Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  The German Lied of the nineteenth century grew out of German folk song; not unlike Cather’s writing, it combined extreme subtlety with an essential simplicity.8 Hegel, in his 1820s Lectures on Aesthetics, defined what was necessary for this fusion of poetry and music. It required ‘an intermediate kind of poetry’, ‘true, extremely simple, indicating the situation and the feeling in a few words’, with ‘the ring of one and the same feeling pervading the whole’, so that the lyrical music of the setting could ‘express in melody the mood of the individual soul’.9 That simplicity, intensity and concentration on one mood, were the qualities Cather was trying to replicate. It was a double operation, mirroring the doubles inside the story: to identify with strong emotional moods (as in Lucy’s response to the Winterreise) and to distance them (as in Sebastian’s singing of it) into a sense of long, sad retrospect.

  The great Lieder – Schumann, Brahms, Schubert, Wolf and Mahler settings of Goethe and Heine, Möricke, Schiller, Müller, and a wealth of lesser known romantic poets – return again and again to the figure of the lonely (usually male) outcast-lover, and dwell on moments of intense feeling, sometimes focused on a star or a stream, a linden tree or a bird song. Key words recur, often as the titles of the songs: Sehnsucht (yearning), Abschied (parting), Traum (dream), Heimweh (homesickness), Einsamkeit (loneliness), Wanderer. Lucy appropriates these lyric emotions directly into her own life; the music is her fate: ‘As Lucy had been lost by a song, so she was very nearly saved by one.’ [LG, p.178] Her most intense moments of feeling – yearning towards the evening star, or remembering lost love in the apple orchard – are like self-contained Lieder set in a song cycle. She longs for a world elsewhere, like Goethe’s Mignon (‘Kennst du das Land’….‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’).10 Her sense that what she pursues is a ‘fugitive gleam’ she ‘could never catch up with’ invokes the Jack O’Lantern (‘Irrlicht’) or Delusion (‘Täuschung’) that dances along in front of the wanderer in Winterreise, and misleads him to his death. And Lucy’s last journey is a female re-enactment of that song cycle. Bereft of love, alienated from her home, she sets out like Schubert’s protagonist, turning her back on the town, stumbling on the frozen ground, cold tears on her cheeks (‘Pale grew thy cheek and cold’) and, after Harry goes past refusing to help her, in a rage which gives her the same kind of bravado as in the song ‘Courage’ (‘Mut’). She goes forward to meet (as in ‘Wasserflut’ and ‘Auf dem Flusse’) a torrent of flood-waters under the ice.

  But Lucy is an accompanist, not a singer, and she does not encompass all the complex phases of feeling in Winterreise. The novel is something more than ‘The Ballad of Lucy Gayheart’, as there is more in the Lieder than tender, fragile yearnings. It is Sebastian who embodies the stranger and more sinister aspects of German romanticism, filling the novel with dark and uneasy feelings which go beyond Lucy’s range.

  Sebastian’s baleful aspect is striking, especially since it is part of his attraction for Lucy. Rosowski reads the whole story as a Gothic novel,11 a rewriting of Dracula from the point of view of the ‘Lucy’ victim, whose breath is sucked out and whose blood is made to run cold by her demon lover. The reading makes good sense of their strangely oppressive love scenes, and of the secret, occluded circumstances of their meetings. (Lucy hides at his concert, ‘steals’ after him into church, secretly watches him leave his house, and feels ‘shut away’ with him.) When she stops Harry proposing to her by telling him she has gone ‘all the way’ with Sebastian, she may be technically exaggerating (apart from Eden Bower and Marian Forrester, nobody in Cather is seen going all the way), but we feel she is speaking the psychic truth: Sebastian has penetrated and taken her over. There is a suggestion, too, in Lucy’s musical dedication to Sebastian (she only plays what he tells her to) of Svengali and his hypnotized Trilby.12

  But the Svengali/Dracula approach to Sebastian doesn’t suggest how much we are asked to feel for him. The book splits itself, first between Sebastian and Lucy, then between their story and Harry’s. The musical analogies belong as much to Sebastian’s life as to Lucy’s. Like Godfrey St Peter, the middle-aged singer has reached the point of encountering his dead youth (‘Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle!’). He speaks of himself as dead-in-life, a ghost, reading of the death of an old friend as if he were ‘reading his own death notice’. [LG, p.77] Obituaries and funerals are his only spare-time interests. Like St Peter, he has a dead marriage, spoilt by past hostilities over a ‘talented boy’ [LG, p.79] whom Sebastian once ‘took into their house’ and whom he had to send away. ‘ “I had a nice boy in my house once,” ’ [LG, p.88], he remarks peculiarly to Lucy, sounding as if he might have ‘had’ him for dinner.13 The boy’s name, Marius, invokes the artistic and spiritual ardour of Pater’s young hero, and, also, though perhaps not intentionally, a Paterian sexual ambivalence. Lucy, in a characteristically suppressed homosexual suggestion, replaces the dead youth; Sebastian finds her ‘boyish’. [LG, p.80]

  Cather acknowledged her friend Zoë Akins’s shrewd spotting of Ibsen’s The Master Builder in the mood of Lucy Gayheart.14 Solness, who ‘cannot live without joy’, feels himself ‘chained to the dead’ through his wife’s mourning for their dead children and through the destruction of happiness which his life’s work as an artist has caused. (Both Solness and Sebastian are martyrs to their talent, as a passing reference to ‘Saint Sebastian’ implies.)15 Hilde bursts into Solness’s life like youth itself, but also like a ‘troll’ (one of Cather’s favourite early images, now recalled), responding, and urging him to respond, to the call of ‘the impossible’.16 Like the Master Builder, Sebastian is split between his reduced, disappointed life and his ‘troll-like’ artist’s will. But as an artist, too, he is fatally split.

  His split itself is acted out in the pairing with Mockford, whom A. S. Byatt rightly compares to ‘a Thomas Mann puppeteer’.17 Mockford presents the cynical opportunist side of the artist’s talent to enchant. Like the laughing red-headed singer in ‘Death in Venice’, or the vile hypnotist in ‘Mario and the Magician’, or the red-headed actor who disappoints the trickster Felix Krull, he is the artist as charlatan, always sneering, laughing and theatrical. Mockford’s brilliant playing of Schubert Lieder undermines Lucy’s romantic reading of the songs and suggests that art is only ‘make-believe’, [LG, p.61] ‘Delusion’, ‘Täuschung’.

  Sebastian and Mockford’s performance of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, early on in the novel, points to Sebastian (more than Lucy) as the embodiment of the Wanderer, haunted by himself, a stranger to the world: ‘Everything in this room, in this city and this country had suddenly become unfamiliar and unfriendly’. [LG, p.78] To Lucy’s puzzlement, Sebastian can be ‘not at home’ even when he seems to be there, putting on a professional manner ‘so perfected that it could go on representing him when he himself was either lethargic or altogether absent’. [LG, p.49] He is, and feels, ‘unheimlich’, that uneasy word of the alienated self, explicated by Freud as having a double meaning, incorporating ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’, ‘known’ and ‘uncanny’. (Lucy applies the world ‘uncanny’ both to Mockford [LG, p.38] and to Sebastian’s intimate valet Giuseppe [LG, p.74].)

  In his book on Doubles, Karl Miller brilliantly describes the overlapping associations, in German romantic writing and thereafter, for the theatrical figure of the alienated ‘waif’ or ‘wraith’. The doppelgänger acts out the repressed or hidden self. And his split self is almost always an orphan and an outcast:

  The orphan has many shapes, and many names: outcast, outsider, stranger, changeling, foundling, bastard…waif, wraith, victim, outlaw…artist, writer, monster, misfit, queer…The names and attributes of the orphan warn that he is equivocal. So is his favourite activity of flight…He is engaged in the impossible task of trying to escape from himself, or to separate himself from someone whom he can’t help resembling or repeating.

  The duality of the waif/wraith, orphan/outcast, artist/monster figure in romantic literature means that he is both danger
ous (to himself and to others) and pitiable, at once transcendent and fatal.18

  Clearly, Cather is as much ‘possessed’ by the figure of Sebastian as Lucy is. He projects the strain she feels between a hampered socialized self and a secret, troll-like artistic will. That strain is temperamental and persistent, not just the product of post-war disenchantment. Sebastian is a late, sinister version of Alexander, in her very first novel, also a ‘master builder’ fatally divided and doomed to drown. More obscurely, Sebastian’s feeding off Lucy’s ardour seems to make covert reference to a profound sexual unease in Cather, as though she feels, at some level, that secrecy or a form of repression has cannibalized her own ardour.

  Unsatisfactorily, though, Lucy Gayheart refuses to let Sebastian take over. Unlike his predecessors, Alexander or St Peter, he remains glamorously fictive, inert, edged out to leave room for Lucy’s less interesting romantic illusions. And the impact of his doubleness is diffused by its becoming a general property. Back in Haverford, it becomes apparent that everyone has a split self. Even Pauline, who doesn’t seem worthy of a doppelgänger, was,

  so to speak, always walking behind herself. The plump, talkative little woman one met on the way to choir practice, or at afternoon teas, was a mannikin which Pauline pushed along before her; no one had ever seen the pusher behind that familiar figure, and no one knew what that second person was like. [LG, p.168]

  The powerful old matriarch of Haverford, Mrs Ramsay (surely a deliberate reference to Virginia Woolf?), who would like to be a substitute mother for Lucy but remains ineffectual, is felt by her daughter to be changing in old age into a more compassionate person – the novel’s only benign version of a split self. And Harry, duplicitously wearing his ‘jocular masks’ and burying his ‘contrary’ feeling for Lucy ‘so deep that he held no communication with it’, [LG, p.217] is also a double person. (He seems to mirror Sebastian, in his cold marriage to a rich efficient woman, and in his working partnership with an ‘accompanist’, the anxious cashier Milton Chase.)

  Cather repeatedly said that she did not care much for Lucy Gayheart, but thought that it improved at the end, after she had killed off all the Gayhearts.19 As such remarks acknowledged, the novel is oddly split between two kinds of story, that of the Europeanized artist in crisis, and that of the American businessman, hardheaded but capable of passion and weakness. (It was a character she returned to repeatedly, in ‘A Gold Slipper’, in ‘Two Friends’, and, later, in ‘Before Breakfast’.) The divide here between the native and the European, the commercial and the artistic, romance and realism, is awkwardly managed, but it is revealing and characteristic.

  The most obvious difference between the Chicago and Haverford sections is that in the latter there is much more about money. We find out that Lucy’s pursuit of her ‘fugitive gleam’ has cost her family ‘more than sixteen hundred dollars’ in the first two years. [LG, p.191] Pauline has ‘the cheque stubs’ to prove it. Cheque stubs don’t have much to do with Schubert lieder: Lucy, it transpires, has always been indifferent to ‘small economies’. ‘She never seemed to think about money.’ [LG, p.172] Pauline’s jealous resentful ‘sacrifices’ are not allowed sympathy (even her fussy housekeeping is revealed as basically indolent and messy); Mr Gayheart’s conviction that Lucy is worth any expense is much more endearing. When Pauline (in the tradition of Alexandra’s brothers or Claude Wheeler’s father) starts chopping down the old orchard to make room for a profitable onion and potato crop, Lucy’s anguish is endorsed. All the same, Lucy’s poor returns for expenditure stays with us as a hard fact, like the unreconciled opposition between the rifled till and the fantasy life in ‘Paul’s Case’. And the narrative’s transferring of Lucy’s emotional ‘account’ into Harry’s currency is not straightforward.

  Harry has been seen throughout as tightfisted and ungenerous; Lucy was his one ‘extravagance’. [LG, p.23] But after Lucy’s death this is made more complicated. Harry ‘pays’ for his ungenerousness with a ‘life sentence’ of guilt and sadness which improves his character (he does some generous war work and is nicer to his wife). At the same time he makes ‘a great deal of money’ [LG, p.222] and buys lots of land and fast cars. As a form of ‘retribution’ he becomes filially intimate with old Mr Gayheart, playing chess with him evening after evening (like the ‘two friends’ playing chequers) and lending him money from his bank, with a mortgage on his house as ‘surety’. In a way, Harry at last takes possession of Lucy, as Ivy Peters takes possession of the Forrester property. The Gayheart house becomes his, and he can go into Lucy’s bedroom and see her clothes hanging up (as, in one of the book’s odd echoes, Lucy once saw Sebastian’s) and take what he wants of her remains. The photograph of Sebastian in its ‘tarnished’ silver frame goes into his pocket; Lucy’s music books go into a safe in his bank.

  American materialism destroys romantic art and passion? Not exactly. Harry is an eccentric businessman; he could have been more successful than he is, and ‘now that land values are going down’ (the coda is set in 1927) he can see that even his shrewd investments may turn out to be ‘rather a joke on him’. [LG, p.222] Chase, the cashier, has suffered from Harry’s foibles: foreclosing on over-generous terms with a one-time admirer of Lucy’s who accused him of cowardice for not going to her funeral; letting Mr Gayheart run up debts in excess of the value of his mortgage; and, at the last, renting rather than selling the Gayheart property to Chase, so that he can ensure it will stay as it is in his lifetime. He even gives a businesslike order to his puzzled cashier, in the voice of one ‘talking about alterations in a garage’, to keep intact the cement paving with the traces of Lucy’s footprints.

  There is a disequilibrium in Harry’s materialism which gives this part of the novel its depth. His investment in his memory of Lucy makes him, by the end, a more interesting split character than Sebastian. All the same, Lucy escapes him, in a slighter, less impressive version of Marian Forrester’s escape out of the edge of Niel’s frame. In the concrete pavement he owns, her footprints are still running away.

  —

  The deepest split in Lucy Gayheart is, inevitably, between the past and the present. Harry, the only one of the main characters to outlive the war, feels that ‘the world in which he had been cruel to her no longer existed’. [LG, p.220] As with Tom Outland and Claude Wheeler, it’s strongly suggested that those whom the gods loved have died young. The rest of Cather’s work – a few stories and essays, a last novel – concentrate almost entirely on those who live on into old age, beyond their ‘best years’. But Lucy Gayheart is connected to these late writings by the now-familiar trope of the lost lady who brings back the past.

  The last lost ladies are old ladies: Madame Caroline Franklin-Grout, Flaubert’s niece, described in the essay of 1933, ‘A Chance Meeting’; the ‘old beauty’ of the slightly later story; Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, coming back into Cather’s mind when she revised her essays on them for Not Under Forty; and the formidable Sapphira. (Edith also refers, tantalizingly, to a novella called ‘The Golden Wedding’, started in the autumn of 1934 but unfinished.)20 Evidently Cather perceived the connection between the essays and the fictions, telling Elsie when she sent her Not Under Forty that ‘these are true stories, told just as they happened’.21 It is a characteristically deceptive simple statement. Sapphira and the Slave Girl is also presented by Cather as a true story, based on her family’s history just as it happened, with herself as a child entering the fiction as a final witness. But its fictiveness creates, by analogy, uncertainty about the ‘chance meeting’ between life and fiction in the other ‘true stories’ of her old age. How much did Cather idealize her memories of 148 Charles Street? And how much did she ‘make up’ about Flaubert’s niece? How much, in turn, had Flaubert’s niece ‘made up’ her Flaubert?

  Cather spots ‘Caro’ first, in the hot summer of 1930, as an unnamed, distinguished old French woman at the old-fashioned Grand Hôtel at Aix-les-Bains, actively sketching and going to concerts and operas in spite
of her lameness, and telling her new acquaintance what she should do with her time. ‘Seeing things through was evidently a habit with this old lady’,22 Cather remarks wryly, evading her commands at one point as if escaping ‘from an exacting preceptress’. So even before Cather has kissed her hand in silent, chivalric tribute to the amazing discovery that the old lady is the niece who was brought up by Flaubert and to whom he wrote his famous letters, she has been made to feel deferential. The old lady’s questions are imperious and exacting: ‘And by that you mean?’ Cather is treated by her in the way that she, at sixty-four, now treats her own disciples. Sharon O’Brien describes Madame Grout, severely, as ‘opinionated, selfish, domineering, and even a bit cruel’, suggesting that she is the dominant mother from whom the daughter has to escape in order to ‘find her tongue’.23 There is certainly no doubt that Cather is at last, in her late years, writing out the conflict between mother and daughter. But Cather puts a good deal of herself, too, into Madame Grout: this is the kind of difficult old lady she is becoming, or would like to become. And their conversation about Flaubert raises the questions that were increasingly preoccupying her about her own posthumous life as a writer.

  The discovery of Madame Grout’s identity is made when Cather and her ‘friend’ (who is unnamed in the essay-story) are talking to her about ‘the Soviet experiment in Russia’. Edith (in her one recorded remark in Cather’s writing, and this anonymous) says that she is grateful that the great Russian writers such as Tolstoi and Turgenev did not live to see the Revolution. All concur; it is a ‘comfortably’ (‘we talked very comfortably’) censorious little moment between the three elderly ladies, which opens a window onto the way Cather and Lewis must have talked about the past to each other, and points to the kinds of exclusions this essay makes. The old lady goes on, to Cather’s astonishment, to say that she knew Turgenev very well. Her first mention of Flaubert’s name, following on from this revelation, is made ‘in a curious tone, as if she had said something indiscreet and were evasively dismissing it’.