Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  There are three not very distinguished new stories. In ‘A Diamond Mine’, the singer Cressida Garnet is preyed on by her envious family, her Svengali-like Greek coach, and two parasitic husbands in succession – a hedonistic Czech composer, a Wall Street gambler. She goes down historically in the Titanic, but was already being eaten alive by sharks. In ‘A Gold Slipper’ and ‘Scandal’, Kitty Ayrshire, yet another beautiful American soprano, does battle with the censorious disapproval of a philistine Pittsburgh businessman, and the vicious gossip of a New York Austrian-Jewish ‘patron of the arts’. (It’s an unpleasant feature of these stories that they display a streak of anti-semitism, which may have had something to do with Cather’s feelings about Isabelle’s husband Jan Hambourg.)

  One long story, though, stands out. ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’ is the story of a bohemian (with a small ‘b’!) love affair in the Washington Square of old New York, between a young singer fresh from the West, and a painter, Don Hedger, a foundling brought up by a Catholic priest, who has been living in solitude with his bulldog, Caesar, until the arrival next door of the enticing, and enticingly-named, Eden Bower. (She has changed her name from ‘Edna’, so as to take on the role of the self-made artist-heroine of the New World: a role which Cather, here, treats more cynically than usual.) The story (which beautifully evokes the city of Cather’s early McClure’s days)5 makes a fierce moral comparison between the American artist who stays put, refuses the lure of commercial fame and goes on making original experiments which earn a small but high reputation, and the travelling showbiz star with a huge following and a hardened soul, who finds that ‘a “big” career takes its toll, even with the best of luck.’ [YBM, p.63] It is also one of the most erotic love stories Cather ever allowed herself to write.

  Hedger with his surly dog in his dusky room is dark, underground, intent. Through a crack in his closet, he watches the girl next door, naked, doing her callisthenics: ‘the soft flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun’ enveloping her in a ‘luminous mist’. This extraordinary voyeuristic episode (a more sexualized version of Fred’s sighting of Thea on her clifftop) is sublimated into myth: Hedger is a troll-like, goblin force of darkness and earthiness, and Eden is another of Cather’s uncapturable, semi-divine female figures, associated throughout with air, dream, light, stars and freedom. For Hedger – and later, for her public – she is Aphrodite, goddess of love. But for herself she is Diana, goddess of the moon, the hunt, and chastity. Standing on the roof of the house on a hot night, their figures in shadow against the sky, they become archetypes: ‘nothing whatever distinguishable about them but that they were male and female’. [YBM, p.49] Hedger’s sexual force pulls her earthward (‘they moved, at last, along the roof and down into the dark hole; he first, drawing her gently after him’ [YBM, p.49]), but she escapes him. The fearsome risk of sexual passion is inscribed in a ‘brutal’ Mexican story Hedger tells her – it is his courtship – called ‘The Forty Lovers of the Queen’. (Cather took it, years before, from the wonderful Julio,6 though there is more than a touch of Flaubert’s Salammbô in it, and like the Mexican scenes in The Song of the Lark, it injects an exotic, erotic flavour.) A chaste princess with magical rain-making powers is assaulted by a savage captive chief, who is castrated and has his tongue cut out as punishment, and is kept as her servant when she marries an Aztec King. She uses him as a go-between when she wants to summon her lovers; but when she gets too fond of one of them, the Captive betrays her to the King, the Princess and the Captive are burnt to death together, and the rains fail.

  The Medusa-like dangerousness of desire (which will be a very strong subject in the post-war novels) conflicts with the rival risks of a chaste dedication to art. Our sympathies are equivocally directed: Cather expresses herself both through the solitary, male ‘troll’ figure, his thwarted passions transferred into his powerful work, and the escaping, aspiring, woman artist.

  The relations between them are acted out in an enchanting scene, a day out at Coney Island, where they go to see one of Hedger’s models, an Irish-American girl who makes an extra living by going up in a balloon. Eden, having seen her, takes a fancy to the stunt.

  ‘Yes, go along,’ said Eden. ‘Wait for me outside the door. I’ll stay and help her dress.’

  Hedger waited and waited, while women of every build bumped into him and begged his pardon, and the red pages ran about holding out their caps for coins, and the people ate and perspired and shifted parasols against the sun. When the band began to play a two-step, all the bathers ran up out of the surf to watch the ascent. The second balloon bumped and rose, and the crowd began shouting to the girl in a black evening dress who stood leaning against the ropes and smiling. ‘It’s a new girl,’ they called. ‘It ain’t the Countess this time. You’re a peach, girlie!’

  The balloonist acknowledged these compliments, bowing and looking down over the sea of upturned faces, – but Hedger was determined she should not see him, and he darted behind the tent-fly. He was suddenly dripping with cold sweat, his mouth was full of the bitter taste of anger and his tongue felt stiff behind his teeth. Molly Welch, in a shirt-waist and a white tam-o’-shanter cap, slipped out from the tent under his arm and laughed up in his face. ‘She’s a crazy one you brought along. She’ll get what she wants!’

  ‘Oh, I’ll settle with you, all right!’ Hedger brought out with difficulty.

  ‘It’s not my fault, Donnie. I couldn’t do anything with her. She bought me off. What’s the matter with you? Are you soft on her? She’s safe enough. It’s as easy as rolling off a log, if you keep cool.’ Molly Welch was rather excited herself, and she was chewing gum at high speed as she stood beside him, looking up at the floating silver cone. ‘Now watch,’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘She’s coming down on the bar. I advised her to cut that out, but you see she does it first-rate. And she got rid of the skirt, too. Those black tights show off her legs very well. She keeps her feet together like I told her, and makes a good line along the back. See the light on those silver slippers, – that was a good idea I had. Come along to meet her. Don’t be a grouch; she’s done it fine!’

  Molly tweaked his elbow, and then left him standing like a stump, while she ran down the beach with the crowd.

  Though Hedger was sulking, his eye could not help seeing the low blue welter of the sea, the arrested bathers, standing in the surf, their arms and legs stained red by the dropping sun, all shading their eyes and gazing upward at the slowly falling silver star. [YBM, pp.37–9]

  It is not quite like anything else in Cather, with its Boudin lighting, its cheery American holiday crowd, its modern girl (like the ‘New Women’ music-hall artistes Cather used to admire), and its coolly ballooning heroine, quite happy to be the cynosure of all eyes, in a pantomime version of Thea’s eagle-like climb on the cliffs, who must at last come ‘slowly falling’ down from her flight.

  —

  ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’ gave Cather time off – an indulgent flight, like Eden’s – from the novel she had been writing since 1918.7 It was slow work: even after she had thought of the story, she did not start it for six months; she spent a long time gathering material, and the writing took three years of very intense feeling.8 Cather always saved things up (sometimes for much longer than four years), and the slow process this time matched the slowly accumulating impact on her of the war. She differed with her friend Elsie Sergeant over this, who had immediately become involved as a war correspondent for the New Republic and felt that, to Cather, the war was just a ‘story’.9 Elsie was injured inspecting a battlefield a few weeks before the armistice; Cather, in her shocked letter of condolence, compared Elsie’s injury with her own fuss about her shaved head in 1914.10 Elsie seemed fated to let the war get under her skin, she said; perhaps an unfortunate phrase to use to someone whose leg had just been filled with bits of steel. She went on to tell her how modest, alive, and picturesque she found ‘our’ American boys in New York, just off the Mauretania.

  The letter suggests differ
ences in their vantage point which have a crucial bearing on One of Ours. Cather was not there; and though the war did ‘get under her skin’ in a particular and personal way, there was much of it she failed to understand.

  The point of ignition for the novel was the news of two particular deaths in 1918. The first was that of a cousin, Grosvenor (‘G.P.’) Cather (son of the clever, ugly Aunt Franc who had been a partial model for ‘A Wagner Matinée’) who was killed at Cantigny on May 27, 1918. G.P. had always seemed to her a depressed, dull Nebraskan farmboy without much future. But when the war broke out she had been staying on his father’s farm, and she and G.P. had long conversations sitting on top of the haywagons.11 After he went over in July 1917 he seemed, from his letters home to his mother, to find a new meaning in life; his death, she thought, was a ‘glorious’ thing to have happened to someone whose life had seemed so pointless.

  The other boy’s death which affected her strongly was that of a young violinist, David Hochstein, a talented civilized person, a nephew of Emma Goldman, with deep reservations about the war, who had signed up because he was ‘too proud not to fight’. She first met him at a musical evening in New York when he was playing second violin in the Trout Quintet, and then a few weeks after his military training started. At that point he seemed ‘frozen in a kind of bitter resignation’, but three months later she found that ‘something keen and penetrating and confident’ had come back into his face; he could only account for it by his friendship with the other men. In his letters home from the Front, he spoke of having found a faith ‘that for all these heroic souls gone to the beyond there is some future’.12

  These two very different soldiers would find their way into the characters of Claude Wheeler, the Nebraskan farmboy brought to life by the war in France, and his violinist friend David Gerhardt. But, as usual, her fictional figures were composites: G.P. and Hochstein were mixed up in her mind with a general feeling about young America in the war, and personal memories of her own raw shock at being confronted with an old civilization on her journey to Europe twenty years before. And she gathered information from many other witnesses. In the winter of 1918 she visited wounded soldiers in a New York hospital and heard their stories.13 When she was ill with ‘flu in Jaffrey, in the autumn of 1919, the doctor who treated her had a diary from his time as a medical officer on a troopship during a ‘flu epidemic: she used it for Claude’s crossing to Europe, ‘The Voyage of the Anchises’.14 She read newspaper accounts avidly, and other stirring first-hand sources such as the Letters from France of Victor Chapman, the first American aviator to be killed in the war (his father said: ‘It was the cause that made a man of him’), and the poems of Alan Seeger, who wrote before he was killed of having been given ‘that rare privilege of dying well’.15 After she had begun to write the French parts of the book, she felt that she needed to be there, and in the summer of 1920 she and Edith spent six weeks living in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, visiting the battlefields and seeing G.P.’s grave with Isabelle and Jan (now, it would seem, safely become good friends) and appreciating all over again the intense beauty of Paris. The young crippled soldiers in the Luxembourg Gardens, being wheeled about by old veterans of the 1870 Franco–Prussian war, brought home to her the cost of preserving that beauty.16 Edith Lewis, however, remembered her avoiding all the marks of modern life in Paris and saying that ‘she wanted to live in the Middle Ages’.17 The visit to France was more an escape from modern America than an investigation into the aftermath of the war.

  The sources and the attitudes that went into the making of One of Ours lent themselves to an idealized version of war which is likely to make us extremely uneasy now, and which was, at the time, ferociously castigated by the big male American writers. This was partly a territorial defence. If the pioneering West had had to be taken back from a male language, the battlefields were even harder material to appropriate. It is ironical that although One of Ours was the book that made Cather, at fifty, famous and well-off (it sold 30,000 copies in two months, and the royalties for 1923 were $19,000),18 and won her the Pulitzer Prize, it was also the book for which she received the most savage criticism. Ernest Hemingway wrote, in a letter to Edmund Wilson in 1923:

  E.E. Cummings’ Enormous Room was the best book published last year that I read. Somebody told me it was a flop. Then look at One of Ours. Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously. You were in the war weren’t you? Wasn’t that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode. Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere.19

  H.L. Mencken, who had praised The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia very highly, and who was a well-disposed acquaintance, reviewed One of Ours severely:

  What spoils the story is simply that a year or so ago a young soldier named John Dos Passos printed a novel called Three Soldiers….At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war…

  Unluckily for Miss Cather she seems to have read Three Soldiers inattentively, if at all. The war she depicts has its thrills and even its touches of plausibility, but at bottom it is fought out not in France but on a Hollywood movie-lot. Its American soldiers are idealists engaged upon a crusade to put down sin; its Germans are imbeciles who charge machine-guns six-deep, in the manner of the war dispatches of the New York Tribune. There is a lyrical nonsensicality in it that often glows half pathetic; it is precious near the war of the standard model of lady novelist….It is a picture of the war, both as idea and spectacle, that belongs to Coningsby Dawson and 1915, not to John Dos Passos and 1922.20

  The comparison with Coningsby Dawson (also made in a scathing review by Sinclair Lewis) put her into sentimental, patriotic company. Dawson’s war writings (The Test of Scarlet, Out to Win) turns average men into heroes through the ordeal of the trenches, and presents the American soldier as God’s gift to Europe:

  …the American in khaki has astonished the men of the other armies….The soldier from the USA seems to stand always restless, alert, alone, listening, waiting for the call to come….‘Let me get into the trenches,’ that was the cry of the American soldier that I heard on every hand. Having witnessed his eagerness, cleanness, and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how he will acquit himself.

  I have presented him as an extremely practical person, but no American that I met was solely practical. If you watch him closely you will always find that he is doing practical things for an idealistic end.21

  ‘One of Ours’, indeed. This is at the opposite extreme from the war writings of e.e. cummings (the enormous room, 1922) or of Dos Passos in One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), in which an anti-American passion for France and the French is matched by a profound disgust at the war as the ‘fullest and most ultimate expression’ of a sham, futile, crumbling civilization, ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth’, as Ezra Pound had it in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’. In Dos Passos and cummings (as, later, in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms of 1929 and Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore of 1962), American war rhetoric – ‘We’re going to see the damn show through’, ‘making the world safe for democracy’ – is disgusting, camouflage for ‘organized piracy’, part of ‘the ocean of lies through all the ages that must have been necessary to make this possible’. The kind of language that inspired Cather – ‘that rare privilege of dying well’, ‘it was the cause that made a man of him’ – was precisely the language that these writers found obscene and dangerous. Once, they felt, America had offered the immigrant Europeans ‘freedom from the past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europe today with its infection of hate and greed of murder’.22 The American entry into the war was seen as a tragic betrayal of that possibility of freedom.

  Cather deliberately set herself to write a ‘truer’ picture of American boys in the war than Three Soldiers,23 and some of the hundreds of letters that poured in after One of Ours was p
ublished congratulated her for answering the ‘sourness and pessimism’ of Dos Passos.24 She was extremely defensive about her novel (which she always, emotionally, thought of as Claude, though Knopf wisely made her change the title),25 and cited her fan letters as proof (as they certainly were) that though the ‘highbrows’ and the ‘pacifists’ might be scornful, ordinary American readers loved it.26 But she resented the fuss (in a letter to Dorothy27 she wondered whether perhaps she should have written it anonymously) and felt that the book was being misunderstood. It was a fiction, not a piece of propaganda, and Claude was not intended as a glorification of war, but as the portrait of a dim young farmboy (like Henry Fleming in Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage), confronting his destiny.28

  —

  Cather’s defence against her critics is only partly convincing. One of Ours stands, awkwardly, midway between the flag-waving heroics of Dawson and the lacerating disillusion of the ‘lost generation’. In some ways, her story of an unhappy mid-Westerner, bitterly at odds with the American way of life, finding his first and last happiness at war in France, is not so remote from Dos Passos as Mencken made out. Martin Howe, in One Man’s Initiation, is set free from his past on the journey to Europe in a very similar way to Claude Wheeler: ‘He had never been so happy in his life….At last things have come to pass.’29 And Martin is as enthusiastic as Claude in his response to French Gothic architecture and the ‘old romances of chivalry’30 it evokes. The difference, though, between One Man’s Initiation and One of Ours, is that Martin sees his Gothic abbey being shelled to fragments, and understands, as Claude seems not to, that the war he is fighting means the destruction of the very civilization he has fallen in love with.