Willa Cather
Page 26
The ‘house’ of his life is built up, piece by piece, in Book One, ‘The Family’. His equivocal relation with his wife – forbearing, habituated social contact covering a profound estrangement – is not simply or explicitly discovered. We only gradually come to understand how his ‘romance of the heart’ has been chilled, over many years, by his distaste for her ambitious worldliness and by her growing – and understandable – incomprehension of what she perceives as an intolerant withdrawal from his family.
That family life thickens around us as St Peter moves, in a subtly organized double direction, through his domestic and professional present, and through his memories. His reluctance to transfer his study to the smart, new, ‘all mod. cons.’ house, from the inconvenient attic at the top of his old house, which he has shared for years with the family’s Catholic German sewing-woman, Augusta (his great work on Spanish Adventurers in North America taking shape in the company of her ‘forms’ and patterns for the girls’ dresses) comes to stand for his alienation from the whole of his family’s life. Gradually we understand how the unacknowledged separation in the marriage is involved with his relation to his two married daughters, with his work, and above all with the part his dead pupil, Tom Outland, played in his life.
St Peter’s long life-story weaves Tom’s short one in and out of its narrative. For a long time he withholds the sudden appearance of the twenty-year-old boy from the Southwest in the garden of his old house. These early memories, dating back to about 1906, are simple, gallant and touching. St Peter calls vividly to mind Tom’s giving out his Indian relics as gifts, his quiet determination to be educated, his awkward table-manners, his stories of adventure told to the little girls. But after these tender pictures, his story, as it affects St Peter’s, becomes more intangible. Tom’s success as a student, his attachment to the Professor’s family, his years of scientific research under Dr Crane at the university, his invention of a new gas and his willing of the patent to Rosamond, St Peter’s older daughter, before his tragic death in the war in 1916, are referred to, but not visualized. Tom’s life is concealed underneath the story of St Peter, until we come to the sound of his own voice.
So St Peter’s memories of Tom are inseparable from his own retrospect. And much of the book’s painful irony lies in Tom’s unconsciousness of how he has affected the other man’s life. Tom, involuntarily, was responsible for St Peter’s estrangement from Lillian, who began, after about two years, to be jealous of their ‘romance of the imagination’. Posthumously, Tom has caused a breach between St Peter’s two grown-up daughters, which the father observes with grief. The ‘new gas’, willed to Rosamond, was turned after Tom’s death into the ‘Outland vacuum engine’, now ‘revolutionizing aviation’ in America.1 Thanks to the energetic efforts of Rosamond’s husband, Louie Marsellus, Tom’s inspiration has become a business of ‘chemicals and dollars and cents’. This material success, which gives Lillian, Rosamond and Louie great satisfaction, is much resented by St Peter and by his younger daughter Kathleen.
The story of the two sisters and their husbands would, for another American novelist interested in social realism – William Dean Howells, say – have made a marvellously substantial fiction. Cather restrains it. So that Tom can be preserved, in memory, as innocent and asexual, we hear almost nothing about his courtship of Rosamond, and the possibility that Kathleen was secretly in love with him is only hinted at. But the adult family feelings that encompass St Peter are powerfully established. The rivalry between the older, conventionally beautiful Rosamond, hard and determined like her mother, and the more vulnerable Kathleen, closer to her father, and married to a restless young journalist, Scott, who thinks himself too good for his work, is brilliantly touched in. We find out everything we need about the Marselluses’ exhibitionist, lavish appropriation of ‘Outland’ as an inheritance of worldly goods, about Kathleen’s resentment at Rosamond’s betrayal of Tom’s memory, Scott’s anti-semitic hostility to Louie, and Lillian’s transference of her sexual emotions from her husband to her sons-in-law.
Individually, there are subtle sympathies. Apart from the chilling Rosamond (whose name and behaviour recall George Eliot’s Rosamond Vincy), each member of the family makes an appeal to St Peter, and to us. Kathleen and Scott are attractive in their insecurity and their affection for him: they are at their best in their scenes alone with St Peter. Lillian suffers in her own way from the failed marriage, and at moments her interior life is sharply and surprisingly felt. When the husband and wife are watching Mignon at the Chicago Opera, it is not only St Peter who sadly remembers their Paris courtship. Lillian’s hard surface dissolves to reveal ‘something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless’. [PH, p.94] Her own sense of loss, and her own estrangement from the person she loves, are just glimpsed. Most interesting of all these familial knots is St Peter’s reluctant but increasing fondness for the thick-skinned, florid, irrepressible Louie, at first an unwelcome substitute son-in-law, but eventually acknowledged as generous and benign. It is as though, in this peripheral but important relationship, Cather’s own tendency to anti-semitism – put off onto Scott – is being argued with and overcome: Jan Hambourg, the dedicatee in the first edition of The Professor’s House, was probably on her mind.
But although the family members make individual inroads on the Professor’s compassion, as a unit they are made to stand, unforgivingly, for the sins of envy and covetousness. (Cather even has St Peter refer to the seven deadly sins in the lecture he gives to his students.) They represent the corrupt, sexualized world, and are seen in little dramas of greed and malice. Lillian and Louie bend over a casket of jewels, Kathleen turns pale green with envy over Rosamond’s furs, and Rosamond drags her father round Chicago on ‘an orgy of acquisition’. [PH, p.154]
The family betrayal of Tom Outland is paralleled by the Professor’s disillusionment at work. The university where he and Tom once worked together has become a site for ‘the new commercialism’, a ‘trade school’, rapidly replacing its courses in ‘purely cultural studies’ with book-keeping and domestic science. [PH, p.140] The botched execution of a well-designed but cheaply built physics laboratory is one example of the many ‘lost causes’ [PH, p.143] the Professor has spent his working life trying to defend. Cather is always good at entering into vocations she finds sympathetic: the very title of this novel suggests the emphasis on professionalism. She is extremely interested, as elsewhere, in the relation of character to job, and makes this felt through St Peter’s susceptibility to his good students, his arduous negotiations between teaching and research, his long feud with a ‘sham’ historian who sets up against him in the department, his struggles alongside Tom’s old teacher Dr. Crane to preserve the integrity of the university, and, now, his dismay at finding that even the scrupulously puritanical Crane is trying to get something from his pupil’s posthumous profits.
The strong, autonomous sense of character is one of the novel’s great virtues. But Cather also embodies herself, as she has done before and will again, in her objectified male character. Godfrey St Peter is fifty-two, the same age she is when the novel is published. As a child he was taken away from the landscape he loved (the blue inland sea of the lake) to ‘the wheat lands of central Kansas’, and ‘nearly died of it’. [PH, p.30] Like Cather, he has tender memories of his time in France in his youth, and all his associations with that country – youth, spring, sweetness – are Cather’s. And his professional history mirrors her own. The lifetime of ‘eliminations and combinations’ [PH, p.29] which have enabled him to write his great book and be a good teacher remind us specifically of Cather’s hard years in Pittsburgh.2 There is a wider connection, too, with her whole writing life. His early work only reached a small audience: ‘Nobody saw that he was trying to do something quite different.’ [PH, p.32] That neglect has come to seem to him, retrospectively, like freedom. Now, in middle age, he has acquired ‘a certain international reputation’ for his eight-volume Spanish Adventurers in North
America. He is beginning to have ‘what were called rewards’: an Oxford prize for history, ‘with its five thousand pounds’ [PH, p.33], which, as the Pulitzer did for Cather, has changed his life in ways he could have done without. There is enough here (without even embarking on the more arguable terrain of Isabelle’s loss, the possible resemblance of Louie to Jan Hambourg, and the shadow of a ‘midlife crisis’) to let us know that a personal feeling underlies the Professor’s weariness and alienation, his sense that he is in retreat from ‘the human family’.
—
Another voice, and another authorial self, though, enter into this split text. Set inside the enclosing house of the Professor’s editorial memory, Tom Outland’s story derives from the raw material of Cather’s own past, transformed into a boy’s story of pioneering in the Southwest. It begins when he is eighteen. Outland, orphan child of pioneers, is working on the railroads in the raw town of Pardee, New Mexico. He does a good turn to a footloose working man with a rough past, Roddy Blake. The older and younger man befriend each other, and go off in the summer cattle-ranching in the land around the Blue Mesa, a great cliff landmark, said by the ‘old settlers’ never to have been climbed. They make camp with an old ‘castaway Englishman’, Henry Atkins, for ‘housekeeper’, and these three social outsiders make a ‘happy family’.
Chasing the runaway cattle which keep getting into the mesa in pursuit of a wild herd, Tom swims the river into the canyon and suddenly, at the novel’s quiet, secret, central climax, comes upon the mesa’s undiscovered, ‘prehistoric’ Indian cliff-dwellings. His story is a ‘plain’ account, as recorded in his diary, of the pioneering that led to his involuntary discovery, of the work of path-building, exploration and cataloguing that he and Roddy then undertake, of old Henry’s dramatic death by snake-bite and of the advice of Father Duchene (Tom’s Latin teacher, a wise tough Belgian priest with many years’ local experience.) All this is coloured by Tom’s powerful but unspoken feelings about the mesa and the cliff-dwellings. Then the story changes: Tom goes to Washington to try to arouse interest in the native treasures, and is bitterly disillusioned by the lack of interest among the place-seeking politicians. On his return he finds that Roddy, not understanding Tom’s feelings, has sold the relics to a German trader. The mates part in anger – for ever, as it turns out – but once Tom is left alone on the mesa, studying Spanish and reading Virgil’s Aeneid, he seems to ‘take possession’ of the place. A year later, he walks into the Professor’s garden.
Compounding the sense of the novel as a writer’s disguised autobiography, Tom Outland’s story itself mimics the act of authoring: it is a record of exploration and disclosure, loss and repossession, which could stand on its own as a metaphor for the writer’s process of finding, losing and recreating experience. So the novel provides two different, split models of writing-as-memory. Only at the end, and with difficulty, are the two parts made to cohere.
Like the Professor in his study, and then like Tom in his mesa, Cather excavates the layers of her past to get at Tom’s story. It is saved up for a long time inside the novel, just as she had been saving up its sources. ‘Raw’ and fresh though it reads, it is in fact a reworking of slowly accumulated material. When she began The Professor’s House in 1923 it was fourteen years since she had found her voice as a writer with ‘The Enchanted Bluff’. In that story, the boys’ unfulfilled dream of getting down to New Mexico and exploring the legendary, inviolate Indian cliff-dwelling, set sadly against the compromise of their adult lives, anticipated her own lifelong enchantment with the subject. Then her crucial, transforming journey to the Southwest in 1912 had poured itself into The Song of the Lark, where the experience of the cliff-dwellings shapes Thea’s art as it shaped her author’s. And in 1914, the year The Song of the Lark was published, Cather went back to the country that she said3 drove her crazy with delight. She returned in 1915, and this journey (which, like her, I have been saving up until now) would eventually give her Tom Outland’s story.
1915 was the year that Judge McClung not unreasonably thought it dangerous for Isabelle and Cather to go to Europe. Instead she went with Edith Lewis back to the Southwest, on a dramatic train journey along the mountainous border of Colorado and New Mexico, to Durango and on to Mancos, at the foot of the La Plata range, the nearest town to the Mesa Verde. This great cliff-plateau, intercut with hundreds of canyons, its slopes covered in sagebrush, pinyon and juniper trees, the site of the biggest and most astonishing collection of Indian cliff-dwellings in America, had begun to be explored in the 1870’s, and had been made a national park in 1906. Tourism had only just begun to be developed, and Cather could still identify with the pioneers of the mesa, the more so since, in Mancos, she heard almost at first hand the story of the discovery of the ruins by the rancher Richard Wetherill. His brother told her how, in pursuit of strayed cattle, Wetherill and a friend forded the Mancos River, struggled up the steep canyon, and suddenly saw, as she would make Tom Outland see alone, ‘through a veil of lightly falling snow…practically as it stands today and as it had stood for 800 years before, the cliff palace’. ‘It stood as if it had been deserted yesterday; undisturbed and undesecrated.’4 (She would have heard, too, of the controversy over the Wetherill family’s sale of their cliff-dweller artefacts to museums, after their initial failures to attract archaeological interest in the remains.)5
The climax of Cather’s own week-long exploration of the cliff-dwellings was almost as dramatic as Richard Wetherill’s. She and Edith visited an unexcavated cliff-village, the Tower House, with a less experienced guide than usual, who got them lost on the way back, and had to leave them at dusk to go for help. They were rescued by men from an archaeologist’s camp, who helped them make a rough and difficult climb to safety. Lewis remembered the hours they were left alone ‘watching the long summer twilight come on, and the full moon rise up over the rim of the canyon’,6 making a profound impression on Cather. She herself played down the adventure in her report to Elsie Sergeant:7 it was a rough twenty-four hours, she said, but it taught her more than any other twenty-four hours in her life. (The local newspaper reports were more sensationalist: ‘TWO NOTED WOMEN GET LOST ALL NIGHT IN MESA VERDE WILDS: Misses Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, Magazine Editors and Novelists, Have Nerve-Racking Experience’, ran the headline.)8
Cather’s immediate response to the place was to ask herself how it could be rendered. The camera, her letter to Elsie continued, became inarticulate in the face of that light, those heights and depths. What was needed was a big painter, with an egotism commensurate to that of the cliff-dwellers’.9 In 1916 she published an essay on the Mesa Verde which, though she didn’t yet know it, was a first version of Tom Outland’s story.10 Characteristically, the essay grafted her own responses onto the witness of others, Richard Wetherill, and the Swedish explorer Nordenskjold, whose 1893 book on the cliff-dwellings Cather had evidently read. At once personal and historical, the essay vividly recreates the magical first sight of the ruins, and their silent eloquence, messengers of ‘custom, ritual, integrity of tradition’.11 Straight afterwards, she thought of writing a story called ‘The Blue Mesa’, and abandoned it.12 It was to be saved up for seven years. When she did start work on The Professor’s House, it was ‘The Blue Mesa’ – ‘Tom Outland’s Story’ – she began with.13 In it, the cliff-city is described as ‘preserved in the dry air and the almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber’. [PH, p.202] That phrase, like many in the novel, reworks the essay, where Wetherill sees the ruins ‘preserved in bright, dry sunshine, like a fly in amber’.14 Like the cliff-city itself, the narrative of adventure and discovery had been preserved in the amber of Cather’s memory, waiting its time.
—
The insertion of that memory into the house of the Professor’s thoughts makes the most startling dislocation in the whole of Cather’s work, more daring and unexpected than – say – the interpolation of the Peter and Pavel story into My Ántonia, or the jump from America to France in One of Ours, o
r the sudden shift of fortunes in My Mortal Enemy. Cather felt she needed to justify the structure. Her title page quotation from Louie Marsellus, ‘a turquoise set in dull silver’, refers to Tom’s blue stone from the mesa – simple, glowing, ancient – which is made into a bracelet for Rosamond; it also describes the shape of the novel. Later, in an essay on The Professor’s House,15 Cather said that its structure resembled the free handling of the sonata form, and that it followed early French and Spanish novels in their interpolation of a ‘novella’ (a long short story) into a ‘roman’. Above all, she said, the form was like the Dutch paintings she had seen in Paris, where ‘a warmly furnished’ living room or kitchen would have ‘a square window, open’ looking out onto ‘the masts of ships, or a stretch of gray sea’.
Though they give us important hints for the novel, the analogies from jewellery, music, painting and literature are somewhat misleading. Cather purports to have made a formal experiment for this particular book. But, in fact, its ‘massive dislocation’ was very much in keeping with her persistent interest in doubleness.16 Cather’s formal explanations of her divided narrative structure cover up the obsessional, personal nature of the split, and do not suggest how much fracture and dislocation there is throughout the novel. The attempt to make a coherent, harmonized shape through memory is constantly straining against processes of separation and substitution.