by Hermione Lee
‘That’s a lie!’
Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. ‘How do you know it is?’
‘Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the Garden, and there ain’t no man going to find it. It ain’t intended they should. The Bible says so.’
Hicks began to laugh. ‘Why, that was about six thousand years ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?’
‘Course they are. What’s a thousand years to a cherubim? Nothin’!’ [OOO, p.368]
The loss of Eden, we are meant to feel, is taking place now; Claude’s mother used to read to him from Paradise Lost.40 These scattered, hybrid references to myth, legend and ancient history try to give this modern war, and this ‘simple’ Nebraskan soldier, the dignified status of epic history. By going back to the old world, Claude has become part of a long line of heroic deeds: ‘centuries made no difference’.
But, after all, Claude is not one of the cherubim guarding Eden, or a mythical knight: the Wagnerian resonances seem uncomfortably grandiloquent. He is a miserable, repressed Nebraskan boy who gets killed in a horrible war.41 For all its mythologizing, intended to move and console, One of Ours is a painful and unsatisfactory book. Faced on the one hand with an unprecedentedly futile, large-scale slaughter, and on the other with a civilization which seemed increasingly resistant to restorative, sympathetic readings, Cather’s characteristic attempt at consolatory myth-making fiction broke down. We are left with a conscientious but not always convincing attempt to dignify the war into historical epic while ‘telling it like it was’ (but how many American soldiers, one wonders, called each other ‘you cheese’?) and a hero so thwarted that the only solution for him is a violent early death.
One reading42 of One of Ours suggests that it is only in war and killing that the frigid, mother-dominated Claude can find erotic satisfaction. Though I don’t think Cather was writing about perverted blood-lust, certainly One of Ours gives off strong signals of sexual distress. Until he gets to France, Claude’s mixed sexuality is only a source of confusion and pain.
As a boy he dislikes the ‘shyness and weakness’ of his face, [OOO, p.17] and his ‘chump’ name, ‘another source of humiliation’. [OOO, p.17] His casebook identification with his sensitive mother and resentment of his bullying father are illustrated by the father’s chopping down of the cherry tree to spite the mother and unman the son. Claude’s physical self-mortifications, his social diffidence, his hysterical tempers giving way to passive fatalism (‘He had come to believe that the things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to shape his destiny’ [OOO, p.31]) are symptoms of the shaming sense that Cather herself had in her youth of being the wrong sex, or wrong for her sex. Enid’s rejection of Claude on their honeymoon – a lethally quiet, banal scene of humiliation – compounds his violent feelings of inadequacy, and sends him back to the pre-sexual protection of his mother and Mahailey.
Growing out of this feminine, mothered, unhappy virgin, however, is a tall, muscular, red-headed pioneering soldier, protector of defenceless women and children, faithful companion, and brave warrior. Does war, then, ‘make a man’ of Claude, as it did of one of his models, Victor Chapman? Cather partly wants us to think so, but it is not as simple as that. She is careful to put her knight under the protection, not of a legendary male leader like Richard Coeur de Lion, but of a female hero, St Joan, whom he associates with his mother, and whose martyr-knight-saint status (which at once transcends and incorporates her sexuality)43 is mirrored through the book by other female heroes: the Statue of Liberty, a German aviatrix shot down by Victor Morse, the girl in the convent whose brother has been killed, and a girl Claude hears about who falls in love with a German and kills herself, martyr to the conflict between love and patriotism. Susceptible to these women heroes, Claude’s male heroism is feminized. His friendship-at-arms with Gerhardt is given all the tenderness that was lacking in his marriage. That this love is meant to transcend erotic homosexual feelings is suggested when Gerhardt and Claude and their men kill a decadent German officer who has white hands, gorgeous clothes, and a portrait round his neck of ‘a young man, pale as snow, with blurred forget-me-not eyes’. [OOO, p.431] Claude (though not Gerhardt) is innocent of the German’s nature: ‘ “Probably a kid brother” ’, he says of the portrait. The strange scene marks a denial – even, perhaps, a fear – of explicit homosexuality. For androgynousness to be a source of strength it must be spiritualized. Cather makes Claude censor out the homoerotic possibilities in his love for Gerhardt, so that that relationship can be one of untroubled nobility.44
Censorship remains, though, strongly felt as an ingredient in the novel, giving it a muted, frustrated feeling to the end. Censoriousness – social, sexual, imaginative – is the main quality of American life: ‘ “I thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind” ’, a German farmer on trial for disloyalty in Nebraska says bitterly. [OOO, p.241] There is censorship, to an extent, of the realities of war in the text. Claude’s death is itself a form of censorship: his mother, the last guardian of his virginity (with Mahailey as faithful acolyte) rejoices that he has been kept pure to the last, ‘safe, safe’ from post-war disillusion. [OOO, p.459]
A very disturbing episode in One of Ours describes amnesia as a form of censorship. Claude has been following a pair of lovers – a boy with an injured neck and his distressed girlfriend – through the French streets. Later, he finds out that the boy is an American soldier whose neck injury has made him a psychopathic ‘case’. He has censored out his previous sexual and social identity in America and has been reborn as a son of France. Claude envies him:
‘The fellow has forgotten almost everything about his life before he came to France. The queer thing is, it’s his recollection of women that is most affected. He can remember his father, but not his mother; doesn’t know if he has sisters or not….His photographs and belongings were lost when he was hurt, all except a bunch of letters he had in his pocket. They are from a girl he’s engaged to, and he declares he can’t remember her at all; doesn’t know what she looks like or anything about her, and can’t remember getting engaged….He was found on a farm out in the country here, where the sons had been killed and the people sort of adopted him. He’d quit his uniform and was wearing the clothes of one of the dead sons….They call him “the lost American” here.’
…Claude…wished he could do something to help that boy; help him get away from the doctor who was writing a book about him, and the girl who wanted him to make the most of himself; get away and be lost altogether in what he had been lucky enough to find. [OOO, pp.337–8]
In all her novels up to now, the consolation for mortality has been memory, and the value of the novelist has been as memorializer. Now, in a broken world, the only consolation is forgetting. The function of the novelist is thus put at risk, and may become more difficult, alienated and obscured.
9
THE THING NOT NAMED
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there – that, one might say, is created.
‘The Novel Démeublé’, 1922
‘WE KNEW one world and knew what we felt about it, now we find ourselves in quite another’;1 so Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield in 1922, just before One of Ours came out. She was nearly fifty; for the rest of her long life, this theme of the world’s having broken apart in about 1922, leaving her a stranger on the wrong side of the time divide, would settle into a permanent grudge. Her nostalgic mid-1920s essays, looking back on the New England dignities and graces of ‘148 Charles Street’ and Sarah Orne Jewett, are full of sour references to the ‘tawdry’ cheapness of the present, to the ‘ugliness of the world’, and to the ‘new American’ cut off from ‘the old moral harmonies’.
The early to mid-1920s – the period, paradoxically, of three of her very best novels, A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor’s House (1925), and My Mortal Enemy (1926) – seem to have been a time of personal discom
fiture and depression, not altogether accounted for by the facts.2 From 1922 to 1925, she was ill a good deal, and moving from place to place. In the summer of 1922, while the proofs of One of Ours were coming in, she was suffering from mastoiditis, and had her tonsils out. The operation proved difficult and exhausting, and she spent some time recuperating in a sanatorium in Pennsylvania.3 She also had several bad attacks of ‘flu that year. After the sanatorium, she spent part of the summer writing A Lost Lady at Grand Manan, and took it with her to Breadloaf College in Vermont on a three-week teaching assignment (a rare occasion, not repeated, in spite of repeated requests from the course director). She spent that winter in Red Cloud with her parents; it was their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The following year she went to France for six months, at first staying with Isabelle and Jan in their new house in Ville d’Avray, near Paris. She had already made a long stay with them two years earlier when they were in Toronto (it was that first trip to Canada which had led to the discovery of Grand Manan). But, though we have no information except for Edith’s memoir and a few inexplicit letters, it is clear that this 1923 visit was a tense and difficult one – even if not, as O’Brien surmises, ‘disastrous’.4 The Hambourgs had set up a study for her, but, Edith wrote, ‘she felt…that she would never be able to do any work there’,5 and left for Paris and Aix.6 All this time she was suffering from neuritis in her right arm and shoulder, for which she took mineral-bath treatments in Aix. O’Brien’s conjectural claim that ‘this was a physical sign of her creative paralysis’, or, even, the ‘punishment’ she half expected for venturing into ‘masculine territory’ in One of Ours, seems over-interpretative.7 But the arm-ache does sound like a psychosomatic complaint, whether a demonstration of pain to Isabelle, or a symptom of writer’s anxiety. When she went back to New York in the autumn of 1923 and started to write The Professor’s House, a sense of unease filled the novel, and spilled over into the writing of My Mortal Enemy early in 1925. It was not until her long journey to the Southwest and her stay in Santa Fé in the summer of 1925 – a visit that prepared the ground for Death Comes for the Archbishop – that this mood of anxiety seems to have lifted.
She had mixed feelings in these years, too, about her public reputation. The Pulitzer Prize and the fan letters for One of Ours were pleasing, of course, but she was distressed by its savage reviews. She was by now a famous American writer, exposed, as she had not been before, to the extremes of praise and blame that go with this position. There had been a pleasure, she told Dorothy, in the ‘unsuccess’ of her early books: it meant she could write as she chose, without pressures. Now everyone was demanding something of her, and trying to spoil her fun.8 She wanted to confuse people, not to give them what they expected from her; she wanted to get away from her readers, like an old wild turkey flying off on its own.9 Her letters are ambivalent about her success. She was busy enough to have a secretary; she resented the huge piles of mail. She was famous enough to have her portrait painted (by Leon Bakst, during her stay in Paris); she disliked the gloomy results. She was increasingly in demand for interviews, honorary degrees, and visiting lectures; she was pleased at the honours, but hated the sacrifice of time and privacy. (She would have loathed being interviewed on television.) She was certainly not a recluse: she kept in touch with her family and a large number of friends, entertained with Edith (rather like Gertrude Stein with Alice Toklas) on Friday afternoons at Bank Street, had a New York circle centring on Blanche and Alfred Knopf and their musical friends (Cather got to know Myra Hess very well, for instance, through the Knopfs) and made contacts in her Jaffrey and Grand Manan hideouts. But she maintained her privacy, and was increasingly resentful of intrusions. Perhaps the most telling indication of her need, in these years, for an area of retreat was her confirmation in the Episcopal Church at Red Cloud in the winter of 1922.
The letter to Dorothy of 1922, with which I began this chapter, instances Futurist painting, wide open art forms, and the disappearance from the world of a conception of sin, as reasons for her alienation. This disapproval of all things modern, with its stifling suggestion that the ‘new’ equals the ‘a-moral’, is a hard thing for us, her present admirers – who belong to the future she so hated the thought of – to deal with. Yet her conservatism was a kind of pioneering: she needed to blaze her own trail (like the wild turkey) and not be co-opted under the ‘isms’ of the New. Her repudiation of the modern world may have made her, personally, inflexible. But in her work it enabled her to make her own way. As a writer she was now at her most confident: her personal malaise seems, obscurely, to have nourished the work.
In her literary statements of the 1920s there is the same powerful sense of assurance as there is in the novels of the period. Cather was not a theorist of fiction10 on the scale of James or Woolf or Lawrence, and once she started reserving her energies for writing novels, her views have to be gleaned from letters and interviews and a few important essays. But through these remarks a philosophy of writing emerges which illuminates the ‘middle period’ novels very clearly, and which puts her into a closer, more vital relationship with modernism than might have been expected. Indeed the anti-modernist polemic was something of a smoke-screen: she could see that (as Virginia Woolf put it in the twenties) new art forms were needed for the new conditions.11
There is a difference in tone, of course, between the critical outpourings of the 1890s, when Cather was eagerly working out her feelings about all the books, music, theatre and art that she could lay hands on, and the experienced, judicial statements of the 1920s. But her passion is still for authenticity of feeling and naturalness of effect, and she is, as ever, suspicious of analysis. She likes to give the impression that her writing is unconscious and spontaneous, and her replies to analytical enquiries are evasive. She can only write a story if she is possessed by it, she says in 1922, and if she analyses it, she kills it.12 She never stops to think if a story is good or not, she just plays out the play and has fun – though perhaps not as much fun (she writes in a letter of 1925 from Santa Fé) as she’d have on a pack trip over desert and mountain country.13 There is something disingenuous in this no-nonsense position, firmly rooted though it is in the American tradition of the writer as outdoor philosopher. Like the wild turkey, Cather is asking to be let alone.
When she is writing more openly to closer friends, she reveals herself as much less of a primitive; this ostensibly natural writer in fact has a sophisticated strategy of elision and suggestion. Her admissions often come in the form of advice to her women friends – Dorothy Canfield, Elsie Sergeant, Zoë Akins, Viola Roseboro – who would send her their books, and to whom she would always reply with truthful and tough responses. These show her at her most sympathetic, generously passing on the example of Sarah Orne Jewett. Like Jewett’s letters to her, Cather’s letters to her friends express her own literary principles. Years before, in 1913, she had criticized Elsie for a novel written in letter form, because its heroine had to keep calling attention to herself. Since the character talked and wrote too well and too much, there was no chance to view her through an atmosphere, to see her distanced or idealized.14 In 1922 she warned Dorothy against telling too much about a character; it blurred the effect. She believed in withholding character.15 She was still arguing along the same lines in 1929. A story of Elsie’s began with an introduction by a writer, and Cather preferred to forget that a book was ‘written’. That was why she didn’t like Proust’s La Prisonnière (1923), in which ‘Marcel’ begins to turn into the author.16 What she liked, she wrote in a long letter to Viola praising her novel of American provincial life, was vividness and vigour: the sound of a hammer striking an anvil.17
That masculine, functional image is echoed in an interview of 1925, where she says that the point of view must be built into a novel like ‘an engineer’s deciding on the strain of a bridge’.18 So in her critical language, as in her fiction, there is a fertile crossing between sexual characteristics. She insists on force, workman-like efficacy; but in the s
ame breath she speaks of the virtues of elusiveness and impressionism. Her essay ‘On the Art of Fiction’ of 1920 uses Millet’s painting as an analogy for the kind of writing she admires. He is the ‘good workman’ who makes draft after draft of his peasant figures and at last condenses them all into one picture, ‘The Sower’, where ‘the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable’. This is like the writer who eliminates detail after detail to ‘preserve the spirit of the whole’, ‘so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page’. Virile simplicity and female suggestiveness are here fused, to create a special and probably indefinable quality which is the mark of ‘true’ art. This is set, very emphatically, against cheap or commercial art, the inferior product of ‘standardized values’.19 So, Stephen Crane, described in an essay of 1925 as ‘the first of the post-impressionists’, knew how to select the details he needed. But his realist successors applied ‘thoroughly good business methods’ to art, ‘ “doing” landscapes and interiors like house decorators, putting up the curtains and tacking down the carpets’.20 It is the familiar attack on the twentieth-century American substitution of materialism for idealism, transferred to a manifesto for contemporary writing.
‘Manifesto’, a word so closely connected with the bold, revolutionary projects of modernism (Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism) usually suggests positive determinations and sharp shocks. Cather’s manifesto, inasmuch as the word can be applied to her, speaks of negatives, omissions, and tradition. Certainly her two most famous essays, ‘The Novel Démeublé’ (1922) and ‘Katherine Mansfield’ (1925) do not look like modernist manifestos. The very use of ‘démeublé’ suggests an undemocratic, Francophile, Jamesian aestheticism, and sure enough the essay begins with a scathing distinction between great art and cheap mass-produced entertainment like Woolworth’s Kewpie dolls. There is the same haughty denunciation of materialism as in the piece on Crane; the essay’s attack on over-furnished realism instances a story about a banker which tells us too much about the Stock Exchange: ‘Have such things any proper place in imaginative art?’ She attacks D.H. Lawrence, in The Rainbow, for literalness, for reducing characters to ‘mere animal pulp’. The models for great suggestive writing are Tolstoi and Hawthorne; the desire is for a return to the bare stage of the classic theatre or the bare room ‘into which the glory of Pentecost descended’.21