Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  The potential for sentimentality is kept under control by a very careful language. The narrative is always reminding us of the need for true speech, accurate translation. Rosicky, a man of delicate manners, is careful to speak American for the doctor and for his American daughter-in-law, and his speech is rendered phonetically (more so than the Czech-American speech in O Pioneers! or My Ántonia) as foreign speech. Putting things into words is a challenge to him: his preferred communication is the dialogue of unspoken agreements and assumptions he has with his wife, and his friendship with his horses, in which he finds ‘his way of expressing what he felt’. [OD p.61] His body speaks its own language of history and character, the thickened nail of his right hand, for instance, telling of his past as a tailor. Mary silently reads his face for signs of the ‘heart’ the doctor has diagnosed; his daughter-in-law Polly, at first unwilling to ‘read’ the foreign family she has married into, but drawn to Rosicky through kindness, responds, after nursing him through his first heart attack, to the language of his hand, ‘so alive and quick and light in its communication’.

  It seemed to her that she had never learned so much about life from anything as from old Rosicky’s hand. It brought her to herself; it communicated some direct and untranslatable message. [OD, p.67]

  It is the narrator’s job to communicate in words the ‘direct and untranslatable message’ of that hand. Like Dillon, Rosicky ‘sounds like the thing he meant’; the translation has to be true to that original.

  It was a nice graveyard, Rosicky reflected, sort of snug and homelike, not cramped or mournful, – a big sweep all round it. A man could lie down in the long grass and see the complete arch of the sky over him, hear the wagons go by; in summer the mowing-machine rattled right up to the wire fence. And it was so near home. Over there across the cornstalks his own roof and windmill looked so good to him that he promised himself to mind the Doctor and take care of himself. He was awful fond of his place, he admitted. He wasn’t anxious to leave it. And it was a comfort to think that he would never have to go farther than the edge of his own hayfield. The snow, falling over his barnyard and the graveyard, seemed to draw things together like. And they were all old neighbours in the graveyard, most of them friends; there was nothing to feel awkward or embarrassed about….

  Well, it was a nice snowstorm; a fine sight to see the snow falling so quietly and graciously over so much open country. On his cap and shoulders, on the horses’ backs and manes, light, delicate, mysterious it fell; and with it a dry cool fragrance was released into the air. It meant rest for vegetation and men and beasts, for the ground itself; a season of long nights for sleep, leisurely breakfasts, peace by the fire. This and much more went through Rosicky’s mind, but he merely told himself that winter was coming, clucked to his horses, and drove on. [OD, pp.18–19]

  The passage is deeply rooted in layers of personal feeling and traditions of pastoral writing. Rosicky’s own language (‘nice’, ‘sort of snug’, ‘looked so good’, ‘take care of himself’, ‘awful fond’, ‘draw things together like’, ‘all old neighbours’) is easily woven into the slow Biblical rhythms of the whole sequence (‘A man could lie down’…‘And it was so near home’…‘And it was a comfort’…‘And they were all old neighbours’) which builds up, in a ‘big sweep’, towards the quiet climax of the snow, when it moves, as from earth to air, into more lyrical measures (‘light, delicate, mysterious, it fell’) before coming back to, and closing with, the mortal rhythms of Rosicky and his wagon-horses.

  Cather’s genius, as strongly felt here as anywhere in her work, makes a simple language, as close as possible to Rosicky’s, out of a controlled, experienced craftsmanship. Other voices are invoked (Ecclesiastes, Virgil, Housman, Frost),8 but they are as deeply buried as the inhabitants of Rosicky’s graveyard. The rhythm is brilliantly, and discreetly, manipulated.9 But she ‘draws things together’ so that technical skill and literary resonances seem ‘merely’ natural.

  Rosicky likes the graveyard because it is ‘snug’ and homely (the comedy of his not wanting to be embarrassed in the grave is nicely done) and belongs to the seasonal order of his life. At the same time it is out in space, ‘open country’. That pastoral reconciling of contradictions – the homely with the spacious – is, throughout the story, set against the confinement of the ‘cities of the dead’ [OD, p.71] which nearly buries Rosicky alive. There is nothing else in Cather quite like Rosicky’s memories of his appalling destitution in London,10 and of his years working for a tailor’s shop in New York. This is not the cultured New York of Eden Bower or Myra Henshawe. Young Rosicky, sharing his loft over a furniture factory in Vesey Street with a Czech cabinet-maker who plays the flute in the evenings, or sitting in Park Place on a hot Fourth of July afternoon, surrounded by the ‘blank buildings’ of the business district, all empty ‘like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops’, belongs to the American urban half-life, part grotesque, part nightmarish, of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. It has its own energy – there is something attractive about that loft, with the sea winds blowing into it, and about Rosicky’s attempts to domesticate and cheer up his life as a wage-earner. But ‘real’ domesticity can only be found, according to the story’s agrarian bias, and the tradition of pastoral writing, in the country home – and the country graveyard.

  Rosicky’s domesticity is feminine. In his youth in New York, he and the Czech cabinet-maker are like a ‘bridal pair’; in Nebraska, he and Mary make a partnership which she thinks of, for all their hard life, as essentially ‘gentle’ and ‘soft’. [OD, p.24] All through the story, food and plants and domestic objects are identified with life-warmth: breakfasts cooked for the doctor on the days Mary gives birth, a special cake baked for Rosicky on the day he learns about his weak heart, Mary’s geraniums kept blooming all winter indoors, a feather quilt in the making for Polly (a soft place, eventually, for Rosicky’s first grandchild). Rosicky participates in this female world, buying the ‘ticking’ for Mary’s pillows and quilts, washing the dishes for Polly, sitting in the kitchen corner sewing. He stitches the story of his past into the present, just as Mary takes out her darning in order to talk about their life together. Rosicky is not emasculated: he is a tough old survivor of hard times. But because of his double history as a tailor-farmer, his easygoing unassertive character which makes the best of ‘what we got’, his illness, and above all his capacity for ‘loving people’, he is tender and gentle, lending his presiding spirit, like a minor deity, to this exceptionally gentle story.

  ‘Old Mrs Harris’ is less gentle and more problematic. But it too places unheroic female qualities at its centre. Of course, Cather had had domestic female life before in the corners of her fictions. But until this long story (for which the original title was ‘Three Women’)11 it had not been at the centre. The story begins with a woman, ‘cross-stitch in hand’, looking out of her kitchen window across to her neighbour’s yard, impatiently waiting for the mother of the house to go out so that she can rush across with her coffee-cake and talk to the grandmother on her own. The opening takes us into a complicated ‘cross-stitching’ of women’s daily lives, women’s work and women’s preoccupations. The men are in the background. At the centre of the story are three women admiring a baby; not a spiritualized stand-in for the Infant Jesus, but an extremely human baby:

  She reappeared with the baby, who was not crying, exactly, but making eager, passionate, gasping entreaties – faster and faster, tenser and tenser, as he felt his dinner nearer and nearer and yet not his….The baby fell to work so fiercely that beads of sweat came out all over his flushed forehead….When he was changed to the other side, Hughie resented the interruption a little; but after a time he became soft and bland, as smooth as oil, indeed; began looking about him as he drew in his milk. He finally dropped the nipple from his lips altogether, turned on his mother’s arm, and looked inquiringly at Mrs Rosen. [OD, pp.115–16]12

  In its everyday realism, ‘Old Mrs Harris’ is m
ore directly autobiographical than most of Cather’s writing, and is always used as a literal source-book for the life. (If you go to the ‘Cather childhood home’, taped quotations from ‘Old Mrs Harris’ illustrate the visit.) Certainly she made few factual changes. Grandma Harris/Grandma Boak has followed her married daughter Victoria Templeton/Jennie Cather from Tennessee, not Virginia, and she falls ill at the same time that her granddaughter Vickie/Willa goes to college. (In fact she died after Cather left home.) Hillary Templeton/Charles Cather is working for an irrigation project, not a loans and insurance office. Vickie has no sisters, only little twin brothers and baby Hughie. Her ambition is to study fossils at Ann Arbor, and the money needed for her university place is raised by Grandma Harris, who secretly persuades the Rosens to lend it to the Templetons. (In fact Charles Cather borrowed the money from a business associate.)13 But in essence it is the story of Willa Cather’s life in about 1889,14 and gives off that peculiarly intimate, even painful quality of early life closely remembered, as in The Mill on the Floss or David Copperfield. The Southern family gone West are her family: the long-suffering, indispensable grandmother, the demanding, attractive mother, an ex-Southern ‘belle’, the weak charming father, the difficult, clever older daughter, the jolly little boys (endearingly recalled) and the servant girl, all living together in a small rented house, and having to adapt to the ‘snappy little democracy’ of ‘Skyline’. The cultured Jewish Rosen family next door are versions of the Wieners, Willa’s refuge from her own family in Red Cloud; and the other nosy and philistine neighbours (an equivocal word for Cather) evoke the ‘stupid faces’ of The Song of the Lark.

  But to use ‘Old Mrs Harris’ only as biographical evidence is to do a damaging injustice to this extremely beautiful long story, Cather’s last great work. Though there is no sexual disguise, as with Jim Burden, or fictional displacement, as with Thea’s singing, ‘Old Mrs Harris’ makes an extraordinary imaginative leap. Cather does not only go back into her own feelings as a fifteen-year-old – in fact for most of the story Vickie is seen from the outside, somewhat coolly, by Mrs Rosen – but into the feelings of the three older women who surrounded her, in which, at the time, she had little imaginative interest. Mrs Rosen’s spirited mixture of impatient dislike at the Templetons’ habits and culture, mixed with attraction to their humanness, gives a lively energetic central focus; and the grandmother is one of Cather’s most impressive and sympathetic figures. But the truly surprising empathy is, at last, with Cather’s mother. Handsome Victoria’s spoilt high-handedness with her family and neighbours, her jealousy of favours done to anyone else in the house, her lack of sympathy for her mother and her daughter, all repel us (as Mrs Rosen is repelled). But Mrs Rosen also has to warm, as we do, to Victoria’s generous energy – laughing in a snow-storm, nursing the baby. Very late on, we are allowed inside Victoria’s feelings, at the point when she has discovered she is pregnant again, and her energy erupts as fury and disappointment:

  Now and then Victoria sat upright on the edge of the bed, beat her hands together softly and looked desperately at the ceiling, then about at those frail, confining walls. If only she could meet the situation with violence, fight it, conquer it! But there was nothing for it but stupid animal patience.

  …She was still young, and she was still handsome; why must she be for ever shut up in a little cluttered house with children and fresh babies and an old woman and a stupid bound girl and a husband who wasn’t very successful? Life hadn’t brought her what she expected when she married Hillary Templeton; life hadn’t used her right. She had tried to keep up appearances, to dress well with very little to do it on, to keep young for her husband and children. She had tried, she had tried! Mrs Templeton buried her face in the pillow and smothered the sobs that shook the bed. [OD, pp.177–9]

  The moment is not allowed to dominate; we move away from it, as the cool narrative strategy, imitating life’s indifference, turns to other centres of feeling. But its loud crying noise, ‘smothered’ in the quiet narrative, makes a violent protest against ‘confinement’ in all senses of the word. The paradox of ‘Old Mrs Harris’ is that frustration and confinement are its subject, yet its effect is of largeness.

  From the moment Mrs Rosen looks out of her kitchen window across to her neighbour’s yard, we move through narrow frames of doors and windows into circumscribed corners, limited spaces, makeshift interiors. Characters are framed in doorways, glimpsed through them, as in Dutch paintings, washing or reading. They look out for each other covertly, like Mrs Harris watching for Mr Templeton out of the kitchen window so that she can catch him alone. The interiors of the Templeton house feel scrappy and provisional, but none the less confining for that. The door at which Mrs Harris directs a sad look is ‘flimsy’, made of cheap ‘factory’ wood; [OD, p.163] the walls that keep in Victoria are ‘frail’, and are not sound-proof. Mrs Harris inhabits a makeshift space, more a ‘passageway’ than a room, cluttered with awkward objects. Everything is improvised, substituted; the table is covered with junk and ‘too far away from her corner’ [OD, p.89] to be used; a box covered with an oilcloth serves as a washstand, a corner hidden by a cheap cotton curtain makes a clothes-cupboard, and a splint-bottom chair with sawn-off legs alternates as a place to put a tea-tray, a work-basket, or a child. Grandmother’s bed has no springs, only a thin cotton mattress and wooden slats. Her night-time ‘comforter’ is a torn cast-off sweater, given to her by Mrs Rosen. She covers her bed up in the daytime and keeps her towel on its ‘special nail behind the curtain’, her soap in ‘a tin tobacco-box’. ‘Mrs Harris and her “things” were almost required to be invisible.’ [OD, p.98] When she falls ill, Albert, one of the twins, tries to rearrange her room so that it looks more like a sick-room: he brings down a wooden cracker-box and covers it with a napkin, relaces her tin cup with a glass tumbler, and gives her one of his Sunday-school linen handkerchiefs. These would-be consolatory childish improvisations pitifully bring home the meagreness of what is ‘hers’. Other spaces in the house are confined and improvised too: Vickie’s attic, ‘not much bigger than a closet’, [OD, p.91] the messy yard with its ragged ditch which, the little boys explain to the disapproving Mrs Rosen, they like to use ‘for building bridges over.’ [OD, p.119] Only the parlour, with its Brussels carpet and Protestant paintings, is ‘neat and comfortable’. [OD, p.114]

  It’s not only the layout of the house that embodies the confinement of the three generations of women. So does the time scheme of the story (confined to one hot summer, though the characters range about in time in their minds) and, even, its placing inside a volume of three stories, which gives it the same kind of modest obscurity as its central character. (If ‘Old Mrs Harris’ had been published separately, as a novella the same length as My Mortal Enemy, it would have attracted much more attention.)15 But this female narrative is placed ‘inside’ in every sense. There are hardly any outdoor scenes. When there is a move out, to the Methodist lawn party at the Roadmaster’s house, the family is confined again, in a tent full of gossipy neighbours. Only the Rosens, on their way to the ‘social’, catch sight of a freer space (‘High above, the rustling tree-tops stirred free in the flood of moonlight’). But then philosophical Mr Rosen (like the nuns in Shadows on the Rock) has his own interior space: ‘He carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness’. [OD, p.121] For the women, such interior space is harder to come by.

  Mr Rosen’s freer space is largely cultural, and it’s that space Vickie longs to go out into. Her journeys across the yard into Mrs Rosen’s much more elegant and stylish domain are crude, early attempts to translate herself into a different element. Her greedy awkward half-comprehending forays into Mr Rosen’s collection of German Romantics – Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein (selected, perhaps, for its insistence on character as destiny), Faust, Wilhelm Meister – her admiration of Mrs Rosen’s Italianate opera-cloak, her responsiveness to the quotation from Michelet that Mr Rosen
gives her as a lucky charm (‘Le but n’est rien; le chemin, c’est tout’) move her towards the possibility of placing herself in a wider, liberating, flexible history of thought.

  Vickie is pleased with herself because her liking for Mrs Rosen’s house does not make her dissatisfied with her own. This contradictory touch (she is, of course, intensely dissatisfied as well) points to Cather’s careful ‘cross-stitching’. She does not write off Vickie’s home culture: Mrs Harris’s readings to the children of Tom Sawyer and The Pilgrim’s Progress provide as much interior space, in their way, as Schiller and Goethe. And the cultural complexity of the Templeton family, their elaborate feudal and chivalric Southern traditions, in which the older women have positions of power in their daughters’ houses, brought up short against small-town Western egalitarianism, are acutely examined. As social history, ‘Old Mrs Harris’ is one of Cather’s most exact, specific works.

  But the cross-currents reach down to more obscure places than cultural or social oppositions. The story’s resemblance to Cather’s famous essay on Katherine Mansfield16 has often been noticed. The Templeton family acts out the drama which Cather describes in that essay between the group life and the individual self. This is intensely felt in every detail of the interior scenes, especially in the moment of re-joining, when Mrs Harris forgets about her painful feet and lonely nights as the children come running down for breakfast and ‘she ceased to be an individual’ and became ‘part of a relationship’, [OD, p.136] or, less happily, when Vickie has to join the family dinner table after her father has told her he can’t afford to pay for her university place, and ‘everyone could see she had been crying’. [OD, p.162] The house’s thinly separated spaces mimic the ironic interplay between the self-absorbed characters (Victoria, Vickie, Mr Templeton) and the watchers (Mandy, Mrs Harris, and outside, Mrs Rosen). ‘ “What were families for, anyway?” ’ Vickie asks herself, furiously resentful of both her mothers having ‘gone and got sick’ when she is getting ready to leave. The comically brutal question is remorsefully answered by the story. Families are ‘for’ this painful clash between the self and the group.