Poetry by the Ocean by Richard Newton

One of Clint Eastwood’s successors as mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea recently unveiled a dogs-only drinking fountain in a downtown plaza. Before cutting the ‘rib-bone’, she told the gathered dignitaries that the ‘Fountain of Woof’ (as it was officially named) had been installed by ‘pup-ular’ demand. Give Clint his due: at least he had decent speech writers.

As for the fountain, well it’s very Carmel. This is a town that revels in its eccentricities. By local decree, there are neither streetlights nor street numbers (houses are identified by name: ‘Tinker Bell’, ‘Casa de Lunch’, and the like). The speed limit is just 25mph, and is strictly enforced. There’s a 10pm curfew for under-18s. High-heels can only be worn with a permit. Dogs can go leashless on the main beach, but only if they’re well behaved and their owners clean up after them - poop-scooping bags are provided free by the municipality.

This studied eccentricity is not without design. It helps ensure that Carmel attracts the ‘right sort’. If you own a golden retriever and are seriously wealthy, you fall slap-bang within the desired demographic. (I’m halfway there, thanks to my dog.)

It wasn’t supposed to be quite like this. Carmel was conceived a hundred years ago as a Bohemian community for writers and artists. Its setting on the central Californian coast remains idyllic; the town is enfolded by forested hills and looks out on a ruggedly beautiful bay in which blue, gray and killer whales are often seen.

To the north is the Monterey Peninsula (location of famous golf courses such as Pebble Beach and Cypress Point); immediately to the south is the dramatic mountainous coastline of Big Sur, which, with some justification, has been called ‘the world’s greatest meeting of land and sea’.

From the start, creative types flocked to Carmel, though the benefits of their inspiring surroundings tended to be offset by communal distractions. When Jack London visited in 1906, his welcome party lasted five days.

Gradually, the carefree artists and writers were usurped by well-to-do newcomers. By the time erstwhile local John Steinbeck revisited the area during his Travels with Charley in 1960, it was a different place.

“If Carmel’s founders should return,” he wrote, “they could not afford to live there, but it wouldn’t go that far. They would be instantly picked up as suspicious characters and deported over the city line.”

Over the years, the bigwigs of Carmel became increasingly draconian in their efforts to protect the quintessential exclusivity of their little paradise. By the late 1980s, the most famous resident had had enough. Clint Eastwood ran for mayor on a platform that promised to prune back the plethora of local rules, regulations, building restrictions and zoning laws.

He was elected by a landslide and served two years before acknowledging that he’d rather be making movies than arguing over the pitch of garage roofs. By then, the town had become much more welcoming – he had even granted approval for a car park for visitors.

Clint remains in Carmel, and is not the only celebrity resident. Doris Day has lived here since 1981, co-owns the Cypress Inn, and presides over an animal protection charity. More recent arrivals include Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

There’s no sign of any of them as I enter the town early one sunny Friday morning. On the main street, Ocean Avenue, a few people are out walking their retrievers. They’re the only sign of life. The dozens of galleries and antique shops are yet to open; when they do, many will have under-the-counter stashes of dog biscuits for any canine visitors.

A dense row of trees runs down the centre of the street. There are trees throughout the town: Carmel calls itself an urban forest. In places, pedestrians must negotiate exposed roots – hence the mandatory permit for high heels; a measure intended to ward off lawsuits.

I branch off into the residential area, passing dozens of quaintly named, chocolate-box cottages. Even the most modest properties ooze wealth. In the driveway of a tiny wooden bungalow, two Porsches are parked.

I pull up outside the home of a man who was once world famous. That you have probably never heard of him is a salutary reminder to current Carmel celebrities of the fleeting nature of fame. This is Tor House, and the man who built it was one of the finest poets of the last century, Robinson Jeffers.

Jeffers died in 1962, and his house is now preserved and run by a charitable foundation. The foundation’s vice-president, Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, is waiting for me at the gate. With his bushy, moustacheless beard, he looks the part. He carries a leather Filofax crammed with Jeffers’ poetry. As we tour the property, Elliot frequently fishes out appropriate quotes.

Quite where the poetry ends and the house begins is not simple. They were equal measures of Jeffers’ life’s work; each was invested in the other. “My ghost you needn’t look for,” he wrote in the poem ‘Tor House’, “it is probably here, but a dark one, deep in the granite.”

Jeffers and his wife, Una, settled in Carmel in 1914. It wasn’t their first choice. Their original plan had been to emigrate to Lyme Regis, but an ill-fated pregnancy and the First World War intervened. When they first glimpsed Carmel, it reminded them of the Cornish coast (back then the area was treeless, still largely houseless, and windswept). “It was evident that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place.”

On arrival, Jeffers was an unremarkable amateur poet. His metamorphosis into one of America’s all-time greats coincided with the building of his house, which was constructed from sea-worn granite boulders that he pushed up from the beach. “Hear at night the huge waves, my drunken quarrymen climbing the cliff, hewing out more stones for me to make my house.”

Jeffers placed into the walls pieces of rock and stonework collected by friends from around the world: a piece of the Great Wall of China; a fragment of the Great Pyramid of Cheops; lava from Vesuvius; marble from Hadrian’s Villa. The place is an architectural encyclopaedia.

Once the house was complete, Jeffers set about single-handedly building a four-storey Irish tower beside it as a gift for his wife. (“I built it with my hands, I hung stones in the sky.”)

By the 1930s, he was justly celebrated, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Vanity Fair called him ‘America’s greatest poet’.

Elliot escorts me through the house, which has been maintained as a time capsule. In the living room, there is still sheet music folded open on the Steinway piano, an instrument once played by the Jeffers’ Carmel neighbour, Ansel Adams. There are books on the shelves, ornaments on the sills, family photographs on the wall.

“I believe that this is the best preserved literary home in America,” Elliot says.

We cross the immaculate English cottage garden to the 40-foot tower. A staircase curves around the outer walls. Inside, Elliot reveals the secret internal staircase linking Robinson’s study on the ground floor to Una’s room above. It is so narrow that you can only scale it left shoulder first.

At the top, I ascend the outdoor parapet and gain a fabulous vista of Carmel Bay. To the left and right, new houses crowd in on the boundary of Tor House and its tower. Wrote Jeffers in ‘Carmel Point’: “This beautiful place defaced with a crop of urban houses – how beautiful when we first beheld it.”

The same poem goes on: “It [Carmel] knows the people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their work dissolve.”

After WWII, Jeffers’ bleak view of humanity sharply fell out of favour, and for decades he was ignored by academia. The most comprehensive anthology of twentieth century American poetry doesn’t include him, even as a footnote.

But in these troubled times, his message – especially his warning against American imperialism, and his strident environmentalism – has new relevance, and his work is experiencing a resurgence of interest. A 750-page Selected Poetry was published in 2001.

On the tower’s parapet, I sit on a stone ledge where Jeffers sat. The granite beneath me feels immovable, and though Carmel is all around, doggy fountains and poop-scoopers seem very distant indeed.

Driving back through the town, I realise that it is not far removed from Jeffers’ formidable tower after all. My dog would love living here, and I expect I would too, if I could afford it. Both are perfect sanctuaries conceived to keep the harsh world at bay.