidos the event was turned into a kind of pop Woodstock!Chatagua revival by the media, and the mode-du-jour metonymy of a well- known movie star, crystals. had its fifteen minutes of fame in Time and Newsweek. Crlstals are also common to shamanic healing in the North American Southwest. Marbles: acorns. ,In Central America. the Arias peace plan was adopted. In the White House! Nancy Reagan ruined astrology for everyone but old gardeners.

HI first day on the beach, no~th of Santa Barbara, I saw a a bald eagle. and a rattlesnake made its way across the sand in front of me toward the Pacific Ocean. I swam in th§! ocean ,tn,at afternoon for hours. It mu§t have been fift>"Et;n years since I had stayed in the ocean w\sterforSo k" long.

I felt a kind of sacred auspiciousness tb.ere and decided to stop in Big Sur for the daY Q~ the Harmonic Convergence. 135

Big Sur has always been a legendary place to my generation. hippies, of California bohemians. The coastal California bohemian communities of the late nineteen sixties to the present however, have existed. for the most part in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. And of course. there have been bohemian communities allover the rural North

American West since the early nineteen seventies. That sunny Sunday morning. after driving down the Carmel coast, already littered with traffic, I walked up the Big Sur River. only to find endless hordes of people and their trash. I carried out two thirty gallon bags of beer cans and bottle! that I pulled out of the river itself. It made me think of letters, Jaime said jokingly. referring to a typical Anglo ignorance of the Spanish word

"sur t " meaning south. that were addressed to him in "Big Sewer!~ But could that be any more ironic than the nineteen eighties' mayoral election in Carmel) California. Clint ("Make my day!") Bastwood, the movie star who made his name on a television show called "Rawhide," and restaurateur-owner of the Hogs' Breath Inn, with his fist full of dollars, brought home the bacon. 136

The major issues of the election had to with keeping Carmel open for building development and allowing tourists the right to eat ice cream on the sidewalks while strolling to and from gourmet/botiguy shops. "Head 'em up. Move 'em out. Rawhide." * The symbol is dead like a shiny plate. Knowledge is like life. It must forever die to be reborn. (de Angulo, "Five" 8) * All the time I have been researching the life and work of Jaime de Angulo I have thought about something the JaEanese poet, Basho , said in an introduction to one of his travel journals, about becoming a scholar to plumb the depth of his ignorance. In the North American West the sense of great loss is a recent enough phenomenon to be felt keenly and reflected in its literature. I can remember the Porno basketweaver , Elsie Allen, telling me in 1976, the "Bicentennial Year," that the grass Pomos used to make water-shedding shelters with, in the winter, no longer existed. Within a few years the sedges with which the Porno 137

make baskets would be threatened with extinction by the development of Warm Springs Dam, Lake Sonoma, on sacred Porno land. The Porno basketmakers are today considered among the greatest, if not the greatest, basketmakers in

human histon~. The human spirit here, cannot, try as it may to hide in the surfaces of events, ignore its losses. Looking back upon our histories. a long to phYSically touch what has forever left the earth arises. Even in our intimate relationships that longing is as palpable as what has been lost is evanescent. Perhaps, it is as de Angulo saws in chapter two of The Lariat, "it is because we are civilized and do not understand these things. We have other gods. and we can no longer pray to

the tree" (108). As Jung called the phenomenon I "modern man (sic) in search of a soul." VI. De Angulo, Modernism and Modernist Primitivism 139

1. Internationalist Modernism * [Ezra Pound wrote] in a note to Robert

Cree ley : "w. Lewis & Jaime de Angulo t the only two writers alive that don't put me to sleep within five minutes."

(S!!. ~ Peck 183) * The more I've become aware of the extent of de Angulo's range of cultural experience, the more I become convinced that he was a kind of

representative and exemplary artist and scholar of his era. His life reminds me of one of Frida Kahlo's self-portraits in which vines and tendrils grow out of her body--and she is rooted in the earth! In de Angulo's case, the roots go way out as well as the tendrils. No discussion of de Angulo can be complete without also placing his work in the context of the international and intercontinental modernist

art movement of his day. Think of itl It was a time in which Wilfredo Lam, the Cuban painter, whose god-mother was a priestess of the Afro-Cuban religion, Sentiera, would become a personal friend of Picasso and Andre Breton, and eventually fight in the Spanish 140

Civil War, barely escaping with his life to

France.

The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda would

later recall how Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez once climbed a tree and sang like a nightingale

for him just a few years before Hernandez died of

tuberculosis in a Franco prison. The American

Neruda had never heard a nightingale. (Baland 5)

Peruvian Indian poet, Cesar Vallejo starved

to death in Paris, begging money for the anti­

Franco forces. Spain's greatest poet, Federico

Garcia Lorca, wrote what is arguably North

America's greatest twentieth century poem. Poeta

En Nueva York, and Ernest Hemingway wrote For Who~

The Bell Tolls.

Nobel Prize winning poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez was forced into exile, in America where he would meet and befriend Ezra Pound.

Pound, who knew far less Chinese than de

Angulo, in his criticism-for-verse Cantos, quoted

Confucious as well as Homer in their original languages.

In Paris, New York and the de Angulo house in

Berkeley, jazz, that wonderful hybrid, the true classical music of its day, went down. Franz Boas 141

would send de Angulo allover California, and Zora Neale Hurston all through the south. Swiss­ Parisian Cendrars was off to Moscow; Spanish­ Parisian de Angulo to the Alturas and the twain would meet. It was a time in which de Angulo would discover a resemblance between the conjugation of verbs in Greek and what his friend, Jack Folsom, was teaching him about Achumawi. "Why yes, Jack. It's what they call the dual. That's the way it is in Greek!" Jack had a very kind face, and it was now wreathed in smiles. He evidently felt very proud of the Greeks. He said: "Well, well. What do you think of that now! I always thought them Greeks were nice people." I was astounded. "What do you know about the Greeks, Jack?" "They was a couple of them had a restaurant here a while back. I used to listen to their talk but I couldn't get a word of it, although I know Bome Mexican too. I didn't know they talk like us." (de Angulo, Indians 191) 142

The "dual"--us, meaning the collective Achumawi as

opposed to the two, Jack and de Angulo, a

linguistic precision unavailable in English.

It was Ezra Pound, ex-expatriate and "ex­ societally mad" poet who sent Robert Duncan to

Jaime de Angulo. Duncan called them "two

brilliant old cranks, one living in a cage, the

other dying of Cancer ... " Cill . ..!..!l Callahan 186).

And The Lariat, stylistically, in its

associative leaps through time, its attention to image and, what seems today, an antique flourish of language, derived from medieval European

Romance, creating a tension with an imperative for spare expression, can be said to be an imagist, vorticist novel and, as such, entertains the kind of experimentation and innovation common to both poetry and prose fiction which made ~ era an exciting time to be an artist.

Today I see textbooks that ask has Modernism failed? What kind of question is that? Perhaps the obsession with formal innovation that was part of the Modernist movement no longer seems the single most dramatic element in the creation of art. 143

Perhaps Modernism can be seen today in light of its own temporal and spatial context instead of being the contemporary artistic truth. Certainly the Spain-Paris-North American Modernist connection had its limits. And the smoke may be beginning to settle, something new and better may or may not be in the process of evolving. In a world of starvation and diaspora the astronomical pricetag on a painting by Picasso unearths the tainted contradiction in our daily lives. But art isn't meant to be eternal salvation, although it certainly expresses that among many other longings, but rather, it is revelation, witness, transformation, culture and, as such, answers to the immediate needs of its own makers and users. 144

2. Modernist Primitivism * That the derived term primitivism is ethnocentric is surely true--and logically so, for it refers not to the

tribal arts in themselves, but to the Western interest in and reaction to them. Primitivism is thus an aspect of modern art, not tribal art •.. Objections to the adjective "primitive," on the other hand, focus not unfairly on the pejorative implications of certain of its many meanings. These have had no place, however, in its definition or use as an

art-historical term. When Picasso, in the ultimate compliment, asserted that "primitive sculpture has never been surpassed," he saw nothing contradictory­

-and certainly nothing pejorative~-in using the familiar if now contested adjective "primitive" to identify the art. (Rubin 5) 145

* ... r had read some books on primitive psychology, some of them excellent books like Levy-Bruhl's (who by the way never left Paris, or so I have been told), but I wasn't convinced. All that was too theoretical . . .. But real Stone Age men ••.Well, these had been it, until a very short time

ago. Here was Jack Folsom who was a little boy when the first white men arrived. Was there any thing left? How much had they changed? My God, think of it, to pass in one lifetime from the stone axe to wireless telegraphy! Indians in overalls; no there was nothing picturesque about these Indians, .•• (de Angulo, Indians 195) * Primitive means complex. (Rothenberg, xix) * One element of the modernist painting movement in Europe and the Americas was what William Rubin, in his introductory essay to a two volume text published by New York Metropolitan 146

Museum of Modern Art, names "Modernist

Primitivism" (I), By this term Rubin indicates that part of Modernism, in the graphic and sculptural arts, which, in its expression, found an aesthetic echo in the art of so-called "primitive" peoples--from Africa, Oceana, and the

Americas. And this echo gave a kind of credence to and satisfied the particular psychic formal solutions demanded of artists by their times. I enter into our discussion the matter of Modern graphic and sculptural arts because it strikes me, perhaps due to a personal bias, that the profound influence of those arts upon de Angulo's era cannot be overemphasized. De Angulo's own illustrations have a wonderful "primitivist" quality to them. It is difficult to think of more than a handful of significant European graphic or sculptural artists who worked during the first half of the twentieth century who were not fascinated with the kind of art Picasso extolled. The Fauves, the German Expressionists, the Cubists, the Surrealists, Dada, the Futurists, the Constructivists and Abstract Expressionists all contained elements in common with one thing, their 147

reference to the indigenous art of Africa, Oceana and the Americas.

At this point, perhaps because I live in a place of conquest in the not too distant East, I feel compelled to remark uDon what appears to me to be a tragic coincidence with dire implications. I have always been struck bI how it seems that the Occidental onlI begins to appreciate those peoples his or her people have already almost reduced to cultural genocide. I think there is an understandable bitterness in

response to being the victims of both bloody and cultural conquest wherein lies a deserving

obje~tion to the word "primitive," whatever the intended mean~ng was. In this Post-ChernobIlized time that we live in, what now can be a qualitative definition of civilization. In the Americas, there was perhaps a greater appreciation among artists for the cultural plight of Indian peoples than their European counterparts had for events transpiring in Africa or Oceana. 148

European-American painters such as Marsden

Hartley (who was also a poet) and Georgia 0' Keefe made use of Native American designs and motifs, for their own ends, but with reverence, in what was a very contemporary North American style.

A colleague informs me that living in

Victorian British Columbia, contemporary to Mary

Austin and later de Angulo, although it's unlikely she was known to either, Emily Carr, an eccentric painter, who had studied in England and France, went off and 1ived with the Haida on the islands off the west coast of Canada. There she painted

Modernist paintings of the crumbling Haida totem pole culture and the forests and ocean which surrounded those people on all sides.

Near the end of her life, in 1941, a collection of her short stories, Kle~ Wyck, was published. It was her successful "unpretentious and engaging writing" (Shadbo1dt 192) wbich, after decades of neglect, led people to her truly remarkable pa~nting. The connection between storytelling, poetry, and graphic (abstract and representational) expression is also both an ancient and twentieth century cultural phenomenon. 149

The "primitivist" impulse was not just a phenomenon of Occidental art. Occidental anthropologists and psychologists, in search of some sort of big sur (meaning "more than")­ realism, were obsessed with what they call "primitive." And the men and women who surrounded de

Angulo during the twenties and thirties f who visited with him in Berkeley, that philosophizing and anarchic California town, those who kept in correspondence with him, were the foremost people in their field of study, Kroeber, Boas, Lowie, Sauer, Malinowski, Jung. These names cast long shadows onto the formation of the cultural psychic/ artistic thought for almost one third of the world during the twentieth century. Their work has been, and still is, taught in universities allover the world. Looking back on their work now, one can say that at least some of it was more of an explanation of their cultural psyche and behaviors than a true understanding of the cultures they attempted to describe, but what else can be expected of knowledge derived from the outside in 150

as opposed to that knowing one has from the inside out.

Parisian-born de Angulo, "the freedom-loving anarchist," the Westerner, the man who prided himself in Basque roots which he claimed "went all the way back to Biscay Bay and cro-magnon man" (Callahan xv), was certainly a significant

contributor to the body of information and artistic movements achieved, inspired and compiled by his worthy collection of colleagues. But he was also, as anarchist, North American Westerner, haunted by a neolithic echo, interested in first hand interaction among what was referred

to a s tl p rimi t i ve" p e 0 pIe. Hem0 rethan a d mire d their culture, he tried at various times in his life, to fit his life into their culture. And he became in the process, sensitive to the fact that there was something destructive about the way tritellectual European-Americans seem.d bent upon colonizing culture, at times, insensltive1y reducing non-European cultures, often by romanticizing those cultures, for their owb end.t His Fray Luis is that destructive impulse given personality. 151

Nonetheless, artists' and scholars' awareness offered the possibility for an overthrow of European and European-American cultural ethnophobia and (I hope) an appreciation for the widest range of cultural contributions and their

makers. Having a sense of context in which objects of art are created can, perhaps, enhance and expand our feeling for those who came before us. The greater portion do de Angulo's literary work was pub1ished during the nineteen seventies when North American bohemianism reached one of its cyclical zeniths and there was a revival of interest in non-European based literatures. In part, both of these phenomena were due to the emerging civil rights movement in the United States and response to the self-destructive racist and anti-ecological elements of European­ American history as well as the "profane" and linear modes of thought, the crass-materialism, which dominated American society. Jerome Rothenberg, a New York based poet who lived with the Seneca and became a member of one of the Seneca clans, began a series of compilations which uncovered a great body of non­ European based forms of literature. He also 152

presented the many ways in which European and European-American writers, especially poets, echoed, in their own formal concerns, the formal concerns of tribal literatures, especially with the emergence of performance poetry which contain distinct aspects of ritual. Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred offers in its title both a reference to Eliade's concept of the sacred and descriptions of world-wide shamanic techniques, as well as an attempt to substitute for "primitive" an appellative acknowledgment of the cultural achievements of those whose work he was presenting (xix-xx). And Rothenberg's attempts at what he calls "total translation" certainly bears an echo to Mary Austin's recreations in The American Rhythm. In 1975, on the cover of Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, "A First Magazine of the World's Tribal Cultures." edited by Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock, who has done a number of translations of North American Indian poem cycles, with such contributing editors as Simon Ortiz and Ulli Beier, is photograph of old man, Jaime de Angulo. Within are a Coyote Creation story, a poem by de Angulo, an excerpt from Indians in Overalls, and one of his old time stories, "The Gilak Monster 153

and his Sister, the Ceremonial Drum," accompanied

by a reading he gave of that story for IPFA. VII The Sacred Borderlands

* For any myth relates a story of

creation, tells how something came into

being--the world, life, or animals, man

and social institutions. In this sense,

one can speak of a certain continuity

between myth and literary fiction, since

the one as well as the other recounts

the creation (or the "revelation") of a

new universe. Of course, myth has also

an exemplary value in traditional

societies, and this is no longer true

for literary works. One must keep in mind, however, that a literary creation can likewise reveal unexpected and forgotten meanings even to a contemporary, sophisticated reader.

In sum, as I have said, literary creation can be considered an instrument pi knowledge: knowledge, of course, of other worlds parallel to the everyday world. (Mircea Eliade, Waiting 22-3) * 155

Introduction * Oriole said to Fox, nOh, come along and let's play. You study too much; it will hurt your back. Why do you ask all those questions from the grown-ups? They donlt know the answers. You only embarrass them." "But I want to know the truth," "What for?" "Because I want to know the way it really happened." "IT HAPPENED THE WAY they tell it." "But they tell it differently." (de Angulo, INDIAN ••• 87-88) * I have attempted to present the overwhelming relevance of the life and work of Jaime de Angulo to the historical and literary past emerging out of North America. I have further attempted to locate his work as it emerges out of the contexts of the North American West, California, Big Sur­ Carmel Berkeley and San Francisco. In addition, I hope I have made a successful presentation of his contributions to and relationship with some of the international artistic and intellectual currents of his era. 156

Finally, I have argued that his persistent relevance to both the past and his own contemporary culture, whieh made him such a significant, if relatively unknown, figure during his lifetime, continues, aecretively, although he remains relatively unknown, into the present day. There is so much unknown. Again and again, it strikes me that the existential lesson gained from doing research is that for every documentable and relevant fact that one uncovers, a myriad amount remains hidden or lost. not to mention the inevitable and sometimes embarrassing contradictions. What we call Occidental cultute, more specifically for the purposes of this essay, the province of ruling class European-American culture, tends toward a schizophrenic ethnophobia in so far that it remains unwilling to acknowledge differing cultural experim~nts and experiences from other parts of the wo~ld and within itself. except as anthropology or, in the contemporary context. sociology. And OC2idental culture's insistence upon homogenization. patriarchy, greed, and the ascendancy of war technologies for the basis of its values appears close-minded! 157

ignorant, fanatic, superstitious, and self­ destructive, looked at head-on. Not to mention sadistic (but Occidental culture, EuroEean­ America. it must be said, aren't the only human cultures with such values). Nonetheless history, the story of humanity, also contains beautiful revelations. I find the history surrounding and of Jaime de Angulo beautiful as well as terrible. But beauty is rarely revealed by chronological categories­ because. in fact, those categories are an incredible diminishment of reality. It was, for example. never, never true that Greco-Roman. Judeo- Christian, Anglo-Saxon. Celtic, Norse cultures were the only influences on North American culture. Never. What we label Occidental culture has never been. of itself. by definition, monocu1tura1. That is why I label what we call. Occidental culture in North America as "schizophrenic" in its ethnophobia. The number of simultaneously occurrin& contexts in and out of chronological time indicate that what appears through the linear lens to be lineages of culture are at the same time part of an organic, biological, accretive. human 158

uhenoll\e no n. The lessons of history are clear-­ history must be attended to. the real history and

sacred h~story for which linear chronology and compartmentalization are but two tools available among manI.

To this day we deny ourself the physical delight of planetary motion because we still name aspects of that phenomenon "sunrise" and "sunset."

It strikes me that as far as matters of form gOI linear chronology and compartmentalization can provide a reader with an indispensable and aCGessible shorthand awareness. But the deeper one investigates reality the deeper one realizes that forms and ideas evolve. to use an American Indian idea. out of a spider-like webwork of inte.rrelation and that "facts." "labels" are only, at best, good indices and road-signs. Spearppints among the rubble where real lives.once existed. I realize that my ideas in this matter are neithe~unigue nor particularly new. Cr~tics. essaY1..sts a.nd poets have from the·.hegipning of this century attempted to shake loose and tear down this linear, compartmental approach to knowledge, which remains intact, even today, as an approEriate methodology for academic theses and 159

dissertations. For example, as a poet, I cut my teeth on the extremelI non-linear essays written bI de Angulo's confrere, Ezra Pound. And Pound's essays seem quite tame formally when comp!red with those which have followed. However, I myself think what ought to be

considered appropriate content is at least as serious a matter as the format in which it is presented and that formal innovation Eartakes of existing forms and is most successful when it becomes a means to expand possibilities for understanding. Innovation for its own sake might be fun for the innovator or even liberating but i~ my own case I am not interested in the lesser aspects of the urge toward formal revision. obscurity and occultism. Things are mysterious enough to me as they are. Nonetheless. I cannot help but find myself sympathetic with contemporary formal experimentation in which a number of different modes of telling are used simultaneously and hope for the sake of higher learning that these modes be found acceptable in academic settings. In the flooded river of information conducted among us and the wider unrecorded star-lore that appears like snag-tipped trees poking out of the 160

flood. the best that can be said is that we get and give glimpses of the truth~ 161

1. Indian Tales and the Accretive, Ahistorical, Historical Moment: A North American Ovid * I'm coming, I'm coming. Over the mountains I come home. I'm coming, I'm coming_ With the

daylight I corne home. I'm coming, I'm coming_ From the east I come home. (de Angulo, Indian 16) * Between 1936, after the accident in which de Angulo's son was killed, and the time of his death, not one piece of work by de Angulo was published. Most of the time he wandered around Big Sur before moving to San Francisco, and ultimately, returning to Berkeley, where he had lived so many years between 1920 and 1935. Knowing what I do of de Angulo, his silence seems due to his great personal difficulties and need for privacy. Nonetheless, the man who gave his Indian friends headaches because he madre !them think so much must have had some misgivings about making a reputation upon the lore and knowledge of the people he loved. This, of course, is personal speculation: all writers, it seems to me, have to confront one sort of betrayal or another in their work. 162

What has become de Angulo's trilogy about the Indians, the Spanish, Californios, shamans and anthropologists, Don Bartolomeo, The Lariat, and Indians In Overalls, reflects the "inside out" of those inner tensions of Jaime de Angulo, artist of the many cultures becoming one, in his time and set of places and people, just as the stories of the Achumawi provided something about the conjunction between the inner and outer worlds of those people, their times and places. De Angulo broke his thirteen year long public silence with his taped readings of the Indian Tales for Berkeley radio station, KPFA. He had gone from the tragic Big Sur wildman to a man who, in his final days, had rediscovered his "shadow," his place in the work of the world. Whatever their relations had been since the divorce, N~ncy Freeland took de Angulo back into her Berkeley home. It was there that he put his work in order. It was the same house that de Angulo had rebuilt for Nancy after it had burned down, through the fall and winter of 1922 (de Angulo, Gui 7-8). De Angulo finished work on the house just in time for 163

the Fox Boy-with-the-"ha-has," Alvar, their son, to be born.

More than a quarter century later, de Angulo, deathly ill, would venture out from that house to the KPFA studios. How he went from one place to another is something I do not know. I know this: Robert Duncan was one cross-eyed bear. And I don't think driving de Angulo could have been part of his secretarial duties. Perhaps a young anthropology student took de Angulo over as he had once chauffeured Franz Boas to Mills College, or perhaps it was Nancy Freeland. But I do not know. I look at Jaime de Angulo during the late forties from the other side of eternity through the two-dimensional borderland of photography. From a pair of photographs: gone are the "filthy jeans" and "wicked knife." In their place are formal slacks and iacket--formal but comfo~table­ looking all the same. Against black backgrounds. his hair is brushed in wisps down his ears. His black beard and hair are dashed with white. Only his eyebrows remain a raven's color. 164

His eyes appear tired but are recognizably profound and illuminated with sorrows and an inexplicable delight. His face is so completely etched by age that. it has become a geography. Somehow, his lips retain a beautiful kiss of youth. (Wall 160, Alcheringa cover) Indian Tales was originally composed when de

Angulo's children were very young. Alvar's alterego, Fox Boy, is the hero. Quail is his baby sister. Guiomar's counterpart, Oriole, was superimposed upon the story as Grizzly's daughter-­ Fox Boy, himself, has trouble differentiating between his father, Bear, and Oriole's father, Grizzly, who we find out later is actually Bear's twin. Oriole is also featured in the Old Time Stories, which de Angulo wrote later. There's a danger in making too much of autobiographical information in relation to the texts. Barry Gifford, in his Western American Literatur! review of Shabegok and How The World Was Made, quotes de Angulo's editor Callahan in regard to this matter. He states that the personalities (not the events) in Indian Tales were modeled after de Angulo's family and friends (163). 165

It would be a grave error to suggest that these stories are recreations of de Angulo's family's travels. The tales all take place in some pre-European California. And the family's journey all takes place on foot. I offer the information, however, as an insight to de Angulo and his creative methodology, and, perhaps, the creative literary process itself which, like language is derived from human synthesis. The textual meanings, of course, have a life of themselves. Nonetheless, I would argue that there is an undeniable personal as well as cultural interplay in the making of a work of art. And I suppose a great deal of this thesis, by its own formal presentation, makes this argument. This original collection of stories is marked with a tremendous affection for the intelligent, spirited and willful boy-child. And I cannot help but surmise that there must have been a gratifying experience of equilibrium occurring within de Angulo during those readings. The Indian Tales are stories that de Angulo heard and wrote down and retold to his children with a feeling that related to both the people he had listened to and the family he was writing for. His memory, skill, and affection are a 166

beguiling transformative borderland between the two. De Angulo had once more uncovered his own voice to the world. Perhaps in the days of his "wandering" one of the spirit people who lived back in the canyons, like those John Steinbeck's mother or Rosalind Wall saw, a Tinihowi, took pity on de Angulo. Or perhaps, at that moment in time, Coyote or Kuksu (we'll get to him later), Creation and history, had given Jaime the opportunity to record and save what contemporary shaman/poet/ Pacific Rim historian, Kush, has called the "primal, essential, reality: "The Sacred Stories of Pre-Alta California. They include significant and practical geographical information in that they locate water, foodstuffs, obsidian. Essential survival material. They present, as well, native architecture and its functions, conversation, meals, the gambling games, different ways in wbich sweat baths are made, the making of and care for hunting tools, and shamanic songs, the stuff of culture, as narrative, literary fabric. 167

And, as Kush has also pOinted out to me in a

telephone conversation, they are embedded with

messages as how to behave in relation to others and nature. Good manners toward strangers win the

strangers over. Rudeness, on the other hand, can

cause such serious disruptions in the fabric of

reality that it can often lead to the necessity of

bringing in a shaman to correct the situation.

In the Indian Tales, Bear, leaning over a stream, digging up some water lilies, laughs uncontrollably at a "whirligig bug," The insulted bug runs off with Bear's shadow that held left on the surface of the water. For days on end

Bear becomes insufferable, quarreling with everyone. Finally Oriole has to go to Loon Woman who is an old doctor for her uncle.

This care-filled understanding of the effects of behavior extends beyond the treatment of other hUmans to the non-human world as well and de

Angulo provided the reader/ listener with several examples of how one addresses a place or anan:imal with humility and honor, as if one were always a guest before some sacred presence. 168

De Angulo, himself, took these matters

seriously. When D. H. Lawrence and Jaime went

together to a hot springs near Taos, de Angulo

quite embarrassed Lawrence by chanting before the local power Csli. in Jaime in 32), The tales also teach the child, by example,

to honor him or herself in the same fashion. Each

morning, upon waking, one must sing to one's

"shadow." The quoted song at the beginning of

this section, is the way in which Bear, Fox-boy's

father, calls to his shadow each morning.

I have addressed this matter of the shadow in

relation to de Angulo's final Big Sur years but I wish here to elaborate upon it. In contemporary

Occidental culture we tend to think of a "shadow" in Jungian terms, the dark, emotional aspects of the unconscious which one must bring into the light as "an essential condition for any kind of self knowledge." (Jung 145)

But Jung's term has a pejorative connotation to it that is not really present in de Angulo's tellings. These connotations, I might suggest, also are indications of Jung's personal attitudes toward emotion and what he calls "primitive" behavior, which he says is obsessed by emotion, 169

and therefore, "singularly incapable of moral judgment." (Jung 146) Gui de Angulo states that Jaime disavowed Jungian thought later in life (22). And I am not particularly surprised. Although de Angulo himself, in Indians in Overalls, tries to connect the shadow with what is called, in Jungian terms, "the anima," I suspect, however helpful these terms may be, that the "shadow," in this case is something similar but far more tangible, defining that part of the self which is in a necessary constant mediation with the forces of nature--the Border-self between personal being and existence at large. However, I must qualify this speculation as one that is biased by my own observations which derive from my own contemporary and local world-view. Jung tells us that it is very difficult to know either the shadow or the anima but all Bear has to do is sing to his shadow every morning when he wakes up. It is the losing of one's shadow that is destructive, not the shadow itself. One's shadow is necessary to a healthy human existence. And this is a fact quite cheerfully explained to Fox-boy by his mother, Antelope, when he asks her about his father's song. 170

And when the family camps out away from other people, just before going to sleep Bear calls out,

Good night, Mountains, you must protect us tonight. We are strangers but we are good people. We dontt mean harm to anybody. Good night, Mister Pine Tree. We are camping under you. You must protect us tonight. Good night, Mister Owl. I guess this is your home where we are camped. We are good people, we are not looking for trouble, we are just travelling. Good night, Chief Rattlesnake. Good night, everyone. Good night, Grass People, we have spread our bed right on top of you. Good

n~ght, Ground, we are lying right on your face. You must take care of us, we want to live a long time. (12-13) To echo de Angulots comment in The Lariat, we have eerhaps lost the capacity to seethe tree as a living being in the same sense as we see our individual selves as alive. But this is a kind of blindness that we indulge in--one has only to point to the destruction of the ozone and its relationshie to deforestation to at least abstractly understand the upshot of this kind of 171

blindness. So much earth as well as history has

been paved over and poisoned, we perhaps turn a

deaf ear to the sacredness of life, in order to

evade our own inner violence and responsibility to creation. our inner reflection to history.

But childre~, in contemporary California,.

still retain a capacity for wonder. And I find

this passage, especially tender and sweet;

familial. In this passage I am made aware of th~

original roots of a familial relation that It

California born. have sought to inspire in my own,

California born children with sacred places in the

landscape. "Good-bye ocean," we say after a day

at the beach. And through their eyes it is not at

all difficult to comprehend that the ocean is a

vital. transformative reality for whom we bear affection and honor. or that our sharing this feeling locates us in the larger family of existence,

Gary Snyder, in his review of Indian Teles, identifies some of the root sources for de

Angulo's work as Clear Lake Porno, Yurok, Karok, and Achumawi. But he warns that de Angulo has often mixed up the stories, places and people

(Earth 28-9). De Angulo made the same comment in his preface to the published work and added that 172

he quite made some of the stories up himself (Indian Tales 5). Nonetheless there's no doubt that these tales were meant to be an homage to the people from whom he derived this collection. What makes de Angulo special among those non­ American Indians who have studied and recorded their lore was that he had an intimate understanding of and feeling for the languages and the people from whom the stories originally derived; he had the advantage of being a story­ teller in his own right; and, as such, he was sensitive to the fact that the stories he was hearing were subject to variation over time and were part of a living tradition. Thus de Angulo's re-creations had a conceptual foundation that allowed for playfulness and passion missing in the stiffer renderings done by those who lacked his advantages. The woman who introduced de Angu1Q's readings "on the air," commented that Jaime had finally come forth because the old story-tellers he knew had died and there were few now who had come to take their places. De Angulo feared that their lore would be lost and so these stories, which he 173

had originally written for his children, were recorded orally. The Indian Tales are stories a family, even today at the end of the "jaded eighties," might enjoy listening to on the radio. On one hand they are marvellous repositories of California lore, on the other they are also imaginative and appealing stories about the relations between a child and his parents. Like all childrents stories there is plenty of humor and singing and there are opportunities for the child to display his courage and intelligence. Innocence is doted upon, sloth gently chided and teased. In those days, waI back to when daddy can no longer remember, I would say to my own children, hardly anyone had a television. But radios were in almost every household. In 1949 I was three Iears old. didn't families sit around the radio together as theI do today around televisions? Or as the Achumawi must have crowded around the fire beneath the smoke-hole, to gossip and joke! gamble or tell stories. Amplifying the entire atmosphere of those radio readings was de Angulots rhythmic and melodic story-telling, with his one-of-a-kind 174

accent and phrasing, and his enchanting command of California Indian linguistic modalities. The initial tale from the IPFA readings was not from Indian Tales. Appropriately, however, de Angulo began his series with a telling of a Porno origin-creation myth, whose translation into English he had collaborated upon with his friend and inspiration, Pomo Bear-doctor and basketmaker, William Ralganal Benson. This tale was originally published under the joint authorship of de Angulo and Benson in Anthropopos, in 1932 and later included in the Turtle Island publication of The Old Time Stories. The myth, itself, begins: He lived in the north, the Old Man, his name was Marumda. He lived in a cloud­ house, a house that looked like snow, like ice. And he thought of making the world. (Benson 261) Marumda leaves the Cloud-house and travels through the sky to his brother, Kuksu's house. Kuksu is a northern California deity. Kuksu's following is widespread and transcends tribal borders. In Indian Tales, Grandfather Coyote tells Fox-Boy, "Only a few people have ever seen him, always in lonely places, thinking and 175

studying. And when you ask him anything, he never answers. He merely squints and smiles and disappears." (94) In a long and elaborate ceremony, Marumda and Kuksu make up balls of "armpit wax" that they scrape from their underarms. The balls are combined and attached by a hair to Marumda's ear for his return to the Cloud House. When Marumda went to sleep, returning home, the ball grew. As Marumda continued to sleep, the ball became enormous and eventually broke away from Marumda's ear and became the world. There is, in addition, in this telling, the promise of abundant foodstuffs and other necessities of life. Before the Europeans arrived in California there was a superabundance of food which made life fortuitous (Margolin 40) and proved, first hand, the truth ·of such a tale. To know the myths is ••• , first of all, to know what has happened in'the world, has really happened, what the Gods and the civilizing Heroesdid--their works, adven turas, dramas. (Eliade, R1 tes xv) 176

The tale contains a use of ritualized versification, honoring over and over again the four directions. It could be argued that there is a kind of coded set of directions being given in the telling for a ritual reenactment of the world's original event. Paula Gunn Allen comments, "American Indian tribal narratives are achronistic and ahistoric." Gunn also makes this point, The accretive method that characterizes oral-tradition narratives displays a tendency to develop events on several levels of significance at once; physical, social, and psychological events are unified through connections embedded in triba.l ritual traditions. Perhaps the universal importance of the number four in Indian cultures reflects this understanding: one must experience events in four contexts before they are properly assimilated and one can be said to have acted properly. (Paula Gunn Allen, "American .•• " 1059) 177

Religious historian, Mircea Eliade, argues in many of his writings that the ritual event in traditional societies performs, by its ahistoricity and cosmologically spatial orientation, offers a spiritual antidote to the terror of history and presents the concretely felt and understood possibility for eternal renewal and return. As I sat in the "Cloud House." and listened, for the first time to de Angulo telling this tale and later as I listened to Kush tell me about a

dr~am he had many years ago, before he knew of Jaime de Angulo, at a thousands year old dig in upstate New York, in which he was "told" to create a Cloud House Poetry Archive. something about de Angulo began to crystallize for me. As Kush went on. talking about his move from the East coast of the United States to California where poet Lew Welch would become a significant influence on him and he would begin ~ctin8 with a northern California theatre troupe which performed de Angulo's Indian Tales for bohemian communities rural northern California, this feeling grew stronger. 178

Was it a coincidence that Mary Norbert Korte! a student of Welch's. would take me to a eoets ' gathering in Nevada City and introduce me to Dale Pendell. editor qf Kuksu. A Journal of Backcountry Writing? Or that I would become a contributing editor to Kuksu from Mendocino County? Or that

Kuksu, in 1975. would devote half an issue to th~ work of Jaime de Angulo? I don't really know. But I could not help thinking of Eliade's conceet that sacred time is reversible, and of T., H. White's Once And Future King. in which the sorcerer. Merlin, lives backwards in timet and Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, 1949 theory that in sub-atomic worlds time is! in fact, reversible (Morris 124). And I could not help thinking about Professor David Peri telling me that for years after de Angulo's death that graduate students in anthropology deeartment at Berkeley attempted to rent aut th§ Freeland-de Angulo house in hoees of invoking Jaime's seirit. A kind of "magic-realist" story came to me then in which Jaime de Angulo from some future time and vague cloud-house-like residence was travelling through me and through Kush and so many. many others, back into his own life once more. 179

As we approach the end of what is named the twentieth century, surely the most violent and destructive.hundred years in human history, it strikes me that we need culturally, as never before, a concrete and verifiable sense of renewal.

In this sense, I see de Angulo's adaptions from a way of life that, in its strictest and most terrible historical sense, was entering an enormous and difficult transition, as an example of how renewal occurs through the power of stories. Even history. it seems. cannot satisfy human curiosity. How can it? Even the great weight of human history is only a miraculous ball of scraped

armpit wax to the unfolding universe--call it Kuksu or science. When we forget this fact we lose our shadows--at our own peril. But neither can history be overlooked as if it, too, lacked rea1itI. History and nature partake of one another. Myth. legend. culture exist in a spiritual and material borderland ~etween what we know and what we cannot document. 180

By connecting up with the spirit from which these tales originally derived, by taking up the timing of their phrasing, by summoning his shadow, if you will, de Angulo gave to his books and radio broadcasts a vitality that similar stories, rendered by anthropological sources and fixed in some static historical past, missed. The essential nature of the stories and their spiritual instruction draw upon an eternally shared, present, ahistorical reality--the actuality of cosmos; but the forms, like history or control-burned landscape for the production of acorns and pinenuts, are, by nature, continually changing.

Between life and death remains the disembodied and sacred borderland of human creation. Culture is a collaborative affair. 181

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