by Hermione Lee
The revelation of the mesa and its secret city is one of Cather’s most beautifully contrived and most natural-seeming artefacts. This is partly due to the contrast with what surrounds it, partly to the paradox of eloquent testimony given to a simple speaker. But essentially it arises from her intense feeling for what she was describing. All the great visionary sightings of her earlier work – Alexandra’s celebration of the unformed land, Thea’s rapture of self-realization in the canyon, Jim’s momentary epiphany of the plough on the horizon – culminate in the central irradiation of this novel. And here, unlike in those earlier climactic moments, there is no end to the describing, no sense that the landscape will ever give up all its meaning. It keeps changing as it is approached, and has to be written over and over again. As Tom gets deeper into the mesa, the light becomes more intense; his journey into prehistoric time thus takes him into the heart of light, as St Peter’s journey into his own, personal, past time takes him into the heart of darkness. So the descriptive writing of Tom’s story has a strongly sacramental quality.
At first the mesa seems ‘tantalizingly’ impenetrable. It hangs over Tom and Roddy, a solid inaccessible mass, metamorphosing in different lights:
Some mornings it would loom up above the dark river like a blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against a sky on fire.
No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing. [PH, pp.192-3]
As Tom finds his way in, the colours become less threatening and more intimate. When the city has been discovered, and they are setting up camp there, they drink the water of the spring, which seems to metamorphose back into light. The priest is the celebrant of this mystery.
Father Duchene…always carried a small drinking-glass with him, and he used to fill it at the spring and take it out into the sunlight. The water looked like liquid crystal, absolutely colourless, without the slight brownish or greenish tint that water nearly always has. It threw off the sunlight like a diamond. [PH, p.209]
When Tom comes back to the mesa, after his disillusioning sojourn under the sad Washington sunsets, the descriptions are resumed, and once more, the elements are merged, so that a transfiguration seems to take place.
When I pulled out on top of the mesa, the rays of sunlight fell slantingly through the little twisted pinons – the light was all in between them, as red as a daylight fire, they fairly swam in it. Once again I had that glorious feeling that I’ve never had anywhere else, the feeling of being on the mesa, in a world above the world. And the air, my God, what air! – Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it, full of the smell of pinons – it was like breathing the sun, breathing the colour of the sky. [PH, p.240]
As Tom finally takes possession of the mesa and the cliff city, and becomes its only inhabitant, the sun seems to give him its ‘solar energy’ ‘in some direct way’. [PH, p.251] Light is turned into pure, almost overwhelming, life-force:
At night, when I watched it drop down behind the edge of the plain below me, I used to feel that I couldn’t have borne another hour of that consuming light, that I was full to the brim, and needed dark and sleep. [PH, pp.251-2]
The cumulative metamorphoses of light into air into fire into colour into water seem to stream onto the page. And through this marvellous writing, a theory of natural laws – not unlike the nineteenth-century American transcendentalists’ belief in a ubiquitous, protean ‘Oversoul’ – is implied. The essence of nature, endlessly self-renewing and energetic, is the direct solar energy. In its essence, it cannot be perceived or described, it can hardly be ‘borne’. Tom gets as close to the source of life and light as a human being can. But the pure source constantly adopts different shapes, forms, designs, colours: ‘always before us, and always changing’. It’s that process which Cather’s writing emulates, translating nature’s metamorphoses into endlessly resourceful, energetic figurative language.
But, after all, Tom’s ‘story’ is words on a page, signs for things. And at the centre of his natural landscape is a man-made artefact, the cliff-city. From the beginning to the end of Cather’s work, the making and reading of signs is all-important. The fundamental desire of her writing is to transpose the forms and designs of the natural world, as perceived and shaped through human action, imagination and memory, into words. And these words, by means of a strenuous, concealed battle for simplicity and inevitability, are made to seem as true as possible to the natural forms, whether these are the marks left by the river on the islands of ‘The Enchanted Bluff’, or the order of bird flight contemplated by Old Ivar. Very often, an implicit analogy is drawn between the pioneering attempts of human beings to make their own mark on the natural world – the traces of the wheels of the ‘Forty-Niners’ wagons in The Song of the Lark, the faint sign of the Indian circle in My Ántonia, and now the cliff-city – and the action of the novelist, ordering her own design. These human orderings are always perceived as ancient vestiges, sympathetically recognized through a long vista of time. So they are made to suggest the immortality of the art-work – more particularly, of the native American art-work, which thus takes on classical dignity. By analogy, Cather seems to be ensuring, or hoping for, the long future of her own designs.
By the time we get to Tom’s cliff-city, we have already had a sophisticated indoor version from St Peter of the way in which art can improve on nature. He sounds very like Henry James here, preferring the ‘sublime economy’ of art to life’s ‘splendid waste’.24
It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected and placed – it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection. [PH, p.75]
When, in his reactionary, anti-modernist lecture, he opposes science to ‘art and religion’, he emphasizes this process of selection as the key to the Church’s nourishment of the soul through its ‘gorgeous dramas’ and ‘imaginative acts’. It is ‘The Novel Démeublé’ again, with more insistence on the sacramental function of art:
The Christian theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists, getting splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of great dramatic value…[PH, p.69]
But St Peter can no longer find the connection between ‘composition’ and spiritual nourishment, either in the personal ‘house’ of his life, or in the wider ‘house’ of his time. Hence, the dislocations, discomfort and asphyxiation in his narrative. The essential point of the split stories is that Tom finds, in the light, what St Peter loses in the dark.
The cliff-city, Tom’s find, is an art-work waiting for readers. Very like Keats’s Grecian urn – the similarity has often been noticed25 – it gives out its silent message to future generations. We approach it by way of closer and closer readings. On its first magically silent and sudden appearance, it is described in terms of ‘composition’:
Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as sculpture – and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.
It was beautifully proportioned, that tower….The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something….It was more like sculpture than anything else. [PH, pp.201-2]
Tom senses that ‘a people with a feeling for design’ [PH, p.204] must have built it. As the city is entered and examined, the life of this people is characterized in increasing detai
l and their pioneering qualities are replicated in the bold discovery and painstaking exploration of the ruins by the two boys and old Henry.
Father Duchene’s authoritative commentary on their findings is in contrast with the Professor’s history lecture. The Professor laments the substitution of art and religion for science in an impoverished civilization; the priest describes a civilization which integrated science, art and religion. Scientific methods are now seen as agents, not negations, of imaginative understanding. Tom, the future inventor, classifies his finds like ‘specimens’, and when he finally takes possession of the place it seems to come together in his understanding ‘as a series of experiments do when you see where they are leading’. [PH, p.250] To establish the age of the settlement, Duchene cuts down an old cedar in the middle of one of the trails, which could only have grown up after the tribe was destroyed, and ‘counted the rings under his pocket microscope’. [PH, p.218] The cliff-dwellers themselves were scientists. They ‘experimented with dyes’, they used the tower for ‘astronomical observations’, and among their relics is a bag of surgical instruments: ‘a stone lancet, a bunch of fine bone needles, wooden forceps, and a catheter’. [PH, p.212]
Pre-commercial science is one of the ‘arts of peace’ which Duchene describes as the product of ‘an orderly and secure life’, and the mark of ‘a superior people’. These people were craftsmen who ‘developed’ their arts, ‘improved’ their conditions, ‘built themselves into this mesa and humanized it’. Their culture is as close to nature as possible – it would not have come into being without the setting – but it is not natural in the sense of barbaric or primitive. Duchene’s formal, reasoned, elegiac celebration of their civilization insists on ‘composition’.
I see them here, isolated, cut off from other tribes, working out their destiny, making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man, purifying life by religious ceremonies and observances, caring respectfully for their dead, protecting the children, doubtless entertaining some feelings of affection and sentiment for this stronghold where they were at once so safe and so comfortable, where they had practically overcome the worst hardships that primitive man had to fear. They were, perhaps, too far advanced for their time and environment. [PH, pp.220-21]
The language sounds like a translation of a classical text – Duchene is Tom’s Latin teacher – and it presents the culture as the American classical age. To underline this, a resemblance is noted between the designs of the cliff-dwellers’ jugs, and those on ‘early pottery from the island of Crete’. [PH, p.220] Tom reads his Virgil on the mesa, and, in his memory, superimposes the scenes from the Aeneid onto the cliff-city. This is both like, and mournfully unlike, Jim Burden’s application of Virgil to Nebraska. Like the Nebraskan pioneers, the Indian cliff-dwellers have composed and humanized an immensely daunting landscape. But to refind that native pioneering tradition, Cather now has to resort to an exterminated, ancient people.
There is a bitter contrast, then, between the indigenous folk history of the cliff-city, and the later history of America. Duchene deduces that the tribe was wiped out, when they were down in their summer camp, by a barbarian nomadic ‘horde’, on the rampage for loot. The story of the troll garden is reinvoked – the envious ‘children of the forest’ destroying the enclosed civilization – and provides a paradigm for a history of the world seen as a succession of tribal conflicts. The book is full of illustrations of this history. Tom reads his Caesar while he is minding cattle; when he walks into the Professor’s garden, he starts to recite Aeneas’s account of the sack of Troy to prove his knowledge of Latin. When the Professor talks about ritual to his students, he instances Moses, freeing his people through ‘ceremonials’ from their slave mentality under the Egyptians. St Peter’s concealed first name, Napoleon, is derived from the great-great-grandfather who ‘came out to the Canadian wilderness to forget the chagrin of his Emperor’s defeat’. [PH, p.270] That foiled attempt at world conquest is anticipated by the Spanish imperialist explorers in the New World, the subject of St Peter’s book, and the crusaders, represented in a pageant in which his sons-in-law play Saladin and Coeur de Lion.26
This succession of conquering tribal imperialists, taking over less powerful tribes in their search for loot and fame – Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Spaniards, French – culminates in the modern American republic (which has often been compared to the Roman Empire), now, in the post-war, pre-Depression years, at its most spendthrift and expansionist. So Rosamond shopping in Chicago for her ‘painted Spanish bedroom set’ is compared by her father to ‘Napoleon looting the Italian palaces’ [PH, p.154], and the Marselluses plan, like the old European adventurers, to ‘pick up a good many things’ [PH, p.159] on their trip to France, and to ship them back free of duty from Marseilles to Mexico. The vestiges of this tribal culture, it is implied, would not have much value. If a Tom Outland and a Father Duchene were to excavate it in hundreds of years, what they would dig up would be imports, imitations, and stolen goods.
But Cather’s theory of history is not simply of decline and fall. More interestingly, it is of recurrence. So (as with all her classical pastorals) the cliff-city is no prelapsarian idyll. Pain and horror are concealed inside it, tellingly associated with sexuality. In The Song of the Lark, the shapes of the caves and the artefacts of the cliff-dwellers awakened Thea to a sense of female potential. But now, into an all-male ‘happy family’, substituting for unsatisfactory heterosexual female relations, the female body makes an ominous appearance, as a reminder of betrayal. The boys discover a woman’s corpse – a ‘terrible woman’ to match Augusta’s ‘forms’ – and, grimly joking, nickname her Mother Eve. She has been murdered – for adultery, Duchene surmises – and ‘her face, through all those years, had kept a look of terrible agony.’ [PH, p.214] Mother Eve ‘refuses to leave them’: when the artefacts are carried away, she falls to the bottom of the canyon, and cannot be salvaged. Cather leaves us to make what we like of this, but strongly suggests the inescapable nature of ‘cruel biological necessities’.
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Tom only escapes these necessities by dying young; his romances are all with men, and, more intensely, with the mesa and the city. As so often, Cather transposes her own sexual temperament into an idea of active male companionship. Tom appears, both in St Peter’s version of him and in his own, as Cather’s exemplary hero: young, questing, self-reliant, asexual, full of ‘ardour’, serious, active, imaginative. Metaphorically speaking he has ‘never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas’. [PH, p.260] This – like the direct light of the sun – would be rather too much to bear, if Tom’s relationships were perfect. But it is one of the novel’s fine subtleties that all Tom’s friendships are fallible, and that betrayal exists in his story as well as in St Peter’s.
When Tom tells the story of his friendship with Roddy to the little girls, they turn him into the hero of a romantic Western: ‘ “He liked to be free, and to sit in his saddle all day and use it for a pillow at night….Noble, noble Roddy!” ’ [PH, p.124] Grown-up Kathleen compares their broken friendship to the story of ‘Amis and Amile’, the devoted chivalric friends of a twelfth-century metrical romance, who sacrifice themselves for each other.27 Roddy may be the heroic cowboy of Western tradition, but his relationship with Tom is more realistic and vivid than Tom’s with St Peter. That friendship takes place mostly at a distance, in a succession of silent scenes played through St Peter’s memory. The friendship with Roddy Blake gets closer to Cather’s sense of the sadness of unspoken, suppressed homosexual love. It is not, of course, described in those terms. But from the beginning, when Tom rescues Roddy from the gaming-table and Roddy nurses him through his illness, to the final quarrel, when there is ‘an ache’ in Tom’s arms to ‘reach out and detain him’, [PH, p.247] tender love feelings – as in the popular tradition of American ‘buddy buddy’ stories and films – are latent in the rugged outdoor relation. ‘He ought to have had boys of his own to look after’, says To
m of Roddy, adding very revealingly: ‘Nature’s full of such substitutions, but they always seem to me sad, even in botany.’ [PH, p.186] This is, I think, Cather’s most direct reference to homosexual feeling in her fiction, as a ‘natural’ but sad deviation, and it is a melancholy remark.
Like Tom, Roddy is a democratic American hero, a self-reliant working man with no life except what he makes for himself. But Cather is careful to make him less competent, less intelligent and less sensitive than Tom. He believes in education, but as ‘some kind of hocus-pocus that enabled a man to live without work’. [PH, p.188] He wants to get rich, and completely fails to understand Tom’s feelings about the sanctity of the cliff-city. When Tom sends discouraging reports back from Washington, and Roddy sells off the Indian remains to a visiting German for $4,000, he does it for Tom’s benefit (‘that money’s in the bank this minute, in your name, and you’re going to college on it’ [PH, p.243]) and is baffled by his outrage.
It looks as if Roddy is set up simply as a foil to Tom, to show his unique aloofness from the profit motive: ‘There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its people were concerned.’ [PH, p.244] Roddy appears to Tom as a traitor to the national inheritance, who has sold what ‘ “belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from” ’. [PH, p.242] He seems to join the novel’s other traitors: the Congressmen and staff of the Smithsonian, more interested in good lunches and trips to Europe than in ‘dead and gone Indians’ [PH, p.235], or the German dealer who smuggles the Indian ‘curios’ onto a French boat out of Mexico, thus avoiding customs in exactly the same way as the Marselluses will on their return journey from Europe. The cliff-dwellers have been sold, as St Peter will allow Tom to be sold: everything ‘comes to money in the end’.