by Hermione Lee
All the same, her description in these essays of ‘true’ writing – which is also a description of her own writing – is not, as the tone might lead one to suppose, conventional or conservative. She wants material details to work as ‘the emotional penumbra’ of characters (so Tolstoi is preferred to Balzac); she wants ‘suggestion rather than enumeration’; she wants to feel a mood encircling the actual words on the page, like the ‘twilight melancholy’ of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.22 Katherine Mansfield is praised for approaching major subjects through trivial incidents, choosing ‘a small reflector to throw a luminous streak out into the shadowy realm of personal relationships’.23 It is by those means – concentration on the ‘slight’, evocation of atmosphere – that Mansfield creates her ‘emotional penumbra’, ‘the hazy sort of thing that…lies behind and directs interesting or beautiful design’. There can only be a ‘hazy sort of’ language for this ‘thing’, as in the much-quoted passage in ‘The Novel Démeublé’:
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there – that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.24
‘Penumbra’, ‘luminous’, ‘hazy’, ‘overtone’, ‘aura’: these figurative terms for suggestiveness and impressionism, set against ‘literalness’ and ‘materialism’, are remarkably close to Virginia Woolf’s more well-known contemporaneous arguments for the representation of life as a ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope’,25 as opposed to the photographic representation of ‘every detail’ in the Edwardian fiction of Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy. (Cather’s equivalent American materialists would, I suppose, be Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.)
Cather’s repudiation or ignoring of modernism (which excepted, however, interested even if not sympathetic readings of Mansfield, Lawrence, Proust, Conrad and Mann) and the apparent refusal in her fiction of experimentalism and fragmentation have led (male) authorities on the movement to leave her out altogether.26 O’Brien, leaning the other way, too blithely calls ‘The Novel Démeublé’ the work of ‘the modernist writer endorsing allusive, suggestive art and inviting the reader’s participation in the creation of literary meaning’. This, given Cather’s refusals and prejudices, takes some justifying. The connection is more subtly made in a fine essay by Phyllis Rose, which describes Cather’s affinity with modernism as ‘an urge to simplify and to suggest the eternal through the particular’.27 And certainly her alliance to modernism is felt in the marked similarity of Cather’s ‘manifesto’ and Virginia Woolf’s, and the surprising affinities between Cather’s preoccupations – the fractures with the past, the need for order, memory and its gaps, heroism, myth – and those of great modernist works such as Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, The Waste Land, and A la Recherche du temps perdu. The modernism of this reactionary writer is as much of a paradox as the craftiness underlying her apparent simplicity. In the writing of the 1920s – the essays, the two novellas of ‘lost ladies’, and above all in her great, complex novel The Professor’s House – Cather places herself in the company of Proust, Lawrence, Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.
The essay on Katherine Mansfield begins with a shipboard encounter on a sea journey in 1920 (when Cather was coming back from her post-war stay in France). Cather talked to a crotchety, Jamesian New England bachelor who recalled a long-ago meeting, also on a ship, with Katherine Mansfield as a child. It is one of Cather’s favourite strategies. As in My Ántonia, the ‘real’ encounter in the prefatory journey opens the way into a recollected journey, which takes us closer to the female figure we are trying to apprehend. As in the later essay, ‘A Chance Meeting’, where Cather tells of her lucky encounter in a hotel in Aix-les-Bains with Flaubert’s niece, now an old lady, the way into a writer is through the narrative of someone who knew or met them: ‘And did you once see Shelley plain?’ Madame Grout, Flaubert’s niece Caroline, has the same effect on Cather as Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett once did (her recollections of them are published in the same volume as ‘A Chance Meeting’ and ‘Katherine Mansfield’). These grand old ladies (like, also, the ‘old beauty’ of a late story) open the door onto ‘a long, unbroken chain of splendid contacts’28 with the ‘great shades’ of the past.
In all these approaches to the past, by way of the magnetic, beckoning figure of a woman, there is a tension between enchantment and disillusion, romance and reality. Annie Fields, Sarah Orne Jewett, Madame Grout and ‘the old beauty’ are revered at the expense of the ‘ugly’ present, which presses in on the enchantment of the special encounter. If the charmed, separate figure allows herself to be incorporated into the values of the present, a sense of sacrilege and disillusion is felt. So, the old man on the ship is ‘bitterly’ disappointed when he reads one of Mansfield’s modern stories of sexual betrayal (‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’), finding it ‘artificial, and unpleasantly hysterical, full of affectations’. He wants to remember her as the lively, charming, idiosyncratic child he met, and when he catches sight of her years later in a theatre, ‘looking ill and unhappy’, he wishes ‘he had never seen or heard of her’ again.29 She is a ‘lost lady’ for him, as Marian Forrester is for Niel in the novel of that title.
But Cather’s essay on Mansfield rescues her from that repudiating judgement by showing how the sources of her best writing came from the life of the very child who was thought to be ‘lost’. Her pursuit of Mansfield’s writing about children (involving a brilliant and heartfelt analysis of the tensions of family life)30 is a pursuit of the ‘true’, the ‘best’ Katherine Mansfield. She is hard to analyse and pin down. Mansfield was herself a writer interested in elusiveness and suggestion. Cather quotes her comparing her methods of creating character to the early morning mists of childhood: ‘I try to lift that mist from my people, and let them be seen and then to hide them again’.31 In her portrait of Mansfield, Cather in turn tries to lift the veil from the quality that ‘escapes analysis’ in her work, the ‘thing not named’ on her pages:
One goes back and runs through the pages to find the text which made one know certain things about Linda or Burnell or Beryl, and the text is not there – but something was there, all the same; is there, though no typesetter will ever set it.32
To pursue this unwritten ‘overtone’ needs more sympathy than the old bachelor on the ship could muster. Cather seems to be on the brink of saying that a woman reader is needed, who can reinscribe, through her own knowledge of domestic life and female experience, the ‘white book’ of gaps and silences and spaces under the printed text. But she doesn’t quite say this, and the disillusioned male version of Mansfield remains in our minds, coexisting with the sympathetic female reading.
An intimate and crucial link is being made, at this central point of Cather’s writing life, between her subjects and her methods. Her fictional pursuit, into past time, of her ‘lost ladies’, is bound up with her desire for a writing that can evoke the unspoken. Of course we want to know what ‘the thing not named’ is, just as we will want to know what the indefinable ‘something’ is that makes Marian Forrester and Myra Henshawe so special. What, for instance, are the ‘certain things’ about the characters in Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ which are ‘there’ under the text? Does Cather mean that Mansfield implies Linda’s frigidity and Burnell’s sexual clumsiness, without naming them? Any approach to Cather’s work which sees her lesbianism as its central inspiration will want to read ‘the presence of the thing not named’ as sexual, ‘the unnameable emotional source of her fiction’ that she is forced to disguise or conceal.33 Since Cather’s theory of suggestion and omission is so closely linked in her mind with her portraits of magnetic, enchanting women, the extrapolation seems plausible. All the same, there is something reductive in trying to identify ‘the thing not named’ in Cather’s texts as, specifically, a
sexual secret, or a personal trauma (Isabelle’s departure, the reaction to post-war America, her feelings about her mother, a ‘midlife crisis’). Certainly, these elements in her life make themselves felt in the fiction. But ‘the thing not named’ remains unnameable – that is its point. It is not a buried bone to be dug up, but the ‘luminous halo, the semi-transparent envelope’ of atmosphere and feeling evoked by the writing.
10
LOST LADIES
A compelling, passionate, overmastering something for which I had no name.
My Mortal Enemy, 1926
THE MOST complex and ambitious of the ‘middle period’ novels is The Professor’s House. On either side of it, chronologically, are two short novels, perfectly embodying Cather’s philosophy of suggestion, two ‘portraits of a lady’ which mirror and counterpoint each other. Both A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy, as their ominous titles imply (a long way from the celebratory confidence of titles like O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark or One of Ours) involve a sense of betrayal felt by, and about, the central figure. Though Marian Forrester and Myra Henshawe are very unlike, they share certain dangerous characteristics. They are both alluring, sexual, magnetic women caught inside a marriage which began as a romance. (These novels of the twenties are, uniquely, apart from Sapphira and the Slave Girl, deeply intrigued by marriages. Isabelle’s new marriage, and the Cather parents’ 50-year-old one, may have been behind this.) There is a crucial change, now, from the earlier pioneering novels. The focus has shifted from the immigrants to the American ‘aristocracy’, and from female heroism to femininity. These heroines are ‘ladies’, socially adept, self-conscious, sophisticated, decorative. They have no children, they are separated from their family roots, they have no independent occupations, and they define themselves in terms of their relation to men. They are confined and thwarted, not expansive and self-fulfilling. Their energies are poured, not into something impersonal and bigger than themselves – the shaping of the land, the making of an art – but into personal feelings and self-expression. They are much more elusive and less reliable than the pioneering women-heroes.
Cather’s lifelong admiration of and attraction to rare, beautiful women – from stage actresses and singers to Isabelle McClung – is mixed in these portraits with her distrust and rejection of the image of the ‘lady’ – genteel, pleasing, feminine – in part associated with her mother. These women are not in a stable, conformist relation to the role of ‘lady’. They are manipulative but susceptible; capable of cruelty, but also self-punishing. Their jewels – which in both novels brilliantly evoke their rare value and the dangerous possibility of cold artifice – are ambiguous symbols. The glittering images advertise a fixed value which their wearers resist and evade. Though Myra Henshawe is a much colder, fiercer, older and more embittered ‘lady’ than Marian Forrester, both subvert an idealized valuation of them by their admirers. So both portraits depend for their meanings on their vantage points, and here too there are interesting similarities.
Both ‘portraits’ were drawn ‘from life’. An interview of 1925 described Marian Forrester as a ‘beautiful ghost’, the portrait of ‘a woman I loved very much in my childhood’.1 The woman was Lydia Garber, the glamorous Californian wife of the old pioneer Silas Garber, who, exactly like Captain Forrester in the novel, staked his claim to Red Cloud in the 1870s, named the town, built his fine house on the outskirts and settled there (when not entertaining in Lincoln and Colorado) with his young second wife Lydia, the adornment to his property. Silas Garber was governor of Nebraska, the most important local figure in Cather’s childhood. He seemed to her the embodiment of the grand pioneer dream. As in the novel, Garber’s dream and his fortunes collapsed when his bank failed in the 1890s depression. Lydia Garber stood by him in his decline and nursed him after he had an accident; but when he died she left Red Cloud for the West coast and remarried. She was an object of romance to Cather in her childhood, and went on interesting her: letters of the early 1900s refer to the charming Mrs Garber being much aged and saddened,2 and to her seclusion after the governor’s death.3 But it was not till Cather heard the news of her death in the summer of 1921, when she was staying in Toronto with Isabelle, that she thought of writing about her. In a late letter to Irene Miner,4 she describes how, having heard the news, she went and lay on the bed, on a hot day, and suddenly thought of the story as though she had read it somewhere. The source of Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy is more obscure, but evidently as personal: Cather said in a letter of 1940 that she ‘knew her very well’.5 She had been dead for fifteen years when Cather wrote the story, but many of her friends and relatives recognized her.
The point of these identifications is not to try and ascertain the closeness of the novels to life.6 But the sources of the novels do have a bearing on the way they are told. In both books Cather projects her younger feelings through an observer who can also incorporate a later sense of loss and disillusion. She was at pains, in her remarks about A Lost Lady,7 to play Niel down: he was just a point of view, she said, a ‘peephole’ into that world, not a character. In fact he gave her some trouble: though the story came to her in a flash, she had difficulty finding the right approach. First she tried setting it in Colorado (without Niel, presumably) but had to take it back to the scene of her childhood impressions. For a time she tried to use a first person narrative, as in My Ántonia. But then, perhaps wanting Niel’s memorializing to be less sympathetic than Jim Burden’s, she went back to the third person. In My Mortal Enemy, though ‘Nellie Birdseye’ tells the story, her pared-down first-person narrative is full of gaps and omissions about her own life. So, in both novels, the observers are not entirely our familiars. Niel/Nellie resemble each other in other ways too. Both are younger than the women they admire, and are profoundly affected by them. For both, a chivalric desire to idealize is cruelly subverted by their objects of admiration. Nellie accepts this, Niel does not. And, with both observers, there is a sense that they are trying to pin down something which finally escapes them. Their ‘bird’s eye’ ‘peepholes’ try to spy out and see round their ‘lost ladies’, but the ladies remain, in the end, uncaught.
—
A Lost Lady has three parallel plots, grafted imperceptibly together. One is the grave, slow story of Captain Forrester’s decline: his (offstage) visionary pioneering youth; his substantial prime, enjoying the rewards of his ‘dream’; his accident, his financial landslide (made worse by his honorable insistence on paying in full all the depositors who trusted him), his stroke, and his collapse into a ‘wounded elephant’, or fallen mountain. This plot is mournfully and weightily told, like an old tragic legend of a deposed king or a god in exile. Alongside it is the quite different story of Marian Forrester, agitated, impassioned, contradictory: her (offstage) romantic youth in California (a scandalous match broken off, a rescue from death in the mountains by the Captain); her (offstage) brilliance as a Colorado hostess, her unwilling retreat to Sweet Water, and the double life she lives there (as a devoted nurse to her dying husband and a gracious figure in the community, and as a restless discontented adulteress); finally, her (offstage) departure and lucrative re-marriage to a rich old English ranch-owner. Quite other narrative models – Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina – are invoked and relinquished in this plot. The third story, which is also the frame for the first two, is Niel Herbert’s: his distaste for his own home (unsuccessful widowed father, sloppy housekeeper, proud dead Southern mother who hated the West), his attachment to his old-fashioned uncle Judge Pommeroy and to the Judges’ friends, the Forresters; his romantic admiration of Marian and his processes of disillusion with her; his sacrifice of a year’s study at Harvard to help her nurse the Captain; his change in profession from law to architecture; and his embittered departure from the town. Niel has a touch of Henry James’s attentive, deprived observers; but there is something in his story too of the painfully sweet infatuation and bitter enlightenment in Turgenev’s First Love.
These three personal plot
s make part of Cather’s now-familiar historical story. The values which ‘dreamed’ the settlement of the old West into being are on the way out, due to the inability of romantics like Captain Forrester to make a profit out of the land they laid claim to. The small town is losing its pioneering character, after the end of the railroad boom (like the relapsing into obscurity of Mark Twain’s Mississippi river villages when the river changes its course and by-passes them). Sharp commercial interests, as in One of Ours, are rapidly profiting from the shake-up of the depression, and cutting up the ‘princely carelessness of the pioneer’ into ‘profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest’. [ALL, p.104] The change is here described in class terms, as a decline from an aristocracy (‘princely carelessness’, ‘lost lady’, ‘great landholders’) into a standardized democracy. Ivy Peters, the Bayliss Wheeler/Wick Cutter type, and like them a grotesquely anathematized character with no redeeming features, has to stand for the new world. The symbol of the decline is his profitable draining of the Captain’s marsh – which precedes his equally cynical take-over of the Captain’s wife. But the book insists throughout, and not just in Niel’s voice, on contrasts between the ‘rare’ and the ‘common’: between the distinguished dinner party given early on by the Captain and his wife, and the dinner she gives to the town boys at the end of the book; or between the feudal attitude of the German tailor’s sons to the Forresters (‘They realized…that such a fortunate and privileged class was an axiomatic fact in the social order’) [ALL, p.15] and the revengeful pleasure of the townswomen when they at last get into the house (in a wonderful Hardyesque scene)8 and find ‘they have been fooled all these years’; it is full of undusted rooms and tarnished silver.