Gathering together George Sterling, Robinson Jeffers, we may begin to thread the needle of spirit of Big Sur with Jaime De Angulo. If Sterling was the misplaced Victorian gentleman in an emerging age of literary modernism, and Jeffers the modern who built a monument Tor House and Hawk Tower, made of granite boulders, a fortress set against the storms and the howling winds of the Pacific Ocean, De Angulo was the Poet Vaquero, a scholarly cowboy at home in the raw wildness amid the madrone and manzanita, chaparral, the dust and rattlesnakes of Alta California.
…he hungered for what stretched outside the granite pediments and towers, well past the garrison walls: wilderness, wild animals, Indians, medicine song, and a storytelling tradition that might be ten thousand years old, alive in the human voice.*
Rosalind Sharpe Wall describes her first encounter with Jaime in A Wild Coast and Lonely-Big Sur Pioneers:
Jaime de Angulo was a medical doctor turned anthropologist who bought a ranch at Big Sur in 1914 from Roche Castro. His appearance, in the 1920s when I first saw him, was dramatic in the extreme. He came riding down our hill to Rainbow Lodge on a black stallion, along with a huge turquoise-studded Indian silver conch belt from New Mexico. His long black 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.
*Tracks Along the Left Coast, Jaime De Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture by Andrew Schelling
Growing up in Big Sur from childhood Sharpe had the experience of knowing Jaime over many years and writes unsparingly of his dramatic personal decline:
But Jaime had also a dark side, a perverse and contradictory side—and his enemies called him crazy, bohemian, drunken, dangerous even a devil… His dramatic sense, his need to play a role, to be a buffoon, a star, a madman, a tragic figure, a rebel, a martyr, ruled his life and made it in the end a wasteland, a tragedy—except for his work which was unquestionably the work of a genius.
De Angulo was always brilliant and inquisitive but his methods could be undisciplined and his behavior unpredictable. His conflicts with the newly formed Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley were acknowledged in his book:
Indians in Overalls
…I proposed to record some songs on my phonograph machine. I carried around one of the old Edison phonographs with a big horn. You made the records on wax cylinders with a special cutting jewel needle ; then to play them you changed to a needle with a rounded point. The whole contraption was crude and primitive compared to modern methods. It was hard enough to operate in a laboratory; imagine it in the open, competing with the wind; the horn would swing around; we cursed—-How I sweated and labored over those Indian songs, and the fortune I spent on broken records…That was before the days of amplification; later on new methods appeared; flat disks, unbreakable and permanent; wonderful improvements…but the Indians are gone, no more singing to record.
The passage is footnoted by this:
The University (of Berkeley) would not help me; took no interest; would not even give me enough money to have the records transcribed and made permanent on modern disks. Decent anthropologists don’t associate with drunkards who go rolling in ditches with shamans.
De Angulo was a gifted writer but his novels, poetry and stories were all published posthumously.
Jaime DeAngulo Rides Again
Lisa Scola Prosek composed an opera based on DeAngulos’s 1927 novel The Lariat.
Originally developed in cooperation with Louise Miranda Ramirez, an elder of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of Monterey County, Prosek’s work combined Esselen language lyrics with melodies that De Angulo had researched and preserved, and then retooled them into her musical score.*
*repeatperformances.org, opera, “The Lariat” at Thick House, January 31, 2015
