by Hermione Lee
Much of the material I have been summarizing is buried, peripheral, or withheld. Some of the crucial events (the Captain’s accident, the failure of the bank, Marian’s departure and re-marriage) are reported, not seen. Some important pieces of behaviour (Niel’s treatment of Marian after he has discovered her affair with Frank Ellinger, for instance) are passed over. And some vital ingredients in the story, like the Forresters’ first meeting, are held back for a long time. Cather commented tellingly on her elisions for this book.
You can’t get a delicate face laughing at you out of a miniature…and also have a lot of Western atmosphere and a dramatic bank failure. I like a book where you do one thing.9
The effect of A Lost Lady is of a loosely connected series of pastoral scenes with the mobile, elusive figure of a woman at their centre. The woman is approached by way of the cottonwood grove ‘that threw sheltering arms to right and left’ of Captain Forrester’s house, the two creeks and the Lombardy poplars which lead to it, and the marshland anyone else would have drained for profit, but which the Captain has kept because ‘he liked the way the creek wound through his pasture, with mint and joint-grass and twinkling willows along its banks.’ [ALL, p.6]
Like Marian’s bright eyes and dangling earrings, these landscape pictures seem to glitter and shimmer as we look at them. The seductive words used for scenery are also the words associated with her – twinkling, glittering, crystalline, limpid, fragrant, tender. Sometimes she appears in these glimmering landscapes as a white ghost out of the past. In the book’s first anecdote (‘but we will begin this story with a summer morning long ago’) Niel and the town boys are playing in the Forresters’ ‘silvery marsh’, like Tom Sawyer and his gang, or like the boys in ‘The Enchanted Bluff’, when they see ‘a white figure coming rapidly down through the grove, under the flickering leaf shadows’. [ALL, p.13] After she has materialized into the provider of hot cookies and friendly chat, she metamorphoses back into a woodland spirit, haunting this now ‘long ago’ vanished greenwood: ‘they watched her white figure drifting along the edge of the grove’. She will return as a ‘white figure’. When Niel comes back after his absence at college, he finds her lying in her hammock in the grove, feigning sleep and watching him under her white hat. He gathers up her ‘suspended figure’ ‘like a bird caught in a net’. [ALL, p.109] When he goes out that summer into the ‘sleeping garden’ of the hot night, he finds her ‘white figure’ ‘motionless in the clear moonlight’ on the bridge over the creek, staring into the water and dreaming of escape. [ALL, p.121] But if she haunts Niel’s memory as a vanished ghost, she is alive in the text. These white, ghostly, pastorals are counterpointed with sensual, coloured scenes, palpitating with energy: like the sharp winter day when Niel drives her home in her cutter, tucked in under her buffalo robes, while ‘the late afternoon sun burned on the snow-crusted pastures’ [ALL, p.33] and she looks up at him, characteristically, ‘holding her muff up to break the wind’; or the freezing dusk after the blizzard when she insists on getting out of the house in her rubber boots, and looks at the ‘clear arc of blue and rose colour’ in the bare sky, taking deep breaths of cold, fear, and impatience.
The novel’s beautiful artifice of a feeling landscape culminates in the two most sensual scenes, Marian’s escapade with Frank, and Niel’s discovery of her adultery. The winter sleigh ride with Frank is, crucially, not observed by Niel (instead, Marian, who never escapes observation, is spied on, mutely and uncritically, by one of the German boys) and so has none of his idealizing emotive language. There is no description. Instead, natural things are seen and felt only as they occur in the sexual adventure: the bits of snow flying up from the ponies’ hooves, the deep ravine in the dark cedar woods the lovers disappear into, the blue still air in which the Blum boy can ‘almost hear her breathe’, the strokes of Frank’s hatchet, felling the cedars, which send ‘soft shivers’ through her body. It is in contrast to the lush summer dawn of Niel’s disillusionment, reeling with significant colour and fragrance:
There was an almost religious purity about the fresh morning air, the tender sky, the grass and flowers with the sheen of early dew upon them. There was in all living things something limpid and joyous, – like the wet, morning call of the birds, flying up through the unstained atmosphere. Out of the saffron east a thin, yellow, wine-like sunshine began to gild the fragrant meadows and the glistening tops of the grove. [ALL, p.82]
As if this insistent ‘new world’ imagery weren’t enough, before we reach the fallen Eve we take a further lesson in the danger of passion and the transience of beauty from a handy thicket of wild roses:
Where they had opened, their petals were stained with that burning rose-colour which is always gone by noon, – a dye made of sunlight and morning and moisture, so intense that it cannot possibly last…must fade, like ecstasy. [ALL, p.82]
Everything prepares us for Niel’s rejection of his lady in terms of this allegorical pastoral iconography – plucking a moral flower from Shakespeare (‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’),10 transforming his ‘bouquet for a lovely lady’ into a ‘prickly bunch of wild roses’ to be thrown in the mud.
But this pastoral writing is double, evoking, inside Niel’s judgemental aesthetics, the feeling of Marian’s sexual pleasure, itself, like the dawn and the roses, ‘tender’, ‘joyous’, ‘stained’, ‘ecstatic’. The very shape of that sentence describing the rosebuds, with its withholding and yielding punctuation, imitates a sexual climax and aftermath. The climax of the scene – the overheard sound of the two laughs behind the closed shutters, the woman’s ‘impatient, indulgent, teasing, eager’, the man’s ‘fat and lazy – ending in something like a yawn’ – writes in the erotic joy that Niel would like to censor out.
A Lost Lady, as its title forewarns us, is full of forewarnings, portents of disaster, grave reminders of time. But danger is also an ingredient in the sensuality and excitement that make the novel seem to tingle and shimmer so. In the first story the Captain tells about Marian, she is running away from a bull, laughing and ‘stubbornly clinging to the crimson parasol that had made all the trouble’. [ALL, p.7] Her pleasure in danger recurs when she tells the boys, laughing and shivering, about the ‘water snakes and blood-suckers’ in the Sweet Water creek. Immediately afterwards, Ivy Peters (‘poison ivy’) appears, and, in an extraordinarily sudden, horrifying little scene, catches a woodpecker (‘Miss Female’, he calls it) and slits its eyes, sending it into ‘wild and desperate’ circular paroxysms. The blinding of the bird and Niel’s fall from the tree trying (and failing) to reach it is the most startling of the novel’s pastoral accidents and cruelties: the winter blizzard that imprisons the Forresters, the floods through which Marian struggles to contact Frank.
Marian is dangerous, but she is a victim of danger too: the blinded woodpecker is one of several metaphors – butterfly wings, a bird in a net, a dying rose – which tell us so. The taxidermy kit Ivy Peters gets out to use on the bird (‘tiny sharp knife blades, hooks, curved needles, a saw, a blowpipe, and scissors’ [ALL, p.19]) anticipates Frank’s cedar-chopping axe-strokes, which seem to penetrate her, and the shears which Niel snatches up to cut the telephone wire before her outburst at Frank can be overheard by anyone except himself. Whether the attitude to her is predatory or protective, this bird/nymph/flower-lady is likely to be crushed, cut, or pierced. Even the benign, immovable figure of the Captain, with his dark heavy furniture and his set phrases repeated like ‘inscriptions cut in stone’, seems to enclose and weigh her down. Leaning on his canes like ‘an old tree walking’ [ALL, p.114], as if he has metamorphosed into the willow tree that he planted long before, as his stake to the land; sitting stiller and stiller, with a view of his forced hyacinths and his sundial carved of stone from ‘the Garden of the Gods’ [ALL, p.108], he seems by his end to be Time himself, the warning figure in the pastoral idyll.
The minatory pastoral of A Lost Lady has two explicit sources, which suggest a great change in associations
from O Pioneers! or My Ántonia. Niel, the pious custodian of past values, provides us with a classical analogue. Sitting in his uncle’s office in the long Nebraskan winter, he reads Ovid’s Heroides ‘over and over’, feeling as if he is ‘living a double life, with all its guilty enjoyments’. To him, Ovid’s heroines are:
living creatures, caught in the very behaviour of living, – surprised behind their misleading severity of form and phrase. [ALL, p.79]
Obviously this is very like Jim’s reading of Virgil in My Ántonia. But the Ovidian model introduces into the text quite different elements – seduction, danger, betrayal, sexuality – from Virgil’s serene memorializing. Niel’s ‘peephole’ onto the past (‘double life’, ‘guilty enjoyments’, ‘eavesdropping’) seems sexual and furtive, appropriate, perhaps, to Ovid’s eavesdropping onto the letters of lamentation written by various legendary women to their unfaithful or absent lovers. Ovid listens in on those heroines just as Niel listens in on Marian’s epistle-by-telephone to Frank: Ovid catches the ‘living creatures’ just as Niel, when he takes hold of Marian in her hammock like a bird in a net, would like to ‘catch’ her and take her out of the sad world. The first word Niel speaks in the book is ‘Hush’; the most decisive action he takes is to cut off her voice. Ovid takes over the voices of his lost ladies and speaks for them: Niel too would like to silence and speak for his lost lady, to be, like Ovid, a ghost-writer. But she, as various and contradictory and ‘breathing’ as all of Ovid’s ladies – Penelope and Dido, Ariadne and Helen of Troy, Medusa and Hermione – speaks for herself in spite of his custodial authoring of her story.
The other pastoral model is more innocent and artless than the Ovid, but just as much of a frame to fix the lady in. This model is old English, not classical, suitable for the feudal associations Cather wanted for the Forresters’ ‘princely’ regime. From ‘Alexander’ to ‘Lucy Gayheart’, Cather loved meaningful names. When she calls the Captain ‘Forrester’, (and turns him into an old tree), the upstart parasite ‘Ivy’, the town ‘Sweet Water’, and the heroine ‘Marian’, addressed by her husband as ‘Maidy’, she is letting us know that the cottonwood grove is meant for the greenwood, a Nebraskan Sherwood Forest.11 From the Elizabethans to the Romantics (and on into Tennyson’s pseudo-Shakespearean late play ‘The Forresters’, where Maid Marian appears as a moon-goddess and makes Sherwood ‘Eden o’er again’),12 the greenwood was always linked to the lost golden age, with Robin Hood and Maid Marian as its rulers, sometimes in the guise of the King and Queen of the May. (Hawthorne, very much admired by Cather, transposed the ‘Golden Age’ to the ‘fresh woods of the West’ in his story ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount’, where the King and Queen of the May, re-enacting the Arcadian rites of ‘ancient fable’, transported from ‘Merry England’, have to leave the greenwood and become Puritan American citizens.) The Duke in the Forest of Arden is said to live ‘like the old Robin Hood of England’; he and his ‘merry men’ ‘fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world’.13
Keats, Cather’s favourite English poet,14 in a mood of regret for Elizabethan poetry, equated its generous splendours with the lost days of Robin Hood: ‘All are gone away and past!’ The forest where ‘men knew not rents nor leases’ (the greenwood is always pre-capitalist) has been spoilt and despoiled: if Robin and Marian came back they would find the trees cut down and turned into rotting ships, and honey unobtainable ‘without hard money’.15 This lament is precisely Niel’s for the golden age of the West (‘It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back’). [ALL, p.172] (By an intriguing coincidence, Keats put ‘Robin Hood’ in a letter to his friend Reynolds, of whose decision to give up poetry for law Keats disapproved. Niel’s feeling that the ‘law’ of the greenwood – honour, fidelity – is lost, goes with his distaste for the law as a profession. And Ivy Peters is a lawyer, dealing with ‘rents and leases’.) The Captain’s fidelity to his working-class creditors (‘railroad employés, mechanics, and day labourers’) while all about him are cutting their losses, makes him a kind of Robin Hood, robbing himself to give to the poor.
But for the greenwood to be Arcadian, Maid Marian must be chaste and faithful, the consort of the Lord of the Forest. When the dying Captain keeps calling out ‘Maidy, Maidy’, she must keep calling back ‘Yes, Mr Forrester’. [ALL, p.143] These verbal transactions (eavesdropped on approvingly by our pastoral custodian) have no useful value: ‘perhaps, he merely liked to call her name and to hear her answer.’ Like all the Captain’s fixed repetitions, they merely reiterate the system of values (‘the Captain knew his wife and…knowing her, he…valued her’) now closing down with the Captain’s death and the despoiling of the greenwood.
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It is usual to say of A Lost Lady that the ‘valuation’ of Marian Forrester is restrictive and oppressive; but two quite different readings of the novel emerge from that judgement. One is that Cather entirely endorses Niel’s snobbish nostalgia and the Captain’s traditionalism and judges Marian harshly for betraying these values. So, she goes ‘quite to pieces’ after the Captain’s death, ‘ballooning’ off without any ballast. Mary Ellmann puts the case ironically:
Mrs Forrester seems a delightful person as long as she is faithful to her grandfather surrogate, but she immediately rots under the attentions of men who are not only in good health and of her own age, but of a distinctly lower social status than the Captain.16
This view finds corroboration in Cather’s much earlier attacks on the destructive, emotional self-indulgence of the Bovaryish Edna Pontellier. But a different reading rightly points out that, for all the novel’s ominous warnings, Marian is not, after all, much like Emma Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or Edna Pontellier: her passions are not fatal to her, she gets away and survives, like the ballooning lady in ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’. In this version, ‘the reader departs from Niel’ in his ‘harsh judgement’ on Marian,17 and recognizes that ‘there is more life’ in the lost lady ‘than Niel thinks – or wants to recognize’.18
The truth is that the novel has a ‘double life’, and that both readings coexist, like the two versions of Katherine Mansfield in the essay on her. This double life of the novel holds together, with breathtaking dexterity, what Marian is, and how she seems. At every point there is a delicate negotiation, in the tradition of literary pastoral, between artifice and nature. Niel’s first sighting of Marian, a boyhood memory of seeing her arrive at church in her carriage, consists entirely of effects:
On the back seat was a lady, alone, in a black silk dress all puffs and ruffles, and a black hat, carrying a parasol with a carved ivory handle. As the carriage stopped she lifted her dress to alight; out of a swirl of foamy white petticoats she thrust a black, shiny slipper. She stepped lightly to the ground and with a nod to the driver went into the church. The little boy followed her through the open door, saw her enter a pew and kneel. He was proud now that at the first moment he had recognized her as belonging to a different world from any he had ever known. [ALL, p.38]
And he turns from his memory to look up at ‘the hollow, silver winter moon’. Like that protean goddess, Marian appears to Niel as an icon for worship, ‘all puffs and ruffles’, white petticoats, a shining slipper, an attitude of devotion and an air of distinction. She has no lines to speak. His attitude to this tableau is exactly like Cather’s youthful feeling about the theatre as a sacred place, separate from common life. Niel’s adult reactions to Marian – his refusal of her sexuality, his disappointment in her for not having ‘immolated’ herself on her husband’s pyre, and his last hope that if ‘the right man could save her’ [ALL, p.169] she might still be able to ‘play her old part’ – are all aspects of his wish to preserve an illusory sanctuary for aesthetic admiration.
He knows it is an illusion, and likes to know it. That her ‘elegantly wild’ charm, ‘seemingly so artless’, is ‘really the most finished artifice’ [ALL, p.109], gives him pleasure. This puts Niel at odds with his American contemporaries, democratic realists. Iv
y Peters, who, when he gets his chance, just treats Marian like any woman he can have, takes pleasure in seeing through and taking possession of the Forrester traditions: ‘Good deal of bluff about all those old-timers’. [ALL, p.102] But Niel does not want to cross the footlights or see through the bluff. When Marian starts using rouge or telling the town boys she must go and powder her nose, he dislikes it partly out of sexual squeamishness, partly out of snobbery, but mainly because he doesn’t want the artifice to collapse. And so she must only speak the lines of ‘her old part’:
‘If you came to see me any oftener than you do, that would make talk. You are still younger than Ivy, – and better-looking! Did that never occur to you?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that,’ he said coldly. [ALL, p.156]
Still, the words are spoken. Marian’s erotic appetancy makes itself felt through, and in spite of, Niel’s self-protecting frigidity. And though his first sighting of her as a boy may give her no lines, she speaks through all the words of movement – lifted, alight, swish, thrust, stepped lightly – that describe her in that passage. The scene frames her, but she won’t stay put.
