Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  When he was visiting Mother Philomène’s convent, one of the younger Sisters had confided to him what an inspiration it was to them, living in retirement, to work for the faraway missions. She told him also how precious to them were Father Vaillant’s long letters, letters in which he told his sister of the country, the Indians, the pious Mexican women, the Spanish martyrs of old. These letters, she said, Mother Philomène read aloud in the evening. The nun took Father Latour to a window that jutted out and looked up the narrow street to where the wall turned at an angle, cutting off further view. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘after the Mother has read us one of those letters from her brother, I come and stand in this alcove and look up our little street with its one lamp, and just beyond the turn there, is New Mexico; all that he has written us of those red deserts and blue mountains, the great plains and the herds of bison, and the canyons more profound than our deepest mountain gorges. I can feel that I am there, my heart beats faster, and it seems but a moment until the retiring-bell cuts short my dreams…’

  …Father Latour recalled that moment with the nun in her alcove window, her white face, her burning eyes, and sighed. [DA, pp.181-2]

  This briefly, intensely imagined character, as thwarted by her sex and as incarcerated in her provincial nunnery as the young Cather in her Red Cloud attic, momentarily becomes the novelist. Cather too has translated the priest’s ‘long letters’ into vivid, coloured pictures, recreated through a concentrated effort of the imagination. But she has the advantage of ‘the nun in her alcove window’ of having been able to turn the corner into those wide spaces. She has made herself both pioneer and historian, actor and author, female and male voice, receiver and rewriter of history.

  13

  TWILIGHT AND MIRACLES

  ‘N’expliquez pas!’

  Shadows on the Rock, 1931

  All these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

  CATHER ALWAYS had a sense of loss and regret after finishing a book, as though parting company for ever from a close friend. This recurrent emotion was exacerbated, in the four years between Death Comes for the Archbishop and her next novel, by events which made this the most stressful and dislocated phase of her whole life. Her depression in the early 1920s had had deep sources: loss of Isabelle, post-war malaise, the onset of what James called ‘the middle years’. Between 1927 and 1930 the upsets were more tangible and drastic. All her language, in the letters of the time, is of destabilization: of falling props and disappearing landscapes.1 The apartment at Number 5, Bank Street where she and Edith had lived for fifteen years was to be demolished to make way for the new subway: a stroke of fate which seemed to fulfil, with mocking appositeness, Cather’s view of the vandalism of modern America. Coinciding with the unhappy business of putting her things in store and moving to the Grosvenor Hotel (where, to her dismay, she would still find herself five years later) came news of her father’s heart attack. That year she divided her time between Red Cloud, Jaffrey and New York, writing almost nothing. Then, after another attack, Charles Cather, who was once such a sweet Southern boy,2 died, aged eighty, in March 1928. Cather reached Red Cloud the day after his death, and stayed on, grieving, in the house for some weeks.

  That summer she went back to wild, beautiful, lonely Grand Manan (where the cottage she and Edith had had built was now ready) by way of Quebec. This first visit to the city – longer than she had planned because of Edith’s opportune bout of ‘flu3 – was the beginning of Shadows on the Rock; but there would be a great deal of researching and re-visiting before the book was done. And of painful interruptions: in December, while visiting Douglass at Long Beach, her mother, now seventy-eight, had a stroke which left her paralysed and all but speechless, though compos mentis; she would spend the next three years slowly dying in a California sanatorium. Cather went over annually in the spring to help the family look after her. She hated California, and found the spectacle of the illness bitter. Edith described the radical effect of these years.

  She realized with complete imagination what it meant for a proud woman like her mother to lie month after month quite helpless, unable to speak articulately, although her mind was perfectly clear. In Willa Cather’s long stays in Pasadena…she had to watch her continually growing weaker, more ailing, yet unable to die. It was one of those experiences that make a lasting change in the climate of one’s mind.4

  This difficult mother, who for much of Cather’s childhood had been prone to illnesses and depressions, whose conservative and demanding character had had a powerful effect on the formation of her life and writing (most plainly illustrated in the relation of Nellie and Myra Henshawe)5 was now infantilely dependent. Everything Cather wrote in her late fifties and sixties was affected by the close conjunction of her father’s death and her mother’s stroke. The fiercely controlled old ladies in ‘A Chance Meeting’, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and ‘The Old Beauty’, the tribulations of female family life in ‘Old Mrs Harris’, and the motherless daughters and feminine fathers of Shadows on the Rock and Lucy Gayheart, all take shape from these painful years of mothering her stricken mother.

  Between nursing duties, Cather kept up her professional and private travels, though she was only writing intermittently. In the summer of 1929 she started work on Shadows on the Rock at Grand Manan, and went back to Quebec so as to see the place in the autumn and the winter. In May of 1930, she and Edith sailed to France (on the Berengaria, the ship the family travel on in The Professor’s House) for a four month stay. She saw Isabelle and Jan, for the first time in seven years; she researched the French historical material for the novel; and, in a hotel in Aix, she had the extraordinary chance encounter, which took her back into the literary past, with an old lady who turned out to be Flaubert’s niece. Cather came back (with Edith, no doubt, seasick as usual) by way of the St Lawrence River to Quebec. In the autumn she was at Jaffrey, writing, and she finished Shadows on the Rock in New York on December 27, 1930. After the proofs came she went to California (and took two honorary degrees, one at Berkeley and the other back East at Princeton – where she met the Lindberghs – the latest in a succession of awards she was beginning to find more distracting than flattering). Shadows on the Rock was published in August; it had extensive but only partly enthusiastic reviews, and large sales. A month later, her mother died.

  —

  Cather had not taken Shadows on the Rock with her on her sad journeys to California. While she was there looking after her mother, she wrote a few stories which went back to her childhood and to her mother’s life, and which would be published in 1932 as Obscure Destinies. But the novel had been, she told Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a refuge, which she kept as ‘a kind of underground place, to which she could retire for a few hours of concentrated work’, like a Pueblo Indian withdrawing from his village to an ‘underground chamber’.6 The image evokes Bishop Latour’s solitary reflections when he visits his Indian friend and stays alone for three days, ‘recalling the past and planning the future’; [DA, p.230] or the Professor’s attic study; or her much earlier account of family life as a struggle between the group and the individual. Returning to family pressures in her middle age, Cather felt again the tension between the writer’s need for solitude and the attractions of domestic relationships. Shadows on the Rock, written to console herself for loss and change, is a meditation on childhood, family security and maternal influence, masquerading as a historical novel. But, like all her novels, it also pulls away towards solitude.

  The choice of seventeenth-century Quebec looks like an anomaly. Apart from the battle scenes in One of Ours, it was the only one of her novels which used material quite outside her experience, acquired through research. (Lamy and Machebeuf’s missions overlapped, after all, with her own long experien
ce of New Mexico.) Though the novel centres on a child, she had not saved up French Canada from her own childhood. Except for some juvenile romantic stories, she had never gone so far back in time. All the same, it was not as uncharacteristic as it seemed. (There is even a clue to very early interest, in an 1897 review of ‘The Seats of the Mighty: A Romance of Old Quebec’ by an author famous ‘for his vivid stories of old Canadian life’, whom she congratulates for ‘making the most of Canada’s literary possibilities’.)7 Her explorations of unfamiliar Quebec tapped familiar emotions. Edith records her ‘memory, recognition, surmise’ at ‘the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent’.8 The place aroused Cather’s powerful Francophilia,9 and her deep interest in pioneering cultures, at the point where inherited European traditions were adapting to the challenge of New World conditions, and before assimilation had set in. Quebec appealed to her particularly for being so un-assimilated: ‘She likes the French Canadians’ (she was quoted as saying in Louise Bogan’s 1931 ‘profile’) ‘because they have remained practically unchanged for over two hundred years….Quebec would never have changed at all…if the American drunks had let it alone.’10 (Bogan is clearly quoting accurately: that sounds like Cather.) She could use her recent pleasure in the Grand Manan, Bay of Fundy seascape (which she would return to in one of her last and strangest stories, ‘Before Breakfast’). She found the Canadian coastal scenery and the dramatic setting of Quebec itself, intensely beautiful, and that feeling fills the book. The novel also allowed her, as Edith observed, to use up the leftover world of Catholic feeling and tradition in which she had lived so happily for so long’11 in the writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop.

  Shadows on the Rock might have been expected, in fact, to be more like Death Comes for the Archbishop than it is. They are both about Catholics, history, and French pioneers in the New World. They both use the image of the ‘rock’ at their centre. And there are other similarities. Shadows on the Rock, like Death Comes for the Archbishop, is written in a simplified, deliberate tone, as if in translation. (This time she allows herself whole sentences and paragraphs in French, as befits the unassimilated character of the culture.) It places historical and political events in the background of individual lives, and it evokes the telling of legend.

  Yet the feeling is quite other. Indeed, for readers moving from one book to the next, Shadows on the Rock may feel disappointingly muted. A robust, sardonic tone comes into Death Comes for the Archbishop which is not used here. The colour scheme, in the move to the far north, had gone from dazzling primary tones to a muffled, luminous haze (very like the magical moonlight Hawthorne wanted for his seventeenth-century historical ‘romances’).12 As its title suggests, the book is full of fog and twilight. Cather was impatient with readers who complained of getting chicken broth instead of roast beef; they might have trusted her, she said, to know what she was doing.13

  At one point in the novel, some French tapestries, representing ‘garden scenes’, are admired by the child heroine. ‘One could study them for hours without seeing all the flowers and figures.’ [SR, p.59] Cather brought reproductions of the famous Cluny tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn back from France, and hung them in her room in the Grosvenor.14 She told Dorothy that the novel was a little tapestry.15 This comparison, with its suggestion (again very Hawthornian) of faded, decorative figures at play, set about with plants and animals, is different from that to the monumental, allegorical friezes of Puvis de Chavannes or Holbein. Cather’s descriptions of the making of Shadows on the Rock are more modest and secular than for Death Comes for the Archbishop. What she had found on ‘the rock of Quebec’, and tried to replicate, was the persistence of an old feeling about life, ‘more like an old song, incomplete and uncorrupted, than like a legend. The text was mainly anacoluthon, so to speak, but the meaning was clear’.16 Anacoluthon is the change from one grammatical construction to another within a single sentence: something unfinished, shifting.17 A tapestry, an old song, a syntactical merging: the references suggest a history told through small-scale details and a quiet flow of events. There is no journey through vast spaces and long years towards an ever-immanent destiny which contains all the past within itself. The focus here, as she explains, is ‘an orderly little French household’, from ‘a seat in the close air by the apothecary’s fire’–not ‘military glory’ or ‘Indian raids’ or ‘the wild life in the forests’. At the centre of this difference between her two ‘historical’ novels (though she does not say anything about this) is the fact that the vantage point is not that of a reflective male adult, but of a female child.

  —

  The story of Cécile Auclair, the twelve-year-old daughter of a French apothecary-doctor, begins in October 1697 and ends exactly a year later, with a (characteristic) epilogue set in 1713. We find out at once that Euclide Auclair is a fifty-year-old widower and that he came to Quebec from Paris in 1689 because his father’s apothecary shop, on the Quai des Celestins, was next door to Count Frontenac’s Paris home, and the Count became his family’s patron. Frontenac was Governor General of Canada from 1672 to 1682, was recalled to France by Louis XIV, under a cloud of disapproval, and was sent out again, aged seventy, in 1689. Cather has the historical Frontenac take the fictional Auclair with him as his personal physician.

  In the course of the novel’s year, the factual history of the colony is carefully pieced into the background of the tapestry. We learn of the three-way conflicts between the domineering Frontenac, the ascetic old Bishop Laval and the Parisian, narcissistic Bishop Saint-Vallier; of the ambivalent relations between Canada and France; and of the characteristic lives of the colonists: the clergy and the nuns, the bourgeois tradespeople and the pioneering backwoodsmen and fur traders, the coureurs de bois. In the foreground are the domestic lives of Auclair and his daughter, and their friendships with a selection of ‘types’: the cobbler Pommier and his crippled, lively mother; the cross-eyed ‘Blinker’, town misfit, whom Cécile looks after because her mother did; Jacques, the child of one of the women of the town; St Cyr, a priest from Sault St Louis, the Jesuit mission and Indian reservation at Montreal; the heroic woodsman Pierre Charron; a ship’s captain from St Malo. These fictional characters are smoothly interspersed with the historical figures – Laval, Saint-Vallier, Frontenac, Mother Juschereau, the Mother Superior of the ‘Hospitalières’ nuns at the Hôtel Dieu, the Ursuline sisters – all of whom are brought conveniently into some relation with Cécile and her father. But ‘great matters’ are distanced behind day-to-day ‘trifles’ – ‘trifles dear as the heart’s blood’, [SR, p.97] the narrator allows herself to say, in one of the moments of uncensored sentiment which make the mood soft and wistful.

  The ‘great matters’ of male history, though distanced, are very precisely selected. Cather chose to write, not about the pioneering beginnings of French Canada in the early seventeenth century – Champlain’s founding of Quebec, the sufferings and martyrdoms of the Jesuit missionaries as told in their Relations, the wars with the Iroquois – but about the next generation of colonists, for whom these events were already legend, and who, as Byatt says, ‘had had time to put down roots and build a few meagre traditions’, tended like the parsley which Cécile inherits from her mother, and has to protect against the winter cold.18 Laval and Frontenac are old men; their quarrels have been going on ‘ever since Cécile could remember’. [SR, p.20] Cather wanted to give the sense of a place that already had its history, its ‘shadows’, its traditions, but was not yet (as Cécile is not) quite secure of its future. The period she chose was one of crisis, which would determine the future of Quebec. Auclair and Cécile’s arrival in Canada in 1689 coincides with the outbreak of the French war with England over their rivalry for commerce in the New World. The story ends with the peace of Rysvik in 1697 and the death of Frontenac in 1698. During these war years, there was also a war of policy going on between Frontenac and t
he King over western expansionism, which the King regarded as expensive and dangerously undermining to the French character of the colony. Cather just touches this in, when Frontenac confides to Auclair that he had made the mistake of teaching the King geography: the French court wanted to think of Quebec as ‘isolated, French, and Catholic’. [SR, p.237]

  The passing, and unexplained, reference, is a good example of her submerging of history under the story. Cather’s cunning, economical manipulation of her material is interesting to watch. Not many dates are mentioned, but there are constant references to ‘eight years ago’ or ‘for the next three years’. Names of important off-stage places and events are mentioned with minimal explanation – Sault St Louis, [SR, p.136] Ville-Marie, the old name for Montreal, [SR, p.144] Michilimackinak, the main fur-trading post on the junction of Lakes Michigan and Huron, [SR, p.168] the Phips bombardment, when Sir William Phips laid unsuccessful siege to the rock. [SR, pp.63, 94, 183] They occur as part of Cécile’s mental furniture. Every so often a historical survey is made, by means of a set-piece like the arrival of the ships, or the return of Saint-Vallier in 1713. There is a particularly ingenious, and odd, instance of this tactic, when Cécile visits the cobbler to have shoes made for her protégé, little Jacques. Pommier shows her the wooden lasts which are ‘the feet of all the great people’. [SR, p.81] The story of Robert la Salle is invoked through the wooden simulacrum of his foot, the foot that ‘went farther than any other in New France’. [SR, p.82] The scene works both as a child’s history lesson, with objects as teaching aids, and as a metonymic image for the passing of great men, who leave, as it were, their footprints in the sand. (She would come back to that image in her next novel, Lucy Gayheart.) It is characteristically suggestive: we never hear the full story of La Salle, Frontenac’s friend, an intrepid and rapacious explorer (like those Spanish adventurers Cather so much admired) who tried to extend the French fur-trading monopoly right down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, where he was murdered.