Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  The least distinctive of these young admirers was the most important – Edith Lewis, the daughter of a conventional banking family in Lincoln, whom Cather had met there in 1903, and introduced onto the staff of McClure’s in 1906. If Isabelle McClung cuts an impenetrable figure as the beautiful romantic ‘lost lady’ of Cather’s life, Edith, the devoted wifely companion, is a mere shadow. Her hagiographical memoir, published in the same year as Elsie’s, Willa Cather Living, is such a self-effacing tribute that it’s difficult to get much sense from it of the faithful Boswell. She says next to nothing about their relationship, nothing about her own interests (and nothing, either, about Cather’s feelings for Isabelle or Elsie). Occasional details16 reveal her acceptance of a supportive role: for instance, it was ‘perhaps by a fortunate accident’ that she came down with a severe attack of influenza when they visited Quebec in 1928, since this enabled Cather to go ‘roaming about’ the town for ten days, collecting material for Shadows on the Rock. Cather’s increasing reserve and privacy in later years, the discreetly eulogizing memoir, the censorship and defensiveness exercised by Lewis when she became the literary ‘widow’ and executor, make this lifelong companionship as hard to examine as they would both have wished. Cather wrote feelingly about Isabelle to friends like Dorothy Canfield or Elsie Sergeant, but she hardly ever mentioned Edith, except to say that she’d been seasick again on a transatlantic journey, or that Cather needed to have her on a trip to help her, because she had a hand injury and couldn’t manage packing or dressing alone. She never dedicated a book to her, as she did to Isabelle. The only letter to Edith that survives, from 1936,17 is a description of Jupiter and Venus seen from one of their favourite places, the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (where they would both be buried). But this romantic passage concludes with praise for Edith’s packing of Cather’s clothes: not a wrinkle!

  Recently, some letters came to light that Edith Lewis18 wrote in the late ’40s and the ’50s after Cather’s death, to their friend Stephen Tennant, the eccentric, talented English aristocrat, painter, art-lover and collector, who was for a time Siegfried Sassoon’s lover, and who was one of Cather’s great admirers. Speaking much more intimately than in her careful memoir, Lewis is revealed in the letters as an affectionate, emotional, anxious, rather fussy person, a keen music lover and reader (she has missed Bohème at the Met because di Stefano was replaced as Rodolfo, she enthuses over Rilke and Pater, Shelley and Swinburne), and a lonely ‘widow’ (‘I don’t think of her as in the past…to me she seems more in the present than ever before’), completely devoted to Cather’s memory:

  [She was so] sensitive to everything – the tone of a voice, the look on anyone’s face. Her spirit was so firm and valiant. She guarded the things she cared for, and nothing could shake her or intimidate her.

  When we used to go to concerts I was always so proud of her. She seemed so fine, so above all that crowd of people. She would never admit that she was at all musical – but she used to say wonderful things about music – it was as if she had a direct communication with the spirit of the composer – with that of any great artist – regardless of the medium they worked in. She seemed to know his intention at once.

  Her nervousness over who should write the biography – E.K. Brown had to pass all kinds of tests of his sensitivity and suitability before she gave him permission – echoes Cather’s obsession with privacy:

  You know how she absolutely refused to let the world in on her personal life. She often said in her letters to people that everything the world was entitled to know was in her books. She had to have that feeling of security – had to know that her friends would protect her in that way. It was necessary for her very life as an artist. I keep telling myself that this Life will be a protection from the world – written as I hope it will be written – I don’t believe the cheap and vulgar and the merely curious will get any foothold there.

  At times the letters sink under the responsibility of making sure that Cather is remembered exactly as she would have wished; it was like being ‘the ancient mariner, with the albatross, around his neck – it is all so difficult!’ But if her heroine came also to be her albatross, in happier mood the letters with their reminiscences about their travels and their musical experiences, show how much they shared the same tastes, and how well they got on together. Edith was Nebraskan, she understood Cather’s background. As well as enjoying music and foreign countries (even if she did get seasick), she enjoyed making places pleasant to live in, and she was an attentive critic: she proofread all the books and attentively watched over the work in progress.

  At first she was just a helpful friend. Cather was going back regularly to Pittsburgh to see Isabelle (she may have been hoping that Isabelle would move to New York) and in 1908 they went to Europe again (this time not only to France but to Italy, where Cather saw scenes from the Georgics re-enacted on the slopes of the Apennines). Immediately after this Virgilian interlude with Isabelle, she took an apartment with Edith at 82 Washington Place, just off the square. But she didn’t take Edith with her when she went back to Red Cloud in 1909 (she never did take her home), nor on her business trip to London that year (rich with new contacts—William Archer, Galsworthy, Lady Gregory, Katherine Tynan); and she had holidays with Isabelle in 1911, and with Douglass in Arizona, in 1912. All through these years she was still very close to Isabelle. But in 1913 it seems she and Edith had become more interdependent; they moved into 5 Bank Street, in Greenwich Village, which would be their home until it was knocked down in 1927. This large, old-fashioned, solid building was the centre of Cather’s life after she left McClure’s: she and Edith furnished it simply and traditionally (mahogany chests and oriental rugs), kept it full of flowers, had regular Friday ‘at homes’, and brought in a French cook and housekeeper, Josephine Bourda. (Good cooking, as the novels make plain, was one of Cather’s passions.) But even after Bank Street was set up, Cather was still planning a holiday with Isabelle in 1915, and only after Judge McClung dissuaded them from going to Europe did she go with Edith instead to the Mesa Verde in Colorado: a dramatic adventure, as it turned out. Then the old Judge died and Isabelle almost immediately married. Hereafter, all Cather’s pioneering journeys were made with Edith Lewis, who, in the end, would be buried at her feet: not – at a guess – a position that Isabelle McClung would have wanted to assume for eternity.

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  Cather had gone to New York with high hopes for her career as a writer, and her first book of stories was certainly a much more promising start than April Twilights. The Troll Garden is an awkward book which hasn’t yet found its way to the control of the mature novels. But it dramatically displays all Cather’s preoccupations about becoming an artist, all her sense of frustration, ambition, and fracture. The best stories, which are the most emotional and angry, give off painful feelings. Cather – as usual dismissive of all her work before O Pioneers! – would look back on them, within ten years, as ‘warped’ expressions of the ‘raging bad temper’ of a young person kept from the things she wanted, howling for ‘music-dramas’ in the cornfields.19 Part of the awkwardness of the stories, as David Daiches notices, is that they make ‘an almost feverish attempt’ to ‘demonstrate that she was at home’ in the world of art.20 But at the same time the volume comes armed with warnings as to the dangers of that world, ominous quotations from ‘Goblin Market’ and from Charles Kingsley’s The Roman and the Teuton, which lends the book its title.

  Christina Rossetti’s poem, as we’ve seen,21 spoke to Cather of the dangers of art for the woman writer. In Kingsley’s fable of the children of the forest tempted into the fairy palace of the trolls, the makers of ‘things rich and strange’, the primitive forest children are driven mad by the spell of the palace. They destroy its treasures and wander back disconsolate to the forest, in need of a redeemer. Kingsley is making a Christian, political parable (like the Nibelungen saga, he says) of the overthrow of the Roman Empire by the barbaric Teutonic tribes, a painful lesson of a pe
ople ‘who have to be educated by suffering’.22 For Cather, the story is more about art than empire, a fable of mutual destructiveness. Primitive barbarianism wants to tear down art and illusion; but civilization may also destroy a barbarian innocence.

  The weakest of the Troll Garden stories are those that show off the most. Cather would always say that as a beginner she ‘laboriously’ strove to imitate Henry James.23 The influence had some benign after-effects, but it certainly made for artificiality early on. In ‘Flavia and Her Artists’, a domineering businessman’s wife, locked in ‘the icy fastnesses of her self-esteem’ [TG, p.23], neglects her children for a salon of lions. She is observed by a young, serious philology student, an Alice-in-Wonderland who is losing her illusions. The story stiffly replicates the atmosphere of one of James’s literary house-parties (in ‘The Death of the Lion’, for instance). ‘The Marriage of Phaedra’, about the life and legacy of a medievalist English painter like Burne-Jones, with a philistine aristocratic wife, a loyal Cockney servant (very embarrassing) and an expatriate American admirer, borrows the plot of the artist’s wife who dislikes and distrusts his work from James’s ‘The Author of “Beltraffio” ’, and looks back to a story such as ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ in the decisions which have to be made about the dead man’s work. The other ‘Eastern’ story, ‘The Garden Lodge’, is less artificial, and, as would Alexander’s Bridge, sets a controlled adult life against a secret romantic feeling. Caroline Noble has stifled her artistic impulses in order to salvage, and escape from, her shabby Bohemian family. She married a wealthy man and keeps a good house. But the visit of a glamorous Wagnerian tenor called, in chivalrous mode, ‘d’Esquerré’ (one of several versions of Ethelbert Nevin in these stories) unlocks her secret self. Romantic sexual feeling and the desire for artistic fulfilment coalesce in her sense that ‘a happy, useful, well-ordered life was not enough…the other things, the shadows – they were the realities’. [TG, p.55] She longs, for one night, for a Wagnerian garden of art, spring and passion; but in the morning she pulls herself together.

  The best stories are set in the West, and in Pittsburgh. In all of them a solitary figure with artistic talents or inclinations is destroyed by the ‘desert’, the philistine wilderness. In three of them, a male observer with artistic sympathies, half in and half out of the destructive scene, acts as an intermediary between us and the drama. (This figure is a beneficial legacy of her apprenticeship to James, and would grow up to become the crucial observing characters in My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, and My Mortal Enemy.) And in all of them, the dangerous attractions of cosmopolitan culture and the deadening weight of rural provincialism are completed unreconciled.

  In ‘The Sculptor’s Funeral’, a ferocious, unforgiving satire on mid-Western philistinism (and an angry elegy for Nevin, unappreciated by his townsfolk), the body of Harvey Merrick, who has made his name as a maker of beautiful things and died young, is returned to ‘Sand City, Kansas’, ‘a bitter, dead little Western town’, almost entirely inhabited by spiteful, ugly, mean-minded moneygrubbers. (The winter night-time arrival of the train carrying the body, the shuffling men on the platform, is very fine.) Merrick’s last pupil, a young Bostonian, looks on in horror at the ghastly family scene – hideous house, violent mother, decrepit father, sad mulatto servant – and at the censorious, resentful townspeople. The story culminates in an enraged attack on the town’s values by a red-headed lawyer, a drinker who has failed to get away, but who understands Merrick’s vision. Only one touch suggests a possible reconciliation between this ‘parish’ and the ‘world’ of art, the ‘singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief’ Merrick once made of ‘a thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee’, with a little boy trying to attract her attention. It is a domestic American interior, of the kind Cather would come to celebrate; but not yet.

  Where ‘The Sculptor’s Funeral’ is enraged, ‘A Wagner Matinée’ is pathetic. The narrator, a Western farm-boy escaped to Boston, is playing host to his Aunt Georgiana.24 He owes her his first education in music, Shakespeare and the classics, and though at first he sees her as ‘a pathetic and grotesque’ figure, by the end he has entered more deeply into her feelings. He takes her to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra play pieces from Tannhäuser, Tristan and the Dutchman, with Siegfried’s funeral march as the climax. The music breaks ‘a silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains’ [TG, p.98] and rouses his aunt to a painful sense of everything she has missed, and a deep reluctance to go home again.

  In ‘A Death in the Desert’, a once-successful singer, Katharine Gaylord (‘Gayheart’ is anticipated) is dying (‘lungs’) in her brother’s house near Cheyenne, Wyoming. She was a pupil of, and in love with, the gifted composer Adriance Hilgarde (the courtly name, as usual, suggests the Nevin type) whose brother, coincidentally, turns up in Cheyenne. Everett is always being mistaken for his famous brother, who has everything he has not: an artistic career, the love of this woman. But, as in a fairy-tale, what the (offstage) successful brother does not have is human kindness, and it’s with this that Everett solaces Katharine’s last days. The opposition between the two brothers is interesting, but the strongest emotion in the book is the dying singer’s yearning for a world elsewhere: ‘ “She got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, where she went up like lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now she’s dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can’t fall back into ours. We’ve grown apart, some way – miles and miles apart – and I’m afraid she’s fearfully unhappy.” ’ [TG, p.61] The devoted brother’s words speak loudly of Cather’s fears for herself.

  The sculptor, the singer, the composer, are real artists. In the subtlest and most impressive story of the collection, ‘Paul’s Case’, which transfers ‘Philistia’ from the mid-West to bourgeois puritanical Pittsburgh, the aesthetic type has no talents or capacity for the discipline required by ‘the madness of art’ (James’s phrase, applied to Katharine Gaylord), only a fantasy of escape into the glittering sources of ‘world-shine’ and Romance. He doesn’t read books, he doesn’t want to be an actor or a musician, he just wants to ‘float’ in the atmosphere of ‘an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease’. [TG, p.106] (An eloquent language of watery, tropical escapism – ‘blue leagues’ and yellow sands – runs throughout: ‘Here drifted/An hedonist’.25) Paul is a ‘case’, all right: Cather’s horror of feckless, self-destructive Bohemianism is strongly felt in the story. But she makes a case for him, too, so that we are absorbed into his dream-world, and follow with pleasure his release into the world of music and theatre, his escape to New York, and his brief ‘performance’ as an habitué of the Waldorf (on the firm’s stolen money), before the real world catches up, and he goes out into the snow to throw himself, like Anna Karenina, under a train. Against Paul are ranged all the conventional authorities – family, teachers, employers – set in the world of ‘respectable beds’ and ‘kitchen odours’, crowned by ‘his father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his night-shirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers’. [TG, p.107]

  The opposition is sexual as much as cultural, the hairy patriarch forbidding the white-skinned, blue-veined aesthete. And in all the stories conventional sexuality is avoided or anathematized: marriage damages the artist, passion is always absent or thwarted, the sympathetic figures are androgynous artists or neutral male narrators. O’Brien reads the stories as Cather’s ‘struggle to define herself as a woman writer in the context of a male-dominated literary tradition’.26 But Cather is also trying to find ways for writing to be in control, impersonal, free of the conflicts it describes, whether these are fractures between private feelings and sexual stereotyping, or between an unyielding native environment and a world culture.

  The Troll Garden, as yet, is a negative performance, written out of a deep rage at the obstruction of the artist.27 Its most powerful images are of a landscape which crush
es and resists attempts to shape or transform it. Listening to Wagner, Aunt Georgiana’s nephew has a vision of:

  the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain gullied clay banks about the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dishcloths were always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought than those of war. [TG, pp.98–9]

  This landscape need not be brutally opposed to art. It could (as the narrator glimpses here without acknowledging it) be the source of its own kind of epic writing, in which barbarian Teutonic strength and rich, fine emotions could be reconciled. Heroism, redemption, magic – the Wagnerian themes – might be drawn from what is, as yet, a repudiated landscape.

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  The sense of arrival and release Cather had when The Troll Garden was published in 1905 soon began to slip away. The reviews were not effusive,28 and she was criticized by her old patron Will Jones for denigrating her home state, especially in ‘A Wagner Matinée’. (Cather replied defensively that she had intended a tribute to the courage of the pioneer women.)29 Then the hard stress of six years’ managerial and editorial work closed in on her writing. McClure, as promised, went on publishing her stories. But she produced only seven between 1904 and 1911, and apart from ‘The Enchanted Bluff’,30 and a touching tribute to her Civil War uncle, ‘The Namesake’, they were mechanical, ‘sophisticated’ performances, with Jamesian house-parties, ocean liners, and expatriate studios for settings. (The New York job was later used for a few brisk, harsh, French-realist style stories of office life, ‘Ardessa’, ‘Her Boss’, and ‘The Bookkeeper’s Wife’.) Something was going wrong. Sarah Orne Jewett, in her marvellous letter of advice and encouragement at the end of 1908, could see exactly what it was: