by Hermione Lee
Each effort to improve his nature foils,
Begs, steals, or sleeps and starves, but never toils;
For savage sloth mistakes the freedom won,
And ends the mere barbarian he begun.43
It has to be said that this bears some resemblance to the story of what happens to Tap, Cather’s jolly mill boy. After Sapphira’s death, Colbert frees all her slaves, but none of them can bear to leave the farm. Tap, more than any of them, ‘hadn’t been able to stand his freedom’: [SSG, p.290] he gets into a fight in the pool-hall at Winchester, kills a man and is hanged.
Tap’s cruel little story exposes Cather’s regret for the feudal system, which is built into her sentiment for the lost young Virginian heroes, ‘like Paris handsome and like Hector brave’, [SSG, p.275] and for the sight, long vanished, of a handsome girl in a ‘close-fitting riding-habit with long skirt, the little hat with the long plume’, [SSG, p.278] riding side-saddle on the Winchester road, saluted by Cavalry veterans as she ‘flashed by’.
The novel’s equivocation between resignation and horror centres on the alarming figure of Sapphira. She is a cruel character in a book about cruelty, but she is not easy to read. Though her actions are coercive, even sadistic – a Fascist in historical costume? – she is elusively presented. In her life and in her place in the novel, she is a positive rendered negative, a forcefield of distorted energy.
Like the women heroes of the earlier novels, Sapphira is a manager: she runs the house, the farm, the slaves, the family. The section titles that have her name in them are proprietary (‘Sapphira and her household’, ‘Sapphira’s daughter’). The first sentence in the novel of which she is the subject entitles her to authority: ‘The Mistress was served promptly.’ But like the old ladies of the later fictions, she has become thwarted by paralysis and isolation, and has to exert the authority from a fixed point – a ‘large, cumbersome’ walnut chair on castors – issuing plots, orders, summonses and rejections as if spinning a web. Strong words are used for this curtailment of the will: what her illness has done to her is as ‘cruel’ as what she does to others. It is well in character that her suspicion over Henry’s feeling for Nancy is as much a horror of losing control, of being ‘befooled, hoodwinked in any way’, [SSG, p.106] as it is a sexual jealousy.
Sapphira is very like Myra Henshawe, ‘crippled but powerful’, with her mocking snake’s mouth and tyrannical egotism, ‘a witty and rather wicked old woman’. [MME, p.80] The reworking of the character points to Cather’s unceasing fascination for dangerous female power. As with Myra, Sapphira’s style, her regard for appearances, is always emphasized. It is part of her game to be impenetrable, so surface words are always used for her looks and manners. Her hair and clothes are ‘in perfect order’, [SSG, p.13] her smiles are ‘arch’ and ‘placid’, her speech is ‘affable’, ‘mild’, ‘bland’, ‘tolerant’, with what Rachel perceives as ‘a kind of false pleasantness’. [SSG, p.15] The ‘blandness’ superficially covers something more ‘icy’ and malicious. Like Myra, Sapphira enjoys power and entertainment. She is amused by the ‘glum and disapproving’ [SSG, p.15] side of her more morally responsible husband and daughter, and we too find Sapphira more interesting than the conscientious Lutheran miller and the Baptist widow. She treats the intelligent schoolteacher with ‘mocking condescension’ [SSG, p.81] because he is a Northerner. She is amused by Martin Colbert, a feckless libertine with east-Virginian attitudes to slavery more brutal than her own: ‘ “The niggers here don’t know their place, not one of ’em.” ’ [SSG, p.182] But the arena for Sapphira’s social appetites and love of control is a more malign one than Myra Henshawe’s. Myra, too, liked to fix relationships, with harmful results. Sapphira’s interferences, inside the slavery system – Till’s forced marriage to the impotent Jeff, Nancy’s persecution – are monstrous.
But, in this somewhat obscure and patchy novel, which leaves its own attitudes to the past disturbingly unresolved, we are never quite sure about Sapphira’s motives. Rachel cannot decide whether Sapphira fully intends to let Martin rape Nancy, or was merely ‘ready to tolerate anything that might amuse him’. [SSG, p.220] The daughter’s attempts to understand her mother’s ‘shades of kindness and cruelty’ [SSG, p.219] are, like her father’s, ultimately unsuccessful. After Nancy’s escape, Cather shifts the balance of feeling about Sapphira, through her sympathetic and courageous response to the touching sickness of Rachel’s children and the death of one of them. In the end, Henry has to admit that her cruelty and her stoicism are indivisible:
After she was old and ill, she never lowered her flag; not even now, when she knew the end was not far off. He had seen strong men quail and whimper at the approach of death. He, himself, dreaded it. But as he leaned against her chair with his face hidden, he knew how it would be with her; she would make her death easy for everyone, because she would meet it with that composure which he had sometimes called heart-lessness, but which now seemed to him strength. As long as she was conscious, she would be mistress of the situation and of herself. [SSG, p.268]
Sapphira and the Slave Girl reads, in part, like a violent last resistance to a coercive maternal figure. But it also works as a characteristically indirect autobiography. Cather is registering her own cold and passionate desire for authorial control, her own experience of the pain and handicap of old age, and her own desire to maintain a stoic dignity in the face of death.
—
Cather published nothing after Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and, due to illness and exhaustion and her crippled hand, wrote very little in the last seven years of her life. At the end, after some months of weakness, she died, of a cerebral haemorrhage, at half-past four on the afternoon of April 24, 1947. (Her secretary was there, but not Edith, who had seen her earlier and said that ‘she was never more herself than on the last morning.’)44 The small private funeral was in New York, the burial of the body at Jaffrey, on the 27th, and there was a memorial service at Red Cloud in November. Among her last papers was the unfinished draft of a novel, to be called Hard Punishments, set in fourteenth-century Avignon during the papal reign of Benedict XIV. Lewis took it upon herself to destroy this manuscript, but she gave a summary of the novel to a researcher, George Kates, who in 1956 published a collection of Cather’s early travel essays (including her eloquent description of Avignon written in 1902) and a volume of her stories, which included his attempt to piece together what the novel might have been.
The story, Cather told Lewis,45 was of two boys who had suffered the ‘hard punishments’ of medieval theocracy. One, Pierre, was a simple peasant boy who had been strung up by his thumbs, the other a high-born intelligent youth who had had his tongue cut out for blasphemy. This boy, André, is saved by his aged confessor, Father Ambrose, from a self-destroying sense of personal dishonour, and turns his life to helping the wretched Pierre. Cather’s heavily annotated copy of Thomas Okey’s 1926 book The Story of Avignon showed that, as for Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, she was attending to details – of the papal palace and gardens, the bridge over the Rhone, the life of the medieval city –which she would fuse with her own memories and bury as the substructure of the novel.
By strange chance, a few pages of the manuscript came to light years later, a scene with Father Ambrose and the two boys at Christmas Mass.46 It is a sentimental and pious piece of writing, waxing emotional on the wonders of ‘wonderment’ and ‘the power to worship’, on the beauties of ‘faith, belief, imagination’, and on the feelings of the crowd and the boys in response to the music. (She had heard a young man singing in the papal palace on her last visit to Avignon in 1935, and it inspired her.)47 The subject-matter sounds more interesting than the extract, with its reworking of the male friendship of One of Ours and Death Comes for the Archbishop, its retreat from historical America to the earlier, more glamorous, but equally cruel history of France (at the time of the French occupation), and, above all, its obsession with crippled and stoical heroism. Cather may
herself have been feeling, at this time, that she had had her tongue cut out.
Though Hard Punishments did not survive, three late stories were published the year after Cather’s death. One of these was the once-rejected ‘The Old Beauty’. The second in the volume, ‘The Best Years’, was a long story written in 1945, a last return to Nebraska, written out of her feeling for Roscoe, who died just as the story was finished. He appears in it as a sensitive young Nebraskan ‘Hector’. But essentially ‘The Best Years’ is a story of women, who, this time, in reaction against Sapphira, are benign and protective towards each other. It begins with the likeable, efficient school superintendent, Miss Evangeline Knightly (a tribute to Cather’s helpful Red Cloud schoolteacher)48 riding through the September Nebraskan countryside, all wide horizons and herds of contented animals, on her school rounds. She visits a young teacher called Lesley Ferguesson – so young, indeed, that with Miss Knightly’s collusion she has falsified her age to get the job – and admires her geography lesson. She is teaching the children to ‘bound’ the States by remembering what lies on their borders; the child who is called on to perform is so nervous that he has an ‘accident’, but, thanks to Lesley’s good instruction, the other children don’t laugh. Miss Knightly takes Lesley home to ‘MacAlpin’ for the weekend, and a heartfelt description ensues of a home life that both is and is not Cather’s at Red Cloud.
In detail, the family is different: the mother a practical competent committee-joiner, the father a Bryanite and an eccentric enthusiast for experimental farming, who has called his farm ‘Wide Awake Farm’ because it is an ‘observatory’ for watching the signs of the times, [OB, p.103] and who is laughed at by his neighbours. But the children’s attic room, the excitement of the great trains arriving at the depot, the affection for the brothers, are personal memories, meant to evoke what had come to seem increasingly important to Cather, ‘the clan feeling, which meant life or death for the blood, not for the individual’. [OB, p.113]
—
Lesley Ferguesson, predictably, only survives as a memory. She is wiped out, by pneumonia, in a terrible blizzard.49 Miss Knightly, who has been in Lincoln seeing Julia Marlowe in a play called The Love Chance (as Cather did in 1894), learns the story from the railroad conductor. In the usual coda, she returns to MacAlpin twenty years later to find Mrs Ferguesson crippled with a bad ankle, and lamenting, in a sustained pastoral elegy, not only her lost daughter but the loss in the modern world of ‘real folks’.
This last attempt to ‘bound’ the horizon of her past through nostalgic elegy is only a moderate success. When Cather saw Julia Marlowe act in 1894, she compared her beauty to ‘certain old pictures and lines from certain old pastorals’.50 The story reaches back for that ‘old pastoral’ quality, but feels the need, now, to sentimentalize the picture of ‘clan life’ which, in earlier versions, was more complex and strenuous. All the same, it has an endearingly wistful tenderness for childhood, which links the mortified little boy peeing in his school knickerbockers, the lively ‘little teacher’, and the small timid brother who has been named after William Jennings Bryan, and knows that he must live up to it and ‘some day stop being afraid of the dark’. [OB, p.100]
—
The story placed last in the posthumous volume (though written before ‘The Best Years’) was called ‘Before Breakfast’, and was the only work of Cather’s to be set in Grand Manan. Though the action of the story takes place before breakfast, the title may also be an echo of the White Queen’s advice to Alice, to stretch her mind by believing a number of impossible things ‘before breakfast’. (According to the favourite niece, Mary Virginia, Cather and Lewis had named parts of Grand Manan after places in the Alice books.)51 Henry Grenfell, dyspeptic, country-loving, self-made Boston businessman, with a cabin on this remote North Atlantic island, well away from his disappointing marriage and sarcastic, successful sons, is in a bad mood. As he showers, dresses and applies his eye-drops, he sees a big snowshoe hare nibbling the clover, then looks up to see the ‘serene, impersonal splendour’ of Venus, the morning star. ‘The poor hare and his clover, poor Grenfell and his eye-drops!’ [OB, p.144] On the boat journey, armed as usual with a Shakespeare play (Henry IV, part I), he had fallen into conversation with a geologist professor and his attractive sympathetic daughter. The Professor had told him that the island is a hundred and thirty-six million years old, and Grenfell has spent a bad night of ‘revelation, revaluation’, when, under the impact of this awesome information, everything that was ‘shut-up’ in his life ‘simply broke jail, spread out into the spaciousness of the night, undraped, unashamed’. [OB, p.150]
The erotic metaphor leads him into an ‘audit’ of his tough childhood and chilly marriage, and to an admission that ‘his worst’ – his mortal – ‘enemy’ has been, not his wife, but himself. To get away from his thoughts, he hurries out for a walk through the wood to the sea. On his way, he pulls at a twig of ‘grandfather’ spruce, the skeleton of a fallen tree long since struck by lightning, its root exposed; but the twig, to his astonishment, ‘snapped back at him like a metal spring’. [OB, p.60] Once through the dark wood, he gets to the cliffside and feels, ‘like Christian of old’, that his burden is left ‘at the bottom of the hill’. The island’s ancient fundamental rock need not depress him; after all, ‘the green surface’ goes on flourishing. At the headland, he feels his ‘relationship unchanged’ to the waterfalls, the cliff walls, the resilient ‘stunted beeches’ and the old birches with their twisted one-sided growth. Looking down, he sees a human figure: it is the geologist’s daughter, setting out for a swim before breakfast in the icy water. As she opens her bathrobe, to reveal a pink bathing suit, she looks like a clam shell ‘graciously’ opening itself out. Grenfell thinks he will have to rescue her, but she takes a quick and competent swim, and he goes back, by-passing the ancient tree, pleased with what he has seen, and reflecting humorously on the encouraging aspects of evolution.
The story gathers up a number of Cather’s obsessions: the unhappy self-made American man with a marriage like St Peter’s; the pilgrimage through a dark place, as in Bunyan, or Robert Frost, similarly finding, in ‘Birches’, life ‘too much like a pathless wood’ as a twig lashes across his eye; and the enchanting but distanced figure of the lady, a seaborne Venus, ‘unashamedly’ spied on in an act of benign voyeurism. In its alternation between pioneering, stoic energy, and the impersonal, unmarked stuff of nature, it provides a last, quirky reflection on the human capacity to make its mark. Grenfell’s dismay comes out of a fear of dissolution into the impersonal elements, into time itself:
What was the use…of anything? Why tear a man loose from his little rock and shoot him out into the eternities? All that stuff was inhuman. A man had his little hour, with heat and cold and a time-sense suited to his endurance. If you took that away from him you left him spineless, accidental, unrelated to anything. [OB, pp.148–9]
His resistance to this is exemplified by other forms of resistance in nature, troll-like and fierce in the dead tree’s springing twig or the growth of the cliffside birches, young and vigorous in the girl’s challenge to the freezing ocean. Cather divides herself between the pioneering girl and the old American to cast a last look back, at once pleased and resigned, at the human effort. ‘She hadn’t dodged,’ he reflects. ‘She had gone out, and she had come back. She would have a happy day. He knew just how she felt.’ [OB, p.166] And he comes back too, his fear of being dissolved into ‘the eternities’ appeased, his appetite sharpened, to eat his breakfast.
NOTES
1. JOURNEYS
1. Don Hernando de Soto was one of the sixteenth-century Spanish pioneering explorers of what would be New Mexico, who went in search of the fabulous ‘Seven Cities of Gold’. He was followed by Coronado, whose ill-fated expedition to the Southwest inspired Cather’s imagination.
2. Letter to Miss Masterson, March 15 1943, RC.
3. Malcolm Bradbury left Cather out altogether of his book on The Modern American
Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1983); apart from David Daiches’ short study of 1951 there is no other book on her by a British writer.
4. Scott Fitzgerald, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) p.204.
5. Walt Whitman, ‘Birds of Passage’, Leaves of Grass. See O’Brien, p.440, on Cather’s ‘rebellion’ against Whitman.
6. Frank Norris, The Octopus, 1901, Book 1, Ch. 1.
7. Ole Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 1927 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp.332–3.
8. Norris, ibid.
9. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 1947 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p.15.
10. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 1924 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p.88.
11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836, Ch. I.
12. Emily Dickinson, Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, July 1862.
13. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.
14. Robert Frost, ‘The Gift Outright’, in A Witness Tree (1942), The Poetry of Robert Frost (London: Cape, 1971), p.348.
15. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, 1893, in Ray Allen Billington (ed.), Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, 1961). See also Harold Simonson, The Closed Frontier: Studies in American Literary Tragedy (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).
16. D. H. Lawrence, op. cit., and William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, 1925 (New York: New Directions, 1956).
17. Willa Cather, ‘Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle’, The Nation, vol. 117, no. 3035, September 5 1923, pp.236, 238.
18. Frank Norris, ‘A Plea for Romantic Fiction’, December 18 1901, in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp.76, 78.
19. Courier, April 8 1899, WP, p.608.
