Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  The curious tone of discretion and evasion persists. Madame Grout, Cather is at pains to tell us, is just and enlightened, ‘not an idealist’, capable of admitting the ‘qualities Flaubert did not have’. (And an ‘artist’s limitations’, Cather says in this essay, ‘are quite as important as his powers’.) Nevertheless, she gives a selective and benign version of her childhood with Flaubert, which on the whole avoids personal information (especially about her adult life). She does provide some gossip about Turgenev and his position in the Viardot household, but what she really wants to talk about is Flaubert’s writing and his characters; she speaks of Madame Arnoux in L’Éducation Sentimentale, for instance, ‘with warm affection’, ‘so vividly that it was as if she had entered the room’. The old lady’s memories thus replicate the lifelikeness of Flaubert’s writings. Cather is returned to these by the encounter, in a re-enactment of her own memories of earlier readings of Flaubert. She relishes the works above all for the feeling they give that (as in her own writing) ‘it is something one has lived through, not a story one has read’. The niece who, as a child, lay on a rug in the corner of his room while he was writing (pretending that she was safe in the den of a powerful wild animal), and who received his affectionate letters about her character and her education, provides Cather with a close ‘translation’ of the very spirit of Flaubert, ‘his flavour, his personality’.

  And translation is, in a sense, the subject of the essay. Their conversational exchanges between French and English are much concerned with vocabulary and phrasing. Cather reassures Madame Grout that ‘lowering’ is a ‘safe’ word to apply to the shortening September days, since it would have been used by ‘old-fashioned farmers’ in the American South. The old lady comments drily (and, we are presumably supposed to think, in the manner of Flaubert) that ‘if the farmers use a word it is quite safe, eh?’ When Cather starts speaking to her, stupidly, in ‘very simple words’, she is impatiently reprimanded; ‘Speak idiomatically, please’. Cather admires her speech for its ‘qualities of good Latin prose: economy, elegance, and exactness’. And the old lady’s ‘special feeling for language’ is her key to Flaubert; she translates him back into life for Cather, and is herself interested above all in translations: her chief memory of Turgenev is of his helping her with a translation of Faust, and one of her chief debts to Flaubert is his ‘solicitude’ over her English lessons. Their closest moment of accord is in their exchange over ‘the splendid final sentence of Hérodias’

  where the fall of the syllables is so suggestive of the hurrying footsteps of John’s disciples, carrying away with them their prophet’s severed head….‘Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient al-ter-na-tive-ment.’

  The syllables suggesting the movement – a language which translates ‘life’ as closely as possible – are repeated and exchanged by the two women, mutually translating Flaubert back to life.

  But it is noticeable that this translation is based much more on the works than on the life: it is an edited translation. Cather is as discreet and evasive as Madame Grout about personal matters, commenting on her account of Turgenev: ‘But these were very personal memories, and if Madame Grout had wished to make them public, she would have written them herself.’ And Cather retreats from the personal legacy she is being offered; she does not want a ‘material reminder’ of Flaubert in the form of manuscripts or autographed letters (‘It was the Flaubert in her mind and heart that was to give me a beautiful memory’), and she does not, as it turns out, pursue the acquaintance. She never takes up the invitation to the ‘Villa Tanit’24 to ‘see her Flaubert collection’, the Flaubert letter Madame Grout does send her gets stolen in the post, the correspondence lapses, and the last news of her is her obituary. Unike the old lady, Cather has not ‘seen things through’, and there is a suggestion of remorse at the end of the essay-story.

  Cather has edited Madame Grout for her own purposes. It is noticeable that she turns this active, energetic old lady, interested in modern music and new acquaintances, into a guardian of the sacred flame, ‘armoured’ ‘against a world concerned with insignificant matters’. That editing makes an intriguing parallel with Caro’s own editing of Flaubert, a process of appropriation which is, itself, edited out of Cather’s version. It is probably going to extremes to say, as Ellen Moers does in a debate on Cather’s Francophilia, that Madame Grout was ‘the worst bitch in nineteenth-century literature’, who ‘sucked Flaubert dry’: ‘took his money, refused to give him affection…stood at his funeral haggling with the publishers over the rights to Flaubert’s books.’25 But certainly Caroline censored his letters to her and burnt Louise Colet’s letters to him. Julian Barnes gives a judicious account of her editings:

  After Flaubert’s death his manuscripts passed to his niece…who treated them rather as she had treated her uncle in life: with a mixture of affection and greed, possessiveness and irritation. She guarded the family name while tidying up all around it, censoring Flaubert’s letters for publication and making him as respectable as possible; she tended the flame while discreetly selling off some of the firewood which fuelled it. She is usualy cast as a semi-villain who failed to treat her uncle and his leavings with the same tender solicitude which those criticizing her would have done in her place; but both her moral disapproving and her literary ethics were those of her period and milieu. Moreover, if Caroline looked back over her life and in particular at the lost years of a first marriage into which her uncle encouraged her, she would have been unnatural not to feel a grudge. The case for Caroline has not yet been fully made. When, in his last years, she urged her uncle to leave his large house in Croisset to help with the family’s finances, and he refused, she and her husband nicknamed him ‘the consumer’. After his death she made up for his resented extravagance by raising money from his manuscripts.26

  Noticeably, it is her childhood with Flaubert which Madame Grout happily recalls to Cather; what came later was suppressed.

  The connections with Cather are extremely suggestive. Cather, with the posthumous help of the ‘friend’ who lurks at the edges of this essay-story, would in turn censor her own manuscripts and letters; the essay is, by implication, a defence of such proceedings. It is through the ‘mind and heart’ of her readers that she wants to live on, not through biographies or letters or collectors’ items. The personal material is no one else’s concern, and should be suppressed – as Madame Grout’s mixed feelings and mixed actions are suppressed by Cather, and as, in turn, Madame Grout suppressed a part of Flaubert.

  An unresolved paradox remains, of which Cather must have been aware: the personal letters from Flaubert to Caro, which she enjoys reading so much, are what makes Madame Grout of interest to her. As so often, but here perhaps most intriguingly of all, the desire to edit and ‘de-furnish’ pulls against the desire to remember and re-incarnate.

  —

  The chivalric gesture in ‘A Chance Meeting’, the kissing of Madame Grout’s hand, is elaborated on, more sentimentally, by the middle-aged American-in-exile of ‘The Old Beauty’, Mr Henry Seabury, a type like the censorious shipboard bachelor who once met Katherine Mansfield (or like the courteous old gentleman, Mr Longdon, out of place in the ‘liberated’ world of James’s The Awkward Age). Returning to Europe from a lifetime of business ‘in China’, Seabury is in search of ‘some spot that was more or less as it used to be’. [OB, p.7] His ‘chance meeting’ at Aix-les-Bains with Madame de Couçy, whom he gradually recognizes as Gabrielle Longstreet, a once-famous Edwardian beauty, with a romantic past (picked up from Martinique by an English lord, queen of Edwardian society, divorced, moved to New York and Paris, remarried, widowed by the war) takes him back to ‘a society whose manners, dress, conventions, loyalties, codes of honour, were different from anything existing in the world today’. [OB, p.5]

  For two months, Seabury divides his time between a touching English family who are visiting their son’s war grave, and the old beauty and her companion, Mrs Allison, a cheerful plump la
dy, once ‘Cherry Beamish’, music-hall star. Both acquaintanceships fuel his lament over a spoilt world, and between them Seabury and Gabrielle repulse the present with all of Cather’s most unpalatable intolerance. Madame de Couçy, a ‘grim’ ‘mirthless’ ‘personage’, travels with her photograph album of dead ‘heroes’ and believes ‘one should go out with one’s time’; [OB, p.46] she confirms Seabury’s prejudice that the beauties of the past (as opposed to the ‘cinema stars’ of the present) had ‘benefited by a romantic tradition…an attitude in men which no longer existed’. [OB, p.25] Their high moment together is a ghostly dance in the hotel ballroom, when they put the enervated young couples to shame by a stylish performance of the ‘Blue Danube’. ‘The two old waltzers were left alone on the floor’, amid comments from the spectators: ‘ “It’s so quaint and theatrical.” ’ [OB, p.60] Gabrielle’s last ‘scene’ is a trip, arranged by Seabury, to visit the monastery of the Grande-Chartreuse. On the way back from this heavenly high place their chauffeur swerves to avoid two young women driving on the wrong side. The old lady is not hurt, but the rude shock of this brush with modernity actually kills her. She dies in the night, and is buried in Père Lachaise, where ‘ladies who once held a place in the world’ used to buy burial lots. [OB, p.72]

  The two girls who cause the accident are interesting specimens. ‘They were Americans; bobbed, hatless, clad in dirty white knickers and sweaters. They addressed each other as “Marge” and “Jim”…lit cigarettes and were swaggering about with their hands in their trousers pockets.’ [OB, p.66] Madame de Couçy calls them ‘those creatures’. Cather is making an explicit comparison between these modern, masculinized female friends and the tender, asexual female companionship of ‘Madame’ de Couçy and ‘Mrs’ Allison. But this contrast is complicated by the suppressed sexuality of that companionship. Cherry Beamish, who has a boyish nickname, ‘Chetty’, used to play ‘boy parts’ (like the young Cather) at the Alhambra: ‘ “They wouldn’t have me in skirts” ’. Seabury remembers her ‘ “in an Eton jacket, with your hair cropped” ’. [OB, p.28] But at that period, theatrical transvestism was quite different from the butch get-up of the ‘frightful’ motorists: it was an act, with its own style and decorum.

  Chetty, though, unsettles the story’s fixed glare of nostalgia. She herself doesn’t mind the ‘young things’; ‘ “The present…is really very interesting” ’, she tells her friend, ‘ “if only you will let yourself think so” ’. [OB, p.31] If Gabrielle had ‘ “a swarm of young nieces and nephews, as I have” ’, (and as Cather had) ‘ “she’d see things quite differently” ’. [OB, p.45] Chetty democratizes ‘things’. The English father remembers her in a popular ‘coster song’, and it’s she who lets us know that Gabrielle’s élitism is based on sound investments: ‘ “Her capital is in British bonds.” ’ [OB, p.43]

  And, as Seabury slowly recalls the much-lamented past, it turns out not to have been so romantic after all. His most vivid memory of Gabrielle, from his youth, is a tawdry one. He came upon her one night, visiting her house in New York, in the hands of a ‘leech’, a banker with a dubious foreign accent who has made some investments for her and is claiming his price. The scene is straight out of a bad melodrama of the period:

  Behind the sofa stood a stout, dark man leaning over her. His left arm, about her waist, pinioned her against the flowered silk upholstery. His right hand was thrust deep into the low-cut bodice of her dinner gown. [OB, p.52]

  Like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, or like the opera singer in Cather’s earlier and equally anti-semitic story, ‘Scandal’, the ‘beauty’ on her own is the victim of an exchange rate – sex for financial support – which makes the old world rather less chivalric than Seabury would have it. It doesn’t occur to Cather (or to Seabury) to follow this through and ask whether the ‘frightful’ Marge and Jim, post-war feminists, might have escaped from that trap.

  Gabrielle, like an older Myra Henshawe, whom she resembles, is an alarming and equivocal emblem of a lost past. The story’s strangest moment comes when, at the monastery, she stays by ‘the great open well’, using a ‘little mirror’ from her handbag to throw a ray of sunlight over its ‘black water’.

  When he glanced back…she was still looking down into the well and playing with her little reflector, a faintly contemptuous smile on her lips. [OB, p.64]

  The contempt is not only for the world; it is also for her own fatuity in trying to re-illuminate, through her little reflections, ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’.

  —

  ‘The Old Beauty’ was turned down for publication by the Woman’s Home Companion,27 an affront to the old writer which ironically confirmed the story’s allegiance to an outmoded style. What followed it, slowly and painfully, over the next four years, was a withdrawal from European to American materials, and, as though this was the only part of America she could now bear to write about, a return still further into the past, as far back as Cather could go. But this journey back to earliest memories (which was how she always described Sapphira and the Slave Girl)28 incorporated her sense of the ‘evil’ being let loose in the world.29 She told Viola Roseboro that the novel was about something more elusive than memories: it was a narrative of the terrible in domesticated form.30

  Virginia had been brought back to her mind through Mrs Harris’s memories, and according to E. K. Brown she had promised her father on his deathbed that she would set a novel there.31 In 1938, not having been back there since 1913 (when she disliked the romantic Southern attitude and the cowed Southern male),32 she made a pilgrimage with Edith, who noted, enthusiastically, her characteristic ability to censor out the present.

  Every bud and leaf and flower seemed to speak to her with a peculiar poignancy, every slope of the land, every fence and wall, rock and stream….The countryside was very much changed. But she refused to look at its appearance; she looked through and through it, as if it were transparent, to what she knew as its reality. Willowshade, her old home…had become so ruinous and forlorn that she did not go into it, only stood and looked down at it from a distance. All these transformations, instead of disheartening her, seemed to light a fierce inner flame that illumined all her pictures of the past.33

  Cather’s own account of the return34 is full of lamentations for the destruction of the Timber Ridge country, particularly the ‘Double S’ country road winding up from Gore to the top of the ridge, once lush with white dogwood blossom and wild honeysuckle and blue-green locust trees. [SSG, pp.115–7]

  The novel eloquently reconstructs that lost landscape. Its ending, she insisted, was a directly autobiographical return to her own childhood.35 What she did not witness—the pre-bellum Virginia of 1856—she inherited from the story-telling matriarchy whose narratives underlie the novel; what she did witness, as a child of five, is told, in a characteristic epilogue, with as much factuality as ‘A Chance Meeting’. So, in that it invokes earliest memories, it is a tender and affectionate narrative, which returns happily to pastoral conventions.

  But this affectionate tenderness was locked into a ‘terrible’ paradox, shared by other American writers – Mark Twain, or Ellen Glasgow, Cather’s exact contemporary – whose families derived from, and whose fictions evoked, the old South. The family past for which personal nostalgia was felt was the slave-owning past; the affectionate personal retrospect could not indulge the social organization which formed the economic basis of that pastoral. Built into Cather’s domestic history of a particular West Virginian family, in the years leading up to the Civil War, was the ambivalence about slavery which her novel re-enacted.

  We must go back, as Cather was doing, to her beginnings. In my description of Cather’s childhood I mentioned the bitter divisions in her family between supporters of the Union and the Rebel, or Confederate, cause. The Cather family belonged to the part of the South which was itself peculiar in relation to the South’s ‘peculiar institution’. The back country around Winchester
was on the border of what would break away as West Virginia in 1863, and was populated by settlers from Pennsylvania and European immigrants. It was not big plantation country, and had no strong tradition of slave-owning (in 1860 there were only 149 slaves in western Virginia in a population of over 45,000)36 by comparison with the rich Tidewater area in eastern Virginia, where there were over half a million slaves. In 1832 the Virginia State Legislature (of which Rachel Blake’s husband, in the novel, is a member) fiercely debated the issues of emancipation;37 by the 1840s western Virginia had begun to feel it would be better off as a separate free state; and in 1848 a poll in the Richmond Southerner estimated that two-thirds of Virginians opposed slavery. Many of the back-country farmers were against secession. During the Civil War, the area around Winchester is said ‘to have changed hands sixty-eight times’:38 it was a key point for the possession of Virginia, and its inhabitants were deeply divided.

  Cather’s family (and, similarly, the Colbert and the Dodderidge families in the novel) embodied all these divisions. On the Cather side, there was the great-grandfather who voted for secession when he was in the legislature, the grandfather and father who were Unionists, and the great-uncle who served as a doctor in the Union Army. Cather’s notable great-aunt Sidney Gore was a Baptist who detested slavery, and looked after the wounded of both sides at Valley Home. But Cather’s mother’s family, the Boaks, had cousins in Louisiana and were Confederate supporters, and we know how strong Grandma Boak’s influence was on Cather. Though Jennie Boak reconciled these divisions after her marriage, she kept till her death the sword which had belonged to her brother, William Seibert Boak, who died fighting on the rebel side. This was the uncle whose middle name Cather appropriated, and for whom she wrote a youthful elegy.39