Blanche Mathias, (1887-1983) was a close friend of the Jeffers family, especially so of Una Jeffers, and spent much time in Carmel and San Francisco, visiting, and at social dinners, entertaining the Jeffers in NYC, etc. A very literate woman, Blanche was friend with many literary personalities of the 20’s and 30’s including Georgia O’Keefe, Bennett Cerf, John Steinbeck, Edna St. Vincent Millay and others. In the 1980’s, Jeffers scholar, printer and small publisher, Dr. Marlan Beilke asked Ms. Mathias to write her reminiscences and memories of the Jeffers family, and he agreed to publish the work. Apparently it took some doing to get her to accomplish the task, which she finally did, recording the information on a series of tapes, then preparing a typescript into hard copy. Unfortunately, life changing issues and a cross country move confronted Dr. Beilke, forcing him to abandon his letterpress printing and publishing activities and he was never able to bring the piece to publication, and the manuscript has lain dormant since 1982. It is now offered here accompanied by the publication rights.
The manuscript consists of 21 double spaced typewritten pages, and is titled, “Memories of the Jeffers And their Friends in Carmel (Reminiscences of Blanche C. Mathias, taped August, 1981 to May, 1982)”. Blanche writes about first meeting the Jeffers in 1934, with the Chicago printer & publisher, Ralph Fletcher, wherein she narrates the closeness she felt with Una and the 2 little boys,Donnan and Garth, followed by Robin reading poetry to them after dinner. “Una says, “Robin, if ever you write as well as Yeats, you’ll be my favorite poet also”. At the time Blanche was living in New York, but later moved to Carmel, with her husband and much of the story concerns their activities during that period. She mentions Frederick Mortimer Clapp, Teddy Kuster, Marian Anderson, Sarah Bard Field, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Krishnamurti, playwright Martin Flavin, the painter William Ritchel, Mabel and Tony Luhan, Phoebe and Hans Barkan, Olga and Sidney Fish, the Kellogs, Edward Weston, Johan Hagemeyer, Lincoln Steffens, Melba Bennett and many others. She describes Una’s passing and her last visit with Robin when she was asked for dinner just days before he died, and was able to spend some quiet hours alone with him, as he described “what a wonderful life he had and what good friends he felt we four had been, and how much it meant to him”(Blanche and husband Russell Mathias, and Robin and Una) The whole is a wonderful intimate personal tribute to Jeffers and his family and friends and certainly well worthy of publication, as it was original intended. Accompanying the typescript are 3 original letters from Mathias to Marlan Beilke from May, 1982, both forwarding the piece, with comments, such as “Were you about to give up on me? We just made some small changes, which I penciled in …and I am sure there are some bigger ones which you may think of. Now Marlan, you wrote me and asked me to do this project, and as I understand it, I was doing it for you. So it is up to you to decide how to print it and what to call it. If there is anything in this that you don’t want to use, feel free to eliminate it. I have no feeling that it should be permanent in any way”. Also included is an original 3-1/2 x 5” b&w glossy photo of Blanche Mathias.
In the 1920’s Mathias served as art critic for the Chicago Herald and Evening Post, and her poetry was published in the literary magazines of the era. Her literary papers, scrapbooks, letters and archive were donated to the Yale collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library between 1967 and 1984. Much of her correspondence with Una Jeffers was published in a series of 4 issues of the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter in 1978-79 covering the period 1927-1950. Marlan Beilke wrote “God in Man in the Works of Robinson Jeffers, 1972. Unpublished and is transferred with the publication rights. Provenance: Dr. Marlan Beilke.