The dial needle, though, starts moving in this general direction from the earliest time. There had always been a great curiosity and interest about Europe, every part of it, even when Willa Cather had been merely an unusually active child, growing up freely on the Divide. Passage after passage in the Nebraska novels, taken autobiographically, makes this clear. Her first journey to the Old World, nevertheless, had come only in her twenty-ninth year, when she went abroad from Pittsburgh with her friend Isabelle McClung, in the summer of 1902.
In his Willa Cather, a Critical Biography, E. K. Brown has summarized its Provençal days most sympathetically (pages 103–4):
In September they journeyed to the south, into the warm land of Alphonse Daudet, where the mistral blew “more terrible than any wind that ever came up from Kansas.” Willa Cather drank in the warmth and color of the land and rejoiced in its people. The impressions of Provence garnered now were ineffaceable to the last. She rejoiced in the landscape, the history, the architecture, the food, the wine; she stayed at the hotel in the ancient Papal city of Avignon, which Henry James had affectionately praised in his travel writings. Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung were the only English-speaking people in the town; there seemed to be no other tourists and Willa Cather enjoyed saturating herself with the life and aspect of the place. Here on the bank of the Rhone the young woman from the Divide had found something that touched her more deeply than the metropolitan density of London or the luminous quality of Paris; a life rooted in the centuries—what she later had in mind when she spoke of the things that lie deep behind French history and French art. That art extended to the sense of well-being that comes from sun and light and artfully cooked food; it is reflected in Bishop Latour’s remark when he tastes the soup cooked by Father Vaillant: “… a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”
Later he tells us (page 269): “The story she was writing in the last years of her life was to express what Avignon, the Avignon of the popes, had meant to her over a period of forty years.” Its roots therefore grew deep; and rich living was to nourish them.
A decade later—but Willa Cather developed late, and slowly—presumably after the publication in 1912 of her first full-length, Jamesian tale, Alexander’s Bridge, and while O Pioneers!, her first novel of the soil, was still in manuscript, she even assured her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, as we are told in the latter’s Willa Cather, a Memoir (page 97), that “Some time … there would be a story with sharp clear definite lines like the country in which I then was [the South of France].” So we have an expressed intention, even at the beginning of a long and fertile career, which first would take her to very different regions. To use the classic expression of Sarah Orne Jewett, some story about Avignon had begun to tease her a full generation before she took it up in sober earnest.
To understand the powerful symbol for her work which Avignon became, with its overtone of religion and, above all, its particular expression of what to Willa Cather was true beauty, one must slowly follow the thread of her whole career. Patiently wound up, this will lead us through the labyrinth.
At the very beginning there is a major vacillation, which it took her a long while to work through. This came in the difficult Pittsburgh years (1896–1906), which Edith Lewis has judged, and no doubt rightly, to have been for a number of reasons among the hardest in her life. Too little considered had been her first book of short stories—in their original version—The Troll Garden, of 1905, which came exactly at the end of this period, and was its summation. A symmetrical pattern of alternation is so clear that, of the seven stories composing it, the first three odd-numbered are distinctly Jamesian, both in setting and delineation of character, while the three even ones were drawn with considerable courage and skill from her own bare world of the West. The seventh and concluding one, “Paul’s Case,” forms a separate and hybrid Pittsburgh epilogue. One could not ask for a better graphic representation of her differing experiments in the attempt to find her proper field.
The contents of the Jamesian first, third, and fifth stories of this book—“Flavia and Her Artists,” “The Garden Lodge,” and “The Marriage of Phaedra”—show that while she still was teaching high school in Pittsburgh, writing from Judge McClung’s house where she was a guest, she must have imagined it almost obligatory for herself to attempt tales of worldly people of high fashion whom she could not possibly have known at this time, people of established place and assured means, preoccupied almost wholly in a dissection of their own emotions. These were the chic puppets of the hour; but were everywhere taken quite seriously.
In the first story, she writes of a large house party in Tarrytown, high life in an eleborate setting, maids and valets, a conservatory, a smoking-room with Turkish hangings and “curious weapons on the wall.” The action of the second tale unrolls in “a place on the Sound,” with “a glorious garden.” It belongs to a man who when he married the heroine “had been for ten years a power in Wall Street.” There a new summer house seems planned chiefly for another house party. In “The Marriage of Phaedra,” set in London, we find people of title who come and go, casual mentions of Paris and Nice. Willa Cather seems determined to qualify as a sophisticate, although she has as yet come no farther from Red Cloud than Pittsburgh. Still, this was the fashion of the time; and as she devised them, these settings seemed proper even for popular consumption. “Society” in America was still enthroned by popular consent, nourished by general interest. We are in the period before it gave way to the romances of film stars; and its sins were told in every Sunday supplement.
Parenthetically, what is even more of a pure pastiche of Henry James exists. This is a story titled “Eleanor’s House,” published in McClure’s for 1907 (Vol. XXIX), soon after Willa Cather had joined that magazine in New York. Here her protagonists have such complete leisure and are depicted as so removed from the hard facts of life in “their own place on the Oise” that, although one man is actually mentioned as “at work in the library,” it is almost impossible to imagine what occupies him there. Such expatriate wraiths may want to “finish the summer in Switzerland” or even as a final touch be “very keen about going to America”—this from Willa Cather!—yet their behavior is altogether shadowy. Every description of the feel of a place, a stream, or a rampart brings her back to us; almost nothing else in this short story does.
In sharpest planned alternation with the tales, in The Troll Garden, of a life that even in the future never was to become her own, is the stark, tragic trilogy of the stories with a Western background. “A Wagner Matinée,” “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” and “A Death in the Desert” all three represent already the Willa Cather of the Nebraska Divide and the Southwest whom we familiarly know, looking the grim fates boldly in the eye, competently grasping with both hands the tragedies of human destiny. “Paul’s Case,” the last in the book, in which she is so sensitively aware of dim hungers, takes her hero from a Pittsburgh variant of this drab world into that other, into the muffled luxury of the hotels, the perfume of hothouse flowers, the music, of snow-covered, wintry New York. Yet Paul must pay for this so brief pleasure by taking his own life. The alternation of a pair of powerfully beaten and contrasting rhythms with a final coda is perfect.
* *
Quite curiously, at her next stage of development the whole search for a proper field has to be gone through once again—this time in full scale. There is exactly the same contrast, both in setting and subject matter, between the worldly Alexander’s Bridge, of 1912, and the rustic O Pioneers!, of the following year. How Willa Cather judged that these together also made a single unit, and how she had labored in giving them birth, she makes clear in a pregnant little essay of self-revelation contributed as late as 1931 to Colophon Part 6. It was titled “My First Novels (There Were Two).”
Setting, however, as well as scale and depth, has now expanded. Alexander’s Bridge gives
us clear and capable pictures of the Back Bay in Boston, which, through her friendship with Mrs. James T. Fields, of unsurpassable literary memories, she now knew at first hand. Indeed, in it we almost enter Mrs. Fields’s house, at the beginning of the book. There are also London scenes, no longer divined through others’ eyes, but become much less mysterious to her through her work and travel there for McClure’s. O Pioneers!, which is really a story of a Scandinavian farmer’s daughter’s love for Willa Cather’s own wild land, definitely wins the upper hand, of course. Thus her career is finally launched, to rise to glorious heights. Willa Cather was now forty years old; at last free to fulfill her destiny and consume herself in her work, as once she had dreamed.
This is not the place to explore in detail the development of her internal feeling for the Nebraskan or the Virginian scene, the two that by inheritance she could fairly call her own. Here also there was much fluctuation: young fear and repulsion only very gradually transformed by a prolonged metamorphosis into their opposites. Against the materialism of the aftercomers alone, the second generation, that lesser breed after the pioneers, was she to remain adamant in lifelong hostility. Here were enemies she moved to slay whenever she rediscovered them. So we can at this place, without losing the clue, pass beyond The Song of the Lark, of 1915, and My Ántonia, published three years later.
There followed Youth and the Bright Medusa, in 1920, a book of collected short stories, in which she turned for new material to four pieces (three already published in magazines) about artists and their struggles—thus often speaking for herself—while at the same time reissuing the three earlier Western stories, somewhat revised, and also adding “Paul’s Case,” from The Troll Garden. This last book had long been out of print, and was now fifteen years behind her. “The Diamond Mine,” “A Gold Slipper,” and “Scandal” all concern the stage and have American settings; “Coming, Aphrodite,” new—and thus used to begin the book—represents her first days in Greenwich Village. We have in all of them the American scene of their decade, with steamships and motor cars to match; and there are only as many fleeting references to Europe as needed.
The contemporary world is now hers in this neat packet, with all the variants that she felt had permanent interest for her. Jamesian or Whartonian subjects, it is to be noted, in which she had earlier tried to qualify, are now sternly omitted; and one field she never entered: the chronicling of society for itself. Indeed, the only part of the Metropolitan Opera House she will apparently never touch, in spite of her long preoccupation with singers and their lives, is its Diamond Horseshoe.
From this satisfactory time, recapitulation achieved, a further—and for our present purposes most interesting—development begins. She embarks on a war story, One of Ours, which will take both us and herself from the later Nebraska, where the best seems already departed, over to France. On this novel of transition she worked for no less than four years. As for her hero, so for herself it was “The Voyage of the Anchises” (the title of one of its books), which bore her away from a familiar land to another where the adventure of life was to begin afresh, more glorious and with other vicissitudes. One of Ours was also published in what we shall see became a critical year of her life, 1922.
The story of the novel progresses from the shallowness of a mechanized Nebraska, deeply ugly and frustrating to a sensitive and inarticulate boy, pathetic in his stubborn loyalty to ideals that he cannot even define, across the seas to France, where he finds the fullness of his life in wonder, only a little before the war ends it. Here Willa Cather shows rare skill. The evocation of the church of Saint Ouen, in Rouen, for example, the crimson and purple colors of its rose window, its grave and deep-toned bell—we are simply taken there; we see and hear as through the just-awakened senses of diffident—oh, so diffident—youth. And the nearest approach to a true love affair in the book, Claude’s meeting with Mademoiselle de Courcy—who represents so well the fineness of a tradition that even in Europe was to pass—how effectively this comes after the horror and trap of a completely loveless marriage, to a frigid and unseeing neighbor, back in Nebraska! There is a sureness amounting to divination as to what mattered, in the mature European point of view, and what did not. I do not believe that this sensitive juxtaposition of the American West with France, so fleeting and fragile, so quietly evocative of the highest loyalties of each, has yet been noticed for what it is.
The novel ends far away from where it began: with a grave in France for Claude, who “died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be.” Here Willa Cather is also surely speaking for herself.
A few sentences later, at the book’s close, she is impelled to the heights. “Perhaps it was as well to see that vision, and then to see no more.” Suddenly the mood becomes absolutely black: “One by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership, leave prematurely the world they have come back to. Airmen whose deeds were tales of wonder, officers whose names made the blood of youth beat faster, survivors of incredible dangers—one by one they quietly die by their own hand. Some do it in obscure lodging houses, some in their office, where they seem to be carrying on their business like other men. Some slip over a vessel’s side and disappear into the sea.” … “And they found,” she concludes, “they had hoped and believed too much.” The end of the war only clamped tighter upon American life the shackles of materialism which were for her a profanation and a torment. Her world had been so very near to a splendid liberation; and now it could lapse, slip back, into this!
Such feelings, I believe, help to explain a cryptic and critical sentence, as self-revelatory as any she ever wrote—Willa Cather was not given to enlargement of her personal feelings—that we find, fourteen years later (1936), in the Prefatory Note to Not Under Forty, a book of essays published in that year.
Here it is with its preceding context:
The title of this book is meant to be “arresting” only in the literal sense, like the signs put up for motorists: “ROAD UNDER REPAIR” etc. It means that the book will have little interest for people under forty years of age. The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years.…”
The painful disillusion, after what she had hoped would come from the war, had taken the usual eternity (to borrow the phrase she got from Stephen Crane) “to filter through the blood.” Now, fourteen years later, she could submerge her personal disappointment within larger issues; she could take her stand, refusing to be budged from tested excellencies, refusing to yield to what she considered ignoble and inferior. She had been of her place and of her time, she would remain so; and if this meant lack of comprehension by the younger generation—in part, perhaps, matching hers also of them—well, they were warned, and could keep away. There is ferocity and bitterness here; but rather than march in the festal train of the Bitch Goddess of worldly success, she will pay any price, even that of alternating between public scorn and private silence. The world has caged her; but beware of her paws! There is to be no silliness about the matter.
Yet she was not permanently caged. A restless, splendid character such as hers would be bound, in the end, to escape—and did. From now on she begins ranging farther and farther afield. “Away, away in time and space” seems to be her mood. After another book published in 1923, a penultimate glance at the Nebraska of her youth, four great novels succeed one another within the space of a single decade. The book of that year is familiar to many: A Lost Lady, a story of decline and fall, of elegiac reminiscence and of tender regret for vanished frailty. The “Lady” is also lost, one must observe, in the snows of yesteryear.
Then we come to the wayfarer’s high plateau, where it is already afternoon with lengthening shadows, and a constant preoccupation over the meaning of life—and also with death at the end much nearer. The titles themselves are highly evocative. Here is the succession:
The Professor’s House (192
5)
My Mortal Enemy (1926)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Shadows on the Rock (1931)
Note the allegory and symbolism in their wording. The Professor’s true house, as his story makes abundantly clear, is his own grave; this is his long home. The enmity of Myra Henshawe for her husband, in the next novel, is maintained, indeed grows and battens, under miserably straitened and constricting circumstances that finally allow her only the manner of choosing her death. Then great Death itself—like a Holbein series, the grim procession continues—comes for the Archbishop in his cell near the desert; while in another austere region, rock-bound Quebec, we can watch shadows fall on further lives. There is no escape from pessimism, or at least from the firmest grasp on the realities of time and human destiny. As in the legend, in this last book, of the Canadian heiress who longed to become a recluse and then—ardors over —lapsed into terrible and prolonged aridity, every device that can be used presses the one inescapable conclusion: we are mortal, we must die.
The Professor’s House, of 1925, as E. K. Brown has pointed out, is an allegory contrived with extraordinary skill, especially the mechanism of inserting a long nouvelle into the center of it, to give an effect of distant clarity and lyric beauty, of sunlit aerial color, seen beyond a dull, conventional foreground. Dead Tom Outland looms, sweet in the purity of young strength, towering beyond the pettiness of the life of a small academic community, where vulgar Louie Marsellus and his shallow wife revel in his succession. The Professor himself passes in the course of the story from later middle age, success achieved but becoming meaningless, into the much colder and passive region of his last years; and Willa Cather has fashioned him of exactly the same age as herself.
Nowhere is she cleverer than in the symbolism of the various houses that are so important to this story. There is the Professor’s old house, where we see him first, the one he is so reluctant to leave, from the very beginning casting a lingering look behind—jerry-built and uncomfortable, but a place where there had been deep and joyful living. There is the new house that can never have true life infused into it; he has even lost his love for the woman who will be its mistress. We are given glimpses also of the elaborate monstrosity of the Marsellus ménage, tricked out with money inherited from the dead Tom Outland, and even named—a profanation—with his last name, used as a wretched pun. Tom’s own group of cliff dwellers’ houses, the houses that he has discovered, simple and intrinsically beautiful, thus makes the clearest contrast between spurious values and those high and ancient ones that can outlast calamity. Finally the Professor’s house-to-be, his grave, completes the grim symbolism.