Critical Woodcuts/Willa Cather and the Changing World
WILLA CATHER has published a new novel, "The Professor's House." If I should say no more than that, I should have said enough to send all discerning readers in search of a copy. Miss Cather is not merely one of those rare writers who have taken a vow never to disappoint us. She is also one of the true classics of our generation. She is not merely entertaining. She is also important. Her work has a vital center, and its contours become steadily more distinct. It will become clear to us presently that she has been expressing these last ten or fifteen years a new sense of values which we are all gradually and often unconsciously beginning to accept. She has been clarifying for us our sense of what we have in common with the generation before 1900, and our sense of the points at which we have departed from the old paths.
Each of her novels has been a desired event, of which one could safely predict nothing but a style with the translucency of sky; a beauty, cool, grave, pervasive; deep feeling under perfect control; and a criticism of life both profound and acute—a criticism which deals as nobly with the simple elements as with the fine complexities of human experience.
"The Professor's House" is a disturbingly beautiful book, full of meanings, full of intentions—I am sure that I have not caught them all. Everything in it has
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its own bright surface meaning. The publisher's announcement suggests that Miss Cather actually intended to describe academic life. She is here addressing herself, we are informed, "to those who do not know or who doubt the American youth, to those who may be interested in the environment which their sons and daughters find in college."
The novel does, to be sure, present Godfrey St. Peter—a man of mixed French and American ancestry—professor of European history in a state university near Lake Michigan; his wife, Lillian—a woman of some elegance and beauty, with whom he seems to have almost nothing to do; the two married daughters and their husbands; the seamstress, Augusta; the professor's favorite pupil, Tom Outland, explorer of cliff-dwellings and inventor, killed in the war, and a colleague or two. The professor has completed his life work, an eight-volume history of the Spanish Adventurers in North America. He has received a big money prize from Oxford. And the family is moving into the new house which he, or perhaps rather his wife, has built with the reward of his labors.
What happens after that point would strike me as inconclusive, slightly incoherent, and without vital thesis, if I did not regard "The Professor's House" as an Ibsenish title—as Ibsenish as "The Doll's House." There is more in this house than meets the eye; but let us consider first what meets the eye.
The professor's former house was a poor old place, lacking many modern improvements, inconvenient, and as ugly as a house could be. It had a tin bathtub which the professor used to renovate with porcelain paint. It had a garret study. The professor wrote his "Spanish Adventurers" in a wretchedly bare little room under the mansard roof, without filing apparatus, and heated by a most dubious old stove. The room was further encumbered by a number of ancient dress forms, and he had to share it at times with Augusta, the sewing woman.
Money comes to the family from the professor's prize and from the marriage of a daughter to a Jewish engineer, who has grown wealthy by exploiting a patent of Tom Outland's. All sorts of comforts and luxuries now are made available—cars, imported Spanish furniture, furs, jewels, wine, country houses, travel. The professor's wife and his children take with alacrity to the new standard of living; they blossom out; the wife renews her youth.
But the professor is a tree of which the trunk has been hollowed by fire. He is nearly burned out. He haunts the old home. He clings whimsically to the fleshless companions of his scholarly solitude—those old dress forms. He finds comfort in chatting with the antique sewing-woman; and she saves his life when he is on the point of asphyxiation from the fumes of the old stove, the fire of which has been extinguished by the wind.
Out of a large acquaintance with professors, I can testify that Professor St. Peter is not an ordinary professor. Ordinary professors do not reluct against exchanging a ramshackle old house for a luxurious new one. Professor St. Peter is rather a spirit than a man. He is a spirit saying good-by to something much larger than the ugly old square domicile in which his life work was accomplished. He is a spirit reluctantly bidding farewell to a generation of American life, to a vanishing order of civilization. I find "The Professor's House" echoing and vibrating with the cumulative meaning of all the books in which Miss Cather has sought to record the quest of her generation for true romance, for the real thing, for that which enables one to forget everything else, for that which uses and consumes one adequately.
Miss Cather came out of a Western small town by way of the University of Nebraska some twenty or twenty-five years ago. From that statement alone one can infer, with small probability of error, that she had a good intelligent mother of "Puritan" upbringing; that her father was something of a pioneer, and that Miss Cather's early education was of what we call a New Englandish cast, qualified by a Western environment and contacts with German, Swedish and Bohemian settlers on the prairies.
When the University of Nebraska had done its best to kindle her curiosity and to open her mind, I infer that she came East with literature and music in her heart, and eagerly continued her education in Greenwich Village, in Paris, in London, and in many other places at home and abroad.
For nearly twenty years I have fondly preserved a second-hand impression of her before she was a famous novelist. It was sketched for me by a college friend of mine, Harry James Smith, who was killed in war service. Many years ago, as a beginner in letters he used to give me delightful gossip about the young people who were in those days sharpening their pens for literary adventure in New York. In my old memories young Miss Cather is sitting every morning on a bench in Washington Square, reading Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." I believe she repudiates this reminiscence as imaginary. But I am sure that she has sat in Washington Square and that she has read "Leaves of Grass." So I cling to the reminiscence for its symbolic truth.
Looking back through the seven novels to discover the newcomer from the West, I see a young Nebraskan, hungry from the austerities and rectitudes of a prairie home, reading the "Leaves of Grass" in the morning sunshine on a bench in Washington Square and dreaming of the western pioneers and of Paris, dreaming of a world richer, fuller, freer than our fathers knew, a world enriched by the development of perceptions of beauty which in them were but rudimentary, and enriched by the liberation of powers which they did not value or which they feared and suppressed. With that much by way of biography, one can in some fashion "account" for everything that she has written.
Her first book, "Alexander's Bridge," 1912, is more significantly hers than she admits. It is a short novel presenting a "crucial moment" in the career of Bartley Alexander. He was by the gift of the gods a tremendous natural force, a great man of action. He came out of the West and distinguished himself as a bridge builder. He married a fine woman of talent and fortune and settled firmly into the imposing structure of established society in Boston. But in his dangerous middle age his unexhausted youth fermented within him. He renewed a liaison of his student days with an Irish actress in London. When he returned to inspect his biggest bridge, then building, it collapsed and he was drowned in its ruin.
In 1922, eleven years after the composition of this tale, Miss Cather wrote an apologetic but extremely interesting preface for a new edition. She said that the "subject matter" had originally attracted her, but that she now recognized it as not her "own material," not the field in which she was master. So far as the "subject matter" is concerned, I can't follow this explanation; she appears to possess the subject matter adequately for her purposes. But so far as the treatment is concerned, I see a point in the apologetic preface. She has tried to treat her theme in accordance with the New England tradition, established by Hawthorne and more or less perpetuated by Mrs. Wharton. She has moralized the story as Hawthorne would have moralized it: the collapse of the bridge is an obvious symbolical device for emphasizing the "collapse" of that pillar of society, Bartley Alexander. In its form and outline, the tale looks like a tribute to that rigorously established order to which Mrs. Wharton used to offer sacrifices.
Now, nowhere else in Miss Cather's work, I think, is there any such tribute to "established society" as is implied in the title and in the dominating symbolism of "Alexander's Bridge." All her deepest sympathies, as her subsequent novels prove, were with, not against, Bartley in his revolt against the prison-house of respectability, in which he felt that the primal energies of his nature were being progressively fettered and wasted. But in this first book she actually lugs in a professor of moral philosophy, a Professor Wilson, to serve as spokesman for the ethical sense of his generation; and he—lightly, yet ominously—speaks of a flaw in Bartley's nature which he once feared might lead to disaster. In so far as the book is moralized in this sense, it is out of line with Miss Cather's practice and her convictions.
Yet in "Alexander's Bridge" itself, Miss Cather does strike into her own theme and material, she begins her own characteristic comment on life, in these "mutterings" of Bartley to the professor of moral philosophy:
"After all, life doesn't offer a man much. You work like the devil and think you are getting on, and suddenly you discover that you've only been getting yourself tied up. A million details drink you dry. Your life keeps going for things you don't want, and all the while you are being built alive into a social structure you don't care a rap about. I sometimes wonder what sort of chap I'd have been if I hadn't been this sort; I want to go out and live out his potentialities, too." [My italics.]
To live out one's potentialities: there is the clew to all Miss Cather's sympathies. There is her primary intuition of the "real thing," in harmony with which she has readjusted her entire scale of values. She sympathizes profoundly and intelligently with that aspiration. It is a major distinction of her work and of her literary generation. Her criticism of life, in both its negative and its positive aspects, springs from her sympathy with that aspiration, and from her intelligent repudiation of the repressive philosophy upon which Mrs. Wharton's established polite society, as well as the village society of New England, was based.
From polite society, Miss Cather turned abruptly in 1913 to one large division of her "own material" in "O Pioneers!" with which, for our purpose, we may immediately associate "My Antonia," 1918. In these books, she tells us that she did not "build" her story. The story shaped itself inevitably in a loose, anecdotal, yet intensely vivid and poignant memoir. Here she is dealing not with the domain of convention, but with the domain of necessity. She is presenting the Bohemian, German, Swedish and native American farmers of Nebraska battling with the soil and the elements, against heavy odds. This is her account of what life is, and must be, at bottom. This is her picture of "romance" in its most elementary form.
For pioneers, these books tell us, there is naught but this: food, shelter, clothing and reproduction of their species; just not to perish; just to hold one's own on the hard bedrock of existence. In these conditions, the primitive struggle suffices to call forth one's best and one's utmost, and to make one oblivious of everything else—of all the graces and refinements and the large awareness of the world in which later generations endeavor to slake the thirsts of the soul.
Miss Cather has taken the pioneers into her brooding heart. She extenuates nothing, but she sets down naught in malice. She cannot, like so many of our jolly young novelists, write satirically or even bitterly of the long, lonely roads that lead to Main Street or of "the big, lonely country where people worked hard with their backs and got tired like the horses, and were too sleepy at night to think of anything to say." In her, this elementary struggle, whether she contemplates its symbol in the plow standing in the black furrows against the Nebraska sunset or in the shards and flints of the vanished cliff-dwellers who left their mournful vestiges under the turquoise heavens of New Mexico and Colorado, evokes a mood of luminous Virgilian sadness. No other American novelist, I think, has treated this theme with a beauty so grave, so wistful.
The heroine of "O Pioneers!" demands special mention as one of Miss Cather's important contributions to contemporary "feminism." Dux femina facti: the chief pioneer is a woman. Alexandra is one of several children on a poor Nebraska farm. On the death of her father she alone of the brood reacts positively and creatively to the new demands of circumstances. Her brothers plod in the old ruts. She strikes out. She has enough vital energy to shape a little the terms of her struggle for survival, to make of it a big thing, an inspiring and rewarding activity. She finds what "romance" life has for her in buying up unvalued and forsaken farms, adding quarter-section to quarter-section, and competing with men in all the details of farm management. In this she is a notable predecessor of Ellen Glasgow's heroine in "Barren Ground."
Alexandra is not inhuman, not emotionally stolid. She feels the normal woman's desires and needs. In the end she takes a husband. But in the end the husband's place in her life is perforce incidental. Before the time comes when he seems to fit in, she herself has already done, fully accomplished, what we used to call "a man's work in the world." Marriage for her is a side enterprise—as it is for a man. It cannot now fill her life to the exclusion of everything else. Her life is already full—all but full. She will live out her personal and domestic potentialities without interrupting the big constructive "romance," which for many years has occupied her mind and her imagination.
From the pioneers, Miss Cather turns to her second major theme in "The Song of the Lark," 1915, and in her collection of short stories, "Youth and the Bright Medusa," 1920. One theme develops, when it develops vitally, out of the other, as the pattern comes out on the waterpots of the cliff-dwellers. Vital romance has its roots in necessity. For Miss Cather there are two great things in the world, the struggle for existence, and the art which expands our measured interval with beauty or high passion till we forget that we must live and must die.
I am astonished to learn that there are still some intelligent persons who have not yet read "The Song of the Lark." It is absurd. "The Song of the Lark" is certainly near the top notch of American fiction. It seems to me one of the truest and profoundest studies of the mind and heart of a great artist ever written anywhere. It is a magnificent piece of imaginative realism. It is also, I believe, Miss Cather's most intimate book—the book which she has most enriched with the poetry and wisdom and the passion of her experience, and made spacious with the height and the depth of her desire.
It is the story of a Swedish pastor's daughter in Colorado, in whom there is gradually discovered a singing voice of the first quality. Gradually the voice is born in her. "Every artist," says her old German singing master, "makes himself born." Gradually she escapes from everything else till she is living to fulfil the possibilities of her talent—for that and for naught else. Then, as one of her lovers says, with a note of pity for himself, "she drifts like a rifle ball" to her object. All her childhood, all her labor, all her love, all her acquaintance with the wide world, her struggles, her frustrations, her triumphs—all are converted into music, into beauty. Everything else is incidental—as it is, as it must be—to every absolutely first rate artist. As for those who play with art, art plays with them. Thea does not play.
Nothing in contemporary fiction has stirred me, I think, quite so profoundly as the deep rich harmonies Miss Cather makes in this story by the interweaving of her life-preservative with her life-expansive themes in those marvelous chapters where she shows. Thea musically assimilating, among the ruins of the cliff-dwellers, the history of humanity's struggle for survival.
In all the stories of "Youth and the Bright Medusa" you will find variations on the central theme in "The Song of the Lark." These are poignant tales of painters, sculptors, singers seeking their "real thing," and discarding the interpretations of polite society, the New England village, and Main Street. Their romance is the expansion of the allotted interval. Their motto, like that of the old play, is "all for love." The object of their one unfailing love is their art. Through all the disgrace and squalor of life, that remains clean and holy. The artist who will not give all is no true lover of his art, and his mistress will forsake him.
The war tried in vain to divert Miss Cather from the development of her theme. In "One of Ours," 1922, she did indeed write one of the stories of the World War. As a reward for this work she received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel which "best presents the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood." I am not sure to what extent the judges were moved by the patriotic and military interest of the book. It is a sufficiently good war story. But war is not Miss Cather's "own material."
And, as a curious and ironic matter of fact, Miss Cather is much occupied in "One of Ours" with an implicit satire on "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood," and with exhibiting the superior literacy, intellectuality, æsthetic interest, friendliness, affability and geniality of German men and women in the Ehrlich family at the University of Nebraska. The young hero who goes to fight the Germans has learned pretty much all that he knows of the amenities of life from his German friends and neighbors.
Miss Cather's hero is a Western boy from the farm whose deepest impulses and aspirations have been frustrated by precisely what I suppose the founder of the Pulitzer Prize imagined were essential constituents of "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood." They have been frustrated by the hard frugality and thrift of prosperous American farmers; by the influence of a narrow denominational religion; by the average American man's contempt for gracious manners, art and the things of the mind; by the narrow mother and the narrower parson piously assuring a warm-blooded, hungry boy that he will find his happiness "when he finds his Saviour"; by a chaste and frigid wife who abandons her young husband in order to nurse a missionary sister in China, etc.
Miss Cather has never been valuable to us as a flatterer of "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood." She has conspicuously served us by showing just how and where this "wholesome atmosphere" has corroded and wasted some of the precious resources of life. She has served us by showing again and again how the "alien" elements in our population—German, Swedish, Bohemian, Spanish, Mexican, French—have utilized what "we Anglo-Saxons" have suppressed and rejected.
Her next novel, "A Lost Lady," is a remarkable case in point. Like "The Song of the Lark," this is a story on her great theme of living out one's potentialities. But in this case the potentiality to which the heroine gives all is not artistic, but personal and specifically erotic, and to a certain extent illicit. Mrs. Forrester is a woman who, as we vulgarly put it, "trades" on her charm, though what she gets in barter is only adoration. She is animated and consumed by the passion for giving and receiving pleasure, which she uses incidentally as a means of refining the manners of those to whom she gives it. Her perfumes, her rings, her furs, her voice, her eyes, her kindness, the touch of her fine hand upon one's arm are all bewitching, penetratively seductive. She cannot bow or give one a passing glance without establishing a personal relation of an indescribable sweetness.
Mrs. Forrester is the radiant Venus Anadyomene united in the holy bonds of matrimony to an honorable, crippled, corpulent, big-jowled railway man who looks and acts like Grover Cleveland. She is, in her own sense, unflinchingly loyal to this fine old wreck. But that is not enough for her. She is in her sense loyal to all men. She gives the best of herself to them all, and so she fascinates all men, and all boys, who come within reach of her voice and eyes. Personal charm is her one talent. In all circumstances, worthy and unworthy, she lives out its potentialities. She uses it as the musician uses music, to expand the allotted interval; and, like a public performer of music, she wishes to please all.
At the first reading of this book I did not lose my heart to Mrs. Forrester. I happen to have a deeply seated, perhaps ineradicable, prejudice against persons who desire to please everybody. Mrs. Forrester's passion for pleasing everybody left her, I thought, without that trait which is essential to pleasing people who are at all particular: it left her without discrimination. It seemed to me to betray her as estrangingly devoid of taste in personal relations. And when she submitted quietly to the embrace of the hard-eyed, carbuncled shyster Ivy Peters, I revolted from her charm as young Neil revolted.
But Mr. Heywood Broun, winking with the indulgence of the Almighty at Mrs. Forrester's unconcern about preserving "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood," assured me in print that in Mrs. Forrester I should find the genuine "portrait of a lady," which I had somewhere said was missing from current fiction. And not Mr. Broun alone, but all my acquaintances, academic persons, old maids, hardened old New England bachelors of the austerest virtue—all unite with Mr. Broun in surrendering to her charm and admitting—the austere old bachelors—that if they could have met anywhere in their generation a lady like Mrs. Forrester—well, their lives might have been very different.
On a third reading I see how "A Lost Lady" fits in with the main thesis of Miss Cather's work. Mrs. Forrester is a symbolic figure. Her story is Miss Cather's poem of personality and its values—its powers, its too-little regarded powers. In her calling she is as admirable as. Thea is admirable in hers. She used the rare talent intrusted to her. She gave all for love. She consumed herself adequately in making personal relations charming. She illustrates, and her innumerable adorers illustrate, the coming around of our generation to Browning's position in the much quoted poem:
Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.