Are we products of nature or of the way we are nurtured? Do our genes dictate who we will be, or is our environment responsible for that? Are we governed by our own free will, or does destiny mandate what will become of us? These are some of the many questions that plague humanity, the questions that give philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and writers material with which to work. Willa Cather, in her short story "Paul's Case," brings forth these questions with admirable skill but offers no clear resolution, as can be seen by the two primary types of interpretation her critics have given to the story.

According to Loretta Wasserman, in her book Willa Cather, the interpretations of "Paul's Case'' are divided according to how each individual critic answers the questions. Many see it as a story of a "sensitive, artistically inclined youth crushed by a withering environment, the dreary rigidities of Pittsburgh Presbyterianism and the physical ugliness of Paul's home." Others see it as as tudy of maladjustment or a pathological state.

It is worthwhile to note here that the time in which Cather lived greatly influenced her writing and her views of life. Born in the middle of the second Industrial Revolution, Cather grew up during a time when new scientific knowledge of physics and chemistry helped build gigantic new industries. The steel industry, in particular, centered in Pittsburgh, used Henry Bessemer's new open-hearth process to create stronger, less expensive steel. His process helped to vastly increase production and profits, which necessitated larger factories, more workers and more machinery. In 1899, Andrew Carnegie created the massive Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh by consolidating many of the local steel works. Only two years later, his company was worth half a billion dollars. However, Carnegie was also involved in the cultural side of life and contributed much money to the arts. He, like Cather, saw that the rapid progress of technology could potentially drown out the more aesthetic side of people, a problem he wished to avoid.

Cather dealt with this technological and aesthetic issue in "Paul's Case," which first appeared in her collection of stories called The Troll Garden in 1905. The story is set in Pittsburgh, and the glamorous lives of "iron kings" like Carnegie become a focal point for Paul's aspirations. According to Gather's obituary in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, it was based on the actual suicide of a high-school student in the Pittsburgh area where she lived. The name for the collection was borrowed from a text of Charles Kingsley, who wrote in his book The Roman and the Teuton that invading barbarians looked at Rome as "a fairy palace, with a fairy garden" inside which trolls dwelled. The stories in the collection deal with encounters in the art world and according to one critic are "implicitly equated with the compelling but treacherous troll garden." Marilyn Arnold, a professor of English at Brigham Young University, helps explain the relation of the troll garden to "Paul's Case." She writes in an essay in Harold Bloom's anthology

Willa Cather

:

Paul is obviously the hungry forest child who is utterly helpless before the luscious appeal of the garden, represented for him in the trappings of wealth and in his adolescent perception of the artist's world For Paul there is no reasoned choice, no weighing of alternatives and consequences, no will to resist, for him there is only ugliness and the garden, and he must have the garden

Gather later reprinted a revised version of the story in 1920 in another collection called Youth and the Bright Medusa. Again Cather focuses on a vision of youth, but to Cather, given the title of this collection, the vision must have been a horrifying one. Medusa, of Greek mythology, is one of three Gorgons, monsters with golden wings, brass claws, and hair of live snakes who turned to stone those who looked at them. One can assume, then, since Cather created the collections herself, that in her mind, "Paul's Case" dealt with the fairy garden and its treacheries as well as the aspirations of a young man involved in the world of the arts.

In the first part of the story, we meet Paul through the perceptions of his teachers, his behaviors at school, his position as an usher at Carnegie Hall, and his friendship with members of a stock theater company. We learn that at school Paul is perceived as "contemptuous and irritating" and insolent. However, his drawing teacher sees that "there is something wrong" and "sort of haunted" about Paul. His mannerisms at school, from his avoidance of being touched to his "dandy" dressing and his "scandalous red carnation,'' paint for us a picture of a boy who does not quite fit in to the mold that is expected. In the music hall, again we see that he is not quite the same as the others. He "teased and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on him." Even with Charley Edwards, Paul's young actor acquaintance, we see that Paul does not fit a mold. Charley allows Paul entrance to the theater in part because he recognizes a "vocation'' in him, but also because he cannot afford his own dresser. So here, Paul is perceived as having the theater in his blood, but also as having some use to those who have already toiled to make real what is in their blood.

Cather gives Paul no redeeming quality in these first pages. We see his willingness to tell lies at school and to his father. We see his disdain for his neighborhood and his neighbors; we know he feels that all but him and those in his "garden'' world are "stupid and ugly." Yet, with all this, we still find ourselves drawn to Paul. We understand his fervent desire to be part of the "fairy world of a Christmas pantomime" where he "felt a sudden zest of life." We understand that he does not want to feel "destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it." In fact, we feel compassion when he spends the night in the basement. We can empathize with his fear of rats and understand his desperate loneliness when he wonders whether his father could view Paul as a burglar so as to kill him.

Cather draws us into Paul's fantasy world. When he sits on the "lowest step of his stoop" he listens to another young man speak with his father. They are talking of the young man's boss, apparently one of the "iron kings." The talk of "palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy," We share in the excitement Paul feels as the orchestra tunes up and his feeling of its "being impossible to give up this delicious excitement."

Cather contrasts Paul's two views of his world. He is drawn to "the exotic, tropical world of shiny glistening surfaces" and will, as he later demonstrates, do anything to avoid "the flavorless, colorless mass of everyday existence." Although the narrator explains that Paul lives on "highly respectable" Cordelia street, we are also given Paul's own view of his home. He has a "cold bathroom with [a] grimy zinc tub" and over his bed hang "the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto, 'Feed my Lambs,' which had been worked...by his mother." Critic David Carpenter suggests that Cather puts these pictures on Paul's wall to emphasize that "the uncreative, superficial and life-destroying values perpetuated in the homes of Pittsburgh are essentially American values." When we look at this view, we might then begin to assume that Cather is siding with the environmental influences on our lives. Wasserman also explains how the embroidered hanging done by Paul's mother "symbolizes his poignant longing for love" that is as absent in his life as his mother is.

There is also a resemblance to Gather's own life in the story that makes the reader aware that such an assumption may have some validity. Edward Brown and Leon Edel write in Willa Cather: A Critical Biography that "the dichotomy of Pittsburgh" provided what was to Cather "the breath of life": "out of its ugliness and slums, its industrial smoke and flame sprang the beautiful things." They continue to explain that Cather became enamored of the Pittsburgh stock company, where she forged a lasting relationship with one of the actresses in ways quite like Paul's and Charley's. They further illuminate the similarities when they say Cather painted the neighborhood where Paul lives with the "petty-bourgeois dreariness that Willa Cather had resented during her years of boarding-house living.'' Professor Dorothy Van Ghent, in an essay included in Bloom's anthology, adds further credence to the assumption that Cather may side with the concept of environmental influence. She writes that Paul is a "young, artistically or merely sensitively gifted person ... whose inchoate aspiration is offered no imago by the environment, and no direction in which to develop except a blindly accidental one."

However, David A. Carpenter points out in his American Literature essay that Cather made great use of irony in the story, and unless a reader is watchful for the irony, the easily drawn assumptions could be erroneous. In literature irony often comes in the form of sarcasm. For instance, in a passage describing Paul's romantic response to the theater, the narrator remarks that "the moment the cracked orchestra beat out the overture... or jerked at the serenade...all stupid and ugly things slid away from him." Dramatic irony, also evident in "Paul's Case," comes from a character saying something that will have a hidden meaning to the readers, a meaning he himself does not realize. Carpenter uses the scene where Paul sits alone in the Waldorf's dining room to explain this. Paul looks around at the splendor of the room and wonders, "Had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering textures. He rather thought he had." Clearly, the readers know that Paul has not always lived in the Waldorf. Yet Paul is so entranced in his fairy world that he believes it is where he has always been, and that is why he feels so at peace with himself, because he need tell no more lies. What is very ironic here is that Paul is now living a lie, not just telling one.

However, even as Carpenter vacillates between whether Cather is espousing environment or heredity as deciding factors, Arnold comes down clearly on the side of psychological defect and heredity when she writes:

Cather portrays in Paul a being who is alienated by more than environment and lack of human contact and understanding... [other Cather characters] could all have been saved by altered environmental circumstances and human caring, but not Paul. He thinks an environmental change is all he needs, but he is wrong.

She further states that Cather "makes it clear that not only is Paul not an artist, but his perception of the artist's life and the artist's glittering world is miles from the truth." In the words of the actors, his is "a bad case."

We need to remember, though, that Paul is an adolescent. Wanting a life different from the one we are born into is a large part of adolescent longing. Denying the obvious, such as that it is necessary to work to achieve one's dreams, is a denial we have all made at one time. Believing that all we need to become the real person we are is a change in environment is also a feeling many of us have encountered. So, then, perhaps "Paul's Case'' really is a case study—one in which a confused and troubled young man with genes that require excitement actually benefits from a change in environment.

Source: Jennifer Hicks, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

"Paul's Case" is Willa Cather's most popular story—deservedly so, although one of the reasons for its preeminence is that for many years it was the only one Cather would allow reprinted. It remains still the first choice of anthologists, as a glance at any half dozen current collections will show, and it has been dramatized in a popular public television series. Until recently, however, "Paul's Case" received little critical notice. One reason, doubtless, is that Paul's story seems admirably clear-cut: a sensitive adolescent, attracted to music and the theater, is pushed by a callous, commercial society into a desperate theft. Facing discovery, he takes his own life by falling under the wheels of a locomotive, symbol of the iron industrialism and grinding materialism of the age. Certainly that is how students respond to the story, attracted, naturally, by any picture of misunderstood youth and no doubt inclined to sympathize, too, with Paul's aversion to lady high-school teachers, with their shrill voices and "pitiful seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative" (Troll Garden).

No doubt a second reason is that "Paul's Case'' resists being assimilated to Cather's other work. It seems to lack her stamp. In place of vast prairie horizons or silent cliff dwellings we have a "smoke palled city" turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh and a boy who markedly lacks the vibrancy we expect in Cather's central figures. Paul's specialness is a kind of inarticulate stubbornness: his teachers think of him as a cornered alley cat. Further, as this example suggests, the sweep of imagery and allusion that marks Cather's style elsewhere is missing here—the narrative voice feels cribbed and confined like her hero's actions and purposes. In fact, these actions and purposes are the real trouble. Could the Cather who wrote so frequently against materialism regard with sympathy one who spends stolen money on a week of high living in a New York hotel and who, confronting death, reflects that he knew now "more than ever, that money was everything"? The answer from the critics is no; in fact, the gathering consensus is that her story is bathed in irony.

Serious criticism began by confronting a task that has proved troublesome—fitting the story into the collection where it first appeared, seven stories having to do with art and artists that Cather titled The Troll Garden, her first book of fiction, published in 1905. The title and epigraphs suggest certain dangers in art, the work of not-quite-human trolls, fascinating to "forest children" peeking into their garden (the epigraph is from Charles Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton). Cather made these dangers more puzzling and ominous by a second epigraph, from Christina Rossetti's "The Goblin Market": "We must not look at Goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits...." Considerable critical acumen has been expended on this suggested framework. E. K. Brown, Cather's first biographer, asserts rather lamely that "Paul's Case," the last of the seven, makes a "fitting coda." James Woodress, in his Introduction to his definitive edition of The Troll Garden, and in his biography, speaks elliptically of a "forest child destroyed by ... the forbidden fruit," the assumption being, it would seem, that Paul transgresses a moral boundary and that theater and concert hall themselves exude a malevolency.

Other commentators are more explicit or venturesome. Susan Rosowski, in her study of Cather's romanticism, stresses the tempting dangers posed by the troll/goblin artists and the horror of the "bewitched" boy who has "lost his soul" to an "inhuman" fantasy. Marilyn Arnold finds Paul indeed a case, a psychological one, "eccentric, maybe even half-crazy," mistaken even about grimy Cordelia Street where Paul, motherless since birth, lives with his father and two shadowy sisters. Where Paul sees grey ugliness, Arnold sees a respectable neighborhood of white-collar workers, full of children and plans for the future. Paul is equally blind about the world of art, mistaking glitter for real worth. Not unexpectedly, Sharon O'Brien, in her psychobiography, also stresses psychology—Paul's "probable homosexuality" may be a thin disguise for Cather's. Cather/Paul yearns for a dissolution of self, apreoedipal union with the mother—a floating on flowers and music (the New York scenes) ending in the final dissolution of self in death. David Carpenter, in contrast, finds Paul's story a sociological case study of "an extremely bleak and seemingly irremediable type of determinism." Paul is a victim of his society, Pittsburgh Presbyterianism, symbolized by the twin pictures of George Washington and John Calvin over his bed, icons transmuted by business and industry into signifying the "uncreative, superficial and life-destroying values" that dominate American life. Paul is a debased version of these values: the New York scenes are heavily ironic, Carpenter maintains, especially Paul's sense of well-being as he luxuriates in the Waldorf. Nevertheless, Paul remains blameable because he "has consumed himself morally and ethically by living a lie—one purchased through someone else's hard work." We are back with the "half-crazy" boy who "sold his soul,'' however different the etiology of his pathological condition. In sum, these recent studies all point in the same direction: toward a weak-willed, morally corrupt, or corrupted youth inevitably enmeshed and destroyed by his own illusions.

That these varying analyses of Paul as a case study in psychology or sociology are plausible is proof that Cather has here succeeded in balancing the competing claims of the old arguments between the opposing determinisms of nature and nurture. Part of the fascination of Paul's story must inhere in just this tension. But is this what Cather is telling us about Paul—that he is the sum of forces impinging on him? I think not, and I think we are alerted to a less positivistic perspective through the comments of Paul's teachers, who, after the disciplinary hearing aimed at correcting his vaguely impertinent attitude, feel so baffled: "his drawing master voiced the feeling of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which none of them understood"; "each of his instructors felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of the trouble."

One aspect of the story may be agreed upon: it is certainly true, as all the recent commentators stress, that Paul is not a budding artist whose gifts are being wasted. His fascination with art, music, and theater is of a different order. He uses art as a means; the sounds of the orchestra or painted landscapes are avenues. When Paul rushes off from the high-school faculty meeting to his ushering job at Carnegie Hall, he first visits its art gallery where "he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself.'' Later, after helping patrons to their seats, he falls into a similar dreamy state as the symphony begins: "he lost himself as he had before the Rico." Cather is explicit that his love of the theater is not based on hidden talent or ambition: "He had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician." Nevertheless, Charley Edwards, the stock company juvenile, regrets it when Paul's father forbids Paul to loiter about the dressing rooms because the actor "recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term 'vocation'." What is meant by this strange term for Paul's obsession? And how likely is it that this easy-going stock company actor would employ it? It must be that the author is here signaling to her readers over the head of her character. Blanche Gelfant, writing on Cather's poetics, notes her technique of "self-reflexivity," of including hints about how to read her story in the story itself. Casting Paul as one who has heard a summons to spiritual duty must be such a signal. Paul is serving a master who calls—a master who calls him to life: in clinging to music, art, and theater, Paul is keeping alive intimations of "a world elsewhere," a world where he would not be an alien. He is fighting for his life—for the life of his soul. (Cather once wrote in the Nebraska State Journal: "'Soul'—it's too bad that we have no word but that to express man's innermost ego.") The life and death nature of his struggle is stressed again and again. When he ushers, he becomes "vivacious and animated," and color comes into his usually pale face, the face that one of his teachers found "drawn and wrinkled like an old man's." The first sound of the orchestra "seemed to free some hilarious spirit within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life." His feeling at the concert hall "was all that could be called living at all." "It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting." Conversely, he thinks of Cordelia Street, where his father in his night clothes stands at the head of the stairs demanding explanations, as threatening death, imaged as suffocation by drowning. ("The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head.") When, in New York, he learns that his father has refunded the stolen money and has come to bring him home, he thinks, "the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever." He can confront suicide with equanimity because, it now seems, "all the world had become Cordelia Street."

Further, Paul's crime, the theft, is treated as an act of self-preservation. When Paul's father placed him as a cash boy in a commercial house and forbade the theater and concert hall, "the whole thing was virtually determined." Paul takes the money instinctively, as a salmon swims upstream. He recalls it merely as "simple" and "astonishingly easy." In fact, he has a sense of relief at his "courage" which, before the theft, he had doubted....

From glitter and stage effects, then, Paul builds a dream world that comforts and sustains. Music and art are merely a means of entrance, a "portal of Romance." Again Cather hints at religious dedication: "Paul had his secret temple... his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore." To convey the peculiarly hermetic quality of Paul's "dome in air,'' Cather alludes through an extended simile to a strange, even lurid, legend that shimmers forth strangely from the usual flat narrative voice: Paul's vision, we are told, "was very like the old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there, with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly apparelled women who never saw the disenchanting light of London day." This odd bit of social rumor is vaguely subversive. It hints at Paul's sense of alienation from his world, at his need for refuge, at the security money can buy, at religious apostasy, or paganism: a temple for the senses. Also—an ironic point, which lifts the story above the sentimental— it hints at Paul's limited imagination: this "pleasure dome" seems modeled after the lobby of a first-class hotel—perhaps the Pittsburgh Schenley.

The badge of Paul's fidelity to his dream, his talisman, is the red carnation he wears in the buttonhole of his shabby coat as he confronts his teachers, which they (correctly) interpret as a sign of his unrepentant attitude ("flippantly red"; "the scandalous red carnation.") Cut flowers become a motif: Paul notes that the "prosy" male teachers he despises never wear violets in their button-holes. Arriving in his suite at the Waldorf he orders violets and jonquils. Driving down wintry Fifth Avenue he notes the flower stands, "whole flower gardens blooming under glass cases, against the sides of which the snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley." Hot-house flowers, being both artificial (raised by human contrivance under unnatural conditions) and yet also natural (they are real flowers) appropriately symbolize the limits of Paul's imagination and his plight. They are expensive. Badges of color in a colorless, gray world, they nurture the inarticulate boy's dim sense of a beauty connected to substance and reality but not available to him. He buys carnations again on his last journey to the snowy hill above the railroad tracks....

With judgment closing in, and death his only out, Paul still has no regrets, and his final thoughts are put in the only terms his circumscribed life has made available. The truth he knows now, "more than ever,'' is that "money was everything, the wall between all he loathed and all he wanted." In a theatrical, indeed ritualistic, gesture he buries one of his carnations in the snow before launching himself before the train. As he dies, Paul sees the "folly of his haste ... with merciless clarity": but the "folly" is not his crime, nor his suicide, nor his false moral sense; rather it is his failure to escape further, to more distant lands, to "the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.'' In part Cather is here taking a sly pleasure in balking the sentimental moralists of her day who expect deathbed guilt and remorse. (In this she resembles her admired Mark Twain.) More to the point is Paul's vision of the temple of beauty that blesses his final moments. Surely this is the "epiphanous moment" of the story, confirming his vision as authentic and his fidelity to it justified. The closing line tells us that a compassionate universe receives him: "Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed.... Paul dropped back into the immense design of things." It is a moment of wonder and absolution.

But the immediate appeal of "Paul's Case" does not lie in its relation to the author's personal history or in its relation to other Troll Garden stories. It lies, I contend, in our fascination with Paul's transformation of himself, however short-lived, and his discovery, so ultimately wrong, and yet so plausible, so right, "that money was everything." Here is the true accomplishment of the story, the conversion of romantic longing into a devotion to the medium of exchange (of change) itself—currency, the coin of this democratic realm, the glass slipper that can change a sow's ear into a silk purse. It is a very American dream, the romance of money. It was to be given greater and more developed expression a few years after Paul's story in the transformation of James Gatz into Jay Gatsby, who also sought to invent a new self, to find new parents, to create an identity by means of drawers of shirts and opulent surroundings. In fact, there may be a direct line between Paul and Gatsby. In a 1925 letter to Cather, apologizing for what might be seen as plagiarism in the likeness of Daisy Buchanan and Cather's Marian Forrester, Fitzgerald declares himself "one of your greatest admirers'' and singles out 'Paul's Case," along with her novels, as a favorite.

Although the beauty Paul served was, like Gatsby's, "vast, vulgar and meretricious," and, like Gatsby, he served it criminally, he served it unswervingly. In her note about the Parsifal theme, Cather refers to the Blameless Fool: a nice epitaph for Paul.

Source: Loretta Wasserman,"Is Cather's Paul a Case?,'' in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol 36, No. 1, Spring, 1990 pp. 121-29.

The elements of an individual prose style are elusive of definition. Although we can sometimes describe a writer's characteristic diction, imagery, and idiomatic preferences, most of our comments will be impressionistic and tentative rather than statistically precise. No writer is perpetually true to type, and fine prose, like every other creative manifestation, is often unpredictable in both its methods and effects. Nevertheless, in a well-established literature the rhetorical mannerisms of certain authors are usually distinguishable after long acquaintance. Habits of syntax and predilections in prosody, along with the stylistic resonances they produce, can be as distinctive as a signature in the world of letters.

One minor but useful prosodic device is prose rhythm and cadence. Although sometimes dismissed by plainstyle devotees as a superficial ornament, prose rhythm provides delightful embellishment to a well-constructed sentence by giving it a flow comparable to the measures of verse. These cadences need not follow a fixed pattern; the writer who strives for an auditory effect in prose simply highlights the natural rhythms of his native tongue through the artifice of arrangement and word choice. Certain combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables produce a pleasing, jarring, or otherwise noticeable effect in a sentence, and one which can reinforce the tone of a statement or smooth the flow of a narration....

Most writers who use prose rhythm in English do so in an instinctive rather than a calculated manner. In the case of Willa Cather, however, there are strong indications that her cadences were based on careful training in classical prosody. We know that she received a respectable if not extensive classical education, first from the Englishman William Ducker, who tutored her in Latin and Greek when she was a schoolgirl, and later at preparatory school and the University of Nebraska, where she studied the major ancient authors. As an undergraduate she published creditable translations of Anacreon and Horace in her campus literary magazine. Further, when Cather left home to start out on her career, one of the first positions she held was that of Latin teacher in a Pittsburgh high school. Such a background, certainly more common in Cather's time than it is today, ought to alert us to the possibility of classical influences on her style. And indeed when we look at her prose, we find evidence not just of a professional writer's attention to graceful word arrangement, but also of cadences that are deliberately reminiscent of stately Ciceronian periods....

"Paul's Case" has been widely anthologized, and the story is probably familiar to most teachers of American short fiction. A young Pittsburgh student named Paul, progressively sickened by the numbing routine of his bourgeois family and dreary school-work, absconds with a thousand dollars to New York City. There he lives for a week, satisfying all the hunger for luxurious indulgence that had gone unfed in his respectably ordinary existence. At the end of the week, with no money left and his father in town to find him and reclaim him, he chooses to commit suicide rather than return to the leaden monotony of his former life. The story makes extensive use of sensory allusion; colors, odors, textures, tastes, and sounds are lovingly, even morbidly dwelt upon. Paul's drab life in Pittsburgh and his stolen pleasures in New York, the homespun provincial homilies of his town and the frank urbane hedonism of the city, are vividly and effectively counterpoised. Cather's normally solicitous search for le mot juste is intensified in the hothouse of sensuous imagery that the development of her theme demands. The story is deliberately tinged with a fascination for the sort of artificiality associated with Nineties Decadents, towards whom the mild irony of the story is probably directed in part.

A good example of deliberate cadence can be found m the last words of a paragraph describing Paul's return to his home on Cordelia Street after a night at the Pittsburgh opera:

The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head After each of these orgies of living he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.

The double dactyl of flavorless, colorless, with its heavy restraint, leads into a cretic and spondee clausula with a resolved variant:

mass of everyday existence.

This particular clausula pattern will be familiar to readers of Cicero. They will recall that Cather's everyday existence is metrically equivalent to esse videatur, as illustrated in the First Catilinarian 14.5. Now it is possible, of course, that this collocation of stresses in Cather is merely coincidental, but I am not inclined to think so. First of all, this same cretic and spondee pattern is repeated several other times in the story, and second, the pattern always occurs in end position. It would take the credulity of an invincible skepticism to believe that these cadences are purely fortuitous.

In any case, to return to the text, consider how Cather finishes her paragraph after the words "flavorless, colorless mass of everyday existence.'' The undertow of retarding stresses in these words emphasizes the barren constraint of Paul's life, the prose mirroring, as it were, the chafing repression that holds the boy's libido in check. But Cather completes her sentence with these words:

a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.

Here, the pent-up energy of the word desire, in itself metrically ambiguous, bursts the double dactyl opening of the phrase with a triple spondee. If the passage is read aloud, the effect is unmistakable; the rhythm compels the listener to believe in the power of Paul's desire to break out of his prison.

Another example of the cretic and spondee clausula can be found in a passage that describes Paul's reaction to the ambiance of the theater:

The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired

The ultimate proof that Willa Cather was a deliberate creator of prose rhythm lies in a seemingly minor detail of syllabication that a careless reader might easily overlook. One rule of classical poetry is that a terminal and an initial vowel placed next to each other are to be blended into a single quantity. When Vergil writes (Aen. 4.54)

his dictis impenso animum flammavit amore

the words impenso animum, although they contain six syllables, constitute only five metric positions, for the o and the a are blurred in pronunciation into one sound. Such blurring (which also takes place if the second word is aspirated) is called elision. If for some reason elision does not occur when it normally should, there is an awkward gap or hiatus between the two vowels, and this contingency is almost always avoided in classical metrics. Willa Cather's conscious use of cadence is evident from her careful avoidance of hiatus in end positions. The following paragraph demonstrates how solicitous she could be for perfection in such matters:

There were a score of cabs about the entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait Boys in livery were running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above, about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.

The rhythm of the last words (glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth) is based on three resolved cretics and a final isolated stress on the word wealth. This final stress clinches the key significance of money in the world that Paul has just entered, and the triple cretics hammer the idea into the reader's consciousness. But the rhythm does not work unless the e and the o of the omnipotence are elided. Cather uses a similar elision in another sentence:

He had only to glance down at his attire to reassure
himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to
humiliate him

.

I anticipate the objection that one can hardly picture Willa Cather or any other great writer slavishly counting syllables and stresses in the heat of literary creation. Even if I were sure of the validity of that objection—which I am not—it would only serve to support my earlier contention that prose rhythm is judged solely by aural criteria; the cadence is there because we hear it, as the artist instinctively heard it in the toil of composition. It is not necessary to assume that every good author knows the minutiae of cadence, but what is certain is that fine prose has definite, stable rhythms to which its most masterly practitioners are drawn again and again, as to recurrent patterns of harmony. As one commentator has said, "This kind of artful prose is not so much the product of conscious effort as the overflow of a sensibility thoroughly saturated in a tradition, to the extent that the esthetic unity of form and content has become second nature."

Willa Cather was certainly gifted with such a Sensibility, but I am also persuaded that she attempted to carry into her writing the graceful elegance embodied in the periodic and cadenced structure of Ciceronian Latin. The evidence of "Paul's Case" convinces me that she strove not just for excellent prose, but for a prose that registered, acoustically, the very heartbeat of her esthetic impulse. Cather once wrote that "[A great story] must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality that one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden.' There is no better description of the achievement of "Paul's Case" than these words, which remind us that language, even when silently read, evokes the memory of sound, and the resonance of imagined music.

Once we appreciate the subliminal acoustic capacities of written English as they are revealed in prose rhythm and cadence, we are liberated from the false notion—propagated by too many composition teachers—that prose is simply one more means of communication among a dozen others for getting across some abstractable message. This is a ubiquitous but degraded view of language that is in no small part responsible for the current decline in prose standards. For a master stylist such as Cather, fine prose is the complex product of many intellectual, esthetic, and emotional ingredients, all of them conspiring, as it were, to create a multifaceted mode of expression. The powerful effect of "Paul's Case" depends heavily on the hand-in-glove cooperation of sound and sense, on the conscious artistic complicity of diction, rhetoric, syntax, and rhythm. It is precisely this ideal unity of all the available resources of language that the artistry of Willa Cather aspires to attain.

Source: Joseph S. Salenu, "The Measure of the Music-Prose Rhythm in Willa Cather's 'Paul's Case'," in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol 10, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 319-26.