by Willa Cather
Willa Cather can be very direct in such matters. After a close call from accidental death through sheer and symptomatic lethargy, she makes the Professor reflect that his sagging old couch is already his coffin, with poor sham upholstery: “Just the equivocal American way of dealing with serious facts,” she says. “Why pretend that it is possible to soften that last hard bed?” No palliative, no trickery or ornamentation will blind her to the essential hardness, to the punishments of life. She will have none of the cheap standards, the petty consolations, about her.
In terminating his own discussion of the book (on page 246), E. K. Brown makes a significant remark: “Not by any answers it proposes, but by the problems it elaborates, and by the atmosphere in which they are enveloped, The Professor’s House is a religious novel.” So we have come out onto the last great plateau of Willa Cather’s own journey. She is now much nearer to a finish with the local scene and its rather minuscule passions, which she has definitely appraised.
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The development continues inevitably, inexorably. One of the hardest, most obstinate stories of her whole work is the relatively short, but strangely intense, novel published in 1926 (only one year later, and in her own fifty-third), My Mortal Enemy. It remains a mysterious work. E. K. Brown, who must long have pondered its cryptic subject matter, does suggest a clue. In the end, he says (page 250): “… it becomes plain to us that this worldly woman has passed out of worldliness into preoccupation with primary realities.” This is the place to which Willa Cather wanted to bring her heroine, after headstrong youth and an ill-considered elopement with a much weaker man, whose character could never match her own. Finally Myra goes straight to religion, which here is not treated by implication, as in The Professor’s House, or even as an anodyne, consoling the end to the unhappy life of a once worldly woman, of fierce will power, détraquée. Here it becomes a principal part of the story. The way now opens for the next two, perhaps the greatest pair of Willa Cather’s novels.
A light ever seems to radiate from broad sun-swept stretches in the Southwestern desert landscape of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). There is also a marvelous unity to the book, made up in large part of deceptively simple passages; here a local story retold, there a pious legend remembered. To this corresponds the harmonious and expanded character of Father Latour himself. In part he may be taken to represent Willa Cather’s own late summer hours—or at least her aspiration for them—in the country she had discovered far beyond her old West, in one of the great adventures of her intellectual life.
What is significant in the new direction of her journey—which through much reminiscence of Auvergne, the province from which both priests in the book had started, becomes also a pilgrimage in the direction of Avignon—is that she now is a declared seeker for a faith that will console her, nostalgic as she always has been, for the perishability of life. Indeed, that life of “The Best Years”—the title of a very touching later tale—had passed first, as Virgil had phrased it in words that she long held in memory. For her, also, “Optima dies … prima fugit.…” It is significant also that in the year 1922, when the geological break in the continuity of her life had occurred, in that year she herself entered the Episcopal church, being confirmed at the same time as her parents. As is Episcopal to Baptist, it would seem, so is the great beauty of what once was and now is gone to the more prosaic world of the present. Yet her treatment of Catholics in this book, as well as later in Shadows on the Rock, became so sympathetic as she went along that many readers quite unconsciously must have thought her speaking for her own faith—which in a sense she was. She had indeed already moved her setting far away from her own youth and early novels.
Death Comes for the Archbishop also constantly takes one backward and forward, on missions of religion, between the Old World and the New; it is as if Willa Cather were intent upon weaving a cable of many strands between them. She seems to delight in flashing before us the scenery of Rome or Clermont, intermittently, to contrast them with Santa Fé or Taos; demonstrating that the greatest discrepancies vanish, and only harmonies remain, for those who are dedicated to a great ideal and thus in part transcend their surroundings. Here, on such firm heights, the unhappy and restive self perishes, to give way at the last to harmony and tranquillity. Vicariously this was her coming to terms with her own destiny. It further explains her intention behind the disarming and lovable simplicity of the small events in the foreground of the novel, symbols that with the economy of a great artist she has used for great purposes.
Colder, later in personal time, and more remote also by more than a century—for the action is set in the time of Louis XIV—is the next story, the serious, not to say somber, Shadows on the Rock, of 1931. Willa Cather is now in her fifty-eighth year. Her heroine is a young, motherless girl whose somewhat frail life revolves almost wholly about her touching effort to achieve a woman’s warmth and service for the household of an aging father. The characters of Count Frontenac and Monseigneur Laval are drawn as those of already old men.
The bastion of the great rock on which Quebec has been founded, the climate, the cold winters, somehow all seem of an unvarying gray after the smiling warmth of the open Southwest. Here and there a sheen as of unexpected late sunset wonderfully suffuses her mood; although Willa Cather herself seems to have moved still farther away, both in time and space. Religion also is very near the heart of this book. The characters are American in the sense that they come to live permanently in the New World—although even Cécile, her young heroine, is represented as born in Paris—but their pathos is in their continuing attempt, destined for never more than partial success, to transplant and keep alive, under hard and adverse conditions, the standards of the full civilization of France, their distant and revered “mère des arts et des lettres.” This must be accomplished in a world where even the flora and fauna are as on another planet, often menacing as in a nightmare.
Willa Cather makes much of Old World cooking, of cleaning and polishing, of the amenity of a sensitive and quiet bourgeois “foyer.” By the night fireside in the little house on the crooked street the old values still have force and power. The latent threat comes from the genius of the new land itself; and the ships that sail slowly across the stormy seas, and whose arrival becomes as vital to the reader as it is for the inhabitants of Quebec itself, these ships bear the very life-blood that must continually be transfused if what was admirable and remembered can continue under such difficulties.
Subtly Willa Cather’s sympathies seem to have changed; or is it such a change, after all, because from the earliest time her German musicians, her young men from Prague—or Bergen or Upsala—even arriving as poor immigrants, these had brought to the outlying farms about Red Cloud values that the young girl who was also Willa Cather sensed by every worthy measurement as far transcending what they found in possession about them. Excellence does not change, whatever the circumstances, the fluctuations in its appreciation.
As so often after a major advance Willa Cather now seems to need rest on her flinty journey. There comes about a time of retrospect; first with the three stories collected in the volume titled Obscure Destinies (1932), and in the sensitive portrayal of touching Lucy Gay-heart (1935), a last full-length evocation of the world of her morning years. Then, going back even earlier, she turns to the dim days of her earliest childhood in Virginia, this last a theme scarcely touched before—indeed, except as a background it had not determined her life. As is to be expected, the development proceeds step by step with a decline in her own vitality.
She had early rebelled against her destiny, born on the fringe of things; she had defied, she had never surrendered. Now she seems to wish passionately to submit. The violins tune to some of the most beautiful melodies of all: in “Old Mrs. Harris,” a tale in Obscure Destinies, she can touch sublimity—can create it out of almost nothing. The same is just as true of another touching and so delicate short story, already mentioned, “The Best Years,” published posthumo
usly in The Old Beauty. It is also about the earliest Western time, but now seen as far behind and long ago vanished. The journey may be wilder, the hour late, and there is no “going home” now except to death; yet courage and love have not failed her.
The place of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, begun in 1937 and published only in 1941, four years later and in her own sixty-seventh, is curious. It is a cold, slow-paced book, the chief character a willful and repellent invalid. One receives the impression that the material was never turned to in affection—at least, with the old spontaneous and warm affection that Willa Cather could give to the destiny of Ántonia, who had been such a match for her fate—but rather in an attempt, a decision, to cultivate one more area that she knew well but never had used. The action occurs near Winchester, Virginia, and the uneventful year is 1856.
This novel, as E. K. Brown comments (page 317), is not about “heroic moments in American life—the moment when the French made a civilization in the Canadian wilderness, the moment when the Southwest was at it apex, the moment when the wild land of Nebraska took the first impress of the pioneer. Now it was enough to evoke quite ordinary moments from the past; and these too had vanished, taking with them the burden of beauty for which there was nothing to compensate.”
It almost seems as if Willa Cather had come to a dead end; and indeed this may have been so, for in illness and fatigue she published nothing else during the seven years remaining before her death in April 1947, in her seventy-fourth year.
At this point the story about Avignon consequently takes on added interest. For Willa Cather apparently attempted her most difficult task, the summoning of reality from a remotely distant time and place, which in any event she never could have known personally—as in some measure she did know something about all that had gone before—when life had most worn and tired her. So the circumstances surrounding the work were somber and not very favorable. Personally, she was facing the adamant combination of old age, illness, and the slow approach of death—that ultimate engagement in which triumph was impossible. Perhaps also she reached the field of the tale in a historical setting just too late: energies never sufficed, we must remember, over seven years, to bring it to completion. And this may have been one of the reasons—which we must respect—why at the end she ordered its destruction.
Even if she surmised that her powers were failing, she may still have wanted the companionship and solace of a piece of work in the making, as it always had been for her in the richer years of her own life. To work, also, was to pray. This may explain what was going on in her mind when we see her as Edith Lewis describes her, pacing the “open roof garden of the Fairmont, walking to and fro, and reading.…” Okey’s little guide-book become a breviary.
It is easy to see why a French palace like that at Avignon rather than the one at Versailles should have seized on Willa Cather’s imagination. Her firmly expressed distastes would normally find the latter artificial and flimsy, just where the noble pile beside the Rhône was the reverse. The surprise and splendor of the conception, the wonderful spareness of the lofty architecture, these broad halls set high above rich farming-land, this capital of popes in exile, across the mountains and beside a broad, rushing Provençal river: all would have spoken clarion words.
Constant similarities between the rural life of Provence and regions she had known all her life in the West must also have been in mind. Farming is farming: to plow and to sow, to harvest and to garner, require the same labor, take their toll with the same fatigue no matter by whom performed, where—or when. Yet there were also the particular vigor and sap of this people. From her own twenty-ninth year, now long in the past, she had been consciously drawn to their special character, which apparently never ceased to delight her.
Once the definite conception had taken shape, she did, for a while, proceed. As Edith Lewis tells us (pages 195–6):
She worked fitfully at the Avignon story in the next two years [i.e., 1944 and 1945]; but her right hand was so troublesome [with a long disability that set in], became instantly so painful when she tried to write, that she was unable to make much headway. It was a story of large design, and needed concentrated vigour and power. Her knowledge of this often led her to put it aside entirely and try to forget about it until better times should come.
Alas, they did not; and now even this incomplete manuscript is destroyed.
Why, we must ask, did she at the last thus turn so completely away from America? The fact that the world had broken apart for her personally in 1922 has become clear enough. That in One of Ours she turned savagely against the American present is attested by the dark flow at the end of the book. She also reverts to this same theme in the story about “The Old Beauty,” which, although written earlier, was only published posthumously, in 1948. Here she sets her story wholly in Aix-les-Bains—how unthinkable this would have been earlier in her career!—which her middle-aged American finds, to his satisfaction, “unchanged” in a world already transformed; and this story is also set in the fateful year of 1922.
She is no longer at any pains to conceal her disillusion and aversion to most of the life about her. For a writer as classic both in feeling and style as Willa Cather, this judgment was natural enough. Indeed, in her private life she took no trouble to conform to newer interests about her, in literature, or art, or music. To preserve her entity, in a time of too facile communication, she became almost a recluse, certainly not “keeping up” with contemporary movements. Her defense was dogged and complete. She does, in the essay titled “A Chance Meeting,” in Not Under Forty, qualify Marcel Proust as “the greatest French writer of his time”; but otherwise one hears of no later enthusiasms whatsoever. She will not go beyond Thomas Mann and Katherine Mansfield. Indeed, in the last months of her life she turned away from everything of the present, back even to Shakespeare and to Chaucer. Here was her grandeur and her consolation.
A soliloquy in the critical One of Ours should at this point be recalled. Of her hero, Claude, she says (page 406):
He had begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow emotions. That was the way [his friend] Gerhardt had put it once; and if it was true, there was no cure for it. Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
Thus France could give one meaning to life which it was impossible to find in America.
It could not have been easy, nevertheless, for her to turn to Europe, to expatriate herself—even if only spiritually—as had Henry James and Edith Wharton (although for very different reasons) before her. Even for them, as we know, the task was of immense magnitude and yielded dubious results; and they were wealthy patricians who without great effort could remove themselves from any place to any other. Willa Cather, embedded as she had been in Nebraska, and with a much harder destiny in many ways than those of such comparative darlings of fortune, took much longer; but in the end and by gradual steps she did very nearly the same thing. Like many people of plain origins, her first great need had been to be reassured, to still the youthful panic of seeming to possess only an inferior brand of everything that her more fortunate brothers and sisters took as naturally theirs. This was a prime need; but she had conquered it in her own way, which was the way of genius.
Furthermore, Edith Wharton and Henry James lived much the same cosmopolitan life wherever they happened to be, following—even when they were railing at—contemporary fashion. Willa Cather reached first for the stars over the pure air of Nebraska, and then, when their light became obscured, would accept nothing less beautiful in their place simply because it was American. Her position was grander; the evolution of vastly more moment. Her stubborn loyalty to excellence, and the tenderness of her love, refused to alter because they had come upon alteration. Thus the Avignon story, incomplete and vanished as it is, remains the last great testimony of what she believed in, and of what she had
lived for.
We should have to conclude on this lofty but rather barren note were it not for a piece of singular good fortune, a circumstance that is the origin of this essay. Miss Lewis does remember quite a little of the manuscript that no longer exists; and she has been kind enough to give the following account of it, thus adding a precious last chapter to the history of Willa Cather’s writing:
The title of Willa Cather’s unfinished and unpublished Avignon story was Hard Punishments.
The setting was Avignon of the 14th century (1340), at the time of the papal residence of Benedict XII.
The central characters were two youths—whom she tentatively called Pierre and Andŕe; and the story was of their friendship.
It opened with a scene on the height above the Papal Palace, overlooking the Rhône. This place is now a park; but in the 14th century it was a sort of ash-heap, where refuse from the Palace was thrown over the cliff. Pierre, a peasant boy from a farm beyond the river, has climbed up there in order to sit and look across toward his former home. He is a criminal, according to the law of the time. A simple, childlike, rather stupid boy—he had traded off his father’s cart and donkey, and a load of pottery he was carrying to market, for a wonderful monkey belonging to a sailor who was passing through the town. His father had denounced him for theft to the authorities, and as punishment he was strung up for several hours by his thumbs. His hands are now useless, and he is an outcast—homeless, in constant pain, and unable to work. A woman in the town who keeps a brothel has taken him in and given him a corner in which to sleep. He sits on the height above the Palace, crying from homesickness and misery.
