Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  All this passionate grandeur is immediately subverted (as in My Ántonia, where the vision of the plough is followed by the story of Wick Cutter) by a spiteful quarrel between Myra and Oswald over a key: the key, by implication, to their sexual life. Their banal exchange, nervously eavesdropped on by Nellie (How dare you – the hell you did – I might have known it – well, you needn’t) is cheap drama after high art, the underside of Myra’s ‘passionate, overmastering something’. After a final encounter with a scornful Myra on the train leaving New York, Aunt Lydia declares she is sick of her old friend’s ‘dramatics’.

  And the line between ‘dramatics’ and ‘drama’ is a thin one: Myra is always on the edge of being just an uninterestingly self-centred, trivial, difficult woman. Why should Nellie (or we) be drawn to her? Coldly described, Myra’s actions in Act 1 (matchmaking, paying court to Modjeska, baiting Oswald) do not sound worth much attention; they certainly don’t compare in scope and grandeur with carving a farm out of hard land or making a career as a great singer. But Myra’s sense of herself as a heroine turns her into one. And in Act II her staginess becomes a form of stoicism, and so not as inferior to Alexandra’s strength or Thea’s energy as it might seem at first. Struck down by real misfortunes, poverty and illness, she plays a deposed monarch, a fallen Caesar, a medieval saint. That nothing is real for her, not even her own death, unless it is dramatized, is very disturbing; but the show she puts on is a gripping one.

  Act II begins, as with a stage direction, ‘ten years after’; the scene has changed from old New York to a ‘sprawling’ new West Coast town ‘in the throes of rapid development’. All the characters (like so many Americans in the ‘throes’ of the 1890s) have fallen on hard times: Nellie’s family is impoverished and squabbling over their few heirlooms, Nellie is teaching and living in obscure boarding-houses; the Henshawes are rumoured to have failed financially and to have moved west after Myra, as ever too proud for her own good, refused to let Oswald take an inferior position in his old company. By extraordinary coincidence, Nellie comes across them in her seedy apartment-house: Myra is a sick old woman, bitterly resentful of her changed conditions; Oswald has ‘a humble position, poorly paid, with the city traction company’, and is wearing himself out looking after her.

  The rediscovery of the Henshawes is very beautifully done, in a subdued crescendo, from Nellie’s hearing, through the thin walls, the man next door moving about quietly, trying to keep the details of his ‘housekeeping’ to himself, humming a Schubert song as he switches on the ‘gasolene’ and cleans his neckties, to her encounter with a much-aged Oswald carrying a supper tray on the stairs, and her climactic reunion with Myra. Oswald prepares for the disclosure with an intensely histrionic speech:

  ‘She is ill, my poor Myra. Oh, very ill! But we must not speak of that, nor seem to know it. What it will mean to her to see you again!’ [MME, p.74]

  And after this build-up she is revealed on her stage, the lighting carefully set (‘the electric bulbs in the room were shrouded and muffled with coloured scarfs’), dressed to impress in a bright Chinese dressing-gown, surrounded by props from the past – including, of course, the old velvet curtains – and ready on cue to flash out into an aria of high theatricality about premonitions, fortunes, and her ‘temporary eclipse’. ‘She looked strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather wicked old woman, who hated life for its defeats, and loved it for its absurdities’. [MME, p.80]

  Act II is a series of long soliloquies from this daunting figure (with Nellie upgraded – like a grown-up daughter – from silent watcher to confidante), bitter disquisitions on poverty, age and sickness, culminating in statements of horrifying emotional recklessness: ‘ “We’ve destroyed each other….It was money I needed. We’ve thrown our lives away.” ’ [MME, p.91] ‘ “A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other.” ’ [MME, p.105] To make her effects, she uses all the cultural remnants she can clutch to her. ‘Her old poets’, like her velvet curtains, are in both senses her ‘props’. Nellie hears her murmuring speeches of Shakespeare’s deposed or failed kings ‘at the very bottom of her rich Irish voice’. [MME, p.99] When she takes her for a drive to a bare headland overlooking the sea, Myra at once appropriates it for her own tragic requirements:

  ‘Why, Nellie!’ she exclaimed, ‘it’s like the cliff in Lear, Gloucester’s cliff, so it is!’ [MME, p.87]

  After a particularly savage outburst against Oswald, she calls Nellie in and asks her to read her Heine’s poem ‘about how he found in his eye a tear that was not of the present, an old one, left over from the kind he used to weep’. [MME, p.95] The poet addresses his ‘anachronistic tear’ in a brief drama of regret which re-enacts the losses of his past. ‘Ah, my love itself dissolved like an empty breath! Old, lonely tear, you too must now dissolve!’28 Nellie, drily narrating, sees Myra turning the poet’s drama into her own, reacting and re-enacting all in one.

  My friend lay still, with her eyes closed, and occasionally one of those anachronistic tears gathered on her lashes and fell on the pillow, making a little grey spot. Often she took the verse out of my mouth and finished it herself. [MME, p.96]

  The moment sums up the book’s emotions: the cold eye registering, and yet moved by, the ‘dramatics’; the painful luxury of ‘romantic’ self-pity; the grand futility of the whole performance. It sums up, too, Myra’s combination of helplessness (‘My friend lay still’) and her persistent desire for control (‘Often she took the verse out of my mouth’). Though physically dependent on Oswald and Nellie, she continues to fix, manage and conspire, locking Oswald out or turning Nellie away when the mood takes her, secretly hoarding money to pay for masses for Modjeska, summoning her priest, insisting on candlelight to die by, and finally staging her own death on ‘Gloucester’s cliff’. ‘She can do anything she wills’, Oswald says. Like Sapphira and ‘the old beauty’ in stories to come, this figure of the tyrannical, crippled, manipulative older woman makes an alarming matriarchal contrast to the energetic women-heroes of the earlier books.

  —

  Cather projects herself, as always, indirectly. In part, she is the observer in hiding. ‘Here is Nellie Birdseye, rapping at the gates.’ [MME, p.63] ‘Her room is thirty-two; rap gently…’ [MME, p.74] Nellie, rapping gently, is let into Myra’s room, but what she finds there is dangerous to herself. This reads like bitter personal experience. Nellie’s alienation from her home town, her youthful stoicism, her grim ambition (‘ “I know what I want to do, and I’ll work my way out yet, if only you’ll give me time” ’ [MME, p.79]) must remind Cather of herself. In Nellie’s desire to prove herself to Myra, and in the hard lessons she learns from her, there may be a memory of Cather’s relationship with her mother. But Cather is also the bitter old woman, inveighing against ugly new buildings and ugly new poetry. The memory of Modjeska (one of Cather’s own early heroines) listening to ‘Casta Diva’, lingers on, for Myra as for Cather, as an emblem of all that was good in the past.29 And all that is bad in the present is summed up by another kind of enforced listening, to the people upstairs. The violent neurotic language used for their tramping and shrieking – they are ‘animals’, ‘cattle’, the woman is an ‘adder’ – gives away a personal obsession. Cather was, indeed, extremely touchy about this: Godfrey St Peter in The Professor’s House also makes sure that there is no one ‘tramping over him’. [PH, p.26] The tyranny of uncontrollable, random city noise is made to stand for all the messiness of twentieth-century life.

  But Myra’s tragic embitterment is not simply a projection of Cather’s nostalgia. My Mortal Enemy is stranger and more interesting than that. In fact it is Oswald who most cherishes the past, and urges her to remember ‘the long time we were happy’. [MME, p.91] Her response to this is brutal:

  ‘He’s a sentimentalist, always was; he can look back on the best of those days when we were young and loved each other, and make himself believe it was all like that. It wasn’t.
I was always a grasping, worldly woman; I was never satisfied.’ [MME, p.104]

  Cather said of Myra that she was the sort of woman who could never have been at peace. And it is a powerful picture of congenital discontent. Like the pelican tearing at her own breast, Myra Henshawe devours her own memories and refuses the past as consolation: ‘We were never really happy.’ The novella is as brutal as its heroine about the impossibility of contentment for the kind of woman who feeds continually off her emotions. Myra tells Nellie that if she had had money she might have been consoled for the loss of ‘the power to love’; or, if she had had children her feelings might have gone through ‘natural changes’. But we are made to feel that nothing would ever have been enough. The role of the ‘lady’ is a self-destructive performance, since it is entirely based on the personal. Cather is reiterating her judgement of heroines like Edna Pontellier, who ‘really expect the power of love to fill and gratify every need of life’.30

  If a life lived for the personal self-destructs, then the object of personal feeling is likely to be destroyed too. ‘ “Perhaps I can’t forgive him for the harm I did him” ’, Myra says penetratingly of her ferocious treatment of the ever-chivalric Oswald. The most desolating aspect of My Mortal Enemy is Myra’s punishment of the person she loved. With a very few, telling details, Oswald’s aptitude for victimization is made apparent, enough to make us understand his part in this terrible, indissoluble marriage. Those strange, listless, half-moon eyes belong to someone who is living a life that is wrong for him: ‘He possessed some kind of courage and force which slept.’ [MME, p.65] He is sexually susceptible (young girls, such as the giver of the topazes, or the Cather-like bright, awkward journalist in the boarding-house, are always falling for him) and so makes Myra violently jealous. But he is also sentimental and uxorious, and so allows her to tyrannize over him. Though their sexual life is evidently over by Act II, he refuses to think of her as an old woman:

  ‘These last years it’s seemed to me that I was nursing the mother of the girl who ran away with me. Nothing ever took that girl from me. She was a wild, lovely creature, Nellie. I wish you could have seen her then.’ [MME, p.121]

  Touching though this romantic fantasy is, it is also dangerous; he refuses to accept her old age, and thereby makes it harder for her to resign herself. There is nothing else in Cather quite like this intense picture of mutual damage.

  As she gets iller, Myra is appeased by religion. The solution comes as no surprise at this point in Cather’s life and work. From the first, she had been writing about visionaries, idealists, characters motivated by spiritual rather than material ends. The argument of The Professor’s House is about renunciation: both Godfrey St Peter and Tom Outland see appetancy as self-destruction, and losing as finding. But, until now, orthodox religion had not figured largely. Official believers – all minor characters – had been fanatics or hypocrites or mystic simpletons. Myra’s deathbed reversion to her great-uncle’s Catholicism gives orthodox religion its first central place in Cather’s work. The ground is being prepared for the historical novels of heroic faith; and Cather’s increasing preoccupation with resignation is being displayed.

  But the religious feeling of My Mortal Enemy is disconcerting. For all her speeches about absolution and renunciation, Myra goes on clutching and wanting till the last. There is something extravagant and manipulative in her last-minute Catholicism, as in all her gestures. It is another scene in her ‘dramatics’. She is as histrionic over her ‘holy rites’ – hoarding the secret money for Modjeska’s masses, or staging her death, ebony crucifix in hand, overlooking the sea – as she once was over her jewels and matchmaking.

  This sensual attraction to ritual (which expresses a very strong feeling of Cather’s) is characterized as primitive and reactionary. Myra’s Catholicism is like her old great-uncle’s: her death is as scenic as his funeral was. And since her memories of him are all of an indomitable ruthlessness, her reversion to his religion recalls all these qualities. She can feel old John Driscoll’s ‘savagery’ strengthening in her. (So her Irishness is rather tiresomely accentuated towards the end.) This belief is alarmingly phrased. ‘ “The nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.” ’ [MME, p.99] Our destiny, Myra tells Nellie, is to revert to type. So the return to religion opposes the possibility of individual choice. It operates as a form of determinism, and as an expression of hostility to the contingencies and ‘free-thinking’ of the modern world. Myra’s priest even suggests that she is like a saint of the early Church: ‘ “She’s not all modern in her make-up, is she?” ’ [MME, p.111]

  The troll-like power of old beliefs emerges, distorted, in spoilt, civilized Myra, as superstition and vindictiveness. Her religion may be her only comfort against dying, but she also uses it as a means of revenge. The iller and more religious she gets, the more she turns it against the object of her old ‘idolatries’. ‘ “It is one of her delusions that I separated her from the Church” ’ [MME, p.116] Oswald says pitifully. By the end there is nothing to choose between her prayer and her curse: her terrible words to Oswald (‘ “Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?” ’) linger on in Nellie’s mind ‘like a confession of the soul’. [MME, p.122]

  Cather resisted interpretations of the phrase which assumed that Myra was her own worst enemy. Oswald, she insisted, was the ‘mortal enemy’.31 But the misreading of the title, if it is one, is understandable, since Myra turns against herself quite as much as she turns against her lover. And readers of this discomforting novella have continued to reinterpret the cryptic title. Oswald is Myra’s ‘mortal’ enemy, says Rosowski, because he refuses to accept the realities of her old age, and is thus ‘the enemy of her mortality’.32 Her ‘mortal enemy’ is not Oswald, says Judith Fryer, but time itself.33 Myra could even be thought of as Nellie’s ‘mortal enemy’. It is Nellie who speaks, and might therefore (like Jim Burden) have given the narrative its title. And, like the unlucky amethysts which Myra left her, and which cast a ‘chill’ over her whenever she wears them, Myra’s words have been a blight on Nellie’s whole life:

  Sometimes, when I have watched the bright beginning of a love story, when I have seen a common feeling exalted into beauty by imagination, generosity, and the flaming courage of youth, I have heard again that strange complaint breathed by a dying woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul: ‘Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy!’ [MME, p.122]

  If Myra has been destined to inherit her ancestral beliefs, then Nellie seems doomed to have taken on this quasi-maternal legacy of cynicism and despair. It is a chilling conclusion.

  Cather’s titles are often possessive; but they make us think twice about possessing. My Ántonia and One of Ours sound reassuring enough; but the books ask the meaning of ‘my’ and ‘ours’. As for The Professor’s House: does the professor own his house, or does his house possess him? My Mortal Enemy is about the fatal – the mortal – flaw in the desire for possession: what we think we own, we must lose; what we clutch at turns to dust. The title seems to give off one of Myra’s dark terrible laughs. And she herself escapes possession: the ‘my’ disappears into ‘myra’, and no one can have her; all that’s left is ‘a compelling, passionate, overmastering something for which I had no name’.

  11

  TAKING POSSESSION

  It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession.

  The Professor’s House, 1925

  GODFREY ST PETER, the professor of The Professor’s House, is a historian, and his story is a recalling of the past. He is the most articulate and reflective memorializer in all Cather’s work. The novel he inhabits is about splits and disjunctions: between the masculine and the feminine, language and sile
nce, materialism and idealism, and above all, the past and the present. Poised, as the novel begins, between the old house he is reluctant to leave and the new house that is being forced upon him, Cather’s historian is poised between the past and the present. The professor’s house is, in one sense, the house of memory.

  We already know how Cather saved herself up, and projected her time past into the fictive time of her novels. This book, exactly in the middle of her writing life, reaches back as deep into her own experience as The Song of the Lark or My Ántonia, but puts it to more oblique and fragmented use. She buried herself very deep inside the novel. Cather projects herself as St Peter in many ways, and one of the fascinations of this novel is its revelation of intense personal feeling. At the same time, St Peter is one of her most impersonal and realistic characters: substantial, complex, objectified. We feel from the first sentence of the book to the last that this middle-aged scholar with a demanding family, living in a university town near Lake Michigan, is thoroughly imagined, not merely a transparent ‘stand-in’ for Cather.