In what is sometimes called its Pioneer Myth, California
has always seemed the ideal venue for the American dream.
Even today, loading up a Ryder truck and moving to The Golden
State is less about displacement than adventure. At the same
time, the subtitle to a 1989 cover story on California for
Newsweek voices the state's siren song: "American
Dream, American Nightmare."
Appreciating this paradox means beginning, at least, with
the last part of the nineteenth century. An 1880 poster promoted:
The Cornucopia of the World
Room for Millions of Immigrants
43.795.000. Acres of Government Lands Untaken
Railroad & Private Land For a Million Farmers
A Climate for Health & Wealth without Cyclones or Blizzards.
Such was the promise for individuals who were willing to work
hard for their fortunes, embrace the bountiful frontier, and
actively shape their society. Their state's destiny seemed
wide-open: in his insightful study, Americans and the
California Dream (1973), Kevin Starr writes of the last
half of the nineteenth century, "At its most compelling,
California could be a moral premise, a prescription for what
America could and should be." Less compelling were the
state's Gilded Age monopolistic businesses, corrupt politics,
and racist institutions (particularly against Chinese immigrants).
The result was the state's "divided fable," as Starr
calls it, split "because California's experience had
been a rhythm of expectation and disappointment, ideality
and harsh fact." California, in other words, was, and
is, extraordinary yet unexceptional, a virtual magnet for
those seeking to reconstruct themselves and the American dream.
At the turn of the twentieth century, George Sterling (1869-1926)
exemplified California's divided fable. Sterling, a Decadent
poet who today is largely forgotten, was once seemingly secure
in the American literary canon: Mary Austin wrote in a 1927
American Mercury article that, if Sterling's position
would be "not the highest, it will surely be not a low
one." Austin was too optimistic. By 1929, Alfred Kreymborg,
although an admirer of Sterling's sonnets, would write that,
in the case of Sterling's "A Wine of Wizardry" (1908),
"The wizardry was borrowed, and the amazing rhetoric
almost devoid of life and human contact." More recently,
critics have generally dismissed Sterling's art altogether,
resigning, as Joseph W. Slade says in his 1968 article for
The Markham Review, that Sterling "is remembered
chiefly for his literary associations." To be remembered
lowly, though, is at least not to be forgotten.
Despite his fallen literary status, Sterling’s career
is worth studying, for his example suggests the categorical
limits to what may be construed as the three principles of
life: vocation, location, and society — what we do,
where we live, and with whom we associate. This seemingly
simple formulation is complicated by the ways in which principles
overlap or split: we want to “have it all," but
we might love our region while disliking our work, or we might
love our families but dislike our colleagues. Although compromise
becomes necessary, the very opportunity to maximize any or
the sum of these principles emerges as a working definition
for the American dream. Identifying these three principles,
in fact, is the point here, not a thoroughgoing explication
of a man's entire life and career.
1. Vocation: From Enthusiasm to Pedantry
Vocation is central to the American dream, and California's
forty-niner promise "to get rich quick" continues
to exemplify America's seemingly wide-open opportunities.
Silicon Valley's "dot-commers" are the Pioneer's
descendents. In the category of vocation, at one limit is
what may be labeled enthusiasm (literally, "having a
god within") and at the other pedantry. Neither limit
is logically possible: because we do not live in a vacuum,
we organize institutions, but in the very act of organizing
are the seeds of pedantry. To moderate between the extremes,
we typically strike a balance in the principle of service,
a principle most obviously manifest in our everyday jobs.
The business of America is business — and nowhere is
that more apparent than in California.
In 1890, Sterling moved from Sag Harbor, New York, to Oakland
in order to work for his uncle, Frank C. Havens, in Havens'
real estate ventures. However, except for meeting his future
wife, Caroline ("Carrie") Rand, Sterling had his
mind elsewhere. In his 1964 biography of Jack London, Richard
O'Connor depicts, "The best George could do, in that
line, was show up for work punctually each morning, often
with a colossal hangover.... [For Sterling] would never be
anything more than a timeserver in business." Timeserving
soon gave way to frustration. While scribbling checks for
Havens, Sterling was asked whether poetry interfered with
his business. His response was worthy of Oscar Wilde: "No,
hang it! Business interferes with my poetry." What followed
in Sterling's career alerts us to the danger in such all-or-nothing
In Sterling's enthusiastic eyes, the model poet was Joaquin
Miller, the bearded, self-styled "Poet of the Sierras"
and vestige of San Francisco's literary frontier. Self-styling,
though, is not enthusiasm, and Miller was only too conscious
of this distinction. Even as early as the 1870s, Miller defended
his wearing outrageous western garb while visiting England:
"It helps sell the poems, boys!" At first, Sterling
missed the point, imitating Miller's illusion by favoring
personal appearance over artistic production. Rarely did he
take the time to revise his work. Sterling's pedantry surfaced
in smaller ways: Albert Parry wryly notes in Garrets and
Pretenders (1933) that Sterling loved the very word “Bohemia,”
rhyming it "with anything but anemia." In the end,
though, Sterling gave up on Miller, eventually noting that
Miller "wrote with a quill, a very stub affair, which
made the interpretation no less difficult. And I grieve to
state that this illegibility was but another of his poses.”
Spun between the vocational poles of enthusiasm and pedantry,
Sterling grew to resent the necessity of having a vocation
at all. The result was a double standard, Sterling disparaging
the wealthy even as he fed on their surplus. In his play written
for the summer retreat of San Francisco's elite Bohemian Club,
The Triumph of Bohemia (1907), Sterling has the Spirit
of Bohemia destroy Mammon, Bohemia arguing that Mammon cannot
buy "A Happy heart!" The Club itself, though, was
by then constituted of well-heeled businessmen, and Sterling
never stopped brooding about this contradiction. His short
poem, "In the Marketplace," concludes:
In Babylon, dark Babylon,
Who take the wage of shame?
The scribe and singer, one by one,
That toil for gold and fame.
They grovel to their masters' mood;
The blood upon the pen
Assigns their souls to servitude —
Yea! and the souls of men!
In writing these lines, Sterling knew, apparently, how far
he was from his original enthusiasm.
Much of Sterling's poetry reflects his increasing pedantry.
Propelling his muse was a different vestige of California's
literary frontier, the west coast's leading literary arbiter,
Ambrose Bierce. Bierce, a craftsman of language, introduced
his pupil to the three principal sonnet types that soon became
Sterling's favorite forms and to that wellspring of prolixity,
Roget's Thesaurus. More directly, Bierce helped edit
Sterling's works and, so, could steer his disciple toward
an art-for-art's-sake sensibility. As an example of Bierce's
inflexibility, Sterling asked in his drafting The Testimony
of the Suns (1903) whether Bierce preferred the phrase
"bubble-eden" to "heaven of rapture."
Bierce sniffed, "I like 'Eden,' but not 'bubble.' It
has hardly dignity enough." When "dignity"
imposes on enthusiasm, pedantry is not far behind.
Interestingly, Sterling clearly knew that Bierce's was the
wrong direction. After the publication of The Testimony
of the Suns, Sterling hedged in an interview with the
San Francisco Examiner’s Ashton Stevens that
"it would be rather late in the day for me to question
his [Bierce's] judgment as a critic.” In truth, Sterling
could never completely abide Bierce's aesthetics, experimenting
instead with forms ranging from attempting popular poetry
in Beyond the Breakers (1914) to imitating his neighbor
Robinson Jeffers in Strange Waters (1924). By 1925,
Sterling was disappointed in himself: he resigned in an essay
about Bierce pointedly titled "The Shadow Maker,"
"In view of the modern movement in poetry, he [Bierce]
was not, perhaps the best master I could have known."
One example of Sterling's poetry will serve to demonstrate
the product of his vocation. Only on Bierce's insistence,
"A Wine of Wizardry" (1907) appeared in the pages
of Hearst's Cosmopolitan. Even the poem's physical
publication slogged in its own pedantry: separated from the
magazine's other pages on thicker paper and framed by luxuriant
decorations by F. I. Bennett, the effect was heightened by
the editors' headnote announcing that the poem served to rebut
the British author James Bryce's disdain for American poets.
In a supplementary essay, Bierce trumpeted, "I hold that
not in a lifetime has our literature had any new thing of
equal length containing so much poetry and so little else."
Contrary to Bierce’s nod, Sterling's readers wanted
something more than "so little else."
Besides its physical publication, the poetry of "A Wine"
reflects Sterling's sense of vocation. The poem, which follows
the empress Fancy's journey, finally describes the night,
a time of cessation but not of rest:
O'er onyx waters stilled by gorgeous oils That toward the
twilight reach emblazoned coils. And I, albeit Merlin-sage
hath said, "A Vyper lurketh in ye wine-cuppe redde,"
Gaze pensively upon the way she went, Drink at her font, and
smile as one content.
Fancy's inability to find fulfillment and the poet's inability
to communicate with Fancy illustrate Sterling's Decadent view
of art. Language, the medium of poetry, is inextricably tied
to society, but the beauty in which Sterling tried to believe
was completely apart from any human reference. Vexed by this
paradox, as George Douglas has noted, Sterling came to identify
with rejected poets: "I know how they feel…. They
know how far short they fall of what they want to say.”
The critical response to "A Wine" was predictably
far less generous than Bierce's. Porter Garnett wrote in a
Pacific Monthly review that Sterling's effort was
"bad art," "The sensation derived from reading
it…not unlike the sensation that might be caused by
listening to the hammering of a tattoo on a sweet-toned bell.
The sensorium is set in vibration, but it cannot vibrate truly."
It could not "vibrate truly," no doubt, because
Sterling himself seemed uncertain what he was trying to accomplish.
In a letter to Upton Sinclair of June 7, 1924, Sterling waffled,
"If you can make out…where I stand as to 'art for
art's sake' you'll be lucky. It seems to me I've no bone-bound
convictions on the subject, but prefer to let each man follow
his natural bent.”
Sterling's vocational crisis was visibly exposed when, in
1914, he was divorced from Carrie and ventured east to test
himself apart from his California status. Sterling's efforts
were commercially fruitless and personally humiliating, and
he found himself lonely for his friends, removed from public
tastes, and reduced to accepting charity. In 1915, he retreated
to San Francisco, where, despite his shortcomings as a poet,
he still had his status. To his (and our) astonishment, Sterling
found some lines of his poems carved next to those of Shakespeare,
Dante, and Goethe in the Gate of the Four Seasons for the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The moment dramatized
how quickly enthusiasm can shift to pedantry. Dwarfed by the
Exposition's concrete structures that were themselves imitations,
Sterling read an ode celebrating the occasion but then overstepped
in proclaiming himself "Poet Laureate of San Francisco."
Harriet Monroe followed with a scathing review of Sterling's
poetry for the March 1916 issue of Poetry, dismissing
it as so much "tinsel and fustian, the frippery of a
bygone fashion." Although not amused by Monroe's comments,
Sterling also winced at their truth. In a letter to John Myers
O'Hare of March 12, 1916, Sterling could only joke, "The
funny thing is that the old girl is probably correct! Peace
to her undemanded maidenhead!"
Despite his manifest poetic failings, Sterling's lifetime
of clear prose letters and commentary hints at what he might
have accomplished in poetry had he pursued a more moderate
vocational track. In 1929, B. Virginia Lee estimated in
Famous Lives, "Perhaps the pithiest of all Sterling
legend is forever buried in his personal letters. Here he
was free to damn or bless; either of which he could do to
the king's taste.… They were rich in wisdom and health."
Such letters numbered about one hundred a week, and, on certain
occasions, the honesty of his prose even inspired his poetry.
Notably, before his suicide in 1926 Sterling scrawled a final
poem titled "My Swan Song":
Has man the right
To die and disappear
When he has lost the fight?
To sever without fear
The irksome bonds of life,
When he is tired of strife?
May he not seek, if it seems best,
Relief from Grief? May he not rest
From labors vain, from hopeless task:
— I do not know; I merely ask.
We can only imagine Sterling gazing at himself in the mirror
while writing these lines, his classical profile by then so
eroded that he appeared, as it was expressed by those like
Charmian London, "A Greek coin run over by a Roman chariot."
However, the limit of anything is not about moderation, and
Sterling dismissed the poem as "crude stuff.” Others
who followed would provide the corrective: whether the likes
of John Steinbeck or, later, Remi A. Nadeau (in such works
as The Water Seekers and California: The New
Society, most of California's writers know that the state's
golden promise is far from free and certainly not easy.
2. Location: From Preservation to Exploitation
Like those for vocation, terms for identifying the logical
limits to location vary, but at one end is what may be called
preservation, in which location is deemed inviolable. The
problem, however, with preservation is that it precludes our
actual inhabitation and commerce, a fact that has doomed one
utopian venture after another. Utopia, by definition, is no
place; like Thoreau, we must return to the village to earn
a living. In doing so, we in some measure move to the opposite
end of the category, exploitation. Not wishing to destroy
location, however, we typically balance preservation and exploitation
in the principle of management. Indeed, a great deal of California's
cultural history is tied to this very issue.
Between 1905 and 1914, Sterling served as the guiding spirit
for a colony of artists at Carmel, a setting of rustic retreat
that could not have been much prettier. He was close to San
Francisco and yet removed from its pace and pressures. If
anywhere, Carmel was a place worthy of careful management;
even so, the colony's founding principle was not to manage
the region but to chase real estate profit. Formed by James
Franklin Devendorf and Frank H. Powers, the Carmel Development
Company did not originally have Bohemianism in mind at all:
in its 1904 promotional brochure for the area, the company
listed the coming railroad, electric wiring, moderate climate,
potential for growth, hunting, and fishing. Only in subsequent
promotions did the company tap Bohemianism. Thus, when the
artists arrived, recounts Michael Orth in his 1969 essay for
The California Historical Society Quarterly, "There
were over seventy-five people, several stores, a restaurant
or two, and a school and hotel — not exactly a town
perhaps, but civilized enough." For his part, Sterling
was happy to assume residence on the financial wings of his
benefactor, and Uncle Havens was happy to rid himself of a
dime's worth of trouble.
In retreating from vocational pressures, Sterling and the
colonists spent a great deal of time tenderizing the local
abalone, singing a song that suggests more about them than
they probably realized:
Oh! Some folks boast of quail on toast
Because they think it's tony
But I'm content to owe my rent
And live on Abalone.
While living in this artificial paradise where no landlord
comes to collect overdue rent, the colony produced all too
little of enduring artistic merit. Meanwhile, Sterling was
downright assiduous in hunting for the colony's food, an activity
he labeled in a 1913 letter John Myers as his "best recreation."
His aim, it turns out, was far from re-creating anything.
As we may expect of a poet — especially in the Greek
sense of maker — Sterling envisioned the hunter as integral
to nature's processes. Sterling’s "Autumn in Carmel"
is nothing short of pastoral:
Hunters wait on the hillside, watching the plowman pass
And the red hawk's shadow gliding over the new-born grass.
Purple and white the sea-gulls swarm at the river-mouth.
Pearl of mutable heavens towers upon the south.
Sterling's Carmel diaries bear witness to a different muse.
On August 30, 1907, Sterling records, "There was a leopard-seal
at the 'landing,' shot this morning (w/ buck-shot). A handsome
seal. His blood smells very fishy." Sterling neither
mentions why he killed the seal nor what he did with it —
the killing was apparently its own reward for him, and years
of conscientiously recorded slaughter follow. What he ate,
he often ate uncooked: in a 1912 letter to Witter Bynner,
Sterling prescribes, "Don't fail to eat one of our mallards,
RARE.” Part of this record involves his kill ratios:
on October 15, 1909, Sterling "Got five squirrels, 6
blackbirds (1 shot), & three small ducks, (one shot)";
on October 19, he "got two small ducks, two snipe, one
lark, three squirrels, six killdee[r]s and eight blackbirds
(one shot)." Such attention tended to the callous: on
November 3, Sterling is unfunny in noting, "went hunting...&
got a loon (who's looney now?)." On October 20, 1911,
Sterling changes verbs: "Went gunning with Doc Gates
and got a quail, killdee[r] and six larks." By February
9, 1912, matters turn downright strange: Sterling writes,
"Went to the river-mouth with John Kenneth Turner in
the afternoon, to try to shoot salmon. Got no chance, but
shot a rabbit and seven larks." On April 5, 1912, Sterling
scoffs that the local game-warden asks about his shooting
sea gulls — note "Autumn in Carmel" —
yet on March 27, 1913, Sterling records that he and his company
"went to Mission Point and river mouth. Tried the rifle
on golf signs and sea-gulls." In all, Sterling's hunting
became almost random. On August 16, 1913, he "shot at
a big skunk"; on September 8 of the same year, he hunts,
along the way, "a white hawk, an owl and a pirate cat";
on October 22, he frets that his tally does not equal that
of his friend Turner.
Not surprisingly, Sterling's poetry provides a kind of commentary
on his slaughter of wild animals. Adverse response raises
the critical problem of intentionality: Sterling was a Decadent,
after all, a sensibility that favored flourish over narrative,
emotions over substance. As such, his poetry is not accountable
to contemporary tastes. Nonetheless, it is peculiar that Sterling's
nature poetry drifts so far from a sense of either preservation
or even management. For instance, although the publication
of a poem like "Yosemite" (1915) was accompanied
by a cover painting and interspersed with photographs of the
valley, the poem mainly demonstrates Sterling's range of reference
to mythology and history, overlaid with abstractions of colors,
sizes, and shapes. Despite its title, one may say, the poem
only exploits the name of the actual valley that John Muir
promoted; in fact, Sterling wrote the poem in order to pay
debts to John D. Phelan, who staked Sterling while the poet
tried the New York market. Given the circumstances, the results
O falling rivers, beaut[i]ful in doom!
Your lofty raiments sway
As mountain-winds fling wider to the day
The sounding fabric of a stony loom.
These lines are typical, Sterling ending no fewer than fifty-three
of the poem's 360 lines with an exclamation point. Moreover,
Sterling does not stay in this Decadent key, ultimately changing
it to promoting socialism: "O Valley waiting through
the wistful years, /The sure though distant tread/Of those
young armies of the Comrade State!"
Even Sterling was confused and bored with the effort. In
a letter to Upton Sinclair of 1924 regarding his artistic
creed, Sterling equated "Yosemite" to so much "preach[ing]."
Moderation, for Sterling, was never easy.
3. Society: From Devotion to Egoism
In the myriad possibilities for the American dream, vocation
and location are complemented by society, a principle ranging
from devotion to egoism. Like any category, though, theory
is one thing; reality is another. America proceeds, in the
famous phrase of Alex de Tocqueville, on "self-interest
rightly understood." In short, because we cannot escape
either ourselves or our social spheres, we typically sympathize
with each other, needing others as much as others need us.
For Sterling, society was the most important principle to
his California dream: In 1928, the Spring Valley Water Company
even erected a bench commemorating Sterling, inscribed with
a musical line by Uda Waldrop titled "Song of Friendship."
Despite such masonry, Sterling's friends in life were too
often passing shadows with too-easy smiles. In citing Sterling's
"In Autumn," Charmian London resigned that Sterling
"was no one's man — not even his own man. He was
forever searching into himself to be sure, but also 'lonely
for some one I shall never know'.” In the terms here,
Sterling was lonely because he could not strike a balance
between giving and taking, devotion and egoism.
At the Carmel colony, eventual inhabitants included Austin,
the young poetess Nora May French, and James Marie ("Jimmy")
Hopper. A host of visitors filtered in and out, but by far
the most important for Sterling was the very image of manly
Bohemianism, Jack London. The two met in 1901, and Sterling
soon came to call London "Wolf" after the adventurer's
Yukon experience while London called Sterling "Greek"
after the poet's classical profile. Their relationship is
best left to the record. Each failed at his first marriage
(Sterling did not remarry); each had various affairs; and
each idealized women beyond life, London seeking a "mate"
for his superman self-conception and Sterling elaborately
worshiping women like Mary Craig Kimbrough — later Upton
Sinclair's second wife. (In 1911, Sterling wrote Kimbrough
a sonnet a day for one hundred days, published in 1927 as
Sonnets to Craig.)
Most striking are Sterling's epistolary salutations to London,
for they reveal a growing deference: on May 27, 1906, Sterling
wrote to "Dearest Tiger"; on July 31, 1906, it was
"My darling Wolf"; on November 18, 1910, it was
"O Hater of Henids! O Wolf! O Mussel-trap!"; and
on January 29, 1913, it was simply "Heavenly Wolf.”
In a letter of September 12, 1907, Sterling remarked, "You,
Wolf, I love — more than I dare say." In response,
London shied from fully committing to Sterling. In a letter
of July 11, 1903, London wrote to Sterling,
And so I speculate & speculate, trying to make you out,
trying to lay hands on the inner side of you, the self side
of you — what you are to yourself in short. Sometimes
I conclude that you have a cunning & deep philosophy of
life, for yourself alone, worked out on a basis of disappointment
& disillusion. Sometimes, I say, I am firmly convinced
of this, and then it all goes glimmering, and I think that
you don't want to think, or that you have thought no more
than partly, if at all, and are living your life out blindly
Given the overall tenor of Sterling's letters, London's uneasiness
reflects that something had to change.
Of course, one may dismiss the relationship between Sterling
and London, to cite James Henry in his 1980 limited edition
of Sterling letters, as "Probably of great symbolic significance
to the head-shrinking clan." Suffice that the two grew
increasingly distant. While London refrained from visiting
Carmel in favor of adventure and then farming, Sterling receded
to the shadows. In a letter of October 14, 1913, Sterling
addressed London in a manner both obsequious and petulant:
months-to-go-cruising in! (I don't blame you)." Soon
enough, Sterling was content to provide London with scattered
story ideas, reasoning that London's more popular name would
sell better than his. Displaced to the shadows of London’s
literary light, Sterling allowed in a letter of March 30,
1913, "I know I don't deserve you, Wolf. But in a way
I am glad that I'm one of the illusions you still elect to
His life having tested the limits of devotion and egoism,
Sterling took refuge in an anonymously donated room above
the Bohemian Club. In 1926, he spent his last, alcohol-soaked
days there, disappointed by the delayed visit of an acquaintance,
none other than H. L. Mencken. Following the suicides of Nora
May French in 1907, Bierce in 1914, and Carrie Sterling in
1918, Sterling died — alone — from cyanide of
potassium poisoning, the fatal dose from an envelope that
he had carried with him for years and marked with the word
“Peace.” Upton Sinclair responded in 1927 that
the "nebular hypothesis" overwhelmed Sterling —
that is, Sterling despaired for mankind's fate in a doomed
universe. More simply explained, Sterling was disappointed
that he could not achieve lasting social connections.
Despite his eventual suicide, Sterling could occasionally
achieve social balance. For instance, Sterling wrote a "'rough-neck'
hooch song" to London, which begins and then follows
O the Wolf, the Wolf, the Wolf!
The fat, voracious Wolf!
He's hair on his toes,
And whiskers in his nose.
And where he gets his thirst
Christ Jesus only knows.
Sterling seemed content with the effort. In a 1921 letter
to Estelle P. Crane, he proudly observed that "Some of
the men in [the Bohemian Club]...sing it at times when tipsy."
Such might be the best of Sterling's legacy: when the club
observed the fiftieth anniversary of Sterling's death in 1976,
their Library Notes remembered their former resident as a
"living legend." No one, it would seem, can deny
that Sterling was the life of the party.
Last, in his 1957 article titled "George Sterling: Western
Phenomenon," Stanton A. Coblentz commends Sterling's
"cosmic perspective" and assesses that Sterling
was a last, rare individual in American literary history,
namely, "the full-time poet, the man for whom poetry
is both vocation and avocation." Rebuttal may be left
to a more recent British poet who could not be more different
from Sterling — Philip Larkin. In a 1979 interview,
Larkin commented, "I've always thought that a regular
job was no bad thing for a poet.... [For] you can't write
more than two hours a day and after that what do you do? Probably
get into trouble." Sterling found trouble in California's
golden promise, all right; now, in pondering his approach
to vocation, location, and society, we cannot help but reassess
our own American dreams.
From guest contributor Peter Kratzke