Tributes

by Bradford Morrow

  The Professor’s House was out of print when I first read it in the early sixties. So was the novella which followed, the brilliant My Mortal Enemy, a love story that is richly spare and brutally anti-romantic. I remember writing against the loss of these works which were quite forgotten while the prairie novels of Miss Cather, as I would properly have called her, were still in textbook editions. And later, having misread, I wrote with some petulance of Willa throwing over the real thing for her “piously researched later works,” Death Comes to the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock. Misreading Death Comes, indeed, for the novel of the two French priests who go from the seminary to the Spanish Southwest is a risky work that finds its structure in tales within tales, nonlinear as the fables of Marquez or Calvino.

  The narrative of Cather’s great novel of the Southwest is worked like a tapestry or a quilt to tell its many stories. There is, of course, the inevitable chronology—both Father Valliant and Archbishop Latour grow old. The railroad reaches Santa Fe. There’s gold discovered in them thar hills and now … now I see that it’s only my Willa who was smart enough to juxtapose landscape of the tertiary social man, the prospector, with the golden yellow hill in the Rio Grande Valley that will yield the stone for Bishop Latour’s ambitious European cathedral bringing two cultures together, chipping away at the land for God and Mammon. A chapter, toward the end of the novel, is titled simply “Cathedral.” This is a story of male friendship: Bishop Latour is more attuned to beauty than Father Valliant, the plainer man of the cloth and the more spiritual. Raymond Carver must have read these pages with care, with as much care as he read D. H. Lawrence’s “The Blind Man” before writing his “Cathedral.”

  Father Latour laughed, “Is a cathedral a thing to be taken lightly, after all?”

  “Oh, no, certainly not!” Father Valliant moved his shoulders uneasily. He did not himself know why he hung back in this.

  How smooth the surface of this interchange, how subtle Willa’s instruction that Latour’s aesthetics, or even the sacred edifice of cathedral, does not quite win the day. At my parochial schools, the nuns’ adulation of Willa Cather seemed to me, even in adolescence, an embrace that would not be returned, that she was given more to the manner of storytelling than to the subject matter of Catholic missionaries. That was perhaps my first understanding of desire as creation, and of the magic that must bring together what medievalists term the matière and the sens, the material and its meaning. She was rightly annoyed with reviewers who could not classify her late work, the forms which she went on to invent. When she wrote of her writing at all, it was with brief clarity and brought to our attention not the work, but the paintings, music, legends, contes, lay of the land and recollections of her Nebraska childhood as well as her European travels, which brought forth her own desire.

  I have made her up, my Willa, though I offer no narrative frame to my view of her work. Reading, rereading a writer who has opened the schoolroom window has no end, not even an elegiac—So long! She died when I was seventeen and had outgrown her, then turning the page, a printed page, I see that I called her my mentor. Now, though I am happier than she would ever be to work with the popular goods in the dime-store window, Willa speaks more as my familiar: “The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once—nor, for that matter, does the ability” [1920]. A tough statement, something of a burden: all passion not spent.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson. Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts.

  The Emerson Madrigal

  Bradford Morrow

  I HONOR THE MAN who wrote My cow milks me.

  I admire the youthful Emerson who proclaimed I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer or suffer—the Emerson who with those words promised a lifelong resolve against indifference, dullness, detachment, disregard. The man who discovered early on that passionless thought builds the sepulchres of the fathers. He who asked Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe! as fresh as that known to Plato and Pythagoras, Lucretius and Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus, Meng Tsu and Marcus Aurelius, Dante and Milton, Goethe and Kant who went before? The radical contrarian who, even as he read over the course of a long life through so much of the world’s literature, believed always that the journey is only in the footfall, that the masterpiece is only in the word read now, that all literature is yet to be written.

  I celebrate the humanist but exacting Emerson who would have read our present mudslide of exposés and confessions, and the same exacting but humanist Emerson who would have read our Gobi of newspaper critiques and academic deconstructions as simply more works by the dead for the dead. The man who proposed The real danger of American scholars is not analysis, but sleep. The man who thundered All this polemics, syllogism, and definition is so much wastepaper. The man who would clear his mind.

  I honor Emerson the botanist who took delight in the names of reeds and weeds and grasses, and Emerson the friend whose house was forever filled with the discourse of so many voices, and Emerson the doubting Thomas who often annotated his journals with outbursts of humorous self-deprecation, and Emerson the abolitionist who said in a blistering speech in Concord not only that black or white is an insignificance but that The negro has saved himself, and the white man very patronizingly says I have saved you (1844). Emerson whose wife Lidian was so ashamed of her country that she draped their front gate with black cambric cloth every Fourth of July until the emancipation was in sight. The Emerson family who were members of the underground railroad in Massachusetts. This same Emerson who protested the illegal removal of the Cherokees from their homeland, who wrote Van Buren that such a crime deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country— who when he recognized his remonstrations were in vain still concluded that The amount of it, be sure, is merely a scream, but sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. The angered Emerson who wrote Abolish kingcraft, slavery, feudalism, blackletter monopoly, pull down gallows, explode priestcraft, open the doors of the sea to all emigrants. The Emerson that Lincoln and John Brown had good reason to respect, and Polk and Webster to resent.

  I celebrate Emerson’s fundamental and sacramental congeniality with the earth and its inanimate and animate denizens, his genius for observing a moral precept in the shivering sunstruck needles of a pine, say, or the warm ashen path in the shadow of Etna. Admire him for seeing how nature’s individuals—plover, hawk, wood anemone, foxglove, otter, laurel—constitute the divine; how the starlight and wild strawberry are sources of comprehension and revelation in and of themselves. I commend the man who understood nature’s transformative clout as when Frogs pipe; waters far off trickle; dry leaves hiss; grass bends and rustles; and I have died out of the human world and come to feel a strange, cold, acqueous terraqueous, aerial etherial sympathy and existence. The man who learned his land and house were more than what was measured by the surveyor and stipulated in the deed. Who wrote When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, boblinks, and thrushes; as little did I know what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying. The thoughtful man who looked again and saw more than first met the eye, listened again and heard more than struck the ear. I honor him for his mastery of so many nonverbal and invisible languages, of the syntax of forests, of the grammar of birds and fish and flowers, the rhetoric of embryo and carrion.

  I applaud the audacity of the man who wrote Beware when the great God lets loose a new thinker on this planet, the same who deduced from Stoic and Quaker and Islamic thought the unhampered personal philosophy that insists the universe is the externization of the soul. He who would weave his own religion from the threads, the brambles, the seeded shafts of various others, looking less for differences among mankind’s doctrines than the convergences which he found everywhere. Synergies of spirit and thought were his focus, the world sans murs and history outside time: the American thinker not as isolationist, but in fact outward bound. And like the osprey willing to build with what is at hand. Writing of Goethe
, Emerson revealed himself—where some saw only fragments he saw connections. Here is an Emerson I respect, and there are other Emersons, too.

  Such as the bemused Emerson who wrote that Pirates do not live on nuts and herbs. The grinning Emerson who admired Henry David Thoreau’s credo “If a man does not believe that he can thrive on board nails, I will not talk with him.” The scowling Emerson who loathed the faker, the flimsy, the mock, and was always alert to such weaknesses in himself, to such a degree that sometimes he discovered them when they were not there. The manifold Emerson who was private yet public, fond yet cross, discreet yet frank, religious yet antireligion. The Emerson who was compelled to write it all down and who would, despite the many days he spent reading, note once in his journal: It makes no difference what I read. If it is irrelevant, I read it deeper. I read it until it is pertinent to me and mine. Who in another year on another day laughed in the face of his very muse: Books,—yes, if worst comes to worst.

  I honor the secular theology of the declaration To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Such is one of his many convictions that displays Character, which is to say a purity of ends realized by a rigor of means. Whenever I stumble either in choosing an imperfect means to an end, or perfect means to a flawed end, let me be reminded of the more perfect original thought I must have had, and work once more from the private heart to the better consequence: so I wrote in my own notes, a small prayer prompted by the son of a preacher who was himself a lapsed preacher.

  I admire the man who remarked of his sentences I am a rocket manufacturer.

  I celebrate his impudence and his prudence, his certainty and doubt, his exultations and darknesses, his love of home and the exquisite impetuosity that led him to resign his ministry at the Second Church in Boston, give up his house, auction off most of his worldly effects and board the brig Jasper (sick with diarrhea) to sail away to Europe. I laud his decision to make the Grand Tour backwards—working his way from Italy through France to England—as he searched out new ideas, new images, new knowledge in the Old World. I am intrigued by his grudging respect for the art he saw in Rome, the gardens he rambled in Paris, the writers he met in London and Ecclefechan in Scotland—his unsentimental education and admission into the larger world of struggle and accomplishment. By the way in which no matter how far from Concord his travels took him (before he was done, Emerson would walk beneath the sequoias in California, touch the pillars of Stonehenge, behold the sphinx in Egypt) he was always renewed upon his return to wife, children, family, friends, even enemies.

  His brilliant unapologetic contradictoriness I celebrate. I revere this same wanderer who with customary cheek in the face of contradiction wrote Let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause and wrote again The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still.

  I celebrate the pure élan, the tenacity, the ferment and holy grit of the man!

  His dictum A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds with its clarion whoop of invitation to speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day inspired and freed, no doubt, the minds of many readers since it was first published a century and a half ago. I acclaim the simple complexity of such plain insight, the recognition of our mercurial humanity, the philharmonic nature of our lone voice. And acclaim that Emersonian rebelliousness which draws us to him when we are young, and carries forward into later years if our suppleness, wit and fire remain at work.

  The force of character is cumulative, he wrote, referring to women and men and the societies they build. Who but the Plato for an unfledged, immigrant nation would declare that the old institutions and their attendant rituals are stinking ghosts we drag behind us in an act whose only magnanimity is the lame aerobics of the backward glance?

  I love the Emerson who was unafraid of enthusiasm.

  The Emerson who wasn’t afraid of making mistakes.

  The Emerson who learned from the fieldhand Tarbox.

  The Emerson who knew the value of indignation.

  To conform or not to conform, this is the question I celebrate in him. For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure, and yet, isn’t it also true that contempt is the malign gift the public eventually bestows upon its conformers? Emerson who thus proposed you act as you will, and let the world go its own way: What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. What gives this intimate declaration of independence such greatness, though, is that it does not come with an invitation to retire from society, to seek hermitage, but to walk straight into society with your autonomous head held high. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Walden Pond may serve as a kind of temporary seminary, a secluded lyceum where student and teacher are one and the same, but the moment comes when we must reenter the world. Walden Pond is a state of being, a grace that soon streams onward.

  I honor Emerson who was the first to translate Dante’s La vita nuova, that liturgy and analysis of love. I celebrate his own love for Ellen Tucker and Lidian Jackson and Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis. And for Henry David Thoreau. I praise the authentic love of and taste for the world shimmering in a dream where he floated at will in the great Ether, and saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, “This thou must eat.” And I ate the world.

  I toast the boundless appetite of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  How I would like to think he would have embraced the newness of the music of Harry Partch, and that of Leadbelly, too, despite the fact that he seldom mentions music in his journals and essays (in one notebook he does bemoan prison melodies and Jim Crow songs, calling instead for the Godhead in music, as we have the Godhead in the sky and the creation). Coltrane? and Ives? and Amy Beach? Miles? Godhead is present in their measures. I celebrate the idea of Emerson down at the crossroads with Robert Johnson.

  His droll self-portrait I honor: I am awkward, sour, saturnine, lumpish, pedantic, and thoroughly disagreeable and oppressive to the people around me, just as I admire his response to someone who asked him to describe his life: I have no history, no fortunes that would make the smallest figure in a narrative. My course of life has been so routinary, that the keenest eye for point or picture would be at fault before such remediless commonplace. And concluded with the pronouncement We will really say no more on a topic so sterile.

  I celebrate a mind this rich and unremedial and admire his preference for the tough edge, in himself and in others, to any sophisticated suave: Hard clouds, and hard expressions, and hard manners, I love. Emerson was tough on himself even as he allowed himself to ramble and digress, and recognized that such dignified and unadorned hardness was the best way to make the mind limber and the spirit serene.

  I celebrate the man who early on championed Walt Whitman.

  And the mad Jones Very and unlucky Bronson Alcott.

  The Emerson who was admired by Emily Dickinson.

  His assiduous routine that began before dawn with hot coffee and cold pie, then the invariable steps to his desk where for seven hours he would work, I admire, and that he attempted to maintain this habit no matter what circumstances of disaster fate visited upon him, I admire—work in the face of a fate which often was truly cruel to Emerson. His life was boundary-stoned by deaths. His first wife he married likely in the knowledge she was dying of tuberculosis (they had three indelible years). His son, Waldo, born to his second wife, Lidian, died young of scarlet fever. He gave up his innocent little breath like a bird, Emerson wrote in his journal that winter. His brothers, so promising, met with p
rofessional disappointment, or else died young—John Clarke aged eight, Edward aged twenty-nine, his beloved Charles but twenty-eight. And his sisters mostly fared no better—Phebe lived two years, never having met her brother-to-be, and Mary Caroline just three. Sorrow makes us all children again,—destroys all differences of intellect, he noted. The wisest knows nothing. I honor him in his anguish and his phoenixlike response, his understanding of the value of the tragic flame, his earned words about the enrichments attendant to disaster: He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain.

  I celebrate the Emerson who might lose this or fail at that, but note the very next day with superb delicacy: This morn the air smells of vanilla and oranges.

  I celebrate the writer who said outright what most writers think: No man can be criticised but by a greater than he. Do not, then, read the reviews.

  The Emerson who at once displayed majesty and aloofness and engagement and human-kindness and pluck and flamboyance and knotty radiance and the one who regretted he didn’t possess a greater knowledge in the fields of geography, mathematics, astronomy and who wished his German was better, and his Greek.

  I celebrate the photographs of him so sadly joyful, so sternly charitable, with almost always the same expression in every frame, a firmness of spirit in the eyes and on the brow but with the mouth drawn out not quite into a smile, nor quite into a frown, but rather toward a magnificent variance of thought. His I must be myself— yawping forward toward Whitman and the century of thinkers who had not yet been born—I celebrate not only for the sheer classic weight of the charge, but for how the very proverb formed itself in the countenance of the man who made it. Both Emersons always there in the visage: the Emerson who wrote I enjoy all the hours of life, and the Emerson who wrote The badness of the times is making death attractive. His face which wore a similar serious benevolence at seventy-four and forty-three and fifty. Scholar, husband, father, friend—the look of one who rarely if ever bothered to invent an excuse.