by Willa Cather
During that first summer, Willa Cather had a pony; she rode it every day—widely, sometimes frantically over the prairie—and she began to know her neighbors. Neither educated aristocrats nor bourgeoisie living a genteel middle-class life, these people were hard-working farmers, many living in humble, dug-out dirt homes. Germans and Czechs and Poles and Russians and Bohemians: a polyglot people who had come from Europe to start over in Nebraska. Once she got to know them, Willa began to solicit their stories, especially the narratives that the grandmothers told—tales from across the seas and colorful accounts of family life. Although these stories were told not in the musical rhythms of Virginia, but in a halting, immigrant tongue, the old women of the Divide did much to continue the work that Mary Ann Anderson had begun; and the themes of the Nebraskan stories were often remarkably similar to those of Virginia.
After about a year, the Charles Cathers moved from Catherton into the little town of Red Cloud. Although it had only about 1,200 residents when the Cathers moved there, it did have one immense advantage: the town was on the railroad line. It had a roundhouse and railroad shops and a hotel, eventually even an “opera house” (that is, a large room over the hardware store where performances could take place). These were links with the larger world, the world of culture and ideas; and so were the various townsfolk who became Willa Cather’s friends. In Red Cloud, the girl encountered an extraordinary mixture of people, many with backgrounds of learning and cultivation that exceeded even what she might have encountered in Virginia. Mrs. Miner, the mother of Willa’s best friend, was the daughter of the oboe soloist in the Royal Norwegian Orchestra; she had attended a school founded by the Dowager Queen and was, herself, an accomplished and knowledgeable musician. “Uncle” William Drucker began to teach Willa Cather Latin in 1884 when she was not yet twelve; and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wiener, who spoke both French and German and taught her how to read French novels, were the original source for her exhaustive knowledge of French literature.
It had been a long journey and a difficult one—from post-Civil War Virginia to rural Nebraska, from Catherton to the small town of Red Cloud. However, Cather had begun to accumulate a rich store of experience as foundation for her later work.
During her adolescence and throughout her college years at the University of Nebraska (1890-95) Willa Cather began to formulate her beliefs about art: that art could render incomparable (sometimes dangerously alluring) beauty; that it could explore and disclose the complex, timeless realities of human existence; that art could organize and contain the unavoidable dangers of life, the violence and uncertainty, thus robbing them of their terror. However, by the same token, art could become a kind of trap, presenting an idealized world that cannot withstand the cold light of reality. And at length, the mature writer Willa Cather learned one more sobering lesson: that a creative life is an essentially lonely one.
From the moment performers began to come into Red Cloud and put on plays in the opera house, Willa Cather was infatuated with the stage. She enjoyed organising amateur plays with her family and friends; off the stage she cultivated a series of personae, wearing male costumes and calling herself William Cather, M.D.; she read everything she could find about the theater; and when she went to college in Lincoln, she became a devoted theatergoer (even hanging around backstage after the show to chat with the players). She was ambitious and apparently filled with self-confidence; and in her junior year of college (still one month short of being twenty) she began to sell columns to the Nebraska State Journal, eventually becoming their regular theater reviewer. Her commentaries were blunt, uncompromising, often scathing. As Will Owen Jones, the managing editor of the Journal, observed: Many an actor of national reputation wondered on coming to Lincoln what would appear next morning from the pen of the meat-ax young girl of whom all of them had heard. Miss Cather did not stand in awe of the greatest actors, but set each one in his place with all the authority of a veteran metropolitan critic.
Willa Cather wrote more than a hundred reviews in Lincoln, and all have this singular stamp of severity. However, the sternness of her criticism was balanced by her many kindnesses to actual people. She lent money to actresses who were “down on their luck”; she became a sympathetic ear for the women whose unfaithful or unscrupulous husbands and lovers had robbed them or deserted them for another woman. And this intimate, complex involvement with the theater did much to enlarge Cather’s understanding of artists and the creative process.
Surprisingly, although Willa Cather had an extraordinarily precocious intellectual beginning, she did not begin her career as a novelist until she was almost forty. Instead, she began to earn her living as a newspaper woman. By the time she had finished college, Cather was an experienced and skillful journalist; and although she never wavered in her desire to write fiction, until 1910 she had to make her living principally as a newspaper writer. Her first job was editor of the Home Monthly in Pittsburgh; next, she interrupted her newspaper work for about two years to become a high school teacher; then she began working for the Pittsburgh Leader and The Pittsburgh Gazette. Finally she moved to New York to work with the staff of McClure’s magazine from 1906 until about 1911, eventually becoming its managing editor; and she made New York her more or less permanent home. Although Cather published two books before 1910—April Twilights (1903), a volume of poetry, and The Troll Garden (1905), a superb collection of short stories —so much of her time had been committed to editing the work of others that she could not undertake a long piece of fiction. Thus at the conclusion of her stint with McClure’s, she gave up journalistic work for good.
In one way, then, Cather lost more than a decade of her creative life; in another way, however, she gained something positive from having pursued the rigorous discipline required to rework other people’s prose. The tone of Willa Cather’s earliest writing, especially the essays written while she was still in college, is florid and melodramatic; it was, by her own later admission, embarrassingly overwrought. More important, it was vastly different from the supple, subtle use of language that characterises her mature work. Today we might call Willa Cather a minimalist. She revised her fictions with painstaking care, and her revisions always took the form of removing excess verbiage to make a complex work of fiction as concentrated as possible—brief and apparently simple. Just as she expanded her notions of art and the artist during her years as theater critic and friend of travelling actresses, so she honed her skills as a writer throughout the dreary years of editing and teaching writing. It is true that Willa Cather published her first novel later than most major novelists; however, the quality of her work reveals the emotional and technical complexity she had gained from this long apprenticeship.
The stories in this volume display a wide range of Cather’s work. The earliest, “Peter,” written while she was still an undergraduate, was the first story to be published; it appeared first in a Boston magazine, The Mahogany, and later in The Hesperian, the University of Nebraska literary magazine. In some ways this is a primitive piece of fiction; however, it gathers together many of the themes that would run through her later work. Nature’s ruthlessness, the lust for commodities that debases human nature, mankind’s potential for brutality, and a passion for the beauty of art that is both tenacious and tenuous. “Peter” is significant in another way. A Bohemian farmhand named Frank Sadelek committed suicide; Cather heard an account of it from the immigrant grandmothers shortly after she arrived in Red Cloud, and the tale haunted her memory for many years. Ultimately it was transformed into fiction, becoming “Peter.” Cather often worked in this manner—finding inspiration in one or more actual events or people, transforming them, and creating fictions that bore an uncanny (but entirely ambiguous) resemblance to the original source of inspiration. She employed this technique so frequently and so subtly that readers were often inclined to mistake her fictions for realistic accounts. It’s always a combination—she would exclaim emphatically—never a literal portrait. The most striking use of this
same material clearly supports her protestations: the core elements of Francis Sadelek’s suicide lingered so persistently that more than twenty years later, it was reworked again, now to become an episode in her great novel, My Ántonia, where “Peter” became Ántonia’s father.
A fuller and more tantalizing treatment of the themes of hardship and brutality can be found in “The Profile,” a story whose imperfections are outweighed by its significance in Cather’s development. If the adversity of the Nebraskan tale was a spur to Cather’s imagination, “The Profile” makes it clear that such difficulties were not limited to the Midwestern frontier. Here, the artist Dunlap in the story is almost entirely motivated by the need to recompense the anguish of a specifically Virginia past. In part it is his pain, the mutilation inflicted by his ignorant, uncaring grandfather; to an even greater extent, however, it is the pain that has been endured by the women he has known:Dunlap had come from a country where women are hardly used. He had grown up on a farm in the remote mountains of West Virginia, and his mother had died of pneumonia contracted from taking her place at the washtub too soon after the birth of a child. When a boy, he had been apprenticed to his grandfather, a country cobbler, who, in his drunken rages, used to beat his wife with odd strips of shoe leather. The painter’s hands still bore the mark of that apprenticeship, and the suffering of the mountain women he had seen about him in his childhood had left him almost morbidly sensitive.
Dunlap’s response to his harrowing ordeal has been to reward every woman he paints with some essential core of beauty. In short, his art becomes compensation or atonement for the suffering of all women; and in serving this end, the aesthetic and emotional power of his portraiture has been compromised. His renderings are merely pretty, never great. And his encounter with Virginia, the disfigured woman he marries, becomes a tragic test of this artistic decision. In this tale, Cather clearly intends her reader to have the work of other writers in mind, especially Hawthorne, whose stories “The Birthmark” and “The Artist of the Beautiful” raise many of the same issues.
Cather was knowledgeable about the visual arts, and her fictions are replete with references to them. Thus a reader should not overlook the painting Circe’s Swine that opens this narrative, nor dismiss the various reactions to it. It is a “freakish” image of mankind, just as Virginia’s scar is a freak of nature. What, Cather asks, is the scar? the freakishness? Indeed, are we justified in seeing such things as “freaks” or deviations from nature? Is it ever wise so casually to turn away from whatever these blemishes represent? In the end, what are we to make of the series of decisions that Dunlap has made?
“The Joy of Nelly Deane,” which treats the tragic destiny of women more directly, also reveals Cather’s abiding interest in mythology. It opens with a scene explicitly designed to suggest the Three Fates, here personified by Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny. Guy Franklin’s mercenary marriage suggests one source for the tragedy of Nelly’s life. The character of Scott Spinny suggests another. With a “grim and saturnine” body, a “bearded face,” and “strong, cold hands,” his image recalls the god of the Underworld, and Nelly’s marriage to him is surely like some voyage into Hades. However, unlike Persephone, Nelly has no Demeter to rescue her. Indeed, wherein, one might ask, is her “joy”?
Surely, one is inclined to protest, the radiant vitality and beauty of a Nelly Deane ought not to have perished so soon and so needlessly. The introduction of Queen Esther suggests the possibility of an alternative fate, a prospect of regal strength and powerful influence. Yet insofar as Nelly is “fated” to such a short and sorrowful life, can we find a cause for the tragedy? Who or what is to blame? (Or is it simply futile to raise the question of “blame”?) Cather refuses to resolve the various forces she has presented or to provide an answer to the questions a reader might ask. Much later in her career, Willa Cather returned to the essential material of this short story and reworked it into a full-length novel, Lucy Gayheart. In the novel, the issues are more complex; however, there is still no “reason” given for the ultimate fate of the characters.
“Behind the Singer Tower” is uncharacteristic of Cather’s work because it seems to partake of the “muck-raking” school of writing (for which McClure’s had been famous) and to focus narrowly and rather specifically on the need for social reform; it may even have been inspired by a disastrous fire in New York’s Triangle Shirt Waist Company in 1911, for it was written while McClure’s Magazine was running a series of articles on the crucial need for fire escapes in New York City’s multistoried buildings. Nonetheless, this narrative has a number of elements that mark it as distinctively Catherian. Perhaps most obvious is Cather’s mistrust of engineers, a dislike for their arrogance and their indifference to the needs of humanity. In this respect, “Behind the Singer Tower” anticipates Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge; even more, perhaps, it looks forward to the complex character of Louis Marcellus in The Professor’s House. Next, there is the bleak vision of a money-hungry society, infatuated with commodities and accelerating into tragedy. Finally, and perhaps most important, there is the deflation of the phallic imagery; this symbol, embodied not merely in the Singer Tower but in the entire skyline of New York, reflects the engineer’s overweaning pride and the businessman’s lust for money and power. Later, in novels like O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Cather would elaborate a semiotic system of female complexity and power that became the creative alternative to the cold, cruel dominance of the phallic ambition represented here.
“The Enchanted Bluff” is perhaps the most appealing of the “Uncollected Stories” here (and readers who are familiar with The Professor’s House will recognize the tale as a prelude to that novel). It may remind us of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn; nor is this association inappropriate, for Willa Cather was both an acquaintance of Mark Twain’s and a great admirer of his work. Here, as in “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” we can see youthful dreams that remain unfulfilled; and in this story, it is perhaps the touching innocence of the Sandtown boys that makes the compromises of their adult lives seem so poignant. And yet it is a “bluff” they are seeking, and an “enchanted” one at that. Are we to infer, then, that all such dreams are, by their very nature, elusive—forever beyond our grasp?
The publication history of Youth and the Bright Medusa is interesting. During the Christmas season of 1919, Willa Cather wrote a story just to please herself—that is, not one that had been commissioned by a magazine—and the result was “Coming, Aphrodite!” One of her very best short tales, this little narrative seems to have pleased her a great deal, and she decided to fashion a collection of stories that would put “Coming, Aphrodite!” into a congenial setting. Alfred Knopf, who had just become her publisher, had been urging her to reissue her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden. Instead, she suggested, why not excerpt several stories from the earlier collection and combine them with more recent work to make a volume that dealt entirely with art and the artist. Mr. Knopf was delighted with her idea, and the result was Youth and the Bright Medusa.
Before discussing the stories, we might pause to think about the title. Medusa, in Greek mythology, was one of the Gorgons, three once-beautiful sisters whose hair had been turned into snakes and whose eyes would turn an onlooker into stone. The Gorgons represented both great danger and the opportunity for great heroism. Ultimately, Perseus, a son of Zeus, slew Medusa by looking not at the creature herself but at her reflection in the burnished back of his shield. Later, he presented the head of Medusa to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, fertility, handicrafts, and judicious warfare. We might wonder what it tells the reader about art (the organising “subject” of this collection) that Cather has introduced this figure of Medusa. Why is she “Bright”? Why does Cather stipulate her connection with “Youth”? (And in connection with these queries, we might remember that Cather’s first collection of short stories—also largely about art and the artist—had also been given a tantalizingly ambiguous title, The Troll Garde
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In this collection, the last four stories are drawn from The Troll Garden, and to some extent they reflect Cather’s earliest concerns as a serious author, the anxieties of a gifted woman who had only recently left the harsh plains and come to the city to write (for although the collection was published in 1905, all the stories in it were written between 1901 and 1903). Willa Cather’s genius had been her salvation, a passport from nowhere to a world of art and music and serious thought. Yet at the beginning of her career, Cather’s letters reveal her uneasiness about the fact that the very success that had brought happiness to her life had also fundamentally separated her from the rest of her family. “I have less and less in common with the folks at Red Cloud,” she had written to a friend. And until she devised some way to bridge this gap (as she did in her later years), she would continue to feel the pain of this separation.
Her uneasiness is announced even on the volume’s opening page: Cather cites two quotations that amplify the title. The first is from a poem, “Goblin Market,” by Christina Rossetti: “We must not look at Goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits; / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry, thirsty roots?” The second is from a lecture entitled “The Roman and the Teuton,” by Charles Kingsley: “A fairy palace, with a fairy garden: ... Inside the trolls dwell . . . working at their magic forges, making and making always things rare and strange.” The quotation from Kingsley’s lecture suggests both Cather’s own sense of isolation and, more broadly, the unavoidable division between an artist and those who cannot understand the creative act. Kingsley’s lectures told of the invasion of Rome by the barbarians: the Romans are the artisans of civilization while the forest people, those outside the garden, are both wonder-struck and envious at the artisans’ creations. Eventually, they break in and overrun the garden, only to find that they cannot rebuild what they have demolished. Rossetti suggests a different perspective. The poem as a whole deals with two sisters, one of whom is lured out of their cottage into a sinister glen where animalistic goblins sell their luscious but forbidden fruit; eventually, she succumbs and tastes the fruit. Immediately, she falls into physical decline and grows prematurely old; far from being satisfied, once having tasted the fruit, she longs for more, and only the love of her sister can save her. The implications of these introductory quotations are various, and they have been the subject of a good deal of critical investigation; but we might make a few brief observations.