by Hermione Lee
The immediate result of the European rite of passage was a ‘slim volume’57 of poetry, which she paid a vanity press to publish. For its time it was an unexceptionable, and unexceptional, collection. Cather was no lyric poet; she needed bigger scope. April Twilights, as its title suggests, was a sentimental collection of parlour pastorals, a pot pourri of French and English late-Victorian and fin-de-siècle influences, touchingly exhibiting its affection for Housman:
Lads and their sweethearts lying
In the cleft of the windy hill;
Hearts that are hushed of their sighing,
Lips that are tender and still.
Stars in the purple gloaming,
Flowers that suffuse and fall,
Twitter of bird-mates homing,
And the dead, under all! [‘In Media Vita’]
A tone of decorous neopagan wistfulness prevails (inspired as much by Ethelbert Nevin’s death as by the European experience) in laments for Marsyas and Eurydice, for a lost Arcady and a vanished Apollo. There was little use of native materials, apart from the Burnsian address to her ‘grandmither’ and an elegy for her confederate uncle Seibert, ‘The Namesake’. The language had just the sort of soft-edged, bookish ‘slither’ (purple gloaming, dust-begotten doubt, pulses a-sleeping, lissome maiden willows, roundelays, wasted cheeks, and so on) that Ezra Pound would deride ten years later in his 1913 manifesto for Imagism: Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’, don’t use ‘book words’ or ‘straddled adjectives’ like ‘addled mosses dank’ (Cather has ‘windy hillside gray’), don’t put into poetry anything ‘you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say’.58
In later years, Cather found April Twilights something of an embarrassment. Though she had a few good reviews at the time (George Seibel was kind), she knew it was not going to make her name. More to the point, in 1903, the stories she was publishing in magazines attracted the attention of a brilliant and extraordinary New York editor and publisher, whose interest in her was to transform her life. It begins as a fine story of professional good luck and advancement.
S.S. McClure – this deus ex machina – sent his cousin talent-scouting in the provinces for the McClure Syndicate, and the cousin had Cather’s name put to him in Lincoln by Will Owen Jones. McClure then wrote asking to see her stories (some of them, unknown to him, had already been turned down by his staff, a mix-up typical of his office). A week after they arrived, he summoned her to New York by telegram. Cather was overwhelmed by the meeting. McClure extracted her life story, praised her work, ticked off his readers for turning her down, took her home to Westchester to meet his family, and promised to bring out a book of her stories and to publish everything she wrote thereafter. It meant, she felt,59 the end of long years of waiting, perseverance, and discouragement. She was so encouraged and strengthened that it made her want to do well as much for McClure as for herself. He had a genius for proselytizing, she told Will Jones,60 a boyish enthusiasm which took hold of you. After some delay, McClure published her first collection of seven stories, The Troll Garden, in 1905: the real beginning of Cather’s writing career. (I will come back to these stories.) The following year, after a disastrous walk-out by most of his staff, McClure rushed over to Pittsburgh, spent a persuasive evening at the McClungs, and offered Cather a job on his magazine. By the summer of 1906 she was living in Washington Square and working for one of the most famous publications in the country.
4
BURIED ALIVE
I feel as if a second man had been grafted into me…He is strong and sullen, and he is fighting for his life at the cost of mine. That is his one activity: to grow strong. No creature ever wanted so much to live.
Alexander’s Bridge, 1912
SAM McCLURE,1 an indigent Irish immigrant brought up in Illinois, who had forged a publishing career with ferocious energy and gusto, was the kind of vigorous pioneering hero Cather admired, an antitype to the Nevin/Housman ideal of delicate grace. When she ghosted his autobiography2 in 1913 she enjoyed it for its honesty; when she caricatured him as the editor O’Mally in her 1918 satire on McClure’s ‘Ardessa’, she showed him as impatient, volatile, but likeable. Cather would always be loyal to McClure, and, as he must have guessed she would when he captured her from Pittsburgh, she worked all out for him, for six years.
Not all his staff found him as congenial. McClure had a genius for talent-spotting and big ideas, but he was an extremely erratic magazine publisher. He would commission articles or appoint staff and then lose interest, and other people would have to pick up the pieces. Half the time he was rushing about the country making contacts, spending money and speculating recklessly; the other half he was in the office interfering with everybody’s work. Staff trying to meet deadlines would have to be hidden from him in hotel rooms. ‘He could raise a rumpus’, said his star reporter Lincoln Steffens; Edith Lewis compared it to working in a high wind.
McClure was the pioneer of a journalistic phenomenon to which President Roosevelt (in the year Cather went to New York) gave a name that stuck: muckraking. It was part of a general movement of reform which had been building up at the turn of the century, in reaction, principally, to the power of the huge privately-funded monopolies and the dismaying conditions in American cities: immigrants pouring in to live in indescribable squalor, pervasive corruption in city government. ‘Progressivism’ was mainly an urban movement, but there was a link, all the same, between William Jennings Bryan back in Nebraska, and S.S. McClure in New York. Like the 1890s Populists, the reformists of the 1900s wanted social legislation – whether for tax reform, ‘efficiency’ in business, labour laws, or immigrant welfare – to curb the untrammelled power of individual wealth. The new realism overlapped with the reform movement. Shocking novels of urban deprivation, like Norris’s 1899 McTeague (much admired by Cather), set in San Francisco, or Stephen Crane’s 1893 novel set in New York, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, dealt with the same conditions as non-fiction ‘exposés’ like Jacob Riis’s 1890s book on city slums, How the Other Half Lives. Reportage and fiction came together most notoriously in Upton Sinclair’s stomach-turning account of conditions in Chicago’s Packingtown, The Jungle (1906).
McClure was interested in fiction as well as fact: he had been running a fiction distribution syndicate, and when he founded his magazine in 1893 he published English writers such as Stevenson, Conrad, Kipling, Anthony Hope and Arnold Bennett, as well as the big Americans, Twain, Crane, and Jack London. He also published some very good poetry. From the start, he was running ‘human interest’ stories (Ida Tarbell, his star woman journalist, wrote gripping lives of Napoleon and Lincoln), but it wasn’t until 1903, when McClure sent Lincoln Steffens out to investigate municipal corruption, that the magazine made its name. The January 1903 issue of McClure’s had Steffens on ‘The Shame of Minneapolis’, Ida Tarbell on Rockefeller’s vicious control of the Standard Oil Company, and Ray Stannard Baker’s defence of the non-striking miners in the Pennsylvania coalfields. By the next year, McClure’s, at ten cents a copy, had a circulation of 750,000, and muckraking had become a national industry. In the office, however, the staff celebrities McClure had created were getting tired of his managerial methods and increasingly wild expansionist schemes – not to mention his complicated private life. When Tarbell, Steffens and Baker took most of the staff with them to found a new magazine, leaving McClure with only the impressive Viola Roseboro (liked by Cather for her energy and independence), he had to hire a whole new team. Cather, it seems, was meant as a replacement for Ida Tarbell.
But her interests were not political or reformist, and McClure’s was in some ways an alien environment for her. There is a revealing letter of 19113 describing a meeting with a woman colleague of Jane Addams, the great social work pioneer who founded Hull House, welfare centre for immigrants in Chicago. Cather compared this woman (whose ‘cause’ was the white slave trade) to Electra, driven mad by living so long with a single horrible idea.
She couldn’t talk comfortably, she said, with people who were obsessed with the destruction of social evils. And she is caustic, in ‘Ardessa’, about the solemnity of the muckrakers, ‘the great men of the staff…as contemplative as Buddhas in their private offices, each meditating upon the particular trust or form of vice confided to his care’. [UV, p.102] Her own social concerns, inexplicit and indirect, were embedded in her feeling for human survival and heroism. When she wrote in 19104 to a new young contributor, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (who was to become a great friend) suggesting that while in Berlin she look into an exhibition of inventions for the protection of working men, it’s clear that her interest is in the details that would bring those hard lives home to her, not in policies for reforming labour conditions.
Most of Cather’s work for McClure’s was editorial: subbing badly written pieces, soothing the authors5 whose manuscripts McClure had picked up and then mislaid or forgotten about, advising young contributors6 – who reminded her of herself in Lincoln ten years earlier – to condense and simplify, to provide information first and foremost and to restrain their emotions: feelings crushed into the background would be all the more potent, she told one of them,7 for being scarcely noticeable. By 1909 she was managing editor, successfully keeping up the circulation and being sent off to England to make contacts and issue commissions.
—
Photographs of Cather in her thirties show a firm, competent, rather formidable looking woman, no longer a young hopeful, but someone in control of a working life. New York felt, from the start, much more like home to her than Pittsburgh. Following the footsteps of famous male writers making their way in the city (Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, O. Henry) she moved into a ‘bohemian’ studio apartment on the south side of Washington Square, facing the dignified brownstones which still retained the atmosphere of the old, genteel, parochial New York evoked by James and Edith Wharton. The story ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’ eloquently remembers all that – the oyster houses, the little shops in the Italian quarter, the French hotel with a restaurant-garden on Ninth Street, the violet gaslights and the horses and carriages of Fifth Avenue seen through the Arch into the Square, the pigeons circling over the fountain and the Garibaldi statue. She would come to feel intense nostalgia for this early New York scenery, as the city filled up – to her disgust – with cars and subways and new buildings. Still, for all her regrets, and frequent quests for remote unspoilt places, New York would from now on always be her base.
The dignified past she caught a vanishing glimpse of in Washington Square was much more pervasive in staid, old-fashioned, Puritan Boston. Cather went to the New England city in 1908 when she was doing her one large-scale piece of investigative journalism for McClure’s. This was the rewriting and researching of Georgine Milmine’s scrappy but sensational biography of Mary Baker Eddy,8 sainted founder of the Church of Christian Science. Cather produced a splendidly caustic debunking of Eddy as a neurotic egotist: ‘She had developed a habit of falling into trances’…‘This literary tendency was a valuable asset, which [she] made the most of. It gave her a certain prestige in the community, and she was not loth to pose as an “authoress”.’ The robust ironies learned in Cather’s ‘meatax’ reviewing years are recognizable; but her name appeared nowhere in the serialization, and Milmine took all the credit – and the outrage.
What was more important to her than Mary Baker Eddy was her experience in Boston. It made the last stage in a formative journey which was a kind of counter-pioneering, back from the raw Nebraska childhood to the East; back to Europe; back, now, through a century of literary history. A new and very civilized Boston friend, the wife of an eminent lawyer, Louis Brandeis, introduced her to what Henry James would call a ‘waterside museum’,9 the house at 148 Charles Street, overlooking the river, where the publisher’s widow Mrs Annie Fields and the writer Sarah Orne Jewett kept their ‘Boston marriage’, preserved their memories, and dispensed a gracious, archaic hospitality.
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you,
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new!
When Cather came to write her ‘memorabilia’ of Charles Street in 1922 (and to expand them in 1936), Browning’s poem came aptly to mind, since the charm of this house, where Mrs Fields had lived for fifty years, was the window it gave onto ‘the richness of a rich past…a long, unbroken chain of splendid contacts, beautiful friendships’.10 James Fields, who had died a quarter of a century before, had published most of the great English and American writers of his time in his magazine the Atlantic Monthly, and his publishing house, Ticknor and Fields, gave generous terms to English writers in the days before international copyright laws. Dickens and Thackeray and Arnold had all stayed in the house. Mrs Fields had talked to Leigh Hunt about Shelley and to Joseph Severn about Keats; there was a lock of Keats’s hair, as well as Tennyson’s copy of his poems, among the relics.
Henry James, who had also been a habitué of this literary salon, and wrote his own memoir of it in 1915, describes the attraction of such a scene perfectly in his preface to The Aspern Papers, a more sinister version of a pilgrimage into a literary past:
I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past – in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table….That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable….We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar…11
For James, with his cosmopolitan, part-European upbringing, the visitable past of New England felt somewhat thin and jejune: whenever he describes it (in The Bostonians, or The Europeans, or the essays on Hawthorne and Emerson) he paints it in cold, pale, raw, wintry colours. For Cather it was quite the opposite: when she ‘does’ Boston (in Alexander’s Bridge, or the story ‘A Wagner Matinée’) it seems to shimmer in ‘silvery light’; its inhabitants dress up for the evening in ‘all the colours that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape’. [TG, p.98]12 By contrast with the naked West, Boston and its literary past made a picturesque, reassuring enclosure.
Cather was a frequent pilgrim to the ‘visitable past’ of Charles Street and, after Sarah Orne Jewett’s death, to Mrs Fields’ New England summer retreat in Manchester-by-the-Sea. Her memoir of Charles Street has a hushed, even pious tone: she insists on the house as a ‘sanctuary’, a safe retreat from ‘everything ugly’, where the ‘tawdry and cheap’ have been ‘eliminated’.13 ‘Eliminated’ is ominous, and O’Brien is probably right to detect something constrictive and artificial in the relationship with Mrs Fields. Certainly the memoir brings out Cather’s most censorious tone about contemporary life. But it is of course a retrospective, nostalgic piece: as so often, she is doubly memorializing, the recollection of her own lost past evoking another. At the time, though Boston was clearly a welcome antidote to McClure’s office, she could be quite caustic about Mrs Fields’ genteel repudiation of the modern world: in a letter of 1913 to Elizabeth Sergeant14 she makes a joke of Mrs Fields’ horror at the ‘naked lady’ on the cover of McClure’s: ‘Can’t you just hear her saying “undesirable”?’ she asks.
The more enfranchising relationship was with Sarah Orne Jewett. Cather had already admired her stories before she met her; now, in the last year of Jewett’s life (she died in 1909, aged sixty), they made a brief, profound, vital friendship, one of those fortuitous and invaluable encounters between a writer who has finished and a writer who is beginning. Jewett’s delicate, responsive, humorous personality, her long accepted ‘marriage’ to Annie Fields, her carefully treasured and potently used rural background, her discriminating interest in other writers, and her very precise, technical encouragement, pointed C
ather the way she would go. Charles Street provided the combination her imagination most responded to: a sanctified past, and an inspiration to enterprise.
In Boston Cather played the ingénue for the last time; in New York her new friendships were with younger women who would look up to her for advice and encouragement. One of these was Zoë Akins, a young actress from St Louis, who sent some poems to McClure’s which Cather rejected, telling her she should try her hand at plays. And Akins did become a successful and well-known playwright. Cather’s lifelong letters to her in California, where she went to live, are full of enthusiasm for her work and thanks for the exotic presents – hothouse plants, a crucifix from the Southwest – which Zoë regularly sent her. Another protégée was Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a young, socially committed journalist from Boston, who came to the office with a piece on New York tenement workers, expecting Cather to share her muckraking interests, but found a literary mentor instead. Cather’s early letters to ‘Elsie’ are fondly intimate, and for about ten years – her crucial period of transition from McClure’s to full-time writing – they were very close. Cather wrote her long, witty, eloquent descriptions of her trips back West, confided in her about her writing and her life, criticized her work and took her – a special privilege – to the ‘sanctuary’ in Boston. Sergeant was an attentive and helpful reader of the early fiction, especially of O Pioneers! Her 1953 memoir of Cather gives a vivid picture of her in the McClure’s era: brusque, dressed in striking colours, enthusiastic, domineering.15 But it’s clear from the memoir that problems developed between them, as Elsie Sergeant became less of a ‘learner and tyro’ and more of an independent, confident journalist. In the war years they drew further apart: Elsie reported for the liberal New Republic (and was injured inspecting a French battlefield); Cather’s war novel seemed to her out of touch and romanticized. For all this, Cather was still writing to Elsie at the end of her life as one of her dearest, oldest friends.