by Hermione Lee
Chabanel was always being baited by the Indians (who in this book, rather surprisingly after Death Comes for the Archbishop, do not inspire much interest), and his most horrible moment comes when they invite him to ‘a feast of flesh’:
After he had swallowed the portion in his bowl, they pulled a human hand out of the kettle to show him that he had eaten of an Iroquois prisoner. He became ill at once, and they followed him into the forest to make merry over his retchings. [SR, p.150]
His retchings are an antidote to the novel’s good housekeeping. Not all the physical sensations in Shadows on the Rock are pleasant: deformities and distressing sights are frequent. Blinker has a suppurating jaw; a sinful woman in a story of Mother Catherine develops ‘a loathsome disease’ and is buried in a ditch like an ‘unclean animal’. [SR, p.37] Frichette’s brother-in-law dies in the woods of a gangrenous leg; Frichette is ruptured, and has to give up his livelihood. Poisoning is a recurrent theme. Auclair makes good medicines, but, misused, they would be the ‘poisons’ ‘Toinette accuses him of storing. ‘Medicine is a dark science’, he says, [SR, p.210] and the ‘guardian of the stomach’, in pioneering medical days, has to be both wary and bold. Auclair counters Cécile’s credulous belief in the miraculous effects of the martyr’s skull with a horrible story of a famine in France when the people ate dried bones and died in agony. [SR, p.125] Cécile and Pierre and Auclair all love good food (witness their French dinner with the sea captain, ‘a dish made of three kinds of shell-fish, a tête de veau…a roast capon with a salad, and for dessert Breton pancakes with honey and preserves’ [SR, p.214]), but Pierre will boast, too, of eating dog meat and ‘tripe de roche’ in the wilderness:
‘You gather it and boil it, and it’s not so bad as it goes down, – tastes like any boiled weed. But afterwards – oh, what a stomach-ache!’ [SR, p.186]
The language used to describe the forest itself is of poisoning, of being choked by mould and stinging insects, of vegetation strangling itself ‘in a slow agony’. [SR, p.7] (We even discover that the King’s heir has died of poisoning. [SR, p.274]) Poison and medicine, retching and good eating, counter each other like faith and despair, hope and bitterness. Cather inclines the balance so that she can keep a sweet smell in the book, like the ‘balmy odours’ that blew out from the Canadian shores from the spruce and pine, which the early explorers believed to be ‘the smell of luscious unknown fruits, wafted out to sea’. [SR, p.187]
She manages her sweetening and softening of the bitter material not only by turning it into a child’s experience, but by giving the whole book, as its title suggests, the air of a dream. Everyone dreams. Jacques’ memory of being rescued by the old Bishop comes back to him ‘in flashes, unrelated pictures, like a dream. Perhaps it was a dream’. [SR, p.69] When Cécile is sick in bed, her mind is ‘dreamily’ conscious of her world encircling her ‘like layers and layers of shelter, with this one flickering, shadowy room at the core’. [SR, p.156] Towards the end of the book, in a strange and alarming sequence, the dying Count Frontenac is given a long and ominous dream. He is a boy at an old country farmhouse, trying to keep out ‘a very tall man in a plumed hat and huge boots’ [SR, pp.241-2], a giant against whom the house must be made safe. The dream has an uncanny resemblance to Auclair’s childhood memory of the Count’s return to his Paris home, when the gates he had never seen opened are dragged inward, and the Count appears next day wearing ‘his uniform and such big boots’, [SR, pp.18-19] terrifying the boy, who hides under the counter. Like Death coming for Count Frontenac, the Count, also, was to be Auclair’s destiny.
The mortal dreaming spreads out into the novel’s setting, the rock, the river, the sky, which Cather ‘paints’ over and over,39 in different lights and season, with all her eloquence and precision. Diffusing the literal, definite readings of childhood are the hazy, obscuring mists of the far northern city, its autumn fogs, ‘rolling vapours that were constantly changing in density and colour; now brown, now amethyst, now reddish lavender, with sometimes a glow of orange overhead where the sun was struggling behind the thick weather’, giving the feeling of ‘walking in a dream’, of ‘living in a world of twilight and miracles’. [SR, p.61] In the thaw, ‘everything grew grey like faintly smoked glass’. [SR, p.153] At sunset, there is an afterglow, ‘the slow, rich, prolonged flowing-back of crimson across the sky’, with a ‘haze’ that makes ‘the colour seem thick, like a heavy liquid’, and makes Cécile, at twilight, think yet again of miracles and martyrs. [SR, p.230] The most haunting time on the rock is All Soul’s Night, when
the shades of the early martyrs and great missionaries drew close about her. All the miracles that had happened there, and the dreams that had been dreamed, came out of the fog [and] overshadowed the living….Fears…and memories…hung over the rock of Kebec on this day of the dead like the dark fogs from the river. [SR, pp.94-5]
Haunted by her own past, just at the point where she was turning towards old age, Cather overshadows her story of childhood faith, enduring loyalty and solid rock with a hazy, mournful duskiness. It makes a muted transition from the strong works of the middle years to her late lookings back.
14
OBSCURE DESTINIES
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house…
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
Robert Frost, ‘Directive’, 1946
‘ “EVERYTHING THAT’S alive has got to suffer,” ’ says old Mrs Harris to her grandsons. The three stories Cather wrote while her mother was dying could well have been stories of pain and loss. One of them recalls the breaking-up of a friendship, one tells of the death of a Czech Nebraskan farmer during hard times, one enters into the last days of a dispossessed, indigent old woman in a troubled family. The ‘destinies’ of these mid-Western characters from almost half a century back are ‘obscure’ in the sense of being ultimately mysterious. ‘Everything here seemed strangely moving and significant’, the doctor thinks in ‘Neighbour Rosicky’, contemplating the graveyard, ‘though signifying what, he did not know’. [OD, p.70] The characters don’t know the ‘significance’ of their own destinies; what they do know, as Gray reminds us in his Elegy for ‘the humble joys and destiny obscure’ of the poor, from which Cather took her title,1 is that ‘all await alike th’inevitable hour’, that all paths ‘lead but to the grave’.
But, in fact, these are not painful or morbid stories. Cather may have had ‘Un Coeur Simple’ in mind when she wrote ‘Old Mrs Harris’, but (unlike Gertrude Stein in her American improvisation on Flaubert, Three Lives) she does not emulate Flaubert’s ‘coldness’.2 ‘Two Friends’, and even more so ‘Neighbour Rosicky’ and ‘Old Mrs Harris’, are benign stories, full of an appeasing benevolence and resignation. The ‘inevitable hour’ comes, as for the Archbishop, when it must. Up to that moment, one’s destiny is to be made the best of. It is Euclide Auclair’s stoicism again. The stories, returning to Nebraska after many years’ fictional absence, reinvoke, but more simply and quietly, the pastoral ethics of O Pioneers! and My Ántonia: the dignity of labour, and ‘the sentiment of deep-rooted, patient affection triumphing over all’.3
‘Neighbour Rosicky’ particularly embodies these sentiments, and as a result the story has been much anthologized,4 nostalgically welcomed, like the less craftily ambivalent of Robert Frost’s ‘rural’ poems, as a celebration of old-fashioned American agrarian values – immigrant hopefulness in the land of opportunity, self-help, honesty, pleasure in the everyday, domestic order, endurance, and a belief in land-ownership as better for the soul than urban wage-earning. It is ironic that the friendship in ‘Two Friends’ breaks up because one of the men becomes a supporter of Bryan’s Populism, and that political rhetoric is repudiated – as Cather felt the need to repudiate it at the start of the polemical 1930s – as destructive of true feeling. After all, the beliefs expressed in these stories still have their roots in
that mid-Western Populism for which Cather in her youth felt some sympathy. Though the memory of the pettiness and inferiority of small-town provincial life still irks her, everything really bad – sweated labour, squalid (as opposed to honourable) poverty, political agitation, dead-alive confinement – is felt to come from the big cities. The dignified central figures, ‘obscure’ but not commonplace – Rosicky, Grandma Harris, the slow, solid cattle-rancher in ‘Two Friends’, meaningfully named Trueman – stand for a moral ideal of pre-war pastoral America. To have left behind a reminder of that legacy is, as it turns out, their ‘obscure destiny’. So the stories are more than ever about memory. Cather explained to her old friend Carrie that ‘Two Friends’ was not a picture of the two men, but of her memory of them.5 And the memories of the characters themselves play in and out of these stories about remembering.
Yet, though they do turn away from the modern world (particularly ‘Two Friends’, which has a smattering of grumpy remarks about ‘today’ – motor cars, the loss of independent businessmen and the decline of the theatre), these stories have not been well served by the kind of praise that makes them sound merely escapist and reassuring. In all three, there are delicate and risky negotiations: between the solidity of the remembered figures, and their makeshift, transitory environments; between the feelings of childhood, and the feelings of age; and between the eloquent simplicity of the narrative, and the difficulty of true speech. The language of memory is not as secure as it looks: the simplest, Cather said of ‘Old Mrs Harris’, is always the most difficult.6
‘Two Friends’, though told in a calm masterful way, is about a failure of language which puts at risk the narrator’s pleasure in memory. It opens with a passage on the need for memories as ‘unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things’ which can give one ‘courage’, [OD, p.193] but this sententious-sounding dictum has become more uneasy by the end, when what needed to be kept as one of those unalterable truths has become ‘wasted’ and ‘distorted’. The story of disillusionment – of the two friends in each other, and of the narrator in their friendship – makes a discomforting paradox out of the process of remembering: how do you look back happily on what now makes you feel sad?
As a child (not sexed, but seemingly boyish like Jim Burden – he plays jacks, goes on errands and sits about the grocery store with the men in the evenings) the narrator hero-worshipped the two friends, Dillon the wealthy, clever Irish banker and store-owner, a devout family man and a Democrat, and Trueman, ten years older, the slow quiet Republican poker-playing cattleman from Buffalo. They were his ‘two aristocrats’, the outstanding men in the small town. The story moves surely between his remembered feeling for them, and their feelings for each other. This is not a simple emotion: Dillon, the more quick and articulate, given to satire, tolerates his friend’s gambling and (rumoured) womanizing, relaxations which give the heavy, melancholy rancher a kind of ‘double life’. These idiosyncrasies and reciprocities unfold as the characters are observed, always in the context of their specific environment. We register their special attributes – Dillon’s well-built store, even the sidewalk outside it more solid than anything else in that ‘flimsy’ community, the two men’s fine shirts and handkerchiefs, their excursions to the city, and above all, their conversation – as qualifications for a local reputation: ‘He was, according to our standards, a rich man’ [OD, p.195]…‘Their excursions made some of the rest of us feel less shut away and small-townish.’ [OD, p.202] They stand out from the inferior, provincial setting, she suggests, like planets in the firmament.
Cather enjoys astrological analogies, and she makes this one quite specific, even allowing the two men and the narrator to witness a transit of Venus, which portends the eclipse of their friendship. Their relationship as a planetary ‘equilibrium’, ‘like two bodies held steady by some law of balance, an unconscious relation like that between the earth and the moon’, producing a ‘mathematical harmony’ which is aesthetically pleasing to the observer, [OD, p.227] is established by the story’s insistence on order. The men’s lives are observed in a seasonal pattern, first on winter nights, playing chequers in the back office of Dillon’s store, the pattern on the board reflecting the ‘equilibrium’ of their friendship, the rings on their hands (flashier Dillon’s a diamond solitaire, stoical Trueman’s an onyx Roman soldier) shining like stars;7 then on spring and summer evenings, sitting out on the sidewalk in the office armchairs, talking. The figures stand out in the minutely remembered landscape (right down to the shape of each of the chairs) like solid ‘masses’.
At the centre of the story is a passage of strange unexpected beauty, in which the men, sitting out in the bright moonlight, seem ‘more largely and positively themselves’, and the ugly ramshackle buildings of the street are harmonized:
These abandoned buldings, an eyesore by day, melted together into a curious pile in the moonlight, became an immaterial structure of velvet-white and glossy blackness, with here and there a faint smear of blue door, or a tilted patch of sage-green that had once been a shutter. [OD, p.211]
Sound, like objects, is transfigured: the white dust on the road seems to ‘drink up the moonlight like folds of velvet’, and drinks up ‘sound, too’; all is ‘muffled’ by the dust that lay ‘like the last residuum of material things – the soft bottom resting-place’. [OD, p.212] Like Shadows on the Rock’s twilit chiaroscuro, this recalls Hawthorne’s account of the softening and estranging effects of moonlight on a familiar room. Dillon and Trueman, real and familiar in their lives, are transformed by the ‘moonlight’ of memory and imagination. Silenced, they become blocks of colour in an impressionist painting (like Lily Briscoe’s rendering of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse), part of the deep ‘soft bottom’ silence of the past. But this aesthetic harmonizing, which turns the two dead men, long turned to ‘dust’ themselves, into ‘composed’ figures in a silent landscape, does not obliterate the sounds they made. The interest of this very fine story is in the tension between silence – which we identify with memory, death, the stars, paintings – and language, which belongs to life, conflict, relationships, politics, and writing.
‘ “Careful of the language around here,” ’ [OD, p.200] Mr Trueman reprimands his poker-playing friends when they get rowdy; and carefulness of language is what, above all, distinguishes the two friends (as it distinguishes their author) from other people. Their talk is carefully contrasted: Mr Dillon has ‘such a crisp, clear enunciation, and could say things so neatly’ that ‘people would take a reprimand from him…because he put it so well’. [OD, p.205] His voice expresses the exact shade of his feeling for the person he is speaking to; his speech is never ‘perfunctory’ or ‘slovenly’. When he made a remark, it not only meant something, but sounded like something – sounded like the thing he meant.’ [OD, p.206] Trueman, by contrast, has a ‘thick’, ‘low’ voice, and is usually silent. But every so often he will tell a long story which is ‘sure to be an interesting and unusual one’. [OD, p.205] In spite of these differences, both men are admired by the listener (like Neil Herbert haughtily preferring Captain Forrester’s decorums to the Ivy Peters generation) for the superiority of their ‘conversation’ to the inarticulate slang of the young men of the town. Their formalities, like their addressing of each other by their initials, are relished. When they talk about the plays they have enjoyed on their trips to the city they ‘transfer’ their experience completely: ‘They saw the play over again as they talked of it, and perhaps whatever is seen by the narrator as he speaks is sensed by the listener, quite irrespective of words.’ [OD, p.218] The experience mimics that of the story’s reader, responding to a language that is attempting to transfer something more than words.
But this linguistic harmony is broken in on by another language. Dillon becomes an avid supporter of William Jennings Bryan after hearing the legendary ‘cross of gold’ speech, and campaigns for him locally. Trueman is disgusted by his friend’s conversion to Populism, for reasons which have everyth
ing to do with language: Bryan is a ‘windbag’ with nothing ‘back of’ his ‘tall talk’ but ‘unsound theory’. [OP, pp.220-21] The narrator agrees; initially enthusiastic, won over by Dillon’s rhetoric, he finds that Dillon’s voice changes as he gets more political, and becomes ‘unnatural’. [OD, p.223] The friendship is ‘distorted’ by the imposition of this unnatural speech. The two men lose each other (like The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, this is a chaste love story) and the narrator, like a spectator in the theatre when the curtain has closed, loses their language: ‘the old stories…the minute biographies…the clear, detailed, illuminating accounts’ and, most of all, ‘the strong, rich, out-flowing silence between two friends’, which was itself a form of language. [OD, p.226] The story remembers their dis-membered speech at a time when that very language of traditional narrative seemed to Cather to be under threat from a politically unsympathetic modernism.
‘Neighbour Rosicky’ is more consoling. As its title suggests, by sounding at once homely and foreign, the story makes a kind of translation: Cather was going back to one of the crucial subjects of My Ántonia. (Of the three stories in Obscure Destinies, this is the closest in feeling to the earlier novels, with Rosicky a rewritten version of Ántonia’s Cuzak.) Rosicky has ‘translated’ himself in several ways: from rural Czechoslovakia to London and New York, from urban to rural America, from a bachelor’s to a domestic life, and, above all, from suffering to contentment. He translates his painful past into enjoyable stories, turning memories of deep distress into fairy tales. In the end he is translated into the earth, his life ‘completed’ in a country graveyard.