Ina Coolbrith - Librarian

Librarian

Coolbrith had hoped to tour the East Coast and Europe with Miller, but stayed behind in San Francisco because she felt obliged to care for her mother and her seriously ill, widowed sister Agnes who was unable to care for herself or for her two children. After he returned from Europe, in late 1871 Joaquin Miller reunited with his first daughter, called variously Calle Shasta, Cali-Shasta, or Calla Shasta (Lily of the Shasta), born in August 1858 to a Native-American woman named Paquita. He took the teen from her home in rural Northern California to Coolbrith in San Francisco for her to school while he went abroad again, this time to Brazil and Europe.

Beside the Dead

It must be sweet, O thou, my dead, to lie
With hands that folded are from every task;
Sealed with the seal of the great mystery,
The lips that nothing answer, nothing ask.
The life-long struggle ended; ended quite
The weariness of patience, and of pain,
And the eyes closed to open not again
On desolate dawn or dreariness of night.
It must be sweet to slumber and forget;
To have the poor tired heart so still at last;
Done with all yearning, done with all regret,
Doubt, fear, hope, sorrow, all forever past;
Past all the hours, or slow of wing or fleet—
It must be sweet, it must be very sweet!

—Ina Coolbrith

At a literary dinner on May 5, 1874, Coolbrith was elected honorary member of the Bohemian Club, the second of four women so honored. This allowed the members of the club to discreetly assist her in her finances, but their help was not enough to cover her full burden. Coolbrith moved to Oakland to set up a larger household for her extended family. Coolbrith's sister Agnes died late in 1874, and the orphaned niece and nephew continued to live with Coolbrith. Coolbrith wrote "Beside the Dead" in grief from the loss of her sister. Her mother Agnes died in 1876.

To support the household, in late 1874 Coolbrith took a position as the librarian for the Oakland Library Association, a subscription library that had been established five years earlier. In 1878, the library was reformed as the Oakland Free Library, the second public library created in California under the Rogers Free Library Act (Eureka was first). Coolbrith earned a salary of $80 per month, $1,930 in current value, much less than a man would have received. She worked 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. Her poetry suffered as a result. She published only sporadically over the next 19 years—working as Oakland's librarian was the low point of her poetic career.

"...I named you 'Noble'. That is what you were to me—noble. That was the feeling I got from you. Oh, yes, I got, also, the feeling of sorrow and suffering, but dominating them, always riding above all, was noble. No woman has so affected me to the extent you did. I was only a little lad. I knew absolutely nothing about you. Yet in all the years that have passed I have met no woman so noble as you."
—Jack London, in a letter to Coolbrith

At the library, her style was personal: she discussed with the patrons their interests, and she selected books she felt were appropriate. In 1886, she befriended and mentored the 10-year-old Jack London, guiding his reading. London called her his "literary mother". Twenty years later, London wrote to Coolbrith to thank her.

Coolbrith also mentored young Isadora Duncan who later described Coolbrith as "a very wonderful" woman, with "very beautiful eyes that glowed with burning fire and passion". Magazine writer Samuel Dickson reported that, at a soirée in 1927, an aging Coolbrith told him of the famous lovers she had known, and that she had once dazzled Joseph Duncan, Isadora's father. Coolbrith said that his attentions led to the breakup of his marriage. Duncan's mother left San Francisco and settled her four children in Oakland, little knowing that Coolbrith would soon meet one of her children, and help the young dancer develop a wider knowledge of the world through reading. Duncan wrote in her autobiography that, as a librarian, Coolbrith was always pleased with the youthful dancer's book choices, and that Duncan did not find out until later that Coolbrith was "evidently the great passion of life".

Coolbrith's nephew Henry Frank Peterson came to work with her at the library, and began to organize the books into a faceted classification scheme that she specified, one which used one- and two-digit numbers to stand for general subjects, and three-digit numbers to indicate individual books in that subject. Before this, Coolbrith had resisted library trustee attempts to classify the books; she had wished to continue the reading-room atmosphere that she had established.

In 1881, Coolbrith's poetry was published in book form, entitled A Perfect Day, and Other Poems. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, after Coolbrith's publisher sent him a copy, said "I know that California has at least one poet." Of the poems, he said "I have been reading them with delight." Yale poet Edward Rowland Sill, professor at the University of California and a keen critic of American literature, gave Coolbrith a letter of introduction that he wished her to send to publisher Henry Holt. It said, simply, "Miss Ina Coolbrith, one of our few really literary persons in California, and the writer of many lovely poems; in fact, the most genuine singer the West has yet produced." Quaker poet and former abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier wrote to Coolbrith from Amesbury, Massachusetts, to share his opinion that her "little volume" of poetry, "which has found such favor with all who have seen it on this side of the Rocky mountains", should be republished on the East Coast. He told her "there is no verse on the Pacific Slope which has the fine quality of thine."

Beginning as early as 1865 in San Francisco, Coolbrith held literary meetings at her home, hosting readings of poetry, and topical discussions, in the tradition of European salons. She helped writers such as Gelett Burgess and Laura Redden Searing gain wider notice.

Once warmly social with her, in the 1880s Ambrose Bierce turned his caustic pen to criticism of Coolbrith's work, and thus lost her as a friend. In 1883, he wrote that her finely-wrought poem "Our Poets" should have been made a dirge, as the great poets of California were dead. He wrote that the periodical she worked for should be named the Warmed-Overland Monthly because it delivered nothing new. Regarding her poem "Unattained", Bierce complained of "this dainty writer's tiresome lugubriousness." In response, Coolbrith sided with those who said his incessant needling led local writer David Lesser Lezinsky to suicide.

The Poet

He walks with God upon the hills!
And sees, each morn, the world arise
New-bathed in light of paradise.
He hears the laughter of her rills,
Her melodies of many voices,
And greets her while his heart rejoices.
She to his spirit undefiled,
Makes answer as a little child;
Unveiled before his eyes she stands,
And gives her secret to his hands.

—Ina Coolbrith

Coolbrith published poems in The Century in 1883, 1885, 1886 and 1894. All four poems were included in Coolbrith's 1895 book, Songs from the Golden Gate—a re-issue of her earlier 1881 collection, with some 40 poems added. In New York, Coolbrith was acknowledged by a reviewer in the monthly journal Current Opinion as "a true, melodious and natural singer. Her work is characterized by great delicacy and refinement of feeling, and comprises dainty love songs, verses of deep religious feeling, stately odes, written for special occasions, and charming bits of description."

In September 1892, Coolbrith was given three days' notice to clear her desk, to be replaced as librarian by her nephew Henry Frank Peterson. A library trustee was quoted as saying "we need a librarian not a poet." Coolbrith's literary friends were outraged, and published a lengthy opinion piece to that effect in the San Francisco Examiner. Peterson's plans for the library were quite successful, however; under his guidance circulation quickly grew from 3,000 to 13,000. Peterson opened the library on Sundays and holidays and increased accessibility to the stacks—he was praised by trustees for his "management improvements".

In 1893 at the World's Congress of Representative Women, held at the beginning of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Coolbrith was described by Ella Sterling Cummins (later Mighels) as "the best known of California writers... who stands peerless at the head." Coolbrith was commissioned to write a poem for the Exposition, and in October 1893 she brought with her to Chicago the poem "Isabella of Spain" to help dedicate Harriet Hosmer's sculpture Queen Isabella which stood before the Pampas Plume Palace within the California Pavilion. Listening to Coolbrith were well-known women such as suffragist Susan B. Anthony and journalist Lilian Whiting. During Coolbrith's visit, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, her friend from the Pacific Coast Woman's Press Association (the two women served as president and vice-president, respectively), wrote to May Wright Sewall on her behalf; Stetson observed that Coolbrith could benefit from introductions to Chicago's best writers.

Coolbrith's difficulties in Oakland followed by her trip to Chicago unsettled her friends who did not wish to see her move away and "become an alien" to California. John Muir had long been in the habit of sending Coolbrith letters, and the occasional box of fruit such as cherries picked from the trees on his Martinez estate, and he made such an offering in late 1894, accompanied by a suggestion for a new career which he thought would keep her in the area—she could fill the position of San Francisco's librarian, recently vacated by John Vance Cheney. Coolbrith sent a response to Muir, thanking him for "the fruit of your land, and the fruit of your brain". After signing the letter "your old-time friend", she added a post-script comment: "No, I cannot have Mr. Cheney's place. I am disqualified by sex." San Francisco required that their librarian be a man.

In 1894, Coolbrith honored poet Celia Thaxter with a memorial poem entitled "The Singer of the Sea". Thaxter had been to the Atlantic Monthly what Coolbrith was to the Overland Monthly: its "lady poet" who submitted verse containing "local color".

The Sea-Shell

"And love will stay, a summer's day!"
A long wave rippled up the strand,
She flashed a white hand through the spray
And plucked a sea-shell from the sand;
And laughed—"O doubting heart, have peace!
When faith of mine shall fail to thee
This fond, remembering shell will cease
To sing its love, the sea."

Ah, well! sweet summer's past and gone,—
And love, perchance, shuns wintry weather,—
And so the pretty dears are flown
On lightsome, careless wings together.
I smile: this little pearly-lined,
Pink-veined shell she gave to me,
With foolish, faithful lips to find
Still sing its love, the sea.

—Ina Coolbrith

A second poetry collection, Songs from the Golden Gate, was published in 1895; it contained "The Mariposa Lily", a description of California's natural beauty, and "The Captive of the White City" which detailed the cruelty dealt to Native Americans in the late 19th century. As well, the collection included "The Sea-Shell" and "Sailed", two poems in which Coolbrith described a woman's love with deep sympathy and an unusually vivid physical imagery, in a way that presaged the later Imagist school of Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. The book included four monochrome reproductions of paintings by William Keith that he had devised as visual representations of the poetry. The book was well received in London where editor Albert Kinross of The Outlook papered the London Underground walls with posters announcing "his great discovery".

Connections among Coolbrith's circle of friends resulted in a librarian job at San Francisco's Mercantile Library Association in 1898, and she moved back to Russian Hill in San Francisco. In January 1899, artist William Keith and poet Charles Keeler obtained for her a part-time position as librarian of the Bohemian Club, of which Keith and Keeler were members. Her first assignment was to edit Songs from Bohemia, a book of poems by Daniel O'Connell, Bohemian Club co-founder and journalist, following his death. Her salary was $50 each month, less than she had been earning in Oakland, but her duties were light enough that she was able to devote a greater proportion of her time to writing, and she signed on as sometime staff of Charles Fletcher Lummis's The Land of Sunshine magazine. As a personal project, she began to work on a history of California literature.