Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Cather’s letters to Tennant give the strong, energetic side of her monumentalism; they are full of gusto, certainty and good sense. Her sound advice to him was self-revealing: Don’t talk about the book but get on with it; there’s no point setting out to write a masterpiece and then sinking into self-conscious self-analysis; the only way to do it is to have fun with it, like an exciting game. Until the first writing is done, the explanations will only strangle the initial impulse. After you have caught it, you can pick about with tones and colours. But even if it doesn’t come off, it isn’t the end of the world. Cather matches her own robustness, by implication, with that of Flaubert (much in her mind after her meeting with Mme Grout), whom she thinks of as a solid Norman workman. Cather had much enjoyed Mme Grout’s telling her that when Turgenev visited Flaubert, they talked about everything except their books. The letters return repeatedly to the value of instinct over analysis, of robust realities over fastidious sensibilities, and of the old over the new. When she was ill in hospital, she told him, she read nothing but what Fitzgerald once called the ‘Helpers-to-Live’.55 Her late reading (according to these letters and to Menuhin’s and Edith’s reports) was Chaucer, Shakespeare and Scott. Evidently the pleasure of the quasi-maternal relationship with Tennant was in acting as a mentor and ‘Helper-to-Live’: when he arrived in America in the winter of 1935, looking frail, she packed him off to Jaffrey to fatten up.

  Giving advice and organizing (like her mother before her) also formed part of her affectionate late relationships with her nieces, particularly with Mary Virginia Auld, her sister Jessica’s daughter, who had been a favourite of Cather’s ever since she was an undergraduate, and who made herself indispensable to Cather and Lewis when she became a New York neighbour and a regular visitor to Grand Manan. Cather was rather surprised at liking Mary Virginia so much, since she had always found her parents lazy and selfish.56 But she became very involved with her life, anxious over her illnesses, and upset when she and her husband, a surgeon, left New York in 1942.57

  Cather as fond aunt makes a more sympathetic figure than Cather as crusty recluse. And there were other, more equal, and more formidable, connections and correspondences. Through her old friends Alfred and Blanche Knopf Cather met one of the living writers she most admired, Thomas Mann, after he came to America in 1939 (though we have no details of their meeting)58 and, also through the Knopfs, Sigrid Undset, ‘that great rock of a Norwegian woman’.59 Undset, author of historical trilogies of medieval Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter and Olav Audunsson, which Cather found sympathetic, and of some deeply religious novels of modern Norway, had been outspoken against the Nazis in the 1930s. In 1940, when she was in her late fifties, she fled the country (losing one of her sons, who was killed in a concentration camp) in a dramatic escape to America. The New World greatly impressed her, especially the mid-West. Like Cather, she was a strong woman with a deep feeling for people’s spiritual relation to their land and their past; they got on well. (Indeed, it was Cather’s only warm relationship with a woman writer of her own stature and generation.) Cather, echoing her feelings for Olive Fremstad, admired Undset’s large, heroic warmth and calm, her truthfulness, her ability to surmount her losses, and her combination of the artist, the peasant and the scholar.60

  Undset connected Cather to suffering Europe. So did another valuable relationship, through letters, with Thomáš Masaryk, founder-president of Czechoslovakia, who had corresponded with Cather for about eight years, until his death in 1937.61 Masaryk had an American wife, and had visited America in 1918 to raise support for Czech/Slovak unification. Frustratingly (though we know that Annie Pavelka had some prints from Czechoslovakia on her wall, which Masaryk had given Cather),62 we have no details of this interesting connection. Perhaps it began with Masaryk’s reading Czech translations of Cather’s work. But all that has been sacrificed, presumably, to Edith’s bonfire.

  These links with Europe were crucial for Cather’s later writing, which, while it returned to memories of Nebraska and Virginia, also went back, in the essays on Mann and on Mme Grout, in Lucy Gayheart and ‘The Old Beauty’ and the last unfinished fragment of a novel set in medieval Avignon, to strong feelings for European culture and history. Of all these late links to Europe, the most vital and profound was with the Menuhin family.

  Menuhin understood very well what his family gave Cather: ‘We who had found our American author gave our author her European family.’63 They met through Jan Hambourg in Paris in 1930, and the following year, when the fifteen-year-old prodigy was touring the West Coast, the friendship was resumed. Cather fell in love with them all: the tough, idiosyncratic mother, the three brilliantly gifted musical children. They were her last ‘proxy family’,64 and the last great romance of her life, recapitulating her idealizing passions for Ethelbert Nevin and for the great singers and actresses, like Helena Modjeska and Olive Fremstad, who had so enthralled her. To Cather, the young Yehudi was, simply, ‘beautiful’.65 The family’s visits were like festivals, reminiscent of Myra Henshawe’s musical evenings. Menuhin recalled ‘parties and birthday luncheons, excursions to the Metropolitan Opera, bunches of flowers and orange trees arriving in snowstorms, and always books and walks in Central Park’.66 Cather read them Shakespeare and gave him Goethe and Heine; later, she admired Hephzibah for giving up her concerts and dashing off to an Australian ranch,67 and advised Yehudi on his early marital problems. When Isabelle died, Menuhin came to comfort her;68 and in the month before her own death, in March 1947, Yehudi and Hephzibah and their children were her last visitors.69 The friendship brought music back to the centre of her life. The Knopfs gave her a ‘phonograph’ on which to play Yehudi’s records; she and Edith went regularly to operas and concerts, and she saw a good deal of Myra Hess, and of Ethel Litchfield, her old musical friend who had moved from Pittsburgh to New York.70

  But the Menuhins meant not only youth, music and talent to Cather. They also turned her mind again to the double inheritance of American artists. If they stay always at home, she wrote to him, they miss ‘the companionship of seasoned and disciplined minds’. But if they ‘adopt Europe altogether’ they ‘lose that sense of belonging which is so important’. ‘The things his own country makes him feel…are about the best capital a writer has to draw upon.’71 It is the old dilemma of Henry James, or of the ‘lost generation’ of self-exiled American writers in France. For Cather, the solution (and the one she recommends to Menuhin for his itinerant career of worldwide music-making) is to ‘live two lives’. So, doubleness – America and Europe, youth and age, music and writing – came back to her again as a subject for late work.

  15

  THE IMMENSE DESIGN OF THINGS

  Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

  ‘Paul’s Case’, 1905

  At any rate; that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

  My Ántonia, 1918: quoted on Willa Cather’s tombstone

  Why tear a man loose from his little rock and shoot him out into the eternities?

  ‘Before Breakfast’, 1944

  ‘IN HAVERFORD on the Platte the townspeople still speak of Lucy Gayheart’. [LG, p.3] Cather’s penultimate novel begins with a marked sense of déjà vu. Like the Haverford townspeople, Cather is ‘still speaking’ the same story: still, the exceptional artistic figure escaping from, and returning to, the small restrictive mid-Western town; still, the division between family life and professional aspiration, native American environment and world culture. Everything about her heroine belongs to the Nebraskan past: her name is stolen from a girl Cather met in 1896; her combination of golden-brown eyes, spirited skating and musical talent are remembered from a long-ago Red Cloud friend called Sadie Becker.1 And the novel recapitulates earlier fictions: ‘A Death in the Desert’, the 1903 story of the singer who gets away to Chicago, New York and Europe, falls in love with a composer, and com
es back to her family in Cheyenne to ‘die like a rat in a hole’; ‘The Joy of Nelly Deane’,2 of 1911, with the same bright, golden-eyed, musical young girl destroyed by a brutal marriage and by her small-town incarceration; and The Song of the Lark, charting Thea’s escape through music from the ‘Moonstone’ which still remembers her.

  But although Lucy Gayheart’s reworking of old tunes does point to a falling-off in inventive power, Cather is trying, as in all her books, for a distinctive mood. There is a delicate clue to Lucy Gayheart: the footprints of three steps, running across a concrete pavement before the concrete had set, and left there for ever, motion in stasis. The prints are ‘light, in very low relief; unless one were looking for them, one might not notice them at all’. [LG, p.226] The narrative is similarly light, and in low relief.

  The story has a simple air. Lucy, the attractive, lively younger daughter of the town’s easygoing German watchmaker, has gone to Chicago to study music and to be a piano teacher, and has fallen in love with the middle-aged singer Clement Sebastian. Sebastian is using her as his accompanist while his regular partner, the sinister James Mockford, is having an operation. Lucy, in a dream of emotion and music, rejects her home suitor, the young businessman Harry Gordon, hard-headed, confident, and secretly sensitive. But the singer is drowned (with – or perhaps by – Mockford), and Lucy, heartbroken, returns to Haverford and her unsatisfactory family. Harry has hastily married a rich girl, and rejects Lucy’s desperate overtures of friendship, leaving her to go, in her turn, to a tragic wintry death by drowning. The rest of his time is to be a ‘life sentence’ of regret and remembering.

  All our associations with Lucy are of lightness and ephemerality: spring flowers, rapid skating, running through rain or cold, ‘a twig or a leaf swept along on the current’ [LG, p.75], a ‘little boy’s kite’ [LG, p.117], an arrow catching fire. Fire and ice (as in Robert Frost’s ominous poem of that title)3 are continually opposed. Lucy’s ‘ardour’ (Tom Outland’s word again), her impetuosity, her inability to conceal or revoke her feelings, her passionate longings for love and art (or love as art) are the fire; but the fire has to vie with the cold. When her ‘ardour’ is strongest, the fire wins: ‘The sharp air that blew off the water brought up all the fire of life in her: it was like drinking fire.’ [LG, p.47] But when she returns to the ‘real’ world without ‘ardour’ or illusions, her heart is frozen and she feels unable to breathe.4 Her death in the cold river simply confirms and concludes the competition between fire – exhilaration, aspiration – and ice (numbness, suffocation, expiring).

  The language of Lucy’s aspiration is always fragile and escapist. Going home from skating with Harry, she salutes the ‘first star’ of the evening as the signal of ‘another kind of life and feeling’, in a momentary ‘flash of understanding’. [LG, pp.11–12] In her mind’s eye, the city of Chicago exists as a dark blur punctuated by ‘spots’ associated with Sebastian where ‘a magical meaning might at any moment flash out of the fog’. [LG, p.25] ‘This city of feeling rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition, – beautiful because the rest was blotted out.’ [LG, p.24] When she first hears Sebastian singing, her intense revelation of art and life as a ‘tragic force’ [LG, p.31] is like a spell which blots out everything else. In her first love scene with him, she feels as if ‘everything were on the point of vanishing’. [LG, p.87] When Harry comes to Chicago while Sebastian is away, Lucy’s longing for what is absent is like the loss of a ‘ravishing melody’; without it she ‘couldn’t breathe’. She wants to become ‘nothing but one’s desire’, to dissolve into pure breath. [LG, p.102] After Sebastian’s death, she has a revelation, another momentary ‘flash’, that he incarnated for her the desire for another world, and that ‘it’ (the vague word often used for Lucy’s longings) could be recaptured without him. But the ‘it’, when defined, is a ‘fugitive gleam’, a ‘flash of promise’, insubstantially evoked as ‘flowers and music and enchantment and love’. [LG, p.184] Lucy’s dedication to the primacy of feeling (she is described as one of those for whom their ‘fate is what happened to their feelings and their thoughts’) makes for a blurring effect, a Paterian synaesthesia of light, music, colour, air and fire. No wonder that when she and Harry are looking at French Impressionist paintings, they argue over representation, Harry insisting that ‘anatomy is a fact’ and that ‘facts are at the bottom of everything’, Lucy preferring, in art as in life, ‘the city of feeling’ over ‘the city of fact’.

  Those of Cather’s critics who have taken this novel at all seriously have pointed to the dangers of Lucy’s choice of romance over realism.5 She occupies an extreme position in that long debate which Cather embarked on when she was about Lucy’s age. And the novel’s soft, fragile, emotional language suggests the perils of the position. Lucy is much more like the self-deluding, pointlessly aesthetic Paul than she is like the ferociously ambitious Thea, And, like Paul’s, her aspirations to dissolve into a ‘bright star’6 or ‘fade far away’ and melt into the aether are frequently brought back to earth, by a voice (Harry’s) ‘saying something about lunch’, or by her return to Haverford. She is constantly terrified that ‘romance’ will fall apart into mere insubstantiality. To try to enter entirely into that world, believe it to be more ‘real’ than the ‘city of fact’, is to disable oneself from the stoic, level vision of the characters in (for instance) Obscure Destinies. So Lucy is sometimes seen as blind, and Harry’s memory of her as an arrow is not just as an arrow of fire but also of ‘blindness’, shooting ‘toward whatever end’. [LG, p.221]

  For all that, Cather engages very deeply with Lucy’s impossible romanticism, and doesn’t mean us to be detached from it. She tries to make those yearnings into the literary equivalent of a particular kind of music. Instead of a Wagnerian opera, Cather wanted this time to rewrite a Romantic song cycle.

  Lucy’s epicurean German father looks like the ‘daguerreotype of a minor German poet’, [LG, p.6] just the kind whose poems might have been set to music. A temperamental affinity for German romanticism is suggested. And when Lucy hears Sebastian singing Schubert, the effect is immediate and irrevocable. His first song is the seaman’s invocation to the heavenly twins, the ‘Dioscouri’, Castor and Pollux, thanking them for their protection. Then, as the last of a ‘group’ of five ‘melancholy songs’, he sings the ominous, strange, and tragic setting of Heine’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’:

  Still is the night. The streets are at rest.

  Here is the house where my loved one lived;

  long it is, since she left the town,

  yet the house still stands where it did.

  A man stands there too, staring up,

  wringing his hands in agony;

  horror grips me, as I see his face –

  the moon shows me my own self.

  Double! Pale companion! [‘Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle!’]

  Why do you ape the torment of love

  that I suffered here

  so many a night in time past?7

  The songs fill Lucy with a ‘dark and terrifying’ conception of love as ‘a passion that drowns like black water’. [LG, p.31] Cather does not specify the other songs in the ‘group’, but ‘Der Doppelgänger’ belongs to a cycle written in 1828, the last year of Schubert’s life, and published posthumously, after his death at thirty-one, as ‘Schwanengesang’ (‘Swan-Song’). They are songs full of longings and departures, with a great deal of ‘black water’: ‘In der Ferne’ (‘Far Away’: ‘greetings from him who is fleeing, going out into the world’), ‘Abschied’ (Farewell’) and ‘Am Meer’ (‘By the sea’, with a weeping woman whose tears have poisoned the singer’s life and made his soul ‘die of longing’). At his next concert, Sebastian is singing Winterreise, Schubert’s late cycle (to poems by Wilhelm Müller, writer of romantic folk poetry in the 1820s) of the lonely heartbroken wanderer on his winter journey towards death. Lucy entirely identifies the singer and the composer – ‘this was the thing itself’ – but at the same time
is aware that Sebastian is not identifying himself with the ‘melancholy youth’, but is presenting his sorrow as if it were a memory, with ‘a long perspective’ between ‘the singer and the scenes he was recalling’. [LG, p.38] After she has started to play for him, she practises the songs from Die Schöne Müllerin, [LG, p.61] an earlier Schubert/Müller cycle (a great masterpiece of passionate bliss and bitter sorrow) of the wanderer-lover who loses his beloved miller’s daughter to the huntsman, and longs to drown in the friendly brook. And the song she associates with Sebastian more than any other is ‘Die Forelle’ (the tune well known in its later version in the ‘Trout’ Quintet). Lucy takes from it ‘a joyousness which seemed safe from time or change’; [LG, p.76] but in the song the trout is hooked and killed.

  There are other kinds of music in Lucy Gayheart, all with specific associations. At the end of his first concert, Sebastian sings ‘an old setting’ of Byron’s ‘When We Two Parted’, which Lucy takes as an ‘evil omen’ for her own life:

  Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

  Colder thy kiss;

  Surely that hour foretold

  Sorrow to this.

  [LG, p.32]

  Another ‘old English song’ reiterates the image of the pale cold cheek: Sebastian sings her a setting of Viola’s speech in Twelfth Night, ‘She never told her love’, (‘but let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud, feed on her damask cheek’ [LG, p.94]), and refers the song insidiously to Lucy. When she auditions for him, he tries her out with an aria from Massenet’s Hérodiade, whose title, ‘Vision fugitive’, anticipates the ‘fugitive gleam’ of her longings. They start work on Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, a line from which, unfinished when first quoted (‘If with all your heart you truly seek Him’) is completed after Sebastian’s death (‘You shall ever surely find Him’. [LG, p.185]) With Harry, Lucy goes to a week of Verdi operas, and to Lohengrin, which takes her into ‘that invisible, inviolable world’ with which Harry has nothing to do. All these carefully selected musical references corroborate the novel’s unappeased sense of melancholy longing, but none more so than the Schubert Lieder.