Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Marian’s dynamism surges up against Niel’s desire to frame her as a beautiful ghost. She is ‘live’ like an electrical current; she gives off a charge:19

  As she turned quickly away, the train of her velvet dress caught the leg of his broadcloth trousers and dragged with a friction that crackled and threw sparks. [ALL, p.56]

  She was using up all her vitality to electrify these heavy lads into speech. [ALL, p.164]

  Niel may try to cut off her current, as he does the telephone wire, but it is endlessly renewable, a force for life, which she will have ‘on any terms’. Whether we see her shedding her rings in a quick rush, or drinking too much, or wanting to dance, or setting off in a sleigh with her lover, lifting her chin and sniffing the air, or ‘eating toast and making humorous comments’, [ALL, p.71] she is never inert. And, like electricity, she is infinitely adaptable: her ‘contradictions’, her mockery, her imitations of other people, are part of her drive for life. She manipulates her own image in order to manipulate others. So to Cyrus Dalzell she is the enchanting Lady Forrester, to Ivy Peters she is a woman with a bucket and rolled-up sleeves, good for a few laughs. In her domestic life with her husband, glimpsed in a few touchingly matter-of-fact scenes, she is another person again, patient and practical:

  While he was undressing he breathed heavily and sighed, as if he were very tired. He fumbled with his studs, then blew on his fingers and tried again. His wife came to his aid and quickly unbuttoned everything. He did not thank her in words, but submitted gratefully. [ALL, p.54]

  But she can go straight from that room into an edgy, sexually charged scene in front of the parlour fire with Frank.

  Marian’s speech is tough and forthright, and deals in realistic values: ‘ “Money is a very important thing” ’, she tells Niel. ‘ “Realize that…” ’ [ALL, p.113] ‘ “I’m quite sure she makes it worth his while” ’, she says of her cook’s boyfriend. Her diatribe against Frank is ferociously cynical: ‘ “You’ve got a safe thing at last, I should think; safe and pasty! How much stock did you get with it? A big block, I hope!” ’ [ALL, p.134] She herself has no time for an idealized pastoral: the Forrester home is just the place she means to leave as soon as she can sell it: ‘ “I can’t stand this house a moment longer” ’; [ALL, p.72] ‘ “That’s what I’m struggling for, to get out of this hole.” ’ [ALL, p.125] Her will to survive gives her more affinity with the earlier women-heroes, Alexandra, Ántonia and Thea, than might appear: they are all, as A.S. Byatt puts it, products of ‘a great novelist’s capacity to show human beings almost as forms of energy’.20

  Still, Niel’s vision of an Arcadian ghost lingers on. The deep delight of A Lost Lady is its ‘magic of contradictions’. [ALL, p.75] It’s this which enchants Niel, and the novel casts the same spell as the lady; as usual, Cather’s book behaves like its central figure. For all its formality, elegance and traditionalism, it is as teasing and elusive as more ostentatiously modernist narratives. One of the lady’s old-fashioned admirers, a friend of the Captain’s, has a strange way of looking at Marian because of a cast in his eye:

  When Mrs Forrester addressed him, or passed near him, his good eye twinkled and followed her, – while the eye that looked askance remained unchanged and committed itself to nothing. [ALL, p.41]

  Mr Ogden’s double looking – half-sympathetic, half-cold; half-admiring, half-dubious – makes an incongruous, unsettling mimicry of the double life of the novel, which while it frames its lady in a beautiful portrait with its ‘good eye’, loses her, as she escapes out of sight, off the edge of the page.

  —

  My Mortal Enemy, on the other side of The Professor’s House, is a fierce, chilling, severely economical novella. With ‘Old Mrs Harris’, it is an outstanding example of the use Cather made of this beautiful form, which she derived from James, Turgenev and Maupassant. Yet it has always been a hard book to ‘place’ in her work. She herself spoke of it as having been difficult to write and likely to be overlooked or misunderstood.21 (She was sure that if she had still been with Houghton Mifflin and not Knopf, they would never have had the confidence to publish it as it stood.)22 It has tended to be described uneasily as ‘curious’ or ‘unsatisfied’.23 One interesting comparison, with Edith Wharton’s New England novella Ethan Frome (1911) – a terrifying story of a touching illicit passion turned through a ‘mortal’ accident into lifelong incarceration, the object of desire become a source of punishment – suggests its very disturbing quality.24 It is often overshadowed by the two great novels on either side of it. Taken out of its chronological place and set against A Lost Lady, its peculiar quality asserts itself.

  Like A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy is a story that starts with a story. But the change of tone is very striking.

  Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those grey towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. [ALL, p.3]

  I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known about her ever since I could remember anything at all. She and her runaway marriage were the theme of the most interesting, indeed the only interesting, stories that were told in our family, on holidays or at family dinners. [MME, p.9]

  The expansive, regretful air of A Lost Lady, invoking the elusive ‘penumbra’ that is to be its theme, gives way to a much more pointed tone. Myra Henshawe’s runaway marriage is as much a legend of the past as Captain Forrester’s house, but it is sharply and sardonically introduced. The narrator begins with a name and a fact, not an approximate time and an unnamed house. The casual phrasing of ‘she and her runaway marriage’ is somewhat debunking of romantic legend, and is itself dryly undercut by the lack of interest at the family dinner-table: it wouldn’t have to be a very interesting story to be more interesting than most. The feeling is of a realistic observer looking back on something that used to impress her.

  The two ladies come at us differently, too. Marian is first seen rushing out of the house to greet her husband’s friends in dishabille. Myra Henshawe is first encountered by Nellie, alone, in her aunt’s house, before we find out about her past.

  I could see, at the far end of the parlour, a short, plump woman in a black velvet dress, seated upon the sofa and softly playing on Cousin Bert’s guitar. She must have heard me, and, glancing up, she saw my reflection in a mirror; she put down the guitar, rose, and stood to await my approach. She stood markedly and pointedly still, with her shoulders back and her head lifted, as if to remind me that it was my business to get to her as quickly as possible and present myself as best I could. [MME, p.11]

  No ‘spontaneous’ dishabille here. The moment of introduction (for us as for Nellie) feels perilous. It is very like the first meeting in James’s The Portrait of a Lady between Isabel and Mme Merle (also a friend of her aunt’s), who is to be so dangerous to her:

  The drawing-room at Gardencourt was an apartment of great distances, and, as the piano was placed at the end of it furthest removed from the door at which she entered, her arrival was not noticed by the person seated before the instrument. This person…was a lady whom Isabel immediately saw to be a stranger to herself, though her back was presented to the door. This back – an ample and well-dressed one – Isabel viewed for some moments with surprise…she became aware that the lady at the piano played remarkably well….When it was finished she felt a strong desire to thank the player, and rose from her seat to do so, while at the same time the stranger turned quickly round, as if but just aware of her presence.25

  Like another Mme Merle, Myra stage-manages the scene; her artifice is meant to give a sense of power, Marian’s to give a sense of freedom. Myra makes people come to her; she wants to attract, but she also wants to command. The difference between them is acutely felt, too, when they speak. Both want people to do things for them, but their means of persuasion are different. Marian ‘whispers coaxingly’:

 
; ‘Remember, you are coming over tomorrow, at two? I am planning a drive, and I want you to amuse Constance for me.’ [ALL, p.54]

  Mrs Henshawe told him he had better leave us. ‘Remember, you are to bring her to dine with us tomorrow night. There will be no one else.’ [MME, p.21]

  The change from one personality to another is marvellously subtle, from the insidiousness of Marian’s present participles (‘you are coming’, ‘I am planning’), her coaxing question mark, her sweet ‘I want you to’, to the peremptory grand command of Myra’s ‘you are to’ and ‘there will be’. Their laughter is similarly contrasted. When Niel is tired of everything, he longs for his ‘long-lost-lady’s’ laugh:

  Never elsewhere had he heard anything like her inviting, musical laugh, that was like the distant measures of dance music, heard through opening and shutting doors. [ALL, p.38]

  Myra’s laughter is equally well-remembered by Nellie, but it is ‘terrible’:

  She had an angry laugh…that I still shiver to remember. Any stupidity made Myra laugh – I was destined to hear that one very often! [MME, p.17]

  A Lost Lady is a tender novel, My Mortal Enemy is cold and fierce; one ends with consolatory words spoken out of ‘a warm wave of feeling’, the other with a dying curse. And the context for these two heroines is different. There is no settled home in My Mortal Enemy, and, until the western seashore that consoles Myra at her death, no landscape, only city scenes and rooms in cities. It is Cather’s ‘Waste Land’. Like Eliot’s poem it is highly cultured, poisoned with regret, and broken into pieces. And Myra, like Eliot’s narrative voice, is sexually disenchanted, longing for a healing grace in the wilderness, and shoring fragments of language, tradition and ritual against her ruin.

  My Mortal Enemy is as dramatic as The Waste Land. Of all Cather’s novels it is the one which most concentratedly shows the legacy of her theatrical apprenticeship. It is not just that there are scenes at the theatre or with performers, though these are important. In that sense My Mortal Enemy is no more theatrical than The Song of the Lark or Lucy Gayheart, with their emphasis on the craft of performance, or My Ántonia and The Professor’s House, with their ‘set piece’ visits to Camille and Mignon. But in its effects and its construction – a prologue and two acts – it follows what Henry James characteristically called (when he too was applying what he had learned from the stage to his novels) ‘the divine principle of the Scenario’.26 Long before Nellie meets Myra, her Aunt Lydia has given her the big scenes from Myra’s play. Myra’s spoilt childhood as the adopted daughter of her wealthy, ‘picturesque’ Irish-Catholic great-uncle John Driscoll; her quarrel with him over the penniless, handsome Oswald Henshawe (son of German and Ulster Protestants, and so anathema to the old man); John Driscoll’s hard bargain – her love, or his money – reached their climax with Myra’s proud exit, walking down the drive from his house and fortune ‘with her head held high’ to an audience of admiring conspirators: a performance which was ‘probably the most exciting night’ of Aunt Lydia’s life. This offstage romance, and Nellie’s own dramatic associations with the Driscolls – the glamorous rituals of John Driscoll’s Catholic funeral, the spellbound ‘chanting and devotions and disciplines’ of the nuns who have taken over the house that might have been Myra’s – have been the only scenic elements in her otherwise bleak Protestant childhood in ‘Parthia’, southern Illinois.

  But this is not to be a simple melodrama in which Myra’s ‘Parthian’ shot – the world well lost for love – will suddenly be revealed as a catastrophe, and Nellie’s illusions go crashing to the ground. Certainly the story has the tragic shape of fortunes reversed, and as befits tragedy, hubris goes before a fall, the young lovers become each other’s punishment, and the old man’s parting curse (‘ “better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money” ’ [MME, p.22]) comes home with a vengeance. But the tensions are built in from the start:

  ‘But they’ve been happy, anyhow?’ I sometimes asked [Aunt Lydia].

  ‘Happy? Oh, yes! As happy as most people’

  That answer was disheartening; the very point of their story was that they should be much happier than other people.

  [MME, pp.24–5]

  By the time Nellie, already wary, first meets ‘the real Myra Henshawe’, she is ‘twenty-five years older than I had always imagined her’. [MME, p.27] A dry voice of experience undermines whatever idealization there may once have been. Myra is still holding her head up high, but she is doing this ‘partly, I think, because she was beginning to have a double chin and was sensitive about it.’ [MME, p.12] Presumably Nellie ‘thinks’ this at the time of telling her story, not at the time of meeting. But her irony seeps back into the past.

  Myra’s first act is to embarrass the awkward, clever fifteen-year-old girl, her next to laugh at her husband. She shames Nellie, who is too shy to look any higher than Myra’s amethyst necklace, by offering to take it off if it ‘annoys’ her. She mocks Oswald, who has lost one of his expensive new shirts, by telling him she has given them all away to the janitor’s son, because ‘ “You know I can’t bear you in ill-fitting things” ’. [MME, p.16] He responds with a look of ‘amusement, incredulity and bitterness’. The whole history of their relations is latent in the brief exchange. Like Nellie, the reader feels ‘fascinated, but very ill at ease’. With few details, Cather establishes in her prologue the portrait of a woman who creates ‘scenes’, who is likely to be difficult, whose charm and ‘zest’ are risky and unreliable, who is both choosy and reckless over material possessions, and who demands a great deal of her admirers. People keep their eye on her out of interest, but also out of fear.

  The prologue sets the scene for a first act which brilliantly, and with the utmost economy, pursues the tension between ‘fascination’ and ‘unease’. The set for Act I, ‘Old’ New York at Christmas time, is civilized and impersonal. Nellie’s arrival, by way of Jersey City Station, the ferry-boat ride and the crosstown cab to the Fifth Avenue Hotel at Madison Square, gives us the double satisfactions of new excitement (Nellie strains her eyes for a first sight of the city, as Cather once did) and nostalgic recall. To Nellie, New York is an indoor stage set, with its violet lighting, its ‘open-air drawing-room’ feeling [MME, p.34], its tamed winter (‘like a polar bear led on a leash by a beautiful lady’), and its picturesque walk-on cast – an old man selling violets, an Irish boy with a penny whistle, messengers carrying potted plants and wreaths. Indoors from this indoor-outdoors, the Henshawe’s apartment is sketched in with theatrical ‘touches’: long, heavy velvet curtains the colour of ‘ripe purple fruit’, a dinner service with ‘thick grey plates’ and a ‘soup tureen painted with birds and big, bright flowers’. [MME, p.37] Oswald is disclosed in this set, propped up against the fireplace drinking a whisky and soda and waiting for the rest of the cast to make their entrances. All the New York settings – the restaurants, the study of a dying poetess whom Myra visits, the theatres themselves – are as if framed by a proscenium arch. At one point, even, Nellie and her aunt look up and see the Henshawes ‘standing together in one of their deep front windows, framed by the plum-coloured curtains’. [MME, p.45] Each scene has its crucial prop – a jewel, a key – and each actor has a striking, stagy look: Oswald’s ‘sorrowful…strange, half-moon eyes’, [MME, p.47] Myra’s dangerous curl to her mouth ‘like a little snake’. [MME, p.67] Vividly contrasted tableaux of secrets, asides, conspiracies, subterfuges, and confrontations are played, often actually at the theatre, with Myra always centre-stage, and almost always in charge. These scenes do not last long, but they show off Myra in poses that display to Nellie her generosity, extravagance, love of luxury, talent for friendship, jealousy, superstitions, greed, passion, cruelty, and appetite for control. She advises a young actor on his love affair, warning him against giving unlucky opals; she insists on sending the most expensive holly tree in the shop to her friend, the great Polish actress Helena Modjeska. In a box at the opera, she baits Oswald about his topaz cuff-button
s, a present from a young girl which he has tried to pass off as a gift from the ever-conspiratorial Aunt Lydia. Nellie sees Myra, in turn, scornful of her husband’s business friends, consumed with envy of a smart acquaintance in a carriage, magically charming to the dying poetess, and bitterly unforgiving of a treacherous friend seen at a matinée: ‘The scene on the stage was obliterated for her; the drama was in her mind’. [MME, p.56]

  She is the playwright and star of her own life, with Nellie as the silent, attentive audience/transcriber of her scenes and speeches, and of the histrionic responses she evokes: ‘He dropped his hand quickly and frowned so darkly that I thought he would have liked to put the topazes under his heel and grind them up.’ [MME, p.48] For Nellie, Myra’s talk is, like the language of the stage, ‘a highly flavoured special language’. As she turns to each of the supporting characters, her addresses and invocations give them for their moment the stature of heroes and heroines:

  When she liked people she always called them by name a great many times in talking to them, and she enunciated the name, no matter how commonplace, in a penetrating way, without hurrying over it or slurring it; and this, accompanied by her singularly direct glance, had a curious effect. When she addressed Aunt Lydia, for instance, she seemed to be speaking to a person deeper down than the blurred, taken-for-granted image of my aunt that I saw every day, and for a moment my aunt became more individual, less matter-of-fact to me. [MME, p.55]

  The climax of these dramas is the Henshawes’ New Year’s Eve party for their thespian friends (‘Most of them are dead now’) which ends with a moonlit tableau of the queenly, exiled Modjeska, sitting in her long cloak by the window, the curtains drawn back, ‘the moonlight falling across her knees’, listening to her Polish friend singing the aria ‘Casta Diva’ from Bellini’s Norma. Oswald, ever in the stoic supporting role, stands ‘like a statue’ behind her chair. Myra crouches beside it, ‘her head in both hands, while the song grew and blossomed like a great emotion’. [MME, p.60] It would be more usual for a great emotion to blossom like a song, but in this fiction of expressionist stagings, the ‘compelling, passionate, overmastering something’ which Nellie recognizes as the source of Myra’s power cannot be defined, it can only be acted out. The dramatic correlative Cather uses here for Myra’s power is so strong that everything risks getting out of control. Norma, the Druid high priestess who has betrayed her vows for love and who is in turn betrayed, who prays to the chaste moon in the sacred grove for peace, but who is in thrall to the bellicose power of the Roman empire, makes an opulent tragic symbol for Myra (with marked resemblances to Flaubert’s luscious, violent Salammbô, often an inspiration for Cather).27 But the specific parallels are less important than the powerful atmosphere of beauty and sadness transferred (by a bold stroke) from the real Modjeska and the legendary Norma to Myra.