Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  But Roddy’s betrayal is not quite so moralistically simple. He is an unusual figure in Cather’s work, a radical working man. (A more political novelist would have made him a ‘Wobbly’.) His favourite book is Gulliver’s Travels – presumably for its satires on government – and when he and Tom are living together they have ‘long arguments’ about what they read in the newspapers. Roddy is a staunch defender of the Chicago Anarchists and of Dreyfus. Tom believes in Dreyfus’s guilt, and cites him in the heat of their quarrel:

  ‘You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets, like Dreyfus.’ ‘That man was innocent. It was a frame-up,’ Blake murmured. It was a point he would never pass up. [PH, p.243]

  And he goes on to throw Swiftian scorn on Tom’s ‘Fourth of July talk’ and on Tom’s treatment of him as ‘a hired man’. Given Cather’s growing sympathies with Catholicism, her tinges of anti-semitism and her feeling for national pride, one might suppose Roddy’s support of Dreyfus to be a black mark against him. In fact not: in 1899 Cather wrote a stirring tribute to Zola’s defence of Dreyfus, speaking of ‘the courage of the hand that penned J’Accuse.’28 There is no evidence that she changed her mind. Roddy, like Dreyfus, is being wrongly accused: there is betrayal on both sides. His personal tenderness has led him, in Forster’s phrase, to betray his country rather than his friend; Tom’s idealism makes him betray his friend in the interests of his country. The sense of mutual damage is intensified by Roddy’s last words: ‘ “I’m glad it’s you that’s doing this to me, Tom; not me that’s doing it to you.” ’ [PH, pp.247-8] Both young men are ‘punished’: Roddy disappears forever into the limbo of the modern nomadic American west, the world of railroads and newspapers; and Tom tells himself that ‘anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it’. [PH, p.253] He is, indeed, ‘called to account’, in the catastrophic betrayal of all ‘youth’ and of Time itself, the Great War.

  —

  It seems, then, by the end, that all is lost. The split in the narrative mimics the unassuaged betrayals, separations and substitutions of the whole book. And when we return to the Professor after Tom’s ‘ardour’, we see that he is suffering the symptoms of a well-known medieval condition called ‘accidie’: spiritual sloth or indifference. He feels ‘a diminution of ardour’, a sense of being ‘flattened out and listless’, [PH, p.153] an alienation from his own life, and, to sum up – it is almost his last word – ‘apathy’. [PH, p.283] Tom’s active story is replaced by his negations. St Peter did not go back to France with Tom, he did not develop the patent of Tom’s invention, he does not want to move house, he did not want to go to Europe with his family, he does not read his family’s letters, he does not even seem to finish editing Tom’s diary. His attempted suicide is itself a negative act; he does not stop himself from being gassed. All that is left for him is the bitter stoicism of Augusta.

  But that is not all we are left with. The Professor’s House, strangely enough, is not a depressing book, though because of its title character’s dejection it has usually been read so.29 Certainly it is full of longing for death and a painful sense of fracture and bereavement. Yet it has an unaccountable element of happiness, and this is because the novel is not so much about dying as it is about writing.

  The Professor’s House has two kinds of language, two ways of writing about memory. St Peter’s is sophisticated, metaphorical and contemplative. His parts of the novel are all about the inspiration, the design and the execution of his book. He makes self-conscious use of linguistic terms, as when he refuses to have his relationship with Tom ‘translated into the vulgar tongue’, [PH, p.62] or jokingly tells Augusta that her use of ‘the bust’ as the name for one of her dressmaker’s forms is an example of ‘a natural law of language, termed, for convenience, metonymy’. [PH, p.18] (Metonymy is a feature of his language, the ‘house’ standing in for his life and his death, Tom’s ‘hand’ representing to St Peter his whole character.) His writing circles back and forward in time, as opposed to Tom’s linear chronology. It is third as opposed to first person, and so appears inward-looking and ironical. Since Tom’s death, St Peter has had no one to talk to, and (like James’s Dr Sloper or Jane Austen’s Mr Bennet) has to take a sardonic pleasure in being misunderstood.

  St Peter’s style, privileged, involuted, self-referential, is in a tradition of highly mannered Europeanized American writing of which James, Cather’s old mentor, is the prime example. (St Peter cites James at one point, apologizing for his family’s behaviour like a character in The American.) Phyllis Rose, writing very well about The Professor’s House, finds this manner ‘strained – overly didactic, underlining all points, the dialogue forced’.30 But the strain is the point: Cather needs to set a Europeanized, literary language against a native, democratic American speech. The contrast between St Peter’s style and Tom’s belongs to a long-running American conflict, pinpointed by Philip Rahv31 as that between ‘palefaces’ (James, Wharton, Eliot) and ‘redskins’ (Whitman, Twain). Cather is unusual in making both languages interpenetrate.

  Tom’s is also a written memory. But its eloquence is in strong contrast to St Peter’s. Like Huckleberry Finn, Tom is the native plain speaker, talking directly to us in the first person, who doesn’t think of himself as articulate. Both Huck Finn and Tom Outland insert paradoxical disclaimers into their most lyrical passages:

  Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean – I don’t know the words to put it in.32

  I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it…[PH, p.201]

  I can’t describe it. It was more like sculpture than anything else. [PH, p.202]

  As part of the pretence of inarticulacy, Tom Outland’s speech makes frequent use of the tough, jokey understatements that are a feature of Western American male speech. The account of poor old Henry’s death, for instance, is made up of simple sentence structures and matter-of-fact colloquialisms: ‘We lost old Henry….We’d been a little bothered by rattlesnakes….We had got them pretty well cleared out….We caught sight of a little bunch of ruins….We almost made it….A snake struck him square in the forehead….He was so crazy it took the two of us to hold him….We were so cut up that we were almost ready to quit….He got our minds off our trouble.’ [PH, pp.216-17] When this ‘ornery’ folk speech slides into something more literary, its tropes are almost always similes, as in the descriptions of the mesa and the city (like a diamond, like sculpture, and so on). The effect is sequential and explanatory, in contrast with the Professor’s use of metaphor and metonymy, non-linear substitutions which carry more than one meaning at once.

  Tom’s ‘simple’ eloquence must ring true: it is essential that we believe in the integrity of his language, so that it can stand against shams and dis-integrations. Cather guarantees this by making him not only unconfident of his own articulacy (unlike Louie Marsellus’s supremely confident fluency), but unwilling to speak at all. His story is always being withheld. After he arrives at the Professor’s house he ‘never took up the story of his life again’; instead, he tells it to the little girls, keeping them in some suspense too: ‘ “Oh, Tom, tell us…” He would whisper: “Pretty soon.” ’ [PH, p.125] Only after four years does he tell St Peter ‘the story he had always kept back’. [PH, p.176] And he tells Roddy about his feelings too late, because ‘it was the kind of thing one doesn’t talk about directly’. [PH, p.239]

  The preliterate Indians left behind them a composition as close to nature as possible; Cather wants Tom’s language to be a natural speech, imitating that silent testimony. But Tom is not ‘dumb’, in either sense (and he is to blame for concealing his feelings from Roddy). He is educated, unlike Huck Finn, and literate. His narration is, in part, a process of naming things: ‘We began to call it Cow Canyon’; [PH, p.198] ‘Cliff City, as we already called it’; [PH, p.203] ‘Henry named her Mother Eve, and we called her that.’ [PH, p.214] And it involves references to reading and writing. When Tom memorizes lon
g passages of Virgil’s Aeneid, he recognizes, in his own feelings, ‘a religious emotion’, ‘the filial piety’ of ‘the Latin poets’. [PH, p.251] Once again, Cather is applying an oral tradition of classical poetry to an American landscape. So she deliberately blurs the distinction between the written and the spoken. St Peter plans to ‘edit and annotate’ Tom’s diary ‘for publication’. The inset story, however, seems not to be that diary, but Tom’s spoken narrative, told to St Peter on another long-ago summer. After his spoken story ends (with ‘and the rest you know’), the Professor’s narrative resumes with his consideration of Tom’s written record. His editorial commentary on it amalgamates and reconciles the spoken and the written:

  To St Peter this plain account was almost beautiful, because of the stupidities it avoided and the things it did not say. If words had cost money, Tom couldn’t have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and the excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only conventional phrases. [PH, pp.262-3]

  Tom’s classical narrative confirms the Professor’s beliefs about restraint and excision in art. In fact it teaches St Peter to ‘excise’ his own narrative: after he meets him, his book becomes ‘more simple and inevitable’ than it was before. [PH, p.258]

  So the novel is an epitome of all Cather’s writing, in which she divides herself between two ‘writers’: Tom as the instinctual explorer and the Professor as the conscious reviser. Looked at in this way, negativeness, which seemed to be just an element in the Professor’s ‘accidie’, turns out to be a saving virtue. When Tom takes possession of the cliff-city, ‘he does not go for his record’: ‘I was afraid that I would lose the whole for the parts’. It is only by abandoning words and losing the objects he has labelled that it becomes possible for him to ‘co-ordinate and simplify’; it brings with it ‘great happiness’.

  Co-ordinate and simplify describes the design of the cliff-city, Tom’s narrative, and the novel itself. In a mysterious parallel process at the end of the book, St Peter gives up on reading, writing, speech and social relations, and also finds it possible to ‘co-ordinate and simplify’. Withdrawing into dream-states and reverie, he rediscovers his ‘original ego’ and his connection with nature.33 Only words of one syllable will do for this regressive ‘recognition’.

  He seemed to be at the root of the matter; Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths. He seemed to know, among other things, that he was solitary and must always be so; he had never married, never been a father. He was earth, and would return to earth. When white clouds blew over the lake like bellying sails, when the seven pine-trees turned red in the declining sun, he felt satisfaction and said of himself merely: That is right’. Coming upon a curly root that thrust itself across his path, he said: ‘That is it.’ When the maple-leaves along the street began to turn yellow and waxy, and were soft to the touch, – like the skin on old faces, – he said: ‘That is true; it is time.’ All these recognitions gave him a kind of sad pleasure. [PH, pp.265-6]

  This climactic recognition of a primitive, instinctual self brings Cather extraordinarily close to some of her contemporaries. In this great novel, published at the height of the modernist movement, Cather, for all her isolationism and conservative nostalgia, is involved in the modern quest to find, in the instinctual, the primitive, and the mythological, ‘elemental and enduring truths’.34 The connection with Lawrence, particularly striking in this novel, is more than coincidental. Cather met the Lawrences in New York early in 1924, when she was writing it. This was the year of Studies in Classic American Literature, which diagnosed the fatal split in the modern American psyche between instinctual, sensual knowledge (‘the true centrality of the self’)35 and ‘civilized’, heightened, neurotic consciousness. After his meeting with Cather, which both writers enjoyed, 36 the Lawrences went to New Mexico. Cather followed them a year later; like the Lawrences, who had by then moved to a ranch outside Taos, she was a wary guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Cather paid them a visit, they ‘got on famously’, 37 and she sent them a copy of The Song of the Lark.

  The overlap of experiences and interests is remarkable. For all Cather’s negative remarks about Lawrence in ‘The Novel Démeublé’, their responses to the Indian Southwest had a good deal in common. Among the writings of Lawrence which came out of that place and time – ‘New Mexico’, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, Birds, Beasts and Flowers – the essay ‘Pan in America’, written in 1924, is perhaps closest in feeling. Lawrence rhapsodizes over the pine-tree in the Rockies that ‘interpenetrates’ his life, expressing ‘raw earth-power and raw sky-power’. He identifies the ‘silent’ Pan-spirit with the tree and the Indians, in opposition to modern America, and laments the personal loss resulting from that split:

  What can a man do with his life but live it? And what does life consist in, save a vivid relatedness between the man and the living universe that surrounds him? Yet man insulates himself more and more into mechanism, and repudiates everything but the machine and the contrivance of which he himself is master, god in the machine.38

  The tone is quite different, but the preoccupation is connected to Godfrey St Peter’s.

  There is, also, a striking, if coincidental, similarity of tone between the end of The Professor’s House and the last section (written at much the same age) of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Bernard, the writer, feeling his youth ‘over and done with’ (‘The moving was over and done’), shocked by the young death of Percival, his Tom Outland, into seeing ‘things’ without ‘pretence and make-believe and unreality’, is an elderly man facing his mortality. Moving towards silence and solitude, he turns away from a lifetime of phrase-making, and regresses to a ‘little language’ – ‘I need a howl, a cry’ – that will describe ‘the world seen without a self’.

  Thin as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving merely, I walked alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to speak save in a child’s words of one syllable….

  But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red – even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again?…But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture-book had stopped and had said, ‘Look. This is the truth.’39

  The quest for a true language is common to all three writers. In the end, the Professor’s house is the book itself: Cather has written a writer’s autobiography. As another fine American woman writer, Eudora Welty, says of it: 40 ‘A work of art is the house that is not the grave. An achievement of order, passionately conceived and passionately carried out, it is not a thing of darkness.’

  12

  THE GOLDEN LEGEND

  The New World presses on us all; there seems no end to it – and no beginning. So too with him….To me there is a world of pleasure in watching just that Frenchman….Watching, keeping the thing whole within him with almost a woman’s tenderness – but with such an energy for detail – a love of the exact detail –….This is the interest I see. It is this man. This – me; this American…

  William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, 1925

  THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE and My Mortal Enemy were paradoxical triumphs, masterpieces written out of depression and unease. They appear to have had, momentarily, the effect of a catharsis. The next two years, 1925 and 1926, were a period of relative contentment. Of course this sort of biographical generalization sweeps over the very fluctuations of mood and phases of emotion to which Cather’s own writing was so responsive. But it does seem as if, after 1927, in her late fifties and sixties, things did no
t go well for her. Losses, anxieties, illnesses and disenchantments came to dominate the last part of her life. The years of Death Comes for the Archbishop were her last ‘best years’, and they produced the most appeased and celebratory of all her novels. Death Comes for the Archbishop does not have the childhood landscape and folktale of the Nebraskan pastorals, or the deep personal feeling of My Ántonia or A Lost Lady. It doesn’t give itself away emotionally in the manner of The Song of the Lark or One of Ours; it stays above the complicated tensions of The Professor’s House and My Mortal Enemy. For readers like myself who admire that dark phase of Cather’s writing above all the rest, its calm, hagiographical, legendary narrative may be less involving. Something ferocious and unreconciled, that goes right back to the dark primitive troll-self of the hero of her first novel, is placed at arm’s length, outside the characters, in a symbolic landscape. Death Comes for the Archbishop is secure, ritualized, and impersonal. The ‘thing not named’ works in it not as a troubling pressure, but for a sense of serene accomplishment. We are being told, the book seems to say, exactly what we need to know, and in the best possible way. Explanations (of motive, relationships, psychological ambiguities) are minimized. The effect on us is like the influence on Cather of the New Mexican mission churches, which, with their ‘moving reality’, are, she said, ‘their own story’.1

  The phrase is a reminder of Cather’s methods: to build a narrative shape which, as a church is intended to do, incarnates its meanings. This is no new departure. We recognize Cather’s insistence on truthfulness as simplicity of form, from Alexandra’s ‘white book’ to Tom Outland’s withheld narrative. But now her visionary pastoral has been Christianized; we have moved from B.C. to A.D. Cather’s acknowledgement, in 1922, of her links to the Episcopal church (which led in later years to a pious, indeed somewhat sickly correspondence with the Bishop of Red Cloud) had preceded the first signs of interest in orthodox religion in the fiction of the mid 1920s: as a form of art and authority in The Professor’s House, as a consolation for death in My Mortal Enemy. But in these novels, the religious material, though a far cry from her earlier robust satires on Christian hypocrisy, was used equivocally and indirectly. Now, by making her beliefs historical and objectified, she was able to express them fully. Cather’s first ‘new testament’ works supremely well, by virtue of the kind of ‘miracle’ that is repeatedly accounted for, in the novel, as the combined operation of destiny, love and attention. This ‘miracle’ never quite recurs. Shadows on the Rock has its own charm and interest, but is much quieter. Apart from some perfectly achieved late stories of retrospection, ‘Two Friends’, ‘Neighbour Rosicky’ and ‘Old Mrs Harris’, Cather’s work would never again strike the same confidence, depth and joy, like the sound of the Spanish bell which Father Joseph finds in an old adobe church in Santa Fé: ‘Full, clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through the air like a globe of silver.’ [DA, p.43]