Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  The first page of the novel, very unlike most of Cather’s first pages, shows the signs of strain.

  The moving was over and done. Professor St Peter was alone in the dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage, where he had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters. It was almost as ugly as it is possible for a house to be; square, three stories in height, painted the colour of ashes – the front porch just too narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps. As he walked slowly about the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantels with thick round posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over green-tiled fire-places. Certain wobbly stair treads, certain creaky boards in the upstairs hall, had made him wince many times a day for twenty-odd years – and they still creaked and wobbled. He had a deft hand with tools, he could easily have fixed them, but there were always so many things to fix, and there was not time enough to go round. He went into the kitchen, where he had carpentered under a succession of cooks, went up to the bath-room on the second floor, where there was only a painted tin tub; the taps were so old that no plumber could ever screw them tight enough to stop the drip, the window could only be coaxed up and down by wriggling, and the doors of the linen closet didn’t fit. He had sympathized with his daughters’ dissatisfaction, though he could never quite agree with them that the bath should be the most attractive room in the house. He had spent the happiest years of his youth in a house at Versailles where it distinctly was not, and he had known many charming people who had no bath at all. However, as his wife said: ‘If your country has contributed one thing, at least, to civilization, why not have it?’ Many a night, after blowing out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised to behave like porcelain, and didn’t. [PH, pp.11-12]

  Cather’s novels usually open with a sense of wide space or historical distance, a prospect or a retrospect: ‘One January day, thirty years ago…’ ‘I first heard of Ántonia…’ ‘One summer evening in the year 1848…’. Less often, in the big emotional novels of enfranchisement – The Song of the Lark, One of Ours – she begins in a place of narrow, materialistic confinement. The Professor’s House awkwardly, and exceptionally, combines the two modes, setting a character given to retrospection inside a clumsy, constricting frame. The whole account of the disoriented owner inside his ‘dismantled’ house is made of negatives. Though the novel will find its way to end with the words ‘the future’, it begins with a sense of elegiac finality, in a phrase of sombre double negation: ‘the moving was over and done’. ‘Needless inconveniences’, insisted on by ‘too narrow’, ‘too steep’, ‘too cramped’; lack of time to fix things, and their refusal to be fixed; the failure of plumbers, the dissatisfaction of daughters and his never quite agreeing with them, the paint that ‘didn’t’, all compound the negations.

  Nothing ‘fits’ or is ‘fixed’, the house is all makeshifts (the dripping tap), shams (the fake paint) and pretensions (the wooden balls on the mantelpiece). Physical and mental discomforts and dissatisfactions overlap: the Professor’s wincing answers the creaking and wobbling of his stairs, his incongruous activities in the bath reiterate the house’s awkwardnesses. The very sentences, long, trailing, as if randomly constructed (especially ‘It was almost as ugly…’ and ‘He went into the kitchen…’) seem not to have been neatly ‘fixed’. Everything we learn about this man and his house – his preference for French simplicity over American civilization, his passive, even affectionate contemplation of discomforts and omissions, his satirical association of his wife with good plumbing, the exigencies that have had him carpentering during the cooking, or painting the bath at night after a day’s work – set up at once, with brilliant suggestiveness, a general air of dislocation, awkwardness and compromise. There is nothing so simple as an idea that he is having to move from a beautiful house he loved to an ugly house he hates. It is the old house, the house of his past, and through that the whole ‘house’ of his narrative, which is made of makeshifts, substitutions, shams, betrayals, and regrets. Even the language is ill-at-ease with itself.

  It is clear from the first page that disjunctions don’t just make the form of the novel – two narratives, two heroes – but are its subject. St Peter’s life is one of compound fractures. His childhood was shaped by a Methodist mother and a Catholic father, by an inland sea and an unbounded prairie. His adult emotions have been split between his romance of the heart and of the imagination. Professionally, divided between his writing and his teaching, he has for years ‘managed to live two lives, both of them very intense.’ [PH, p.28] The most profound dislocations are between his domestic and intellectual life, and between his past and present selves. The attic sewing room has provided ‘insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life’. [PH, p.26] Sealed off, he has preserved himself from ‘the human house’ [PH, p.27] and might say of it, as Flaubert did of a family with children he once visited (as reported by his niece Caroline, whom Cather was soon to meet): ‘Ils sont dans le vrai’.17

  But this insulation from ‘le vrai’ has not been complete: ‘All the while he had been working so fiercely at his eight big volumes, he was not insensible to the domestic drama that went on beneath him.’ [PH, p.101] Cather uses some eloquent metaphors of female art-work to describe this ‘interpenetration’. The attic has always been Augusta’s sewing-room by day and the Professor’s study by night: ‘they did not elbow each other too much’, and he has grown attached to the female ‘forms’ – ‘those terrible women’ – on which Augusta has hung a succession of his daughters’ dresses. At either end of the box-couch, his manuscripts and her patterns co-exist: ‘In the middle of the box, patterns and manuscripts interpenetrated.’18 [PH, p.22] Later, the possibility of ‘interpenetration’ between the life of the mind and of the family is beautifully and formally compared to a famous female composition, a comparison which displays Cather’s pleasure in an androgynous art that can interweave the heroic and the domestic:

  Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux, – working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes, – alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories. [PH, p.101]

  (That idea of a female ‘composition’ which can reconcile into a natural-seeming art form the domestic and public, the physical and the spiritual, is touchingly demonstrated too by the pious Augusta, who tells the Professor, to his ‘intense interest’, that ‘the Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat’. [PH, p.100])

  In the past, then, the splits in his life have been just reconcilable. But not now. The whole world has broken in two, and that split can’t be healed. The ‘great catastrophe’ which has intervened between Tom’s youth and the Professor’s middle age – in which ‘all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself’ [PH, p.260] have been swept away (a passage which Cather excised, as being perhaps too emotional, from the novel’s later edition) has fractured the Professor’s single life, as it has everyone’s. (In national politics, too, there is a large-scale fracture, as Scott remarks when he is complaining about Prohibition: ‘ “This country’s split in two, socially, and I don’t know if it’s ever coming together.” ’ [PH, p.108]) The world change is embodied for St Peter in a double loss. He has lost his own delight in life: he would have to learn to live without it, ‘just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry’. [PH, p.282] And he has lost the original Tom Outland, now translated into a ‘glittering idea’, [PH, p.111] a public legend, a squabble over profits, and the conspicuous expenditure of the Marselluses. ‘Was it for this,’ asks
St Peter, bitterly contemplating ‘families and fortunes’, [PH, p.90] that ‘the light in Outland’s laboratory used to burn so far into the night!’ [PH, p.91] When Louie and Rosamond call their fake Norwegian house ‘Outland’ (‘ “Outlandish!” ’ murmurs the envious Scott), or when Louie dresses up in Tom’s old blanket, a substitution is taking place: the real Tom Outland – heroic, simple, quixotic, idealist – is being turned into a pretence, an imitation.

  So the novel is full of shams, replicating that central substitution. St Peter had a ‘show study’ downstairs in the old house, ‘but it was a sham’. [PH, p.16] The wire and wooden forms in his (real) study are sham women, ‘fooling’ you into an anticipation of softness and warmth. Plain Augusta, not one for shams, is congratulated by St Peter on her fine head of hair: ‘ “You’ll never need any of this false hair that’s in all the shop windows.” ’ [PH, p.23], which she agrees is a disgrace. Sham characters in the outside world populate the edges of the novel: St Peter’s rival at the university, with his false teaching of history and his pseudo-English manners, who ‘looked like a short cut’ to the country students; [PH, p.56] Homer Bright, the ‘greatest bluffer’ of all St Peter’s students, who has grown up to be Dr Crane’s shyster lawyer; the civil servants Tom Outland meets in Washington who spend their life ‘trying to keep up appearances’; [PH, p.232] the false Roddy Blakes, impostors who have responded to the advertisement for Tom’s lost friend. [PH, p.63] In modern America, St Peter reflects at the end of the novel, even the coffins are padded with ‘sham upholstery’: ‘Just the equivocal American way of dealing with serious facts.’ [PH, p.272]

  The Professor’s relation to the modern world of false substitutions is itself equivocal. His alienation is in large part self-inflicted: intent on keeping true things separated from shams, he has walled himself in, cut himself off. The cultivation of his ‘walled-in’ French garden in an American city, like the cultivation of his intellect and sensibility in a material world, makes him something of a spiritual snob. It would be possible to dislike St Peter (as it is possible to dislike Cather) for his fastidious aloofness from other people’s compromises: Lillian makes this sympathetically clear in her criticism of his intolerance. He cultivates separatism on principle.19 His idea of Tom is that he kept ‘affection and advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that would disintegrate each other’. [PH, p.172] Likewise, he refuses to have his friendship with Tom ‘translated into the vulgar tongue’ of money and possessions. His memory of Tom must remain ‘outlandish’, separate from the world as it is. To be ‘integrated’ with that world is to lose integrity.

  This insistence is part of a general tendency to think in terms of separate categories, illustrated by the Professor’s lecture to his students, which laments the impoverishing substitution of science for art and religion. As in the reference to Tom’s keeping ‘affection and advancement’ apart like chemicals, science is identified with separations. It is no accident that in St Peter’s ironic conversation with Augusta, when he asks her what people would think if he and Lillian were living in separate houses, he calls ‘separation’ a ‘good scientific term’. [PH, p.20]

  Science is opposed to art in the Professor’s mind, and art is always referred to in terms of composition, wholeness, design, as in the images of the Bayeux tapestry or the Magnificat. Yet even when his mind dwells on visions of wholeness and composition – analogues for his writing – these visions are separated from the rest of his life. This is especially true of the ‘key’ memory of his youth, a sailing trip round the south coast of Spain, within sight of the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada. There has been an anticipatory glimpse of this scene when St Peter is at the opera with Lillian. Softened by the courtship memories which Mignon evokes, he confides in her that he regrets their adult life together: they should have been ‘picturesquely shipwrecked’ when they were young. But when he imagines this picturesque shipwreck, he thinks of that Spanish sea-voyage, in sight of the ‘agonizingly’ high, gleaming snow peaks. Lillian is not in this picture: nobody is in it except himself and ‘a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrénées.’ [PH, p.95] It is a strange, suggestive moment in the novel. St Peter’s fantasy of an early death is separated from his feelings for his wife and attached to the sea-journey he made as a young man with an all-male crew; the vision of the mountains on that journey is then used as an image for the design of his book. Death, freedom, adventure and space (all qualities of Tom’s mountain journey too) are thus divorced from the Professor’s sexual and domestic life, and attached to his youth and his writing. And this is fundamental to the idea of separation in the whole novel.

  Godfrey St Peter does not die young; it is Tom Outland who dies young. But in the novel’s coda, we discover that in his deepest feelings it seems to him he has died young. It is, after all, not Tom’s loss he is mourning, but his own. In the final substitution of the book, Tom turns into ‘another boy’: ‘the original, unmodified Godfrey St Peter’. [PH, p.263] He recognizes that this boy has had ‘the realest of his lives’. ‘All the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside.’ A division is posited (Cather had recently been getting irritably interested in Freud)20 between the ‘primitive’ ‘instinctual’ self of childhood, and ‘the secondary social man’. So the theme of separation comes to its climax. It is himself he is separated from.

  His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning.

  [PH, p.264]

  The ‘secondary social man’ is the sexual adult: he has been shaped ‘by all the penalties and responsibilities of being and having been a lover’. The primitive self is presexual, solitary, and in wordless communication with nature.21

  This final recognition explains the Professor’s earlier, bitter references to Augusta’s ‘forms’ as ‘terrible women’, evidence of ‘cruel biological necessities’. Her sham women represent the forces which have separated him from his true self. It is tempting to interpret this true self as a homosexual feeling for Tom, since Tom stands in for his own lost primitive nature, Tom’s friendship has alienated him from his wife, and all St Peter’s Arcadian visions of freedom are scenes of male companionship. (And the great work which was inspired by the Spanish and Southwestern American journeys, his Spanish Adventurers, is a chronicle and celebration of male pioneering.) St Peter, like his Spanish adventurers, is no priestly ascetic: his pleasure in good food and drink, his lean energetic attractive body, his Spanish good looks, his classical figure swimming in the lake (‘his head looked sheathed and small and intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze in their tight, archaic helmets’ [PH, p.71]) all suggest an erotic male potency which finds no satisfactions in indoor marital life. Connections with Cather’s sexual nature are plausible: Doris Grumbach’s view that the novel is a story of ‘private, unconfessed, sublimated’ homosexual love,22 and that Tom’s loss is a projection of Isabelle’s, has a good deal of point. Yet it doesn’t quite accommodate the novel’s obscure sense of spiritual dislocation. The book not only evokes sexual loss. Cather insists, after all, that the ‘primitive’, ‘real’ self is pre-sexual. More profoundly, it describes a loss of self, of a sense of one’s own reality.

  —

  The Professor’s study is awkwardly lit and heated. He has written his great work by the light of a ‘faithful kerosene lamp’, but when it is empty, to avoid going down ‘through the human house’ to fill it, ‘he jammed an eyeshade on his forehead and worked by the glare’ of a ‘tormenting pear-shaped bulb’. ‘It was hard on eyes even as good as his.’ [PH, p.27] The ‘rusty, round gas stove with no flue’ has to be kept on full and the window left open, or the gas might blow out and asphyxiate him. These are functional details, illustrating the makeshift adjustments of his life, and carefully setting up the conditions for his possible suicide. But they work more strongly than that, too.
In the end the study becomes his purgatory. After the long summer in which he has been left alone to read Tom’s story, he hears that his family is coming back from their European tour: Rosamond is to have a child. But he feels he can no longer live with them: he has fallen ‘out of his place in the human family’, and his mind dwells gratefully on the thought of ‘eternal solitude’. A storm comes up, the air darkens. He lights the stove, and falls asleep watching the ‘flickering pattern of light on the wall’. [PH, p.276] In the night he half-wakes, to find the room ‘pitch-black and full of gas’.23

  St Peter is rescued from his passive suicide by Augusta, who fetches him back into the human family, her grim virtues of stoic endurance, held in reserve in the novel, coming into their own at the last. But Cather has it both ways: a death has taken place, the death of ‘ardour’ and ‘delight’. The conditions for this death – asphyxiation in the dark, a live burial, the ‘house’ become a grave – are symbolically opposed to the life-force at the centre of the book.

  When the window opens onto Tom Outland’s story, a great rush of light and air pours into the book. Obviously, the inset narrative makes a powerful contrast in other ways too. Youth is opposed to age, action to contemplation, aspirations to memory. Tom’s improvised male family, with Roddy as a substitute brother/husband, and old Harry and Father Duchene as his mother and father, provides a (preferable) alternative to the Professor’s female domestic ties. Tom’s story is mostly outdoor, St Peter’s indoor. His discovery is of a native, aboriginal history, the Professor’s is of European colonizers and exploiters. But the most sensational substitution is of artificial for natural light, and of ‘airlessness’ [PH, p.150] for space.