by Hermione Lee
Cather would always be attracted partly to that Attic style, and partly to the daemonic, the barbarous, the earthy. In either case, what most allured her was the isolation and distinction of the great artist.24 In her theatre reviewing, she wrote with passion about the great stage personalities of her time: Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘stone age’ savagery and ‘primeval fires’, especially as Cleopatra;25 Eleonora Duse’s ‘delicacy and power’26 (‘The great art of other women is disclosure. Hers is concealment’), Helena Modjeska’s pathos, dignity and restraint in Schiller’s Mary Stuart.27 She was fascinated, as with opera singers, by the constraints and disciplines that made the great expressive actress: the suppression of personality (especially in Duse), the years of rigorous hard labour, the sacrifice of an ‘ordinary’ life. ‘Yes’, the actress Minnie Maddern Fiske told her, ‘I think we feed our art with everything in our lives.’28 Through the power of these sanctified votaries, giving their perfect performances – Bernhardt as Camille, Ellen Terry as Portia, Julia Marlowe as Rosalind – the theatre became a holy place:
We go to change our atmosphere, to get for a moment into the atmosphere of great emotions that are forbidden in our lives….The dress circle, the parquet, the orchestra chairs – that is all the dead world of fact; but right beyond that line of lights are the tropics, the kingdom of the unattainable, where the grand passions die not and the great forces still work; a land of Juliets, Othellos, Theodoras and Marguerite Gautiers. It’s the only place on earth they have left now, those great and unhappy ones. They are like Heine’s ‘Gods in Exile’.29
At the heart of this feeling is the half-admitted sense that the theatre was a safe place for her to fall in love with great and beautiful women. ‘The beauty of a love of the theatre’ thinks the aficionado Peter Sherringham in The Tragic Muse, ‘was precisely that it was a passion exercised on the easiest terms. This was not the region of responsibility.’30 But, at the same time, it satisfied her desire for a sacred ground enhanced by heroic presences.
What Cather saw at the theatre between 1895 and 1900 was very mixed indeed: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, but more often popular hits like Cyrano de Bergerac or The Second Mrs Tanqueray, adaptations of classic novels, native farces, vaudeville, music hall, and old war horses like Camille, which never failed to stir her.31 The American stage was not always, by any means, the home of ‘the gods in exile’:
There are some stage questions which have never been solved yet. Among them are why the maids always wear red dresses and always dust the same piece of furniture through the whole play; why the villains always wear silk hats and smoke cigarettes; why the leading lady always wears black in the fourth act and faints in the fifth.32
On the whole, the American stage of the late nineteenth century had to rely on imports for first-rate plays and players. Cather, working out her aspirations and standards for a native culture, was scathingly critical about the country’s lack of ‘great national schools of acting’33 and the national belief, reminiscent of the Roman Empire, that anything good could be ‘bought in’ and ‘made over’.34 After a particularly dismal production of Romeo and Juliet in 1900, she imagined the American company writing to Shakespeare and suggesting he’d have better success with it if he laid the scene in Chicago, ‘exiling Romeo to Milwaukee. The Spanish war might be touched upon to give the flag a chance’.35
Cather was not, for all that, a snobbish theatregoer. It was the vulgar, commercial ‘Americanizing’ of other cultures she objected to, not popular entertainment. Though she insisted on the special status of the artist, she also wanted the theatre, like music, to be ‘the art of the people’.36 In the programme she was evolving, through her journalism, for a native art, she struggled (like Whitman before her) to reconcile a belief in the special, separating privilege of the artist with the ideal of a democratic culture.
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Her ideas on music and drama were part of an aesthetic programme which she had been working out since the early days of reading and reviewing. By her mid twenties she knew a wide range of Classical, French, English and American literature (also some German, and Russian in translation), and had developed a vigorous, eloquent set of values built around a pantheon of heroes. That ‘second prep’ essay on Carlyle, such a hit with the Pittsburgh ladies, and a later piece on Ruskin from 1896, typify her position. Carlyle is venerated as a kind of prehistoric woolly beast, ‘a great Titan’, ‘the last of the Mammoths’, drawing his strength from wild landscapes, formidably out-of-place in London drawing-rooms, and wrestling with his ‘great ideas’ in solitude.37 Ruskin, by contrast, is praised for his harmonious poetic ‘glory’ and his priest-like dedication to the worship of Beauty.38 The opposition there between the barbaric and the civilized, the virile and the delicate, the native and the cosmopolitan, would go all through her writing.
Cather’s championing of Frank Norris’s programme for a robust native literature, in the 1890s debate on ‘Romance’ and ‘Realism’, derived in part from her enthusiasm for ‘boys’ books’, ‘books of action’.39 So, in Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Stanley Weyman’s romances, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, she found ‘an atmosphere of adventure and romance that gratifies the eternal boy in us’.40 The attraction to ‘boys’ books’ was part of a theory of primitivism or neopaganism which belonged to a quite common mood of retreat from fin-de-siècle ‘decadence’ and self-consciousness. The world is tired; this century has lived too much and too fast….Jaded, exhausted, satiated we have come back to nature acknowledging that she is best, amid the wrecks of an old life we are beginning anew.’41 The return to nature could be pursued in Whitman, whom she praised for his ‘primitive elemental force’, his ‘exultation in the red blood in his body and the strength in his arms’,42 or in Burns with his ‘purity and beauty’,43 or in Kipling (whom she interviewed in Pittsburgh) with his passion for energy and force.44 When she praised Whitman or Kipling she used much the same terms as in her reporting on the Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who seemed to her a reincarnated Viking, possessed of that ‘old unrest’, the call ‘to a larger liberty, of meeting Nature once more breast to breast’.45 The best new writing, by this argument, needed to evoke the best past. Cather’s romantic primitivism was, from the first, reactionary and nostalgic. The myths she chose to support her predilections – the Arthurian Grail quest, Heine’s story of the gods in exile, Kingsley’s end-of-empire fable of the children in the forest tempted into the kingdom of the trolls46 – were myths of loss: the twilight of the gods, the passing of the golden age.
But she also wanted a proletarian writing rooted in home-feeling and ‘ordinary’ experience. In a 1901 piece on the Carnegie Art Institute,47 she applied the word ‘Philistine’, not, as she usually did, to the unimaginative commercialism of America, but to the enjoyment of commonplace subjects (an old lady sewing, a view of the Pittsburgh mills) by an everyday American audience. Her admiration for the nineteenth-century Russian novelists and for certain French writers – Hugo, Anatole France, Maupassant – who seemed to her to have a deep understanding of people; her fondness for George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss,48 and later, for Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories, or Frost’s poetry, or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers49: all these different literary passions, like her opinions on painting, music and theatre, pointed to the heroic spiritualizing of ‘common’ effort and survival in her own work.
Cather’s veneration for natural energies, pure ‘life-force’, meant a hostility to parlour decadence; she disliked the Yellow Book ambience, and she was squeamish about ‘squalid’ realism in Zola’s Germinal or Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. But there were contradictions here. She was allured by exotic writing like Gautier’s or Daudet’s, and she was drawn to the suffering lonely artist out of place in the bourgeois world. So the enthusiast for Kipling, Weyman and Dumas was also to be found praising Housman or de Musset, or defending Verlaine against Max Nordau’s charge of ‘degeneration’.5
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The contradiction is a sexual one, evidently. O’Brien accounts for the paradoxes in Cather’s literary taste as a vacillation between sexual models. She initially wants to escape ‘femininity’ by identifying with virile ‘writers-as-heroes’, but moves towards a more androgynous version of the writer-as-votary. The vacillation, though, is as much between opposing ideas of the American artist’s status, as between alternative sexual identifications. Can the artist be the singer of democracy, the speaker of the real world, if he, or she, also feels himself to be the prisoner of Philistia, a god in exile?
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Cather’s fiction would show up, again and again, the results of this early debate between romance and realism. But for the moment she felt herself to be, more than anything else, a prisoner of ‘Philistia’. She had to earn her living; journalism allowed her to develop her critical ideas, but not to apply them. By 1900 she had published enough short stories in magazines to believe in herself as a writer; she was writing poetry as well, and she wanted to start a novel. So, after a few months’ stint in Washington in the winter of 1900, doing government translation work (from French into English) and sending a column of news from the capital to Lincoln and Pittsburgh, she took a job at the Pittsburgh Central High School for two years and at an Allegheny school, over the river, for the next three. In the first year, she had to teach ‘Latin, composition and algebra’; the first two subjects were enjoyable, but she lost twenty pounds over the third. This was a short apprenticeship, though; after that she taught only literature.
Cather the schoolteacher is not as vivid a figure as Cather the ambitious, busy journalist. She seems to have liked it, and to have been liked by the brighter students, those she could be bothered with; she was clear, hardworking, and severe on her students’ prose style. But apart from the restrictive school in ‘Paul’s Case’, and a 1902 story of a retired teacher who has spent his life trying to inculcate literary taste into his ‘practical, provident, unimaginative and mercenary’ students, [CSF, p.287] the five-year job did not make a mark on her fiction. And, looking back, she remembered these as hard years,51 of working all day and writing at night. She was working her way out: the teaching was not at the centre of her life.
The centre was now taken up by Isabelle McClung, whom Cather met in Lizzie Hudson Collier’s dressing-room in 1899, and whose family house she moved into when she started teaching. It is hard to get close to Isabelle, since her letters to Cather were all burned, with the exception of three that came to light after Cather’s death, dating probably from between 1926 and 1930, affectionate and solicitous, and in O’Brien’s words, ‘attesting to an enduring love’.52 Cather’s earliest biographers are reticent about Isabelle, Edith Lewis possibly out of jealousy, and E.K. Brown, just as possibly, through a fear of offending Edith Lewis. Evidently, she was beautiful, wealthy, and determined. She struck observers with her strength of character: she was a person who got her own way. She shared Cather’s literary interests, but was not a writer herself.
When Cather put something of Isabelle into a story, ‘Double Birthday’, about a widowed Pittsburgh lady and her father, she is described, rather chillingly, as ‘tall, handsome, with a fine, easy carriage, and her face…both hard and sympathetic, like her father’s’. [UV, p.43] He, Judge Hammersley, is a stern old traditionalist, dedicated to a life of order. In the story the rapport between father and daughter is excellent. In life, Isabelle was reacting – as Cather had not had to – against a formidable father figure. Judge McClung was a fierce Presbyterian and pillar of the establishment, who had given the harshest possible sentence to an anarchist friend of Emma Goldman’s, Alexander Berkman, for trying to shoot Henry Clay Frick after Frick had broken the ’92 Homestead steel mills strike. Frick had survived unscathed, but Cather noted wryly in her column (a couple of years before she met the McClungs) that Berkman was doing time nonetheless.53
Isabelle was challenging the Judge’s orthodoxies by hobnobbing with ‘Bohemians’ when she met Cather; and there may have been a family struggle when she insisted that Cather move into the large, grand house on Murray Hill Avenue. Whether or not Isabelle threatened to leave home unless Cather moved in, or her sister Edith decided to go because of Cather’s presence in the house, or the two women shared a bedroom (they certainly seem to have led an intimate life, reading and working at the top of the house with a sewing room converted to a study for Cather, as in The Professor’s House), this was clearly a different matter from Cather’s usual attraction to large, warm families who took her in. She had fallen in love (or, to put it more precisely, in the beautiful phrase used by William Godwin of Mary Wollstonecraft’s relationship with Frances Blood: ‘She contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind’).54 A letter of 1899 to Dorothy Canfield describes Isabelle looking like part of the Parthenon frieze, and says that she is so good to her she is making her feel ‘kiddish’.55 The dedication to Isabelle in the first edition of The Song of the Lark comes with a romantic verse (later removed). They had a long, intimate and emotional friendship – whether or not they were actually lovers, which is unprovable – which lasted until Isabelle’s marriage in 1916. The marriage came very soon after the death of Isabelle’s father and the sale of the house on Murray Hill Avenue which had been Cather’s second home. Isabelle was thirty-eight; she and Cather had been friends and companions for seventeen years. The man she married was a few years her junior, a violinist, one of three musician brothers from a highly-cultured émigŕe Russian-Jewish family who had lived in London and Toronto. Enough of Cather’s letters have survived for us to know that she felt the marriage painfully: it was one of the catastrophes of her life. But she did find a way of continuing the relationship with the couple (though she was never very fond of Jan Hambourg), and was still close to Isabelle when she died in 1938. In the first years, though, the importance of the relationship with Isabelle was the support it provided at the time when Cather was turning herself into a writer. Isabelle seems to have given her not only a luxurious space to write in but the more valuable luxury of strong emotional encouragement.
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In the summer of 1902 Cather made her first journey to Europe with Isabelle (and with Dorothy Canfield, whom they met up with in Paris). She covered the trip in letters back to the Nebraska State Journal, so her excitement and pleasure are recorded. For her as for so many American writers, from Emerson to Henry James, the European experience felt as much like a homecoming as a discovery: the landscape and architecture and society were a confirmation of well-loved, long-known books and paintings. The literary American’s response to these wonders could be extremely equivocal: the old political hostility towards England, a resentment of Europe’s cultural dominance, a distaste for the vestiges of medieval feudalism, and a failing of the spirits before the ruins of ancient empires, affected writers as different as Hawthorne, Twain, and Henry Adams. Cather, however, a ‘passionate pilgrim’ like Henry James, was unadulteratedly enthusiastic.
To an extent she followed the usual literary tourist’s itinerary, exclaiming like Hawthorne over the Liverpool poor, relishing by contrast (as James’s Strether would the following year) Chester’s medieval charm, recognizing Hogarth and Dickens and Kipling in ‘the London shoddy’, seeking out painters’ studios and the theatre, and, once in France, tracking down the graves of the famous in Père Lachaise, paying homage to Flaubert in Rouen, and admiring the great French churches and the countryside. The particular interests which distinguished her pilgrimage from that of countless others were a passion for Housman, and a particular liking for the old Provençal cities. The Housman quest took her to Ludlow and Shrewsbury in search of Shropshire Lad settings, and, rather unfortunately, to the poet’s home (she got his address out of his publishers), which turned out to be a dreary little boarding house in Highgate. An embarrassed Housman, faced with three strange American girls, one of them enthusing about his poems, took refuge in a long scholarly conversation with
Dorothy Canfield about her thesis on French literature. Cather was mortified by the encounter, which deflated her ideal of Housman and of her own romantic quest for him. (It would come back to plague her: Ford Madox Ford made up an embellished version of it, and Housman scholars got on her trail.)
There were no such embarrassments in France. Looking back, in later letters to Dorothy, Cather would say that she felt like a raw, stupid savage in the face of the old world, especially by comparison with Dorothy’s well-travelled sophistication (an emotion which gets into the French scenes in One of Ours). But the rawness only opened her up the more to the experience.56 Cather wrote passionately back to Lincoln about the beauty of St Ouen in Rouen (to be saved up for One of Ours), the Millet-like pastoral scenes at Barbizon near the forest of Fontainebleau, where the wheat fields and poplars reminded her of home, the little Mediterranean fishing village of Le Lavandou, Avignon, the great city of the Popes, and, best of all, the eloquent old town of Arles, rich with associations of her hero, Alphonse Daudet, where ‘besides being shepherds and farmers, almost every Provençal is a poet’.
France would be used over and over again in her writing. But, though she would go back often, she never wanted, like James or Edith Wharton, to move to Europe or centre her writing there. Her subject matter would not be the Europeanizing of Americans, but the transference of European cultures to the American landscape: the survival and reshaping of old orders in pioneer form.