Your California Legacy

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Segment Title: Lewis | Garden

From Against a Darkening Sky, 1943
Janet Lewis (1899-1998)

The pace of Californian life—even rural life—sometimes blurs our perspectives on the pleasures of quiet, deliberate tasks. Not so for poet and novelist Janet Lewis, for whom California life was fulfilled in her work, in her family, and in the pleasure she took by gardening, raising goats, and breeding Airedales at the Los Altos home she shared with her husband, poet and critic Yvor Winters.

Though an accomplished poet, Lewis is best known for her fiction, and many of her stories are set in California. In her 1943 novel Against a Darkening Sky, Lewis took the opportunity to explore how place affects human beings, in this case, the not-quite-fully-settled Santa Clara Valley of the depression era. Here, at the edge of war and a new rush of technological development, two friends—Mary Perault and Agnes Hardy—share the peace of a quiet moment in the valley.

[Mary Perault] had put down the plums and was cutting dahlias as she spoke, admiring the rich autumnal colors and fluted petals, and holding them up for Mrs. Hardy's admiration. Mrs. Hardy, from the slight rise of ground, looked across the ditch and the uncultivated fields to a small house deserted now for several years and surrounded by bleached foxtail and wild oats which grew up against its walls like waves, and back to the dusty richness of her friend's trees and gardens. They continued to speak of trivial things, two women who knew each other so well that there was no need of their talk's being important, or even consecutive. They took a deep and quiet pleasure in each other's presence, and in the serenity of the day, and in the bounty of the small arid garden.

After she wrote Against a Darkening Sky, Lewis continued to publish fiction, including the 1946 collection, Good-Bye Son, and other Stories. And she never abandoned verse; she was chosen to write and present a poem at the 1971 John Muir Celebration at Yosemite.

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