Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Cather’s version of American pastoral may not be as brutal or jovial as Mark Twain’s or Bret Harte’s, but she can go in for a tough Western humour which brings us down with a bump from Jim’s heroic sunsets. ‘ “I don’t see how he could do it!” ’ the grandmother laments over Mr Shimerda, to which Otto replies: ‘ “Why, ma’am, it was simple enough; he pulled the trigger with his big toe.” ’ [MA, pp.96–7] The reunion with the Cuzaks is full of benign memories, but the high point of the dinner is the horrible story of the moneylender Wick Cutter’s murder of his wife. ‘ “Hurrah! The murder!” the children murmured, looking pleased and interested.’ [MA, p.361]

  It’s the ogre-like Wick Cutter (the ugly name sounding both brutal and sexual) who makes the two most startling irruptions into Jim’s Arcadia. ‘The Hired Girls’ does not end, as might have been expected, with the transcendent vision of the plough on the horizon, but with the grotesque story of the money-lender’s attempt to rape Ántonia. Cutter is a vividly horrid small-town character, a gambler and lecher masquerading as a good clean-living American (he is always quoting ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’ and talking about the ‘good old times’). His vicious treatment of his wife, whom he loves to make jealous, and whose frenzied reactions excite him more than the sex itself, is horrifyingly convincing. Ántonia goes to work for the Cutters in rebellion against Mr Harling’s strictures on her dance-hall evenings, but comes back in a fright when Cutter tells her he is off on a journey, hides all his valuables under her bed, puts a heavy Yale lock on the door, and orders her to stay alone in the house. Jim takes her place for the night, and Cutter, having tricked his wife onto the wrong train, creeps back, thinking to find Ántonia, and assaults him. The scene makes an extremely disconcerting conclusion to Jim’s childhood memories; why has Cather placed it there?

  It is partly that Wick Cutter, like his Yale lock, is the future he will come back as Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady). He stands for the debased American currency which Cather saw buying out the pioneers’ values. Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’ is all about thrift; Cutter’s attempted assault on Ántonia is like a miser’s theft. He tries to make her as debased as the usurer’s notes under the bed. The golden figure of the plough against the sun was like a glorious stamp on a coin; Cutter’s licentious hoarding, by immediate contrast, introduces another system of valuation. (His wife is just as ‘base’: ‘I have found Mrs Cutters all over the world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly fed.’ [MA, p.214] This is one of Cather’s most disagreeable moments, but there’s no avoiding it as part of her feeling about changing values.) When Cutter finally murders his wife so that she won’t get his property, and then kills himself, the ‘spiteful’ suicide is set, at the end of the book, against Mr Shimerda’s at the beginning, that of a man who had nothing, and died of a broken heart.

  But Wick Cutter is also a priapic monster who fills Jim with revulsion. His fantasies of protecting Ántonia like a chivalric knight are obliterated by the ‘disgustingness’ and ignominy of the event, and, very revealingly, Cather has Jim blame Ántonia: ‘I felt that I never wanted to see her again. I hated her almost as much as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this disgustingness’. [MA, p.250] It feels like Adam blaming Eve after the fall. And the next thing we know Jim has left his Arcadia, and never does see Ántonia again until she has really lost her sexual innocence and become, not the child of Mr Shimerda he always wants to remember, but an adult woman, capable of being lover, wife and mother.

  Jim’s squeamishness is an interesting element in his ambivalent sexuality. Cather was somewhat defensive about her first extensive use of a male narrator. She may still have been thinking of Sarah Orne Jewett’s criticism of an earlier story, that a male ‘masquerade’ was not necessary for expressing emotions towards a female character.18 She tended to explain Jim away by saying that he came out of her experience of ghosting McClure’s autobiography, or seemed appropriate because most of her original stories about ‘Ántonia’ were told her by men.19 What she does not say is that he allows her free entry into male literary traditions of pastoral and epic, and enables her to speak from her own sexual identity and express her own emotions for women.

  To read Jim Burden, however, simply as a mask for lesbian feelings, is a narrowing exercise.20 He is more complicated than that, an androgynous narrator who mediates between male and female worlds like those Shakespearean pastoral hero/ines, boys dressed as girls dressed as boys. In childhood, he is attracted to the male outdoor pioneering of Otto and Jake – their Wild West exploits, their tackling of bulls and blizzards. No tough pioneer himself, as a young adult he finds male companionship in scholarship; his friendship with Gaston Cleric is like the pastoral brotherhood of male poets and singers. But he also participates in the female world, sitting indoors with his grandmother, or with the motherly and sisterly Harlings, or the hired girls, a privileged pet and a listener. (This is like a contemporary androgynous narrator, also engaged in refinding his past, Proust’s Marcel in A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.)21 He is privy to the women’s stories, those matriarchal narratives which so inspired Cather in her childhood: stories of women giving birth on the immigrant ships, or of the Swedish and Norwegian and Bohemian mothers, or Widow Steavens’ female account of Ántonia’s disasters. Adolescent Jim, reading his Latin for university, spending his evenings with the telegrapher and the cigar-maker, and making a May-basket for Nina Harling, is both boyish and girlish.

  Being androgynous makes Jim an empathetic narrator, but he is not allowed a love affair, either with Ántonia or Lena, and his marriage is an offstage failure. (There is a definite prejudice here: all the marriages in the book give ammunition to Jim’s exclamation: ‘I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!’ [MA, p.367]) Yet, in its way, My Ántonia is a very sexy book. Those alluring foreign girls who cluster around Jim are written up in pleasurably erotic language, whether they are dancing, dressing, lying around, or ironing:

  their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with steam or the heat and curling in little damp spirals about their ears. [MA, p.222]

  At the centre of this pagan bacchanal (over which Blind d’Arnault at one point presides ‘like some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood’ [MA, p.191]) is seductive Lena, who seems sensual to Jim in a passive, cat-like way quite unlike the energetic, ‘outdoor’ Ántonia. Dancing with Lena is like sinking into ‘a soft, waking dream’ on a ‘soft, sultry summer day’. [MA, p.222] On their hot day out by the river she is ‘panting’ and ‘supine’; she is always touching and tempting him. Her flirtation with Jim in Lincoln is subtle and uncommitted; she leads him on and holds him off at once, even in her farewells, made from a typically ‘supine’ position on her couch: ‘At last she sent me away with her soft, slow, renunciatory kiss’. [MA, p.293] It is no accident that Camille, which makes them both cry so much, and for which Cather allows so much space (she wanted their naive wallowing in it to be comical, but couldn’t resist a wallow herself)22 is a play about renunciation as much as about seduction.

  Lena’s later history as a plump successful businesswoman in partnership with Tiny Soderball in San Francisco is pointedly placed at the margin of the last three parts of the novel, as though her independence from the past and her assimilation into America disconnect her from Jim’s imagination. This marginalizing is even more noticeable in the narrative treatment of Tiny, whose amazing life story is briefly fitted into the section called ‘The Pioneer Woman’s Story’. The title refers to Widow Steavens’ account of Ántonia (both are pioneer women) but it would suit Tiny even better. This neat, slender Norwegian girl makes a dramatic journey (like Carl Linstrum, and again offstage) to the Klondike in the gold rush, sets up a hotel for the gold miners, inherits a claim romantically from a dying Swede, makes a fortune in the wilds, is lamed in the arctic weather, and comes back a rich, ‘hard-face
d’, grimly ironic woman. Jim catches up with her in Salt Lake City ‘in 1908’. That ‘1908’ is the only date in the book, and shows how Jim associates her, and Lena, with contemporary American life. ‘This is what actually happened to Tiny’, [MA, p.299] her story begins: it may sound like a tall tale, but it is ‘actually’ a slice of life, like a story in a newspaper. Tiny and Lena are modern; they have cut off the past. Their relationship, asexual, dry, companionable, fails to inspire him. Jim describes Tiny as someone ‘in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out’, [MA, p.302] but he also means, of becoming interesting.

  Ántonia’s peculiar place in his imagination is contrasted with Lena throughout. Whenever Lena tries to seduce him, Ántonia is censorious; she wants to keep Jim’s innocence as much as he wants to keep hers. His revealing erotic dreams of the two girls spell this out:23

  I used to have pleasant dreams: sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding down straw-stacks as we used to do; climbing up the yellow mountains over and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff.

  One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them. Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to me with a soft sigh and said, ‘Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you as much as I like’.

  I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Ántonia, but I never did. [MA, pp.225–6]

  ‘Tony’ and he are like boys together; but they also keep slipping back down into a soft, protected womb-like place. Lena appears as threateningly erotic, a reminder of his (unused) potency, but also a figure of mortality. Sex is death: the only way he can preserve Ántonia from simply growing old is to censor his sexual feeling for her. He must never have that dream about her. His love scenes with Ántonia are carefully controlled. When, as an adolescent, he tries to kiss her like a grown-up, she insists on treating him ‘like a kid’, and he welcomes it. It means that ‘she was, oh, she was still my Ántonia!’ [MA, p.225] Their most passionate scene is a valedictory renunciation:

  ‘I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.’

  To which she replies:

  ‘Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we were little. I can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her about all the things we used to do. You’ll always remember me when you think about old times, won’t you?’ [MA, p.321]

  Jim renounces the possibility of an active relationship with her (‘I’d have liked to have you’) so that she can take her place in his mind as a generalized female inspiration for his memory. Following his lead, she promises to inspire it (‘You’ll always remember me’). The point of motherhood seems, here, to be the opportunity it gives her of recalling their past.

  Another kind of story could have been written about Ántonia: a bright immigrant girl, shattered by her father’s suicide, living in abject poverty with her mean, grim mother and brother, working in the fields like a man, her attempt to upgrade herself in service wrecked by her seduction and abandonment, shamed (like Hardy’s Tess) by having to return home pregnant, surviving the terrible times of the Nebraska depression, finding satisfaction, in the end, only in interminable childbearing and domestic work. That this harsh realist pastoral does make itself felt inside the novel is one of its strengths. In its light, Cather’s conclusion for Ántonia may look sentimental. The lavish associations with breeding, nourishment, milk, preserves, harvest, life itself, might seem uncomfortably like an idealization of maternity. But the associations do work as metaphors for ‘home’. Ántonia’s destiny, in the end, is to fire Jim’s – and Cather’s – imagination, to be the ‘home’ to which they return from their exile in time and space.

  My Ántonia, like all Cather’s great novels, powerfully gives the sense that ‘the thing not named’, in her famous phrase, is the myth underlying the fiction. My Ántonia is not a religious book, but it has religious feelings. It would be quite plausible, if your mind worked along those lines, to make Mr Shimerda into the Fisher King of the Waste Land, Jim into the Questing Knight of the Grail, and the Cuzak home into the place of redemption. This pilgrimage points us towards death. Jim’s ‘predestined road’ takes him, finally, back to Mr Shimerda’s grave. Though the last paragraph tries to suggest that there will be a future for him and Ántonia (‘the road was to bring us together again’) – a future rather feebly gestured to in the Introduction – it feels much more as if Jim’s return home is his preparation for oblivion. As in O Pioneers!, the reunion at the end of My Ántonia is coloured by a deeply melancholy determinism. Jim recognizes ‘what a little circle man’s experience is’; that ‘all we can ever be’ (not much, perhaps) is predetermined, that the past makes up for ‘whatever we had missed’. It sounds more like a lament than a celebration; a heavy burden is being placed on the past to make it console us for, even replace, the present. The present – and the future – are kept out of the circle of return, by a very strong process of elimination which gives this beautiful novel its aura of simplicity and containment. But what is eliminated presses on it. Now it would have to come in.

  8

  THE LOST AMERICAN

  ‘All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,’ Dick mourned persistently. ‘…the silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken…’

  Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, 1934, revised 1951

  He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.

  Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 1895

  CATHER WROTE to Dorothy Canfield in March 1916 that the state of the nations was like souring milk.1 She could have found stronger words. As with many Americans, it would take some time for her to respond more fully to what was happening. She spent the Great War writing My Ántonia; after it came out in 1918 it would be a long four years before the publication of One of Ours, the novel which tried to come to terms with the world’s having – as she put it later – broken in two.

  During these years she found herself new refuges from what seemed to her the increasingly inimical modern times. Two East Coast rural retreats replaced her lost Nebraskan pastoral, and provided intermittent escapes from New York. One was a small village in New Hampshire, Jaffrey. She went there first for a reunion with Isabelle and her husband, fell in love with the place, and returned to it with Edith for many summers and autumns. She stayed in two attic rooms in the Shattuck Inn, looking out over a hilly, wooded New England landscape dominated by Mount Monadnock. In the summer of 1917, when she was working on My Ántonia, she put a tent in a field half a mile from the Inn, on a farm belonging to friends, and wrote in it every day, surrounded by peaceful, solitary woods. She chose this as her burial place, ‘just at the corner of the old burial ground’ (Edith Lewis described it to Stephen Tennant) ‘where you look off over fields and woods to the mountains beyond’.2 In the summer of 1921 she found an even more remote haven, on Grand Manan, a Canadian island seven miles off the coast of Maine, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. It was an extremely wild and beautiful place, with steep wooded cliffs rising sheer out of the sea, waterfalls, masses of wild flowers in summer, fogs blowing down from Greenland, and nothing to interrupt except the steamer coming in from the Canadian shore and the fishing boats below.3 She corrected the proofs of One of Ours there, and later (in 1926) she and Edith had a small house built for them, Whale Cove Cottage, looking straight out over the sea.

  Professionally, too, she found a safe haven in the pos
t-war years which would last her for the rest of her life. She had been dissatisfied with Houghton Mifflin’s proofreading of The Song of the Lark and their jacket for My Ántonia; the book was mostly well received, but sold badly (she made $1300 in the first year but only $400 in the second). Though this was partly due to the coincidence of its publication in wartime, she felt she was not being well promoted. She admired the young publisher Alfred Knopf for his Borzoi Books; early in 1920 she walked into his office, they had a long conversation, and she asked him then and there to be her publisher. For the next twenty-seven years they were good friends. Cather admired his ‘fiery temperament’ and ‘severe taste’, and liked the loving care he took with his books. He understood her, and treated her well from the first, giving her good advances and as much control as she wanted over blurbs and book jackets.4

  Knopf wanted a novel, of course, but agreed to start with a book of short stories. Youth and the Bright Medusa, published in 1920, reprinted the best four stories from The Troll Garden (‘Paul’s Case’, ‘The Sculptor’s Funeral’, ‘A Death in the Desert’, ‘A Wagner Matinée’), with its quotation from ‘Goblin Market’ (‘We must not look at Goblin men/We must not buy their fruits’), which, like the new title, suggested her old theme of the dangerous seductions of art. (The ‘Bright Medusa’, who turns her youthful admirers to stone, stands for the love of artistic success; but also, in some of the stories, for other kinds of dangerous desires.) The four new stories, written between 1916 and 1920, were left-overs from The Song of the Lark: they were all about American opera singers struggling against their ‘natural enemies’ in a philistine, envious, interfering world. It’s a mark of Cather’s mood that these are not, like Thea’s, stories of triumphant escapes, but of compromises and spoilings. In her future returns to the theme of The Song of the Lark – ‘Uncle Valentine’, her touching 1925 memorial to Ethelbert Nevin, and the late novel Lucy Gayheart – it would be the death, not the victory of the artist which preoccupied her.