Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Six boys are making camp, as they have done year after year, on one of the sandbar islands thrown up by the changing course of a Nebraskan river. The narrator, who is about to leave the others behind him to go ‘up to the Divide’ and teach school, is feeling homesick in anticipation. Nothing much happens. They swim, eat their supper, make a fire, watch the stars come out and talk about them, hear the different, heavier noise the river makes after dark, and see the moon rising over the bluffs ‘like a galleon in full sail, an enormous, barbaric thing, red as an angry heathen god’. Under the eye of this fierce male deity they talk desultorily about heroes and legends of conquest and exploration: Columbus, Napoleon, Aztec sacrifices, the Mound-Builders, Coronado’s quest for gold along this very river. The talk turns to places they want to see. Tip Smith, the grocer’s son, excitedly tells the ‘dolorous legend’ that his wandering Uncle Bill has told him, of a cliff-dwelling down in New Mexico, where a peaceable Indian tribe was said to have made its home ‘away up there in the air’ before some of them were massacred at the foot of the cliff and the rest left to starve. No one has ever been up there since, but Tip has a plan to climb it. After his story, a crane screams, flying past, and the boys fall gradually asleep. The narrator dreams he is racing the others to get to the Bluff, and wakes up in ‘a kind of fear’ of losing his chance. The fire is out, the sky is turning pale. The dawn comes up suddenly, and the boys go in for another swim. At Christmas they meet again to skate to their island, and ‘renew their resolution’ to find the Bluff. Then, a coda describes their destinies twenty years on. The narrator has gone away. The German tailor’s sons, one of them injured on the railroad, have inherited their father’s business. Stupid Percy Pound is a Kansas City stockbroker; the older boy Arthur, charming, clever and feckless, has stayed drinking in the town’s saloons and died young; and Tip Smith is a storekeeper with a ‘slatternly’ wife. But he has told his son Bert the legend, and he in his turn ‘thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff’.

  The story anticipates much that is to come (childhood riverside idylls in My Ántonia and A Lost Lady, dreams of heroic endeavour inspired by the cliff-dwellers in The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House). And it is the first time Cather finds her true tone. The atmosphere, slow and resonant, goes back to Virgil’s shepherds talking under the evening star. But there are powerful modern pastoral models too: the night-time river feeling is very like Huckleberry Finn (‘The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine: I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear on the water such nights!’),35 and as Eudora Welty points out in her eloquent tribute to Cather, the sense of mystery and space is like Turgenev’s ‘magical’ story ‘Behzin Meadow’.36 Turgenev’s huntsman loses his way and spends the night by a campfire with a group of boys who are minding the village horses and talking of ghosts and old superstitions. Their voices carry on the summer night like Cather’s boys; and there is the same sense of a scene opening out and out into time and space:

  I sat up in my damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay tumbled in uneasy attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark, but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of night. The stars glistened like crystal globes, and trembled as if they shone through a depth of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to pale and the sky brightened. Day came suddenly, almost instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue night, and it was gone. [CSF, p.76]

  All around absolute quiet descended, as usually happens only just before morning: everything slept the deep, still sleep of the pre-dawn hours. The air was not so strongly scented, and once again it seemed to be permeated with a raw dampness. O brief summer nights! The boys’ talk died away along with the dying of the fires…A sweet oblivion descended on me and I fell into a doze…

  I opened my eyes to see that morning was beginning….The pale-grey sky shone bright and cold and tinged with blue; stars either winked their faint light or faded; the ground was damp and leaves were covered with the sweat of dew….I got briskly to my feet and walked over to the boys. They slept the sleep of the dead about the embers of the fire…37

  Virgil, Turgenev, and Twain, all write pastorals of male companionship. ‘The Enchanted Bluff’ shows that the male disguise releases Cather into a particular tradition of writing.

  She takes from Turgenev, too, an emotional ambivalence which wasn’t there in the earlier stories, crudely split between romance and realism. It is very hard to say whether ‘The Enchanted Bluff’ is a story of sorrowful regret or tender hopefulness. Ostensibly it is a story of failure. The heroes and civilizations the boys talk of have been defeated: Napoleon’s star went out, they say, when he began to lose battles; the peaceable cliff-dwellers are destroyed. Coronado’s fate is not mentioned here, but we will learn in My Ántonia that ‘he died in the wilderness of a broken heart’. [MA, p.244] None of the boys succeeds; they grow up into so many Babbitts, ‘losing their chance’ under the pressures of small town life. Their ‘magic island’, like the legendary Enchanted Bluff, can never be refound. But the bitterness of the early stories is not there; instead, a sense of continuity prevails, as the narrator’s memory goes back through his own childhood into the distant past, and on into the still undisillusioned boyhood of the next generation.

  The narration makes an order and continuity out of time; and the story is layered with orderings and shape-makings, of which the human imagination is only one. The evening light makes the unpromising rough materials of the scene into scenery, ‘flickering’ and ‘quivering’. The river, gouging out its banks, makes new islands, and the islands at once make their own landmarks: ‘a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and fish’. [CSF, p.70] The boys in their ‘new world’ contemplate astral orderings (‘ “Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams….You could do most any proposition in geometry with ’em” ’), the source and direction of their river, the formation of the Bluff from glaciers. They are all historians, in love with the idea of connections. Tip carries ‘some little pill bottles’ (bought from a Baptist missionary) ‘that purported to contain grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives’, and seems to ‘derive great satisfaction from their remote origin’. They laugh at stupid Percy, trying to work out whether the Spanish explorers came through before the Mormons. A sense of inevitability is suggested – their destinies seem to have been inescapable, written in the stars – but at the same time we keep being told of the human need – a natural tendency – to order, persist, and make ‘new worlds’.

  —

  The revenant of ‘The Enchanted Bluff’ is a Virgilian observer, back from a life elsewhere to pick up on the old story (Cather often said that going home again was like catching up with characters in a play or a novel) and keeping quiet about his own destiny. In ‘The Bohemian Girl’, the revenant is the prodigal son, an actor in the drama, and the effect is much more passionate and active. ‘The Enchanted Bluff’ was a tone-poem, an exercise in understatement. Now, in her first extended pastoral, she risks incorporating the early melodramas of love and conflict into a detailed evocation of the life of the immigrant communities ‘on the Divide’. The grafting of romance and realism is a bit shaky as yet, but it opens the way for O Pioneers!38

  Nils Ericson has been away from his mother’s ‘grim square house’ for twelve years (making a living on a shipping line back in Norway, though his family thinks he’s a wastrel). He is the misfit, more lively and imaginative than his dour, stingy Norwegian relatives, not cut out for a life wringing money from the land (‘The Ericsons’, says a tenant, ‘they’ve spread something wonderful – run over this country like bindweed!’). His inheritance is his dead father’s ‘roving blood’ and warm feelings. By contrast, the mother’s forceful, self-serving qualities are seen again in the older brother Olaf: ‘The one thing he always felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the un
yielding stickiness of wet loam against the plow.’ [CSF, p.20] Olaf has political ambitions (in Cather’s view this makes him a crook) and to get the Bohemian vote of the district he has married the daughter of the innkeeper Joe Vavrika. One of Cather’s impetuous, romantic heroines, Clara Vavrika is as resentful of the Norwegian family as her childhood playmate, Nils – who of course has come back for her – and spends most of her time lying in bed (eight o’clock is late for the Ericsons), dressing, visiting her jolly father, and stirring up her gipsy blood galloping her temperamental horse over the prairie. Olaf is placated by the housekeeping of Clara’s devoted aunt (a good early sketch for Cather’s self-denying domestic helpers), who ‘keeps the bear sweet’ with poppy-seed bread and prunes spiced in honey.

  With Nils’s eyes, we look through a series of frames at a selection of contrasting pastoral views: the screen door to Mrs Ericson’s well-ordered lamp-lit kitchen, Olaf’s big barn doors opening onto a Dutch painting of the heroic old women at the feast, Joe Vavrika’s garden inside its wooden fence, with Clara reading the Bohemian papers to him under the cherry tree. These pastoral scenes seem static, but they are changing as we look at them: Mrs Ericson, after all, has a car and a telephone, and Joe is running out of Hungarian Tokai. ‘The second generation’ of Bohemians, says Clara, ‘are a tame lot’. Looking back, Cather is catching the moment of transition which perpetually fascinates her. Not yet homogenized into Americanness, each of the distinct immigrant groups has survived in the alien landscape by persisting in its cultural identity. But soon there will only be two directions to go in: an assimilation into an undifferentiated national culture, or a retreat back to the old world.

  Because the contrast between the Norwegians and the Bohemians is still distinct, it allows for a vivid opposition between the two kinds of pastoral – hard and soft – which will come back as the double plot of O Pioneers! The old women and their pies in the barn, set against the Bohemian swigging Tokai under his cherry tree, make a ‘georgic’ of labour and endurance against an ‘eclogue’ of sensual hedonism. Cather makes it easy enough to prefer the Vavrikas to the Ericsons: she takes a Shavian line on hypocritical, cheerless Puritanism, so often the enemy in the early work. (Nils’s conflict with Mrs Ericson has something in it of Dick Dudgeon’s resentment of his Calvinist mother in The Devil’s Disciple.)39 Emotionally, though, it is not so simple. Clara seems to embody a free, pagan, erotic force, but Nils is in love with her because she reminds him of his childhood. (Cather very often evasively subdues adult sexuality in this way, by making it the legacy of sanctified memories.) Clara points out to Nils that he really prefers women like his mother, and though the plot seems to disprove her, the narrative is ambivalent. The story ends, not with the escaped lovers, but with the return of Nils’s younger brother Eric, who was being lured to Bergen by Clara and Nils, but who finds he can’t leave his mother and the land, and comes back from his abortive running-away to find her sitting in the dark outside her house, ‘as only the Ericsons and the mountains can sit’.

  The mother is associated with the land, and the land is hard to leave. Though ‘The Bohemian Girl’ is good at Dutch paintings of homely interiors, its virtuoso writing is reserved for the outdoor scenes. Cather’s double feeling about the power of the West is acted out in Clara’s struggle between the earth and her lover. The language is that of mastery and subjugation:

  The great, silent country seemed to lay a spell upon her. The ground seemed to hold her as if by roots. Her knees were soft under her. [CSF, p.37]

  You can almost see Clara turning into a tree. This is a country which will metamorphose its inhabitants into passive parts of itself, unless they assert their separateness, or run away. Marks, traces, shapes, have to be made, or the landscape will unmake all human life and turn it back to void and formlessness, like a genesis in reverse.

  6

  WOMEN HEROES

  A personality that carried across big spaces and expanded among big things.

  The Song of the Lark, 1915

  O PIONEERS! begins with a primal scene made up of negatives. The human marks on the landscape are barely evident.

  One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. [OP, p.3]

  There are shops in the ‘two uneven rows of wooden buildings’, but no shopkeepers to be seen – they are ‘keeping well behind their frosty windows’. There are children, but they are invisible, in school. There is ‘nobody about’ but a few countrymen; their wives can be glimpsed – momentary, minimal human detail – by the flashes of their red shawls going from the shelter of one shop to another. The station is empty – there will be no train until night. In this landscape of negations, the only human action is helpless and infantile: a small Swedish country boy is crying because his kitten has run up a telegraph pole and got stuck. The first definite, ordering mark is made on the scene by his sister Alexandra, ‘walking rapidly and resolutely’ up the street, wearing a man’s cape ‘like a young soldier’, her eyes ‘fixed intently on the distance’. She takes off the brown veil round her head to warm her brother’s neck; as her shining hair is revealed, light and colour enter the scene. With a ‘glance of Amazonian fierceness’ she repudiates a passerby’s admiring glance; taking control, she fetches her friend Carl Linstrum, who is indoors looking at the chemist’s ‘portfolio of chromo “studies” ’. (These lithographs are sold to the townswomen, who copy them for their china painting. It is the first thin detail of the local culture, and tells us at once about Carl’s interests.) When he has rescued the kitten, at some risk to himself, Alexandra finishes her shopping and fetches Emil from play with a beautiful little Bohemian girl, Marie Tovesky, the centre of attention for her Uncle Joe and his friends. The children – Alexandra anxious about her dying father, Carl depressed and ‘bitter’ – drive back out into the ‘stern frozen country’, which at once obliterates the town ‘as if it had never been’. ‘The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.’ [OP, p.15]

  The whole book is latent in this wonderfully evocative, controlled, impersonal scene, with its slight incident and powerful sense of the relation of the people to the ‘great fact’ of the land, and (less importantly) to each other. Like Alexandra’s entrance into the book, the novelist’s entrance, this time, has the calm purposeful air of someone who knows what she is doing, has her eyes fixed on the distance, on the whole shape of the thing, but who is, all the same, tenderly attentive to detail.

  The clear, spare, two-part plot is immediately established. Almost all its main ingredients are in that first scene: Alexandra’s control, Carl’s exile, Emil’s feeling for Marie, the sexual contrast between the two women and their two stories. Marie is conventionally wilful and seductive, like the kitten; Alexandra (who like all Cather’s main characters first appears being admiringly watched, like the heroine of a play) is at once androgynized. She is a young soldier and a fierce Amazon, a striding hero and a kind sister, wearing a man’s coat and a woman’s veil, with a severe look and a shining head of hair. (And though she is bold she is not ‘boyish’: she doesn’t shin up the telegraph pole herself, but gets Carl to help her.) The attributes of the strong pioneer figure who combines masculine and female qualities is firmly introduced. Alexandra is about to take over the land from her father, John Bergson, the first-generation immigrant from Stockholm, who failed to conquer it and dies exhausted, in debt and despair. She controls the family: the father, though sympathetically presente
d, is a broken man, the two older brothers Lou and Oscar are grudging and unadventurous, and the mother is a comfortable Swedish housekeeper, dedicated to gardening and ‘preserving’, not just jams but a whole way of life.1 They are all given subdued, ineffectual parts so that Alexandra can be mother, father, sister and wife. But as well as transcending and mixing roles, she also fits realistically into a family pattern. The novel is partly about inheritance, and Cather is always interested in the division of family characteristics. John Bergson’s father was a Stockholm shipbuilder, a self-made man, who later in life married an unscrupulous woman and speculated dishonestly. Reminders of him recur: we see that Alexandra has his strength, Lou and Oscar his tendency to dubious dealings, and Emil his emotional susceptibility. The family displays, too, all the possible responses to the ‘great fact’ of the land: being obliterated by it, being repelled by it, or putting one’s mark on it.

  Sixteen years later (the time is jumped over, as if a spell has been cast) the ‘Divide’ has been conquered and given up its fertile riches, and Alexandra, who had the prophetic faith and the shrewd business acumen to hang onto and invest in the high land, is the manager of a great farm. Her home incorporates and maintains the old Scandinavian pioneer culture, with its giggly Swedish housegirls waiting to be married to sombre Swedish farmhands, visits from Lou’s unregenerately ‘old country’ mother-in-law Mrs Lee, and the presence of saintly-simple old Norwegian Ivar, kept as a blessing on the house, in spite of the grumblings of the ever-conventional, rapidly Americanizing brothers Lou and Oscar, who now have separate farms. The counter-movement of repulsion from the land is given to the two sympathetic male characters, Carl and Emil. Artistic, unsatisfied Carl goes to the city; he is not good enough to be a painter, and gets work as an engraver, but the cheap modern techniques ‘sicken’ him. Like the chemist’s ‘chromos’ he was seen looking at as a child, his art work seems to him false imitation, in contrast to the ‘true’ work of Alexandra’s life. He sets out gold-prospecting on the Klondike (another kind of male pioneering story, which Cather could only do offstage). His visit, en route to Alaska, to see Alexandra, is cut short by the brothers’ mean suspicions about their relationship, and they do not find each other again until the very end of the novel, in an ambivalent and subdued reunion.