Brother Beat
by Dana Gioia - July 8, 2010
Reprinted with permission.
Sixty years ago, Catholicism – for the first time – stood at the center of American literature. Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, Pietro di Donato, and Mary McCarthy represented the front rank of contemporary fiction. Meanwhile poets like John Berryman, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, John Frederick Nims, and Robert Fitzgerald became the first generation of American Catholics to gain major critical reputations. Catholic men of letters like James Agee, Paul Horgan, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Maritain, and Thomas Merton played active roles in public intellectual life. Famous literary converts like Countee Cullen and Tennessee Williams were commonplace figures on the cultural scene. It was not only acceptable for a writer to be a practicing Catholic; back then, it actually seemed chic.
Among this large and distinguished group of writers, there was perhaps no career more interesting than that of the Beat poet William Everson, who at the height of the San Francisco Renaissance briefly achieved immense celebrity as Brother Antoninus. Although he is not a major writer, and his public reputation has declined since his death in 1994, Everson remains a poet and critic of substantial achievement. He is also indisputably one of the greatest letterpress printers in American history. His odd and often torturous life also illustrates the spiritual strengths and perils of the Catholic convert.
Nothing Short of a Conversion
William Oliver Everson was born in Sacramento, California, in 1912, the second of three children to a mismatched couple. The poet's father, a Norwegian immigrant, had come to America alone as a boy. His wife, who was 20 years younger, grew more emotionally distant from her husband with the birth of each child. "In the world of the myth," the poet later commented, "my mother was a goddess and my father was an ogre."
A few months after the poet's birth, his family moved to Selma, a small farming town in the San Joaquin Valley where Everson grew up. A poor student, Everson graduated from Selma Union High School in 1931 and entered Fresno State College but quickly dropped out. Soon he enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Roosevelt administration job program in which he worked on building roads in Sequoia National Park.
Returning to Fresno State in 1934, Everson made the crucial literary discovery of his life – the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. It was nothing short of a conversion experience. "Suddenly the whole inner world began to tremble," he later described his first reading of Jeffers's work. The encounter not only led to Everson's lifelong devotion to the older writer's work – which eventually resulted in two superb, impassioned, and unorthodox critical studies, Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury (1968) and The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure (1988) – but also confirmed the young man's literary vocation. "I began to write other poems," he recalled, "and by the end of the semester I knew what I was going to do." Once again dropping out of college, Everson decided to be a poet. Supporting himself as an irrigation pipe layer and cannery worker, he published his first two volumes, These Are the Ravens (1935) and San Joaquin (1939), with small California presses. In 1938 he married his high school girlfriend and soon bought a small farm.
Rooted in the agricultural landscape of central California, Everson's early poetry is compressed, lyrical, and imagistic. Everson had not yet converted to Catholicism, but these first poems are already suffused with a genuine, if still vague, religious longing. Take, for instance, "These Are the Ravens":
These are the ravens of my soul,
Sloping above the lonely fields
And cawing, cawing
I have released them now,
And sent them wavering down the sky,
Learning the slow witchery of the wind,
And crying on the farthest fences of the world.
When in 1940 American men were required to register for possible military conscription – Europe was already at war – Everson filed as a conscientious objector. After the United States declared war on the Axis powers, the 30-year-old Everson was called up and sent to Civilian Public Service Camp 56 in Waldport, Oregon, where he worked with other C.O.'s clearing trails and crushing rocks. The camp, which contained many other intellectuals and artists, including Kenneth Rexroth and Henry Miller, covertly published an underground newsletter and eventually issued an anarchist journal. Everson not only contributed to these illicit publications but also helped print them – his introduction to hand printing, the craft he would master.
The Birth of Brother Antoninus
During Everson's three-year incarceration, his father died (his mother had passed away in 1940), and his wife left him for another man. After being demobilized in 1946, a dispirited Everson moved to Sonoma County, California, to set up a letterpress in a rural arts commune. Soon falling in love, however, he moved to Berkeley both to learn more about printing and to court an Italian-American artist who was in the process of rediscovering her Catholic faith. She gave Everson a copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, which introduced him to the other decisive author in his life.
At a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, 1948, Everson underwent a mystical experience, and the following July he was baptized at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland. He soon began working for Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement on Oakland's Skid Row, which provided food and lodging for the homeless. In his private devotions Everson continued to have mystical encounters. "I was seized with a feeling so intense as to exceed anything I had previously experienced," he recorded in a notebook. "It was a feeling of extreme anguish and joy, of transcendent spirituality and of great, thrilling physical character.… From the tabernacle had issued to me something like an intense invisible ray, a dark ray, like a ray of light seen in the mind only."
In 1951 Everson joined the Dominican order as a lay brother (a member of the community with no intention of becoming a priest and, therefore, under no obligation to take the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity). Given the name Brother Antoninus, the poet entered St. Albert's, a monastery in Oakland. In addition to washing dishes and cleaning the sacristy, he set up his letterpress in the basement. Soon he started working on an elaborate folio edition of the new Latin Psalter recently authorized by Pius XII, a book which would eventually be recognized as one of the central masterpieces of American hand-press printing.
Everson's conversion unleashed a torrent of poetic creation. Many critics rate the three major collections published under the name of Brother Antoninus as his finest poetic works – The Crooked Lines of God (1959), The Hazards of Holiness (1962), and The Rose of Solitude (1967), which were later collected in The Veritable Years: 1949-1966 (1978). In this feverishly visionary poetry, Everson abandons his earlier style to create an expansive lyrical mode. The poems often sprawl reflecting the ebb and tide of the author's religious exhilaration, ecstasy, and despair. As poet William Stafford observed, this work offers "a shock and a delight to break free into the heart's unmanaged impulses."
As Brother Antoninus, Everson became one of the key figures of the San Francisco Renaissance – the "Beat Friar" featured in Time magazine dressed in Dominican monastic robes dramatically intoning his work to huge audiences. What does Catholic Beat poetry sound like? Here are a few lines from "The Making of the Cross," a rhapsodic poem that imagines how the wood and iron that crucified Jesus came to be at Golgotha:
Just as in life the good things of the earth
Are patiently assembled: some from here, some from there;
Wine from the hill and wheat from the valley;
Rain that comes blue-bellied out of the sopping sea;
Snow that keeps its drift on the gooseberry ridge,
Will melt with May, go down, take the egg of the salmon,
Serve the traffic of otters and fishes,
Be ditched to orchards…
So too are gathered up the possibles of evil.
New Robes
Fame proved Everson's undoing. Although he now wanted to deepen his religious commitment, his public literary life provided too many temptations. After taking his initial three-year vow to join the First Order in 1964, he became involved with a young woman who came to him for counseling. In 1969 Everson left the Dominican order to marry her. With typical panache, he announced his new life by stripping off his religious robes at the end of a poetry reading and leaving the hall. Brother Antoninus was no more.
Everson took a position as a poet-in-residence at Kresge College at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he also founded Lime Kiln Press, which quickly became one of the nation's preeminently fine presses. He continued to publish poetry prolifically, most notably Man-Fate (1974), River Root (1976), and The Masks of Drought (1980). By 1977, however, he had developed Parkinson's disease, and five years later he was forced by the illness to close his press. After a long painful decline, he died in 1994.
Everson's most important later work was his critical prose – and the magnificent books he printed at Lime Kiln. At Santa Cruz, he taught a year-long course on the poetic vocation. Now deeply influenced by the archetypal ideas of Swiss psychologist Karl Jung, as well as his earlier literary and religious sources, Everson examined the nature of poetic creation. His critical methods may seem unconventional when compared with contemporary academic criticism, but they are firmly based in Catholic contemplative literature.
"Suffice it to say," he explained in Birth of a Poet (1982), a little-known but major critical work, "that when I left the monastery for academe the method that I brought with me was meditative rather than discursive. For I had learned how concepts seemingly exhausted by endless repetition could suddenly, under the probe of intuition, blossom into life."
Everson's literary legacy is unique – with enduring achievements in poetry, criticism, and printing. Out of his large body of verse, he left a small group of powerfully original religious poems. His criticism continues to be provocative in its combination of literary insight and spiritual depth. No California writer has more profoundly articulated what it means to be a Western author. His printing stands in the first rank of American private press work. But beyond these varied accomplishments, he represents an important part of the American Catholic literary tradition – a legacy still too little known, even by Catholics.
