Everson, William Oliver (Brother Antoninus)

(b. 10 September 1912 in Sacramento, California; d. 3 June 1994 in Santa Cruz, California), poet and printer known as the “Beat friar.”

Everson was the second of three children born to Louis Waldemar Everson, a native of Norway, the composer of “Selma, the Home of the Peach!,” and a printer, and Francelia Marie Herber, a Roman Catholic from Minnesota who converted to Christian Science. Soon after William was born, the Eversons moved from Sacramento to Selma, California, fifteen miles southeast of Fresno in the central San Joaquin Valley.

The Everson Printery was a source of modest income for the family, supplemented by the elder Everson’s service as justice of the peace and bandmaster. During summer vacations from Selma Union High School, beginning in 1924, William worked at the Libby cannery, which he continued to do throughout high school. In his senior year he fell in love with Edwa Poulson, a junior. After graduation from high school he enrolled in Fresno State College in 1931, but after one semester he dropped out, went back to work at the cannery, then took a job in New Mexico harvesting pine nuts. The pine nut project failed, and he returned to Selma. Working once again at the cannery, he was promoted to syrup maker. In November 1933 he enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In the fall of 1934 Everson returned to Fresno State, where he discovered in the library a volume of Robinson Jeffers’s poetry, which affected him deeply, persuading him to become a poet. After another semester at the college he dropped out again and returned to Selma to write poetry about the San Joaquin Valley, “to become a poet in my own right, to plant a vineyard, to commune with nature, and marry my high school sweetheart.”

After a courtship of eight years Everson and Poulson were married in 1938, when she graduated from Fresno State and got a job as a schoolteacher in Dinuba, California. They leased the Wenty family ranch near Selma and planted muscat grapes. Everson found work in construction, first in building a new post office, then in laying concrete irrigation pipe. The Libby cannery in Selma moved to Sunnyvale, California, where he had seasonal work, again as a syrup maker. While there, he made a pilgrimage to Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House in Carmel, California. In 1935 Everson published his first book of poetry, These Are the Ravens, an eleven-page issue in the Pamphlet Series of Western Poets printed by the Greater West Publishing Company in San Leandro, California, with partial subsidy from the author.

During 1938 he finished writing The Masculine Dead and War Elegies and began The Residual Years and Poems MCMXLII. In 1939 the fine printer Ward Ritchie published San Joaquin, with an introduction by Lawrence Clark Powell, a librarian at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author who became a good friend to Everson and influenced his development during the next decade. San Joaquin was a handsomely designed book and Everson’s first major publication.

As the threat of war grew in Europe, Everson’s pacifist convictions were reflected in a number of poems. Many of these he discarded, but with a loan from his friend Kenneth Carothers he sent The Masculine Dead to the publisher James Decker in November 1941. Decker was in financial trouble, so although the book did appear, Everson was disappointed at the number of typographical errors in it.

After a year of uncertainty about his draft status, Everson was summoned to Civilian Public Service Camp Number 56 in Waldport, Oregon, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp to which conscientious objectors were sent to do forest-reclamation work. One of his poems appeared in the camp newsletter, The Tide, and he was enthusiastically involved in establishing an alternative weekly called Untide, in which his “War Elegies,” among other verses, appeared.

By March 1943 Everson had adjusted to his new surroundings. He wrote to Powell: “Of the 150 men here I have found one affinity, one near affinity, and a host of swell eggs. This is a most marvellous place to be cooped up in. And I suffer a deep sense of guilt that the situation is one I can enjoy while Edwa suffers in Selma.”

Actually, Edwa’s suffering was somewhat alleviated by the companionship of Carothers, who had loved her since high school; Carothers had been discharged from the army (after a nervous breakdown and the discovery in his pocket of a homosexual love letter) within weeks of Everson’s induction into the Civilian Public Service.

Everson did not learn of the liaison for a year, but he accepted it. His only response was his long “Chronicle of Division.” In 1944 the Untide Press published an enlarged version of War Elegies as well as Waldport Poems, which reflects his separation from Edwa. The Waldport Press published The Residual Years: Poems, 1940–1941 in 1944 and Poems MCMXLII in 1945. On 23 March 1946 Everson was discharged from the Civilian Public Service, bought a Washington handpress, and moved to Ham and Mary Tyler’s Treesbank Farm, near Sebastopol, California, where he spent time with Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, and other poets later called the Beats. He also met and fell in love with the artist and poet Mary Fabilli.

Everson next moved to Berkeley, where he installed his big press in Fabilli’s home and took a custodial job at the University of California Press. Everson and Fabilli were married in Reno, Nevada, on 12 June 1948, after Everson’s divorce in February of that same year; later they produced A Privacy of Speech (1949), which he wrote and set in type and she illustrated with wood-block prints. In 1948 Everson’s first major collection of poems, The Residual Years (which included the poems from the earlier title of the same name), was published by James Laughlin at New Directions to predominantly favorable reviews.

Everson’s marriage ended on 30 June 1949, when the Roman Catholic Church announced it would not recognize the union because Fabilli had been divorced while she and her first husband were members of the church. In late July 1949 Everson was baptized in Saint Augustine’s Church in Oakland, California. That same summer he received a Guggenheim fellowship. He wrote poetic tributes to Fabilli in Springing of the Blade and “The Falling of the Grain.” Springing of the Blade was produced in a handsome edition in 1968 by Kenneth J. Carpenter’s Black Rock Press in Reno.

In 1951 Everson was accepted as a lay brother in the Dominican order and given the name “Brother Antoninus” at Saint Albert’s College in Oakland. There the Seraphim Press published his Triptych for the Living on the Nativity. He devoted most of his time and energy to printing NovumPsalterium Pii XII, of which he completed seventy-two pages over the next seven years. But he was still writing poetry, committing to verse his inner conflicts between Eros and Thanatos and between art and religion. In 1955 he had the seventy-two finished pages of the Psalter bound, and they were distributed in a limited edition by Countess Estelle Doheny of Los Angeles, a well-known collector of fine-press books.

In 1957 in Evergreen Review Rexroth published his “San Francisco Letter,” in which he described the work of the Beat poets, conspicuously including Brother Antoninus. Antoninus published The Crooked Lines of God in 1959 and The Hazards of Holiness in 1962, both of which were well received. Reviews of his religious verse had stirred interest in the Beat friar—as well as the disapproval of the archbishop in San Francisco.

In 1959 Antoninus met Rose Moreno Tannlund, with whom he shared a brief but “intense relationship” that inspired his Rose of Solitude, which was published by Doubleday in 1967. In 1963 he was legally divorced from Fabilli, and he entered the novitiate in the Kentfield Priory.

At the end of 1969, however, at a poetry reading at the University of California, Davis, he read a love poem written to Susanna Rickson, “Tendril in the Mesh,” and shed his Dominican robes. He married Rickson the following Saturday, 13 December 1969, and moved with her and her infant son to Stinson Beach, California. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1990.

From 1971 to 1981 Everson was poet in residence at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California and lived at Kingfisher Flat, in the mountains north of Santa Cruz, where he installed his Washington press. He also taught printing at the university library’s Lime Kiln Press, which produced two handsomely crafted Jeffers volumes, Tragedy Has Obligations (1973) and Granite and Cypress (1975). During his final years Everson suffered increasingly from Parkinson’s disease, which with pneumonia was the cause of his death at Kingfisher Flat in 1994.

A major portion of Everson’s correspondence, tapes, and other papers is in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. The Black Sparrow Press has published the most comprehensive collection of his poetry, The Crooked Lines of God: A Life Trilogy, which consists of The Residual Years: Poems, 1934–1948 (1997), The Veritable Years: Poems, 1949–1966 (1998), and The Integral Years: Poems, 1966–1994 (2000). Albert Gelpi’s biographical afterword to The Blood of the Poet (1994) is a good source, as are his introduction to The Veritable Years and Allan Campo’s foreword to the same volume. Obituaries are in the San Francisco Chronicle (4 June 1994) and the New York Times (6 June 1994).

David W. Heron