by Hermione Lee
Julio seems to have been, for Cather, a primitive version of Ethelbert Nevin, a delicate, youthful male artist, a source of ‘real’ folklore, but unlike Nevin a figure perfectly in tune with his landscape. O’Brien describes it as ‘a love affair’,6 which seems excessive. Cather’s romantic holiday feeling about Julio was part of a new, welcome, liberating sense that she was coming back to life in an inspiring American landscape.
The 1912 journey plays as vital a part in her writing as the transition from Virginia to Nebraska. How much of it she saved up! The whole experience would be given to Thea in The Song of the Lark, and Tooker would return as Thea’s faithful railroad man Ray Kennedy and, in a later version, as Roddy Blake in The Professor’s House. Douglass’s tough colleagues would be remembered for Captain Forrester, old hero of the railroads, in A Lost Lady. The priest in his garden would come back as the central subject of Death Comes For the Archbishop. And the cliff-dwellings, silent lessons in the creation of communal, functioning, domestic art forms, would be at the heart of The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House. She had found, just at the point when her new life as a writer was about to begin, a landscape which needed a new writing. Interestingly, though, the effect was not direct. At the end of the summer, indeed, she felt she had to retreat:7 the desert was intoxicating, but she was afraid of being consumed by it. Though traces of the journey do come into O Pioneers!, the immediate result was not a story of the Southwest, but a sudden sense of how to deal with her Nebraskan materials, as though she had at last found the necessary perspective on them.
By the time she was back in Pittsburgh in the autumn, staying with Isabelle on her way back East, she was combining the stories she had been writing, ‘Alexandra’ and ‘The White Mulberry Tree’, into what she revealingly calls ‘a two-part pastoral’.8 It was now, she suddenly realized, not a collection of stories, but a novel in which she lets the country ‘be’ the hero – or the heroine.9 She has done what Dvořák did in the Largo of the New World Symphony, she says, remembering her early music criticism, taken the little themes that were hiding in the long grass and worked them out. It is an image of disclosure and enfranchisement which reflects her own ‘working out’ of what she wants to do. And by calling the writing a pastoral she makes it clear that it belonged as much to a historical tradition as to her own autobiography.
O Pioneers! was published in 1913 with a title page which pays homage to a careful selection of forerunners. The title quotes Whitman, the male bard appropriating the classical epic to celebrate the American victory over the wilderness. The dedication is to Sarah Orne Jewett for the ‘perfection that endures’ of her ‘beautiful and delicate work’, terms suggesting a combination of courageous stoicism and fine, detailed perceptions. There are two epigraphs, Cather’s own poem ‘Prairie Spring’, written that summer in Red Cloud, which sets the heavy, silent, sullen earth against the rapturous desires of ‘youth’, and a quotation from the great exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s nationalistic epic of his lost land, Pan Tadeusz, an exclamation on ‘the fields colored by various grains’. Not for the last time (The Song of the Lark would lift its title from Jules Breton’s sentimental French rural painting, My Ántonia’s epigraph would be a regretful line from Virgil’s Georgics) Cather deliberately frames an apparently simple, unsophisticated narrative inside the paradoxical tradition of pastoral.
The doubleness of pastoral is as old as the form. Like Cather, the classical writers who influenced her, Theocritus and Virgil, were neither of them actually down on the farm when they were writing about crops and shepherds (though Virgil, like Cather, carried the rural memories of his childhood with him). Pastoral has always been liable to accusations of absenteeism, artificiality and insincerity. Johnson’s attack on the conventions of Milton’s Lycidas - what did all these river gods and shepherdesses have to do with real grief? – would resurface in nineteenth-century America as an anxiety about truthfulness and relevance: what could the pastoral dreams of the New World have to do with the machine age? The debate over pastoral is extraordinarily persistent and recognizable. Boileau, in the poem L’Art Poétique of 1674, could as well be describing Cather’s Nebraskan novels: ‘The artlessness of the pastoral is a matter of artistry; its humble simplicity is not the effect of negligence but the product of an elaborate and deliberate craftsmanship.’10
The relationship between ‘humble simplicity’ and ‘deliberate craftsmanship’ is necessarily a duplicitous one. Pastoral has never been written by shepherds. William Empson distinguishes it succinctly from other folk literature in its relation to ‘the people’: ‘Most fairy stories and ballads, though “by” or “for”, are not “about”; whereas pastoral though “about” is not “by” or “for”.’11 And if it is not written by shepherds, more often than not its characters don’t talk much like shepherds, either. ‘Humble’ folk speaking in beautifully polished hexameters led to fierce arguments over decorum versus realism, classicism versus naturalism, an argument all pastoral writers have to resolve one way or another. Cather deliberately plays down the representation of dialect or immigrant speech: on the whole she doesn’t want a grotesque, potentially satirical literalism. But the relation of the ‘deliberate’ craftsman to the ‘humble’ material is a political, not just a technical matter. Empson points out that in one modern re-enactment of pastoral, the proletarian novel, there is always a doubleness in ‘the attitude of the artist to the worker, of the complex man to the simple one (“I am in one way better, in another not so good”)’.12 Jim Burden’s feeling for Ántonia expresses this ambiguity.
The doubleness is partly a tension between belonging and not belonging. From the start, the writer of the pastoral, half identifying with the rural scene he evokes, half looking away from it to the world outside, has been an equivocal figure, a temporary resident, like Virgil saying farewell at the end of his Eclogues, self-consciously detaching himself from Arcadia.13
The sadness of leave-taking links classical and modern pastoral. Once the gods went into exile and the pagan pastoral became Christian, Arcadia was identified with Eden, the lost garden; and increasingly, the pastoral place was the place you had to leave. The apple was eaten, the golden bowl was broken, and the nymphs were departed. That famous phrase of seventeenth-century pastoral painting, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’,14 gradually changed its sense, in later interpretations, from the stern warning of the death’s head (‘Even I, Death, am in Arcady’) to the wistful rememberings of the exiled humans (‘I too was once in Arcady’). No modern writer of pastoral could possibly avoid these contradictions and anxieties. Post-romantic American pastorals are full of temporary residents – Thoreau in Walden, Hawthorne in The Blithedale Romance, Cather’s revenants (Carl in O Pioneers!, Jim in My Ántonia) in her Nebraskan pastorals – re-enacting Virgilian mixed feelings.
Those mixed feelings were not just to do with the writer’s equivocal position on the edge of his landscape. They bore on the pastoral scene itself. What was that landscape: primitive or idyllic, wintry or summery, hard or soft? If Arcadia was an image of the ‘golden age’ – a garden, a bower, an oasis where you could live outdoors in perfect sympathy with nature, playing your flute while apples dropped into your lap, your sheep grazed safely and the ox lay down with the lion – then pastoral writing was bound to be a lament for ‘the great good place and the good old days’.15 Arcadia as a fixed unchanging idyll would then be the opposite of the ‘real’ world, subject to time and decay. The theme of contrast is persistent, from Tasso’s lament in Aminta:
Il mondo invecchia,
E invecchiando intristisce
(‘The world grows old, and, growing old, grows sad’), to the more ambivalent comparisons between the ‘cold pastoral’ and the mortal world in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn and Wallace Stevens’s Sunday Morning. In this version, pastoral writing has to be about an imagined or a vanished place: Poland’s lamented national past in Pan Tadeusz, a changing English rural society in Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss. By
an easy leap, the idea of the lost youth of the world could be turned into a lament for the writer’s own lost youth: ‘So sad, so sweet, the days that are no more’. Jim Burden, contemplating the scenes of his own childhood once he has left them, places himself carefully in this tradition of ‘golden age’ pastoral by invoking Virgil’s ‘Optima dies…prima fugit’: ‘In the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee’. [MA, pp.261–2]
The dangers of pastoral as nostalgia are obvious.16 A preference for past days combined with the idealization of rural life can be perniciously used, as Leo Marx points out, tracing the pastoral idea through American thought, ‘in the service of a reactionary or false ideology’.17 Cather is not exempt from this criticism, especially in her later years. But in the Nebraskan novels she sustains the complexity by not settling, merely, for the nostalgic model of pastoral.
In any case, nostalgic, ‘golden age’ pastoralism is bound to be problematic. How could there have been suffering in the ‘best days’? Yet our main associations with pastoral poetry are the funeral elegy (the brother poet as dead shepherd) and the lament for a lost love. The initial, true meaning of ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ is an ominous one: Arcadia has always encompassed human suffering and death. The very first of Virgil’s Eclogues is about a shepherd who is being driven off his land into exile. And the ‘real’ Arcadia, a barren district of central Greece, described by Polybius as ‘a poor, bare, rocky, chilly country, devoid of all the amenities of life and scarcely affording food for a few meagre goats’,18 was no more idyllic or easy to farm than Nebraska in the 1870s.
There have always been two kinds of pastoral. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they split apart into what is often called ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ pastoral.19 ‘Soft’ pastoral is a romance, a dream of celebration, carnival, song and love: guiltless, prelapsarian gratification, innocent hedonism, to which tender feelings of nostalgia are attached. But soft pastoral has the death’s head within it. It can be elegiac as well as idyllic, a pastoral of melancholy or solitude as well as love. In As You Like It, Jaques and Orlando co-exist in the Forest of Arden. The other kind of pastoral admits that rural life is ‘hard’; it is a realist narrative of labour and endurance. In the Georgics we don’t hear of singing competitions or fond lovers, we learn how to rotate crops and keep bees. The golden age is recalled as an idyllic, vanished period of harmony between man and nature. That was all very well; but the iron age, in which this ‘realistic’ pastoral is set, has taught people how to work, ‘to make boats, to hunt, to fish and to build’. ‘Labor omnia vicit’, ‘Toil conquered the world’. Gardens have had to be made, they don’t spring up naturally. The dignity of labour is embodied in an old man tending his garden – an ‘obscure destiny’ who could easily make a character in a Cather novel – at the end of the Georgics:
I saw an old man, a Corycian, who owned a few poor acres
Of land once derelict, useless for arable,
No good for grazing, unfit for the cultivation of vines.
But he laid out a kitchen garden in rows amid the brushwood,
Bordering it with white lilies, verbena, small-seeded poppy.
He was happy there as a king. He could go indoors at night
To a table heaped with dainties he never had to buy.
His the first rose of spring, the earliest apples in autumn:
And when grim winter still was splitting the rocks with cold
And holding the watercourses with curb of ice, already
That man would be cutting his soft-haired hyacinths, complaining
Of summer’s backwardness and the west winds slow to come…
He had a gift, too, for transplanting in rows the far-grown elm,
The hardwood pear, the blackthorn bearing its weight of sloes,
And the plane that already offered a pleasant shade for drinking.20
There is a quiet, contemplative tenderness in this21 which makes the old man’s busy-ness feel heroic and dignified, and manages to blend the idyllic with the realistic, to reconcile the soft and the hard pastoral. Like his later epic writing, Virgil’s pastoral is weighted with the sense of ‘the tears there are in things’: ‘sunt lacrimae rerum’. It was that tone which attracted Cather22 to Virgil and to the pastoral writers – Robert Burns, Turgenev, Sarah Orne Jewett, George Eliot, Housman, Robert Frost – who found, in their quite different contexts, Virgilian ways of reconciling rural hardship and suffering with a tender retrospect on lost youth, with a celebration of dignified human endeavour, or with what Hazlitt, writing on Burns and the old Scottish ballads, calls ‘the sentiment of deep-rooted, patient affection’ triumphing over all.23
This tone of reconciliation was not usual in twentieth-century American fiction, and it is one of Cather’s extraordinary qualities that she was able to use it so unembarrassedly. The myth of pastoral, as Leo Marx points out, was deeply involved with the American dream of a new golden age in the New World; politically, it provided a blueprint for expansionism and development, and hence it was a peculiarly persistent ideal: ‘Down to the twentieth century the imagination of Americans was dominated by the idea of transforming the wild heartland into…a new “Garden of the World”.’24 Long after the ideal had been violently distorted and invaded by the ‘counterforce’ of technology and mechanization, the pastoral myth of hopefulness and amelioration lingered on as a sentimental rhetorical formula, ‘enabling the nation to continue defining its purpose as the pursuit of rural happiness while devoting itself to productivity, wealth, and power’.25 So from the early nineteenth century, pastoral in American writing was fraught with irony. The pastoral retreat in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance is mere childish escapism; Thoreau’s communion with nature in Walden has a train rushing through it (‘So is your pastoral life whirled past and away’),26 and his neighbouring ‘husbandmen’ are mean, capitalist Yankees. By Cather’s time the good green place was either an absurd unreality (as for Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts), a bitter realist environment of brute force and struggle, or an excuse for self-destructive fantasy, like Gatsby’s dream of going back to innocence and happiness. Cather was almost the only and the last American writer to make wholehearted use of pastoral, and to find a way of negotiating the fundamental opposition between myth and fiction:
Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time…fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now.27
Book Two of the Georgics contains instructions on the grafting and transplanting of wild trees,28 a fine example of the improvability of the wilderness through man’s labour. It is a perfect image for Cather’s annexation of the pastoral tradition. Like Whitman in the ‘Song of the Exposition’, urging the Muse to ‘migrate from Greece and Ionia’ for the ‘wide, untried domain’ that awaits and demands her, like Thoreau making a symbolic location out of his New England pond – ‘another embodiment of the American moral geography’ – she grafts the classical model onto the national material, and makes out of it ‘a native blend of myth and reality’.29 And in doing so, she appropriates a male tradition – Hesiod, Virgil’s Greek model, had no women in his description of the Golden Age, and the loves of classical pastoral are predominantly male friendships30 – and transforms it, as no American pastoral writer had ever done before her, into celebrations of female heroism.
The process of grafting provides an image, too, of her narrative methods. The original meaning of ‘eclogue’ was ‘extract’ or ‘selection’, and classical narratives and their imitators have always been filled with ‘extracts’ and episodes grafted onto larger growths: the wonderful ‘inset’ of the story of Orpheus, a miniature epic sprouting from the bee-keeping passage at the end of the Georgics; the pastoral oases31 in the Aenead, in Dante and in Tasso; the interpolations of ‘bucolic episodes’32 in Cervantes. The whole of Renaissance pastoral was a process of intercutting apparently contradictory traditions: ‘sati
rical allegory and idyllic romance, realism and high poetry’.33 Empson’s comprehensive definition of all pastoral is of ‘putting the complex into the simple’.34 Cather follows the tradition of inserting anecdotes, episodes, ‘extracts’, into her narrative. By a process of grafting – or of quilting, if you prefer the indoor female image of artful labour to the one drawn from male husbandry – she interworks eclogue and georgic, soft and hard pastoral, heroism and realism, apparently without strain. It was typical of the process that her first pastoral novel should have been patched together from two stories, and that she would set versions of her very early Nebraskan sketches inside the longer narratives.
—
Those early stories hadn’t yet acquired the Virgilian tone of reconciliation; they were written in the 1890s, when Cather was still heading her letters from Nebraska ‘Siberia’, and most of them are done with a vigorous, gleefully savage realism. They have barbaric male heroes and grim descriptive language. Far from being in sympathy with ‘mother’ nature, the isolated primitives of these early stories feel her as an oppressive force: ‘Nature did not comfort him any, he knew nothing about nature, he had never seen her; he had only stared into a black plow furrow all his life.’ [CSF, p.537] Their religion is apocalyptic and prohibitive; their pleasures are rough explosions of desperate drinking and dancing, their loves are brooding and obsessional. Those who stay go mad, kill themselves, or sink into bestial indifference.
When the early stories (the death of a Bohemian violinist, the religious fanatic living wild in the woods) are reworked and inset into the Nebraskan novels, they shed this harsh cynical tone and become part of a more humane, complex treatment of the pioneer’s landscape. In the ’90s, though, Cather wanted strong brutal lines. It was not until after the Troll Garden stories that Cather found the right way of writing pastoral. The change came with a marvellous story of 1909, ‘The Enchanted Bluff’.
