SOURCE: Thurin, Erik Ingvar. The Humanization of Willa Cather: Classicism in an American Classic, pp. 94–158, 320–30, 355–63. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Thurin presents an overview of Cather's debt to classical Greek and Latin literature in her short stories.]

FROM BOLDNESS TO CONFORMITY

The narrative technique that was to allow Cather to express herself both fully and adequately was not developed in a day. The stories to be discussed … all belong to a long exploratory apprenticeship which Cather served as a writer of fiction, roughly the period ending with the publication of her first novel.¹ A number of them were written during the time she was working as a journalist and composing her first poems; others are contemporary with the poems specifically written for the 1903 April Twilights, or those which she wrote or drafted during the immediately following years, before abandoning poetry. … [T]here is no particular reason to think that she knew from the beginning that fiction, and specifically the novel, would be her final choice of genre. Very few of her early stories were included in the library edition of her work, and in retrospect, she affected the same scorn for them as for the journalism and the poetry. She would almost certainly have disapproved of—indeed blocked—publishing ventures like Willa Cather's Early Short Fiction 1892-1912.²

The reason for Cather's suppression of so many of her early stories may not invariably have been that she considered them of inferior quality; several of them are better than some of the stories published in Youth and the Bright Medusa. When many of the forgotten tales became accessible again after the author's death, Curtis Bradford noted that she may have wanted to manipulate things in such a way as to make herself look like “primarily an affirmer of America's pioneer past and a critic of the later America which replaced it.”³ There are indications that she did want to project that image.⁴ One is also willing to agree with Bradford when he says that the picture Cather cared to give of herself is “rather less interesting than the actuality.”

The actuality gets even more interesting if one grants that a desire to suppress autobiographical clues may have played a role in this context. “The mature writer,” says Sharon O'Brien apropos of the suppressed early fiction, “could see how much it revealed.”⁵ There is certainly a “confessional” element in many of the early stories, and it is particularly noteworthy in the uncollected ones.

Cather's personal problems are, however, aired less frequently in the earliest stories, with which we are primarily concerned in this chapter; and there is some evidence that she was uneasily aware of the need for suppression even at that stage. If O'Brien is not entirely mistaken, her dilemma may, in fact, be encoded in “The Tale of the White Pyramid,” published in The Hesperian in December, 1892.⁶

This story is written in biblical language; and, strictly speaking, it is set in the Egypt of the early pyramid-building pharaohs, not in “the Egypt Cather found in Shakespeare, Daudet, and Gautier,” as suggested by O'Brien. Nor is Cather likely to have associated the Egyptian environment with “Daudet's One of Cleopatra's Nights,” this work being by Gautier. But no matter: One is willing to believe that historical accuracy meant little to her in this case and that her association of “sensual indulgence and unbridled hedonism” with the Hellenistic Egypt of Cleopatra plays an important part in the argument of “The Tale of the White Pyramid.” O'Brien's own argument must on the whole be called brilliant.

“The Tale of the White Pyramid” is set in Memphis and told in the first person by a priest using his predecessor as authority for some of the things reported. The pharaoh, Kufu, is burying the previous ruler of the land in a white pyramid. A problem arises as the workmen proceed to seal the top of the structure with a huge polished stone; it falls into place only thanks to the bold and quasi-miraculous intervention of “a youth of the Shepherd people of the north” (530). Kufu then acknowledges the deed in extravagant terms and announces that the young man will build the great pyramid he is projecting for himself. The final paragraph reads: “Of the great pyramid and of the mystery thereof, and of the strange builder, and of the sin of the king, I may not speak, for my lips are sealed.” As O'Brien says, the stress on the extraordinary personal beauty of the young man in connection with the references to mystery and sin suggests that his relationship with the king is a case of “Greek” love. Moreover, the analogy, so strongly hinted, between the difficult sealing of pyramids and the sealed lips of the fictional narrator can be taken as an allusion to the situation of the actual author, forced to bury her own secret within herself.

This is manifestly the situation of Cather as she began writing short fiction while an undergraduate student of the classics at the University of Nebraska. The subtle symbolism of “The Tale of the White Pyramid” is something of a miracle and not at all representative of the state of her art at the time. Generally speaking, she had not yet developed the poetic prose style in which classical allusions play so important a role. Without a suitable instrument it is hard to strike a balance between the conflicting needs for expression and suppression. The hazards of trying are suggested by another exceptional story, virtually contemporary with “The Tale of the White Pyramid,” in which her lips are not entirely sealed.⁷

This story also contains a classical element, although called “A Son of the Celestial” and involving China, a country about which Cather knew about as much as she knew about pharaonic Egypt. The scene is San Francisco, and there are two characters, an old American Sanskrit scholar called Ponter and Yung, an old Chinese Sanskrit scholar. Ostensibly—judging by the prefixed poem—the story is about the latter's desire to be buried in the land of his fathers, but the real subject is the relationship of the two men. Ponter does not really like China or the Chinese, and Yung tends to find American scholars distastefully ignorant; yet the two are united in a mystic (celestial?) friendship not unlike the one described in “Two Friends” (1932). It appears to be based on conversation, silence, and opium-smoking—the two have formed the habit of going to a place called “The Seven Portals of Paradise” and lying down on adjacent mats to suck pipes with “bowls of jade and mouthpieces of amber” (525). The pipes have been carved by Yung, who is also a remarkable artist—he is compared to Michelangelo. Ponter insists on reading all of Hamlet to him, translating it into “doggerel Chinese”; and while Yung says he does not understand the work, it is clear that he understands a good deal (526). Ponter also thinks his friend knows “more ethics than Plato” (527). He tends to complain of Yung's coldness but remains unflagging in his devotion to his queer friend. When Yung dies, the American gets his body ready for shipment to China, singing as he puts the last nails in the coffin: “Ibimus, Ibimus, Utcumque praecedes, supernum, Carpere iter comites parati.”

This climactic Latin sentence, quoted somewhat erratically, is from the emotionally charged poem in which Horace answers his friend Maecenas, who has expressed a fear that the poet might die before him and thus leave him bereaved.⁸ Cather's interest in Hamlet's friendship with Horatio has already been touched upon. The references to Michelangelo and Plato speak for themselves. In spite of the veil of irony, one must conclude that the story reflects her fascination with male friendship, which again is likely to be a transposition of her own yearning for female friendship.⁹

One will, however, look in vain for other signs of this yearning in the stories Cather wrote before she left Nebraska in 1896. On the whole, she steers clear not only of that theme but of other overly personal subjects as well. Reminders of her interest in the classics are also sparse. Of the eight stories written and published during this period, only two contain classical references. There is nothing of the kind in those haunting, unflattering stories about early Nebraska: “Peter”; “Lou, the Prophet”; “The Clemency of the Court”; and “The Divide.”¹⁰ Nor is there any trace of her classical studies in her first Virginia tale, “A Night at Greenway Court.” The only other story from this time that does contain some classical matter is a curious political skit called “The Fear That Walks by Noonday.”¹¹

The paucity of classical elements in the earliest group of Cather stories is all the more remarkable in view of the intense use of such elements in her journalism during the years 1892-1896, not only in self-revealing passages … but in virtually any context. One might almost think she felt at the time that classical references were too rhetorical and “high-stepping” for fiction. If so, she began to change her mind after arriving in Pittsburgh. Although some of the stories from the years she spent doing journalistic work in that city still lack references of this kind (“The Strategy of the Were-Wolf Dog,” “The Westbound Train,” “Nanette: an Aside”), there are even more that do contain a classical element: “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” “The Prodigies,” “The Way of the World,” “Count of Crow's Nest,” and “A Resurrection.” These five stories—all published in The Home Monthly—do not, however, suggest a strong desire to reveal and yet conceal some painful personal secret of the kind noticeable in “The White Pyramid” and “A Son of the Celestial.”

The three first-mentioned pieces do air a theme familiar from the early articles and reviews: that of the imperatrix. “Tommy, the Unsentimental” also has an autobiographical connection in that Tommy with her “peculiarly unfeminine mind” cannot but remind one of “Billie Cather.” Yet that story only has one classical allusion, albeit a strategically chosen one.¹² “The Prodigies” has two.¹³ I shall therefore immediately turn to “The Way of the World,” which like “Count of Crow's Nest” and “A Resurrection” features an elaborate pattern of classical references and requires a detailed analysis.

“The Way of the World” features a primarily Roman pattern of allusions, and the effects to which they contribute are facetious as well as ironic. Published in 1898, it is the story of Speckleville, the town a boy called Speckle built in his father's backyard. At first there were only males in this town, but Speckle makes the mistake of yielding to the instances of Eliza, a strong and aggressive girl; he grants her full citizenship in spite of the strenuous objections of the other boys, who are afraid she will spoil the fun. For a while everything goes well. Indeed, the people of Speckleville grow dependent on the amenities and services introduced by the intruder; gradually they accept her as the new leader. Then the original fears of the boys are justified in an unexpected and ironic way. Eliza becomes very much impressed by a new boy from Chicago who signs himself Semper idem, and finally she absconds with him to found another city. Speckleville is no longer fun. It is abandoned by everybody except Speckle himself.

“The Way of the World” contains one fleeting biblical allusion. In mentioning the cream puffs with which Eliza mollifies the suspicious boys, Cather notes: “When a woman first tempted a man she said unto him, “Eat” (400). It is, however, to look for a depth that simply is not there to say that the main theme of the story is the loss of childhood innocence.¹⁴ For one thing, there is no indication that anyone has lost his or her childhood innocence at the end of the story. To be sure, the theme is in a sense the evil of sex: Disaster follows when a girl is allowed to participate in the boys' games. But, as mentioned, Speckle's male playmates anticipated trouble from the beginning. At no point does one find anything like the unawareness of sexual differentiation mourned in “Dedicatory” and various other poems of Cather's. Moreover, the chief image is not the Garden of Eden. Nor is it the Arcady Cather tends to associate with genderless childhood; it is the city of Rome. An explicit parallel is drawn between Speckleville and “that old mud-walled town in Latium that was also founded by a boy.” In fact, the rape of the Sabines is in this context adduced as an ominous historical event that might have made Speckle less eager to add Eliza to his settlement, had he known about it (398). Skipping a thousand years or so of Roman history, Cather says that Eliza in due time “made herself sole imperatrix of Speckleville” (400). Returning to early republican times, she notes apropos of Eliza's defection with the New Boy: “It was as though Coriolanus, when he deserted Rome for the camp of the Volscians, had asked the Conscript Fathers to call on him and bring their families!” (403). At the emphatic end of the story we find Speckle sitting down in his deserted town “as Caius Marius once sat among the ruins of Carthage.”

Cather's use of the classics in this instance reflects the general superficiality of the story. The reference to Marius is particularly unwarranted: The exiled Roman general came to Carthage and “sat” among the ruins of the old city because he was not allowed to enter the new city, the capital of the Roman province of Africa; he was not a Carthaginian and had nothing to do with the building of either city.¹⁵ The analogy between the domineering Eliza and the abducted Sabine women is also a bit vague. The superimposition of the classical parallels on the account of the children's games is justifiable in terms of the author's obvious desire to create a mock-heroic effect. But the jumping back and forth between imperial and republican times is indicative of a deficient sense of history; it would have been more appropriate if the author had been trying to create a timeless setting like that of Greek mythology rather than alluding to the evils associated with history and the founding of cities.

Rome is also the chief mythical point of reference in “The Count of Crow's Nest” (1896), which is otherwise a very different story. The setting is a not-so-chic Chicago boarding-house (“Crow's Nest”). The people who live there all have mediocrity and failure stamped on their faces, with two notable exceptions: Paul de Koch, an elderly count who belongs to one of the oldest families of Europe, and Harold Buchanan, a recent college graduate who has not yet decided what he is going to do with himself, although he clearly leans toward literature and the arts. The two are thrown together by an affinity that goes beyond education and intellect to the realm of feeling and values; in fact, what we have here is another sign of Cather's interest in male friendship. The story is basically about the irreconcilable conflict between the count's values and those of his daughter Helena, who is sentimentally involved with a person of the opposite sex whose morality is very much in doubt. Buchanan gets involved in this conflict rather against his wishes.

The classical references, which are all explicit, are delivered in the dialogue. To some extent they are used simply to suggest sophistication on the part of Paul de Koch and Buchanan.¹⁶ The count, in discussing literature with his young friend, speaks about the difference between wanting your sermon “in a flower” and wanting it “in a Greek word” (453); he refers to the tedium vitae that the new age inspires in him (457). Similarly, Buchanan, when shown the count's collection of old letters and other private documents concerning the high aristocracy of Europe, wonders what “the dominant note” would be if these papers were allowed to yield up their secrets—would it be “Ares or Eros”? He compliments Helena on her knowledge of the sermo familiaris, that is, the Midwestern vernacular (455 and 462).

But classical references are also used to elaborate the central theme, the contrast between two different attitudes to the duties of life. Indeed, Helena de Koch's way of picking up the local slang is one illustration of her general tendency to adopt the worst traits of her new country, the very traits shunned by her father, who has been able to hold on to traditional values in the best sense of the phrase. And here Chicago—the Chicago preparing to host the 1893 “World's Columbian Exposition”—is clearly compared to imperial Rome in terms reminiscent of the parallel Cather draws between imperial Rome and imperial America in an article published in the Nebraska State Journal.¹⁷ It is true that Paul de Koch, who feels decadent compared with his stalwart ancestors, compares himself, not to a Roman patrician of the old stock confronted with a vulgar new spirit, but to Julian, the quixotic Roman emperor who “clung to a despoiled Olympus,” blind to the advent of a new faith “throbbing with potentialities” (457). Nevertheless, the count's face is earlier described as different from the other faces in the boarding-house because of its “patrician” mold (451), and it is not difficult to see where we are supposed to find the real decadence: in the plebeian greed developed by Helena, an unsuccessful singer, in the stronghold of a new faith that has little to do with the early Church.

Helena de Koch also drops a classical reference in her attempt to get Buchanan to help her gain possession of her father's papers by hook or by crook; she wants to sell them to the press, and when Buchanan expresses certain doubts about the morality of her proposal, her rejoinder is: “That all may be, but when we are in Rome we must be Romans or provincials” (464). This reference is, however, immediately followed by a revealing statement: “You must give the people what they want.” That is the voice of modern consumerism and the mass media; and her idea of selling the secrets contained in her father's papers along with his honor cannot but call to mind the “bread and circus shows” to which the mobs were treated during the period of generalized Roman vulgarity. Helena also suggests that it is only serving Truth to expose the high-strutting aristocracy and let people know them for what they really are—“very common clay.” To this Buchanan's answer is that “the tragic buskin” is indeed borne to make men look taller than they are, but that he is not so anxious to be disillusioned that he wants to penetrate into the dressing-room to determine their real size: “If Caesar without his toga would not be Caesar, I would rather stay down in the orchestra chairs.” In short, “The Count of Crow's Nest” is noteworthy as a fictional illustration of the connection between Cather's espousal of aristocratic values and her use of decadent Rome as an analogue of modern vulgarity.

In “Resurrection” (1897), the urban and imperial frame of reference yields to a spiritual milieu that is provincial but also pastoral. The classical references are predominantly Greek. Since the characters are not highly educated people like de Koch and Buchanan, these references are introduced over their heads, as in “The Way of the World.”

The story is set in Brownville on the western bank of the Missouri. Here Marjorie Pearson, 30, has for some time been teaching school while taking care of her old mother and raising the child of the sweetheart of her teens, Martin Dempster. The latter, who is a river pilot, failed her by getting involved with an itinerant actress of French extraction who bore him a child but did him no good in the long run and ended up drowning in the river. As the story opens, Dempster is about forty and eking out a humdrum and lonely existence running the local ferry, too humiliated to propose to Marjorie Pearson, whom he yet loves as much as he respects her. At this very point, however, he is offered a much better job down in St. Louis and goes to tell her that he can now relieve her of the burden of the child—he will take the boy along with him as he goes to assume his new duties. The message upsets Miss Pearson, who envisions the loss of the sole object on which she can lavish her affections. Dempster retreats and says she can keep the child. He is still unable to say that he would like to take her along, too, but in the final scene he overcomes his feelings of inferiority and asks her to marry him. By bringing his masculinity to bear on the situation in a manner that is as adroit as it is unexpected, he prevails against her fear of being too old.

To return to the beginning of this edifying tale, we there find Miss Pearson assisting a certain oldish Mrs. Skimmons with the Easter decorations in one of the Protestant churches. This opening will cause some readers to the see the title of the story as an allusion to the resurrection of Christ, and no doubt it is. A pious allusion of this kind may, in fact, seem calculated to please many readers of the Home Monthly. The only problem from that point of view is that the author does not otherwise go out of her way to please Protestant church-goers. Mrs. Skimmons is portrayed as narrow-minded, very much part of the “petty provincial world” in which Marjorie finds herself trapped. The younger woman does not feel “a bit like Easter” until Dempster (pun on “redemption”?) suddenly turns up with a box of lilies.

Considering the erotic dimension of the story, one is hardly surprised that Cather does not labor to fit the Christian resurrection theme into the general argument of the story. She does at one point have Miss Pearson refer to everything she has “starved and crucified” in herself (428-429), but on the whole her release from spinsterhood, as well as Dempster's from bachelorhood, is described in terms of pagan imagery. At the center of the story is not Christ but the River, a symbol of life-giving power familiar from Greek and Roman literature. Like classical river gods, Cather's River does not invariably use its power in ways beneficial to man, but the gradual clearing up of the misunderstanding between Dempster, a worshiper of this god, and the love of his youth is counterpointed by the resurgence of the River in early spring. In the process, man is seen in a quasi-pastoral perspective—in his relation to nature, not in his relation to God.

The author does not, however, pursue the integration of attendant classical images with the central symbolism in too pedantic a manner. When she says that Brownville after the River changed its course because “a little Pompeii buried in bonded indebtedness,” she passes up a chance to draw an analogy between the fate of the former town and the decline of so many ancient cities for similar reasons.¹⁸ A specific parallel of this kind would have been a good illustration of what she cryptically refers to as the sad fate of the devotees of river gods.¹⁹ “Buried in bonded indebtedness” is nevertheless a nice image for the result of this tragic course of events.

Possibly one might also say that the reference to Pompeii goes well with the implied idea that Marjorie Pearson is buried treasure (an image also used in the case of the heroine of “The Treasure of Far Island”). Miss Pearson is at one point characterized as one of many “living masterpieces that are as completely lost to the world as the lost nine books of Sappho, or as the Grecian marbles that were broken under the barbarians' battle axes” (426). This passage again is interesting not only because it is the only explicit reference to Sappho in all of Cather's fiction but also because it shows once more that she associates the poetry of Sappho with the depiction of feminine beauty. She has just herself been describing the face of the heroine of “A Resurrection” in sculptural terms.

Cather also abandons the central image when she chooses to illustrate the point that the real wages of the River God “are of the soul alone” by referring to the intimate “sympathy with inanimate nature” that “the high-faced rocks of the gleaming Sicilian shore gave Theocritus” (433). But disparate as the comparison may seem, it is a way of making the readers aware that they are reading pastoral. Since Dempster is the one who is credited with the Theocritean sympathy with nature, the analogy prepares us for his poetic outburst at the end of the story, in which he in Dionysian language compares his—and Marjorie's—situation to that of the swollen river painfully but ecstatically digging a new channel.

Comparing “Resurrection” and the other stories from the late nineties with those from the early part of the decade, one immediately perceives a difference: In the latter group, stories without classical references, like “On the Divide” and “The Clemency of the Court,” are more serious artistic exercises than, say, “The Son of the Celestial,” which has several such references. In the former group, it is the other way around: The stories deprived of classical elements tend to be mere bagatelles, whereas those in which such elements are present have all the appearance of products intended to make an impression. Cather's increasing commitment to the classics as a writer of fiction is reflected not only in the greater number of classical references but also in the quality of the writing in which they appear.

It is also clear that the classical allusions in the Pittsburgh stories tend to be quite explicit and much less intriguing than those found in some of the earlier tales. Not only are there no hidden allusions; it is hard to find patterns of explicit references conveying a meaning that needs to be inferred. One may, in fact, speak of a kind of retreat compared with the stories of the Hesperian era. “The Tale of the White Pyramid,” as noted, features a subtle superimposition of Cleopatra's dissolute Egypt on the days that saw the pyramids rise. References to Plato and Horace—as well as to Michelangelo and Hamlet—form a conspicuous constellation in “A Son of the Celestial” and cannot but affect our understanding of the male friendship celebrated in this story. Even readers unaware of the intertextual pattern to which it contributes are likely to find it a bold product to come from the pen of a nineteen-year-old Midwestern girl.

The five Pittsburgh stories whose classical content I have discussed have nothing bold about them. Indeed, they appear to be pretty much in line not only with the values of classical humanism but with ordinary middle-class standards. Even the espousal of patrician values in “The Count of Crow's Nest” does not go beyond affirming traditional values like personal honesty and integrity; it can hardly be viewed as hostile to democratic ideals.

On the whole, Cather here reveals a desire not to be controversial that is often absent in her journalism and poetry. “A Resurrection” does contain a hint of the opposition between classical paganism and a life-denying Protestant creed … but it is no more than a hint. Her caution is particularly obvious in matters of sex. The touch is light in the portrayal of the intimate friendship of de Koch and Buchanan. Theodosia is depicted as androgynous, but the author makes it very clear that her interest in men is not merely collegial, having her say at the end with Jay Ellington in mind: “They are awful idiots, half of them, and never think of anything beyond their dinner. But O, how we do like them!” The one reference to Sappho (in “A Resurrection”) appears in the context of an enthusiastic endorsement of traditional values. In “The Way of the World,” the intrusion of sex into the boys' world is described in so ironic a spirit that the story does not in any way suggest a regressive yearning for a genderless world of the kind sometimes found in April Twilights. The imperatrix theme is prominent, but it is handled in a scrupulously moral spirit, without glorification of Roman or Egyptian vice. In short, the pieces written in Pittsburgh during the period covered in this chapter testify to a high degree of audience-consciousness. They are perfectly suitable for The Home Monthly.

THE HOLINESS OF BEAUTY

The short fiction to be discussed in this chapter [of The Humanization of Wills Cather] was published during a brief but eventual period in Cather's life—her resignation from the Pittsburg Leader early in 1900; the months of free-lance journalism in Washington, D. C., her return to Pittsburgh to teach at Central High in 1901; her moving into the McClung residence; and her European trip in the company of Isabelle McClung in the summer of 1902. Bibliographically speaking, this period comprehends the stories predating those collected in The Troll Garden (the earliest of which, “A Death in the Desert,” was originally published in Scribner's in January, 1903).

This group of stories also includes some in which no classical references can be found: “The Sentimentality of William Taverner,” “The Affair at Grover Station,” “A Singer's Romance,” and “The Conversion of Sum Loo.” Yet another piece, “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional,” contains some scattered references that need not occupy us here. The chief interest of these stories from our point of view is that they prove that Cather's increasing reliance on the classics as a writer of fiction did not grow into a compulsion. I do not think anybody would like to see her more involved with them than she is in the remaining four stories: “Eric Hermannson's Soul,” (1900), “Jack-a-Boy” (1901), “The Professor's Commencement” (1902), and “The Treasure of Far Island” (1902).

With the exception of “The Sentimentality of William Taverner,” one must also say that the stories that do not contain a significant classical element seem slight compared with those which do. There is, in fact, a qualitative difference between the “classical” stories I am now preparing to discuss and those dealt with in the previous chapter. It affects the content no less than the form. Cather seems to be writing in a more serious vein, using her classical background to explore matters of fundamental importance to her. There is a sense in which all four of these stories have the experience of joy and beauty—through art as much as in life—as their central concern.

The first story in this group, “Eric Hermannson's Soul,” also has some things in common with “A Resurrection.” In this case, too, we are dealing with a revival of the soul—of the whole human being—through the experience of erotic attraction and the life of the senses. As in the earlier tale, the male party is portrayed as less refined than the female party but making up for this shortcoming, at least in some degree, through sheer, honest masculinity. “Eric Hermannson's Soul” is of course a more complex story. It is also more impressive from an aesthetic point of view, in part because Cather here avoids the pitfall of sentimentality.

The classical references are not particularly numerous in “Eric Hermannson's Soul.” But they are strategically placed, and their significance is very much enhanced by the philosophical tenor of the story. Throughout, there is an opposition between the life-denying forces associated with the Christian tradition as represented by the preaching of Asa Skinner and a pagan view of the world more in line with the natural tendencies of man. This view is stated by means of classical images reinforced by themes borrowed from Norse—partly Wagnerian—mythology.

Some sections of the story retrospectively describe Eric's conversion through the efforts of Asa Skinner, the “Free Gospeller,” and the sad changes it wrought in him. When he came over from Norway at the age of eighteen, and for some time after that, he seemed to be “in love with life”; his bearing was proud; his flashing eye was of “a fierce, burning blue,” and a “pagan smile” hovered about his lips (368-369). He was not entirely without culture. He had a craving for beauty, beauty of the soul as well as of the body. His violin-playing satisfied the former side of him; it was his bridge into “the kingdom of the soul.” But he also played for Lena Hanson, an attractive single woman “whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country” (360-361). When he crushed the violin to splinters across his knee at the moment of his conversion, it was therefore more than a symbolic gesture; it was a kind of self-mutilation, as the author herself suggests in describing the effect of “the gospel of maceration” on this young Siegfried: “‘If thine eye offendeth thee, pluck it out,’ et cetera.” In terms of another image, Eric has committed spiritual suicide. In becoming a Christian, he may have responded to Asa Skinner's “Lazarus, come forth,” but Cather makes no bones about telling us that religion did him in, assisted by toil and the isolation of the frontier. Nor is he the only one who suffers this fate: “Oh those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin” (369).

Eric has been in a bad way for some time when the New Englander Wyllis Elliot arrives to buy some land, accompanied by his sister Margaret, who has never been out west before. Their minds and souls are not circumscribed by the rules of a monotheistic religion, as Cather immediately hints by suggesting that Margaret's arrival illustrates “by what improbable chances … the unrelenting gods bring us to our fate” (362). Margaret herself gives a first idea of the sources of her imaginative life as she expresses her favorable view of the West with its wide horizons and bracing air: “Wyllis,” she says, “I haven't been so happy since we were children and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day” (364). When she adds that she thinks she could stay forever in this primeval milieu, her brother objects that she would soon get bored and miss the fever of urban life: “There was a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the sand hills and get rid of it. But it is all too complex now.”²⁰

Wyllis obviously has no idea of the excitement the gods are preparing for his sister on this very spot. It does not take her long to discover Eric; and after her first conversation with him, she is certain that a soul is still languishing within that magnificent physique. He responds in a very positive way not only to her own beauty but to that of the music she plays and sings for him at his request. As Cather pointedly puts it, she is a “revelation” to him—a revelation of quasi-divine beauty. She represents a loveliness in the presence of which he “felt as the Goths before the white marbles of the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or gods” (370). That is Cather's own analogy, of course; Eric's frame of reference is entirely biblical—at one point he compares the smell of corn in the night to that of the flowers that grow in paradise (376). But thanks to this new influence he gradually recovers his manhood and his soul; and in the account of the climactic dance at which this process is completed, there is more classical imagery: As the old men stamp the floor “with the vigor of old Silenus,” Eric takes the violin of a Frenchman and begins to play again (374).

Margaret, on her side, is more and more impressed not only by Eric's masculine vigor but by the feeling that she is capable of inspiring in him. An important milestone on the way is what he says after coming to her aid when her pony panicks in response to the approach of some wild mustangs—that he feared for her because he loves her more than he loves “Christ who died for us” and more than he fears hell (372). This feeling—passion—is a revelation to her. She cannot help comparing Eric's greatness of soul to the spiritual inanity of her effete snob of a fiancé back in the East. The letter from him that helps clarify the difference also contains some complementary hints about her own character. Somewhat earlier, we have learned about a “strain of gypsy blood” in the young woman; in her fiancé's letter she is wryly associated with tropical voluptuousness and African shores (373). The soul of a Cleopatra or Zenobia is slumbering within her beautiful frame.²¹

At the dance at Lockhart's, this soul begins to wake up. The culminating incident in the story is Margaret's ascent to the vertiginous top of the great wind-mill with Eric. Here, as in the case of the rioting horses, the symbolism speaks for itself, and it also seems significant that Eric's shoulders on this occasion “looked more than ever like those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful strength in the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died forever with the youth of Greece.”²² Suddenly she realizes that she has never lived. She has been cheating nature all these years. But in the long run nature cannot be cheated: “Can we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Does she not turn upon Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in the desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: I am here still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its destiny”.²³ Margaret lays her lips on Eric's …

But East is East and West is West. Margaret immediately pulls back, seized by panic as she feels all resistance go out of her body. Realizing the dangers of so Dionysian-Aphrodisian a posture, she flees down the ladder of the tower. Next morning she embarks on her return trip after promising Eric never to forget him. He remains behind, revelling in the thought that he will be able to remember her for a thousand years—in hell. It is hard to decide whether the ending can be called sublime or simply makes Eric look ridiculous. The problem would be mitigated if “Eric Hermannson's Soul” could be viewed as chiefly a parable on man's thirst for divine and unattainable beauty. But this is one of a rather small number of stories in which Cather appears to take a genuine interest in the mutual sexual attraction of man and woman. Why does she cripple the man in this manner? The question is all the more pertinent as she clearly exaggerates the primitivity of which a basically intelligent countryman and contemporary of Ibsen and Grieg might be capable if transplanted to the American West.

The opposition of West and East is forgotten along with that of the sexes in the next piece to be discussed, “Jack-a-Boy.” This story does, however, follow up what in a sense is the most important theme of “Eric Hermannson's Soul”: the vindication of beauty and joy over life-denying forces. In this case, too, everything that makes life worthwhile is associated with pagan and specifically classical-pagan ideas rather than with Christian beliefs. Indeed, Christian themes like resurrection, revelation, and redemption are here redefined in classicist terms. Definitely a philosophical parable rather than a psychological sketch, this story yields strong confirmation that Cather is groping toward something like classical humanism at this stage of her career.

“Jack-a-Boy” is the story of a boy of six who charms all the residents of Windsor Terrace, not only the narrator, a youngish pianist referred to as “Miss Harris,” but also “the Professor,” and “The Woman Nobody Called On.” All three of them have been leading emotionally empty lives, and Jack-a-Boy fills a real void for them until his death removes him from their sight as suddenly as he appeared one day with his parents. About these very little is learnt. The focus is chiefly on the Professor, with Miss Harris as the somewhat jealous observer. “The Woman Nobody Called On” (a former “kept woman”) is called in now and then as additional testimony to the redemptive quality of Jack-a-Boy's charm.

The portrayal of the Professor begins as a caricature of the serious scholar, calling to mind the attacks on “grammar and mathematics” in the early articles and reviews. A bachelor, he appears to have crowded the entire content of the British Museum into his one-room apartment: There are “dusty plaster casts of all the Grecian philosophers” (including Aristotle); there are “bronzes of several of the later Roman emperors”; there is a “relief map of the Peloponnesus” and “terra-cotta models of the Acropolis and Parthenon and several other edifices whose very names I have forgotten.” Among the many books piled all over the place are an “Autenrieth,” an unspecified “Griechische Formenlehre,” and “a volume of Flaxman's immortal illustrations of Homer.”²⁴ The professor's specialty is Greek prosody. He does not care to remember “anything at all but Sanskrit roots and the metres of difficult Greek choruses.” He is, in fact, working on a book on that very subject, and when he first becomes aware of Jack-a-Boy's arrival, he fears the boy's romping about will interrupt him “in the middle of a chapter on Vowels of Variable Quantity” and possibly force him to move. He is “a thin, frail man, angular and much bent, who seems to have put all his blood into his grammars, and to have only thousands of tiny Greek accent marks and smooth and rough breathings where the red corpuscles should be” (312).

Jack-a-Boy's first visit begins to change all that. When the boy asks him if he has a book with pictures in, the startled Professor remembers the Flaxman, hands it to him, and suddenly finds himself “launched into an abbreviated and expurgated version of the Trojan War” (314). Jack-a-Boy turns out to be insatiable for stories about the Greek heroes—Achilles shouting by the wall, his sorrow when Patroclus is killed, Odysseus and Diomedes stealing the white horses of Rhesus, and so forth ad infinitum.²⁵ The Professor has never had such a pupil before. Thanks to him, the previously letter-bound scholar begins to rediscover the spirit of Greece. It now becomes perfectly clear that his heart had never been completely dead, “only buried beneath an accumulation of Sanskrit forms and Greek idioms.” When he comes to ask Miss Harris to help him in a matter concerning Jack-a-Boy, she promises to oblige him while wryly protesting that he must have forgotten that she is “neither a lexicon nor an authority on Greek metres” (317). That is off the mark. The man has changed, as the narrator herself realizes in the end when she hears him recite “that old, old story of Achilles' wrath” one more time as the boy asks him to do so in the semi-lucid intervals of his final illness: “I could never have believed him capable of the sweetness and directness with which he told that wonderful story, his phrases taking on a certain metrical cadence of their own” (319).

The Professor's feeling for Jack-a-Boy is rather insistently described as a case of Platonic pedagogical eros. He compares the boy's eyes to violets, and the narrator comments that the analogy was “fresh and unhackneyed” to him because he had probably “never said that of a woman's eyes” (317). He thinks Jack-a-Boy looks like a “boy picture of Keats” and wants to live to see him grow up (318); in retrospect he confesses that he had been looking forward to teaching him Greek (321). But he knew from the beginning that they would not be able to keep him: “Sometimes I fancied he would tarry long enough to sing a little like Keats … and confound the wiseacres and pedants of the world, like those other immortal boys from Parnassus, who were sent to us by mistake. But he had too little to hold him back; less even than Keats.²⁶ The meshes of clay were too coarse to hold him. He rose from them, beautiful and still a child, like Cupid out of Psyche's arms” (320).

Keats is mentioned again in the next paragraph, where one glimpses the Platonic—and Romantic—notion that children are particularly apt to remember the heavenly sphere from which they have come. Heaven is, however, here the world of Greek mythology: “Sometimes the old divinities reveal themselves in children … Why should he have liked Flaxman's drawings better than his picture books? Why should he have liked the story of Theseus' boyhood in the Centaur's cave better than Jack the Giant Killer? Why should he tell me that the two stars that peeped down into his crib between the white curtains were like the eyes of the Golden Helen?”²⁷ The Professor points out that the boy could not possibly have learnt such things from his father: “No, he simply had that divinity in him, that holiness of beauty which the hardest and basest of us must love when we see it. He was of that antique world, and he would have lived in it always, like Keats.” The allusion to Plato's idea of anamnesis becomes particularly obvious in the account of Jack-a-Boy's fascination with the picture of Hector and Andromache. He liked it best of all because he thought it was so nice of Hector to take off his “gleaming helmet” so that it would not frighten his little boy: “He always said ‘gleaming helmet,’” notes the Professor.²⁸ “He loved the sound of the words. Sometimes I used to fancy that if I would speak the Greek words he would recognize them … Perhaps he was remembering more about it all than the rest of us will ever know” (321).

The heavy burden of symbolism placed on Jack-a-Boy's frail shoulders is quite obvious even before we get to this point in the story; not only was the Greek spirit “his”—there is a sense in which he is this spirit. The question is: Does this spiritualistic apology for a classicist paideia stand unchallenged in the story, or does Cather use her observer-narrator to qualify it? As the Professor mourns the great poet or composer lost with Jack-a-Boy, the narrator does protest that she does not care “what he could have done or been” and that what she loved was “the little human boy.”²⁹ Rhetorically speaking, however, this objection only serves the purpose of launching the Professor into a long refutatio (the content of which I have just discussed). The reader will also remember the concession the narrator has already made on an earlier page as she finds “the Woman Nobody Called On” at Jack-a-Boy's sick-bed: “I knew then that the Professor had been the wisest of us, and that this was no human child, but one of the immortal children of Greek fable made flesh for a little while.”³⁰ Besides, Miss Harris goes on to give an imaginative acccount of the boy's death which is in keeping with the view expressed by her learned friend, although not necessarily with the Transcendentalist doctrine of Plato. She says she fancied she detected above the odors of medicine “a fresh, wet smell of violets and of autumn woods and green mossy places by the mountain streams,” and that Jack-a-Boy left them to join “some joyous spirit” he remembered playing with “long ago in Arcady.” “Perhaps some wood nymph, tall and fair, came in and laid her fingers on his brow and bore him off with the happy children of Pan” (319-320).

Miss Harris is quite insistent in invoking the name of Pan, noting in the next paragraph that she is trying to forget the pain and the grief and “remember only that Jack-a-Boy heard the pipes of Pan as the old wood gods trooped by in the gray morning, and that he could not stay.” This eschatology of her imagination—the child returning to the realm of Pan, calls to mind the pantheistic account of the death of Ethelbert Nevin and other passages in the articles and reviews, in spite of the Platonistic overtones.³¹ It is as far removed as possible from the Christian idea of a transcendent God and a transcendent heaven.

This point is particularly significant in view of the ending, where the gospel of aestheticism is compared and contrasted with that of Christ. Following up his earlier suggestion that Jack-a-Boy stands for the “holiness of beauty,” the Professor says that Pater may have been right and that “it is the revelation of beauty which is to be our redemption, after all.”³² Miss Harris demurs: “I was thinking how the revelation of the greatest Revealer drew men together. …” Her statement is emphatically placed, in the last paragraph; yet it leaves an element of doubt. It makes the main thesis of the story less brazen and categorical, but it is hardly sufficient to undo it. In fact, the opposite is more true. Miss Harris' final objection seems calculated to draw attention to the incompatibility of the main theme with Christian belief. After all, it comes right after the account of the get-together of Jack-a-Boy's three special friends for the purpose of celebrating the advent of spring in the manner that he loved—with a May basket hanging. This annual ritual is earlier referred to as the boy's “great fête,” and we are advised that it “meant even more to him than Christmas” (316). At the end of the story, Miss Harris notes that the three friends did not assemble at Christmas but waited until spring because they were not sure they “kept Christmas in Jack-a-Boy's country.” Among the flowers gathered for the posthumous May basket is certainly some narcissus; we are told that the boy also knew the story of Narcissus (317-318). The moon was “as it had been the year before—pale and wan, and curved like Artemis' bow.”

The pagan background of Northwesten Europe thus fuses with and reinforces the classical pagan themes as it does in “Eric Hermannson's Soul.” Taken together, these texts leave little doubt about her religious position in her late twenties, and perhaps this is why the opposition between the Christian faith and the pursuit of beauty does not come up in “The Professor's Commencement,” published the following year; Cather has made her point, for the time being. Here, too, she focuses on the worship of beauty as the highest activity of man, but the conflict is rather with the ugliness and philistinism of a modern industrial city.

Otherwise this story has a good deal in common with “Jack-a-Boy.” The hero, Professor Emerson Graves, is clearly an ideal; and while he is portrayed in a more realistic manner than Jack-a-Boy, he is in a sense the admirer of Flaxman's drawings grown up—or he is what the expert on Greek grammar and prosody might have been, had he been exposed to “the Greek spirit” of Jack-a-Boy earlier in life.

Professor Emerson Graves has forgone an academic career to teach at a Pittsburgh high school and there “cry the name of beauty so loud that the roar of the mills could not drown it” (290). In his single-minded pursuit of this goal, he has remained a bachelor, with his sister Agatha keeping house for him. As the story opens, he is on the eve of retirement (although only fifty-five). Looking back, he would like to think that he has, like Horace, built himself “a monument more lasting than brass.”³³ This view is, however, challenged by his sister, who tells him that he has acted in a quixotic manner and wasted the best part of his life.

That is not exactly the way Cather seems to feel about her hero's life. She clearly suggests that human greatness is not necessarily a matter of outward achievement, but of spirit. In a striking manner, she stresses Graves' superiority over his colleagues in terms of the opposition between letter and spirit: Virtually all of them are “cases of arrested development”—still discussing “the difficulties of the third conjugation” (of Greek or Latin), as they had done there for twenty years (289). Graves is not like them; even his repeated failure to recite Macaulay's “Horatius on the Bridge” from memory appears to symbolize his lack of concern with the letter of things.³⁴ Since his chief scholarly preoccupation is art history and criticism, he reminds one of Pater, mentioned at the end of “Jack-a-Boy,” and even more of Ruskin, of whom Cather says in one of her early articles: “To have lived so pure, so intense, so reverent a life is greater than to have written Modern Painters.³⁵

Looking at the literary themes in terms of which Professor Graves' life and character are portrayed, one will find that they are not all classical. At one point, he is compared to the Hebrew prophets crying out against “the pride and blind prosperity of Tyre” (287), at another to the keeper of the Ear Gate of the town of Mansoul in Bunyan's Holy War (286). Yet the classics clearly dominate. In his fancy, the high school at which he has chosen to teach is “a Pharos to all those drifting, storm-driven lives in the valley below” (286). Like other college graduates of his time, he once pledged himself, in the words of Tennyson's “Ulysses,” to “follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought” (287). First of all, there is the analogy between Graves and Horatius Cocles, “the Captain of the Gate” in Macaulay's seventy-stanza lay: As Horatius prevented a political and military enemy from crossing the Tiber and enter Rome, so the Professor has been defending the city on the Monongahela against the invasion of industrial ugliness and joylessness.³⁶ The analogy is quite explicit. Generations of students have known the Professor as “the bold Horatius” (288); and when he falters in his attempt to recite Macaulay's poem at the commencement dinner, just as he had done at his graduation, one of his more distinguished colleagues has wits enough to exclaim: “I ask you all … whether Horatius has any need to speak, for has he not kept the bridge these thirty years?” (291).

Graves, or “Emerson,” as his sister keeps calling him, is a symbol of moral rather than of physical courage à la Horatius Cocles. Yet it is remarkable how insistently the image of the soldier is used in characterizing him, not least in classical terms. Just before faltering in his recital of Macaulay's lay, he remembers what he had been like when he first attempted this feat: “a young man, resolute and gifted, with the strength of Ulysses and the courage of Hector” (291). A little earlier, while looking at his aging comrades-in-arms, he wonders if they, too, realize that they are now “spent warriors who could only chatter on the wall, like grasshoppers, and sigh at the beauty of Helen as she passed.”³⁷

The allusion to the shrill sound of the cicadas and the old companions of Priam is significant as an image of physical and spiritual decrepitude. Helen here symbolizes the beauty that makes life worth living and inspires the work of artists and critics, and we have just been told that the Professor now senses that he may be too old and tired to finish his “History of Modern Painting” (289). But that is not all: The somewhat premature aging of Graves must be seen against the background of Cather's insistent suggestions that he never was very virile in the first place. His hands are said to be “white as a girl's,” and his sister is “the more alert and masculine character of the two” (284). The story ends with the Professor telling her: “I was not made to shine, for they put a woman's heart in me.”

The combination of martial spirit and effeminancy represented by Professor Graves cannot but remind one of Jack-a-Boy, who in spite of his soldier's clothes is characterized by a girlish appearance that Miss Harris says she does not mind although she usually dislikes “effeminate boys.” As noted, Cather suggests a connection between this appearance and the feeling he inspires in the expert on Greek prosody. Here, too, the stories run parallel. Jilted by the pretty senior girl he once wanted to marry, Graves is also granted his pedagogical eros, with the difference that in this case both parties are adult and both parties are “feminine.” It happened when Graves was still a relatively young man, and it was his only reward in his long struggle to hold the banner of beauty aloft in the grimy city where he has chosen to stay. He did impress one student of genius “with the gentle eyes and manner of a girl.” As in the other instance, Cather does not allow him to enjoy his boon for very long: The young man who “had seen even as Graves saw” was frail; he “had sung a little, struck the true lyrical note, and died wretchedly at three-and-twenty in his master's arms …” (290). There is no explicit reference to Keats here, but “sing a little” is what the other professor says he had hoped Jack-a-Boy would have time to do, like the author of Endymion and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

“The Professor's Commencement” is, in other words, interesting as yet another indication that Cather did not at this time mind androgyny in creative males. It also anticipates certain notes struck in her major fiction: This is not the last time she portrays a professor whose one reward is a student of genius, nor is it the last time she labors to separate the love of beauty from heterosexual love. But Cather comes dangerously close to celebrating devitalization and emasculation in elaborating these themes. This charming tale is marred from a humanist point of view.

In this particular respect, the last story to be considered in this chapter, “The Treasure of Far Island,” is more satisfactory. Here Cather returns to one of the central themes of “A Resurrection” and “Eric Hermannson's Soul”—the mutual attraction of man and woman—with only a touch of the idea of a Transcendentalist quest for beauty which looms so large in the tales involving the professors. “The Treasure of Far Island” details what befalls Douglass Burnham as he returns to the parental home in Empire City for a visit after some years in New York during which he has risen to national and world eminence as a playwright. At a party given in his honor, he meets a childhood friend, Margie Van Dyck, who has grown into a ravishing young woman. Together they visit Far Island, the scene of the “wild” games they used to play. In the process, their old “romance” is renewed in a more serious, adult spirit.

The circumstance that the man's name is “Douglass,” also the first name of one of Cather's brothers, makes one suspect that this fantasy is the reunion of “Dedicatory” in a different key. “The Treasure of Far Island” is also just as replete with literary allusions as the poem is. Some of them are not classical in the strict sense; one also finds references to texts like Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Keats' “May Day Ode,” Emerson's “The Poet,” Daudet's Kings in Exile, Treasure Island, Arabian Nights, and Genesis. Yet the non-classical themes are clearly subsidiary, like the other boys glimpsed in the games Douglass and Margie reminisce about. At first sight the story looks like a reckless looting of the author's classical treasury.

The Greek and Roman references are, however, chosen with a certain care. They fall into significant patterns. The account of Douglass' and Margie's childhood activities tends, in fact, to go in two directions, one of which is associated with Greece, the other chiefly with Rome. In sharp contrast with “The Way of the World,” Greek mythology dominates in the depiction of childhood. “The Golden Age” is invoked, and the western river in which Far Island is located is described as “an enchanted river flowing peacefully out of Arcady with the Happy Isles somewhere in the distance” (276). It is a sand bar surrounded by “all the mystery and enchantment which was attributed to certain islands in the sea by the mariners of Greece” (277). Douglass notes that while playing there they “were not so unlike those Hellenic poets who were content to sing to the shepherds and forget and be forgotten, ‘rich in the simple worship of a day’” (280).

This pastoral note is preceded by the more epic suggestion that they used to build “empires that set with the sun.” The phrase sounds like a punning allusion to the Persian empire said to be so large that the sun never set over it. But in portraying Douglass as “a founder of cities and a leader of hosts,” Cather may well have had Aeneas in mind (275). Somewhat earlier, Douglass mentions that reciting “Regulus to the Carthaginians” was one of his old “stunts” (268). Regulus was of course also an empire builder. So were the Roman generals whose triumphs are alluded to again and again—triumphs in which Margie apparently played the role of the conquered.

The portrait of the adult Margie Van Dyck also goes in two directions in terms of classical references and allusions. Douglass tends to see her as “a goddess” (271), but the goddess is not always the same one. When Margie's feminine attractiveness and feminine responsiveness are being stressed, she is associated with Aphrodite. During their first encounter, Douglass at one point wonders whether like Anchises, the lover of Aphrodite, “he had seen the vision that would forever blind him to the beauty of mortal women.”³⁸ Somewhat later, he is said to feel “as a man might feel who in some sleepy humdrum Italian village had unearthed a new marble goddess, as beautiful as she of Milo” (275). Alternatively, he compares Margie to the semi-divine Helen of Troy, favored by Aphrodite (273). On the last page, a parallel is drawn between him and Paris crossing “the blue Aegean” with Helen aboard.

Sometimes the stress is on the idea that Margie in a sense has spent years waiting for Douglass to return. In such a context, she is once compared to Penelope (282). More often, however, her chastity is suggested by means of analogies with female divinities who also possess other attributes which facilitate identification. Thus the description of her as dressed in white and very tall looks like an allusion to Diana (270); the image is used in several other Cather stories.³⁹ The intellectual equal as well as the perfect (and boyish) playmate is suggested by what can only be an allusion to Pallas Athena—the comparison of “her wonderful hair piled high on her head” to “a helmet of gleaming bronze” (276).

It could be argued that we here have the first sign of the hesitation or tension between two different conceptions of womanhood so often glimpsed in Cather's later fiction. Her tendency to focus on the attractions of the woman rather than the man's is also present in this story. Cather does note that the women of Empire City find Douglass interesting, in spite of his own suggestion that he has not “grown into an Apollo” (279-280). But compared to Margie he remains a somewhat vague and abstract figure; we hardly get to know anything about his physical appearance except that his skin is very white—hardly a sign of masculinity (especially not in the classical world). He is largely an observer, like Jim Burden and Niel Herbert.

But unlike these later heroes of Cather's, Douglass also serves as the aggressive pursuer of the beautiful woman, and in this role he comes through as a normal and conventional man. There are suggestions that he derives a pleasant sense of power from his ability to “convey” himself fully to Margie in conversation (273). But the intellectual companionship that she also has to offer does not in any way deflect him from seeing her chiefly as a sex object. On one occasion, he uses a ruse worthy of a Theocritean shepherd; he pretends that he is the underdog by comparing his own situation to that of “unhappy Orpheus” being flayed by the women of Thrace (279). Most of the time, he is pictured as the one who has the initiative and gets his will, just as in the days when they played at more innocent games. In the end, Margie is said to forget “all her vows never to grace another of his Roman triumphs” (282). Their ancient search for “pirate gold” is resumed not only as an attempt to relive their childhood games in imagination, but in terms of the idea that Margie is the buried treasure and Douglass the “pirate chief” determined to lay his hands on it. This becomes very clear through the repeated references to her hair as “Etruscan gold,” especially in the passage in which this simile is first used: “A woman stood in the dark by the hall lamp with a lighted match in her hand. She was in white and very tall. The match burned but a moment; a moment the light played on her hair, red as Etruscan gold …” (270). It is like a wall-painting in an Etruscan tomb lit up for an instant. A more risqué image casts Douglass in the role of Pan cornering a nymph against the trunk of an oak; Margie is awaiting him “flushed and panting, her bosom rising and falling with her quick drawn breaths” as he asks her: “Why did you close the tree behind you … I have always wanted to see just how Dryads keep house” (279).

This passage is not calculated to make one look for a Transcendentalist dimension to the story. Yet such a dimension is clearly present. It is there already in the name of the place where they go to resume their romance—“Far Island,” also referred to as “the Ultima Thule.”⁴⁰ It transpires in the analogy between children's play and artistic creativity, the Romantic belief that the great artist retains his childish androgyny into adulthood. Above all, there is the way in which Cather begins and ends the story by paraphrasing the peroration of Emerson's already-mentioned essay about the ideal “poet,” or “man of beauty.”⁴¹ In her first paragraph she notes that Douglass and Margie “were of that favored race whom a New England sage called the true land-lords and sea-lords of the world.” At the end, where the lovers are raised to the rank of Olympian gods, they are said to dwell like them in “golden houses” and “recking little of the woes and labors of mortals, neither heeding any fall of rain or snow.”⁴²

One can hardly fault Cather for idealizing a heterosexual love affair, especially as the ideal is presented in a mild, pantheistic light. But her tying it so closely to a philosophical text which contains no reference to the existence of woman is not a fortunate touch. The marriage of Emerson's “priest of Pan” to a wood nymph is, however, not the only thing in “The Treasure of Far Island” that seems a bit artificial. The problem with the story is that it contains too many literary references; there is not enough room for reality to seep in. Like “The Professor's Commencement,” although in the opposite way, “The Treasure of Far Island” illustrates the point that perfect humanism and perfect artistry are two different things.

To sum up: All four stories celebrate beauty and joy, but they do so in rather different and sometimes faltering ways. In “Eric Hermannson's Soul,” heterosexual passion is portrayed as beautiful and joyous but somehow also seems off limits. In “Jack-a-Boy” and “The Professor's Commencement,” Helen reappears as a symbol of the beauty that makes life worth living, but she does so in the imagination of a dying six-year-old boy and an old scholar portrayed as emasculated. Granting that “Jack-a-Boy” is primarily symbolic and philosophical does not completely save it from a classical/humanist point of view. Love and beauty are separated from heterosexual love in both these stories; instead of marriages we have male friendships in line with Plato's pedagogical eros. What is more, the crepuscular existence of Professor Emerson Graves, the defender of beauty against the inroads of industrial ugliness; the death of his androgynous student of genius; and the death of the androgynous little boy who incarnates the love of classical beauty—it all looks like so many suggestions that life itself is incompatible with art. On the other hand, Cather seems to take it all back in “The Treasure of Far Island,” which suggests that one can have everything. In this case she may in some degree be swayed by anticipated audience expectations, as she so obviously is in “A Resurrection.” But the overall impression is that she has not quite made up her mind as to where exactly she stands on some of the most fundamental issues of mankind.

THE TROLL GARDEN

Cather had been writing stories for twelve years when, thanks to Samuel McClure, she was able to publish her first volume of short fiction, The Troll Garden.⁴³ The title suggests an over-all theme: It is an allusion to the “troll garden” described in the introductory chapter of Charles Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton.⁴⁴

The importance of this theme is underlined, as it were, by the epigraph printed on the title page. It is from Kingsley's text and reads: “A fairy palace, with a fairy garden; … inside the trolls dwell … working at their magic forges, making and making things rare and strange.” Cited out of context and with several elisions, the epigraph does not, however, seem calculated to convey Kingsley's argument, which is in essence that the early Germanic tribes—or “forest children,” as he is pleased to call them—were rightly impressed with the splendor and sophistication of Rome but failed to see that they were making contact with a civilization that was already old and corrupt and hence capable of corrupting newcomers: The “trolls” are “cunning and wicked” as well as skilful and rich. Nothing of this historical framework comes through in the abridged text Cather prefixes to her book. A question thus arises as to the relevance of Kingsley's argument to the seven stories she has included in it.

In my view, we need not take Cather's elisions at face value.⁴⁵ It is true that pagan Rome is never seen as the “fairy palace” of art in the journalism and poetry; the contrary is more true.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, there are good reasons to “restore” the reference to Rome and other elided portions of Kingsley's text. For one thing, doing so puts the “troll garden” theme more in line with the theme suggested by the other epigraph to the book, four lines from Christina Rossetti's “The Goblin Market”: “We must not look at Goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits; / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?” This obviously represents a much darker note than the elided quote from Kingsley; and, as they stand, the two epigraphs may seem to suggest that the book contains two opposite trends in the tales told—one comparatively sunny, the other quite dark. Yet a dichotomy of that kind is hard to demonstrate.⁴⁷

The question raised by the Kingsley epigraph cannot, however, be dealt with without considering the similar problem posed by the other epigraph to The Troll Garden: Are we also supposed to “restore” some of the more obvious omissions in Cather's quotation from Rossetti's two-hundred-line poem? Doing so does not in every respect help harmonize the two epigraphs. In the portions not cited, it is, for instance, stated that goblin fruit is not “vended in any town”—that is a flat contradiction of the image making Rome the “fairy palace” of art. And what about the possibility that “The Goblin Market” is about an experiment in Lesbianism ending with the women involved (the two “sisters”) settling down to a more conventional life as wives and mothers—is that possibility also to be taken into account?⁴⁸ As we have seen, Cather's discussion of the poem in an early article focuses on the passions it alludes to and via a brief and negative critique of Mrs. Browning leads straight ot a panegyric of Sappho.⁴⁹

Obviously caution is of the essence in restoring elided portions in either text cited by Cather. She is very cautious herself in indicating the content of her book. There is every reason to think that she knows what she is doing and that the omissions in both epigraphs serve the purpose of rendering the suggested over-all theme conveniently vague—a kind of catch-all. The vagueness of her original conception is best measured by what happened in 1920 as she put together her second volume of short fiction: Four of the Troll Garden stories were with very minor revisions transferred to Youth and the Bright Medusa.

In spite of the intentional vagueness blurring the themes suggested by the epigraphs, it can, however, be argued that the Kingsley text is somewhat more important as a thematic hint than the lines from “The Goblin Market.” The Roman and the Teuton is alluded to in the title as well as in one of the epigraphs. Moreover, the stories themselves seem to fit the opposition seen by Kingsley a little better than the danger alluded to by Rossetti. But the point is hardly worth pressing. As we shall see, the relation between the metropolis and the provinces varies quite a bit and does not always remain within the spectrum suggested by the epigraph from Kingsley when Cather's elisions have been restored. This phenomenon again certainly has something to do with the fact that the basic problem aired in the stories is modern rather than classical. They deal with the ambiguities surrounding artistic aspiration.

In terms of classical-humanist values, the stories included in The Troll Garden are, like her earlier fiction, of varying merit. The over-all view of the human condition reflected in Cather's first collection of stories is, however, too somber to be called Hellenic. The central idea, the basic incompatibility of life and art, is not exactly a throw-back to the personal pessimism of the volume of poetry she published two years earlier, but it has little in common with the basic optimism of stories like “Resurrection” and “The Treasure of Far Island” or the energetic and cheerful spirit of her early articles and reviews. There is, one might say, a curious contradiction between the unclassical philosophy of The Troll Garden and the author's insistent use of classical allusions.⁵⁰

On the other hand, the work of an artist is not to be judged solely, or even chiefly, on the basis of the message it conveys. In gathering seven stories for her first book, Cather certainly must have considered the aesthetic effect of each story as well as the degree to which it might fit an over-all theme; she must have been convinced that the book represented some of her best work to date. Critics tend to agree that it contains some fine stories, although a few are not so good. It seems fitting … to pay special attention to the relation between her use of the classics and the artistic level of each story. What is Cather able to do with the classics at the age of thirty? The answer will have to be that she has not achieved unerring mastery in her handling of classical allusions and references. The result continues to vary from case to case. The most striking thing is the close correlation between the skill she shows in her use of the classics and the over-all effect of each story. The best stories are those in which one sees the first signs of a new, more subtle allusive technique.

Having already discussed in a general way the place of the individual pieces within the whole, I now want to deal with the seven stories in The Troll Garden roughly in the order in which I would place them in terms of artistic merit. I shall begin with the weakest tale: “Flavia and Her Artists.”

Its weakness as a work of art does not deprive the story of interest. Among the numerous classical references in “Flavia and Her Artists” one must count the name of the central figure. The name “Flavia” appears in some non-classical contexts in Cather's day; it is, for instance, the name of the heroine of The Prisoner of Zenda, a book repeatedly mentioned in the early articles and reviews. Most readers are, however, more likely to think of Rome and the imperial Flavian dynasty when they see this name.⁵¹ As Bernice Slote points out, the story is “permeated with allusions to the Rome of the Flavian emperors, and with its atmosphere.”⁵²

Slote is vague on the details of the Flavian connection, limiting herself to wonder if the name of one of Flavia's guests, “the epigrammatic M. Martel,” might not be intended to remind us of Martial. That may be a somewhat fanciful idea, but it is possible to see not a few allusions to Juvenal, another poet of the early imperial age who makes one of the Flavian emperors—Domitian—a target of his satirical shafts (after the target's disappearance). The phrase rarae aves applied to Flavia's most appreciated guests is simply the plural of a rara avis appearing in Juvenal's sixth satire.⁵³ The fact that the original version of the story has an impossible aves rares (152) may seem to suggest that Cather did not know Latin well enough to read Juvenal in the original. But one cannot be sure; she may certainly have read him in a bilingual edition, and there is an impressive convergence of indications that she actually is alluding to Juvenal as well as to his age in “Flavia and Her Artists.” Not only does Cather come down on Flavia Malcolm with something like Juvenal's saeva indignatio; the Roman poet is himself delivering a scathing indictment of women with literary and cultural pretensions in the portion of the sixth satire where the phrase rara avis appears. Nor is that all: two lines after this phrase, Juvenal mentions Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, also referred to in Cather's story.

Cather's Flavia is an energetic woman from “Prairie Avenue” in Illinois who is striving to maintain a kind of salon—or, rather hôtel—where Kulturarbeiter from all over the world can gather for conversation under her auspices. This haven for artists is located on the Hudson, not far from the metropolis of the Empire State, and is indeed described in terms that call imperial Rome to mind (152). Flavia is about to reach her goal—establishing herself as the heart and soul of an “august” circle of famous men and women—when it is discovered that the most august of them all, Mr. Roux, has denounced Flavia as a fake in a newspaper review. This leads to the intervention of Flavia's long-suffering husband (who, we have been told, would have preferred to build a house in the Michigan woods). His drastic course of action is compared to Odysseus' returning home and making short work of the suitors of his wife (170). His belated expense of energy spells the end for Flavia's “House of Song.”

We might see “Flavia and Her Artists” as a satire on a “forest child” impressed with the “troll garden” and unsuccessfully trying to conquer and control its inhabitants, some of whom jealously guard their secrets. The evil Mr. Roux is a Frenchman, that is, a Latin. On the other hand, the Kingsley pattern is far from clear. Especially confusing is the description of one of the “trolls,” Frau Lichtenfeld, as a “refugee from Walhalla” with “heavy, Teutonic features” and dressed in an attire which produces “an effect of barbaric splendor” (151 and 157).

The author's way of using classical references within the framework of Juvenalian satire also leaves much to be desired. By and large, their function is to suggest sophistication on the part of the two persons who serve as observers of Flavia. Chief among these is a youngish woman called Imogen, who like Cather's beautiful friend Dorothy Canfield has “decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at the Ecole des Chartes.” But there are also frequent comments by a somewhat older, mannish character who likes to be called by a male name, “Jimmy,” and wears a dark blue-and-white necktie as if to remind one of the author herself.⁵⁴ Invited to Flavia's house to witness her success, they immediately hit it off in a conspiratorial manner and proceed to “laugh” behind their hostess' back. This backfires, however; the reader cannot help feeling that they are not as nice as Flavia. Moreover, the classical quotations used in the attempt to make her look ridiculous tend to cast doubt on their alleged superior education and good sense. Thus Imogen, the philologist, must be held responsible for the rares aves gaffe. Jimmy's comparison of Flavia to the mother of the Gracchi is also inept; so far as we know, the widowed Cornelia did not bring her children up to be her “intellectual companions.”⁵⁵ Even worse is Jimmy's suggestion at the very end that Imogen, if she sees any of Flavia's artists in town after their sudden departure, should tell them that she had “left Gaius Marius among the ruins of Carthage.” Here Cather is manifestly plagiarizing the ending of “The Way of the World,” and this reference to the exiled Roman general is not more appropriate than the previous one.⁵⁶

In view of the general awkwardness of “Flavia and Her Artists,” it may seem temerarious to couple it with “A Death in the Desert,” a story that Cather thought good enough to include in Youth and the Bright Medusa. But the lavish use of classical references in “A Death in the Desert” is actually almost as inept as it is in the story I have just discussed. Moreover, Cather herself was never quite satisfied with it, and one may note that the number of classical references grows smaller with every new edition of the story. The Troll Garden text is already a revision of an original version that appeared in Scribner's.⁵⁷ As for the 1920 story, the author disparages it as honest but immature in a 1926 letter to Wagenknecht.⁵⁸ She suppressed it entirely in the 1937 library edition of her works. The fact that she kept it around for so long suggests that it held some personal symbolism for her—possibly her old fear of dying in the corn-fields lingered on long after she had become a resident of New York.⁵⁹

The central character, although not the central intelligence, in this story is Katharine Gaylord, a Wagner soprano who after a promising early career in New York and a tour of Europe contracts tuberculosis and withdraws to her native Wyoming. The dry desert climate fails to improve her health, and one gathers that her demise is being hastened by her unrequited love for the incomparable but married composer. Adriance Hilgarde, still lingering in far-off Europe. By a curious coincidence, Adriance's brother Everett happens upon the Wyoming scene; he is, in fact, the observer from whose point of view the story is told. Everett was once in love with Katharine—indeed still is—and since he resembles his brother, she welcomes his attentions. He is allowed to comfort and worship her during her last days.

It will be agreed that the plot seems contrived. There is also something naive and self-conscious about the treatment of art and artists in “A Death in the Desert.” As for the classical references, they are not always ill-chosen as such, but even the best ones lose much of their potential effect because of the mentioned flaws in the over-all conception. Take, for instance, one of the questions Katharine wistfully asks Adriance's visiting brother about what is going on in New York: “Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather”? (206). The flippant tone and the mass of other questions in which this allusion is buried prevent one from seeing it as a poignant anticipation of the successful use of Saint-Gaudens' sculpture as a symbol of female aspiration in My Mortal Enemy. Another example of the same problem is the seeming allusion to a passage in De Rerum Natura in Katharine's comment on the new sonata by Adriance that Everett plays for her: “This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the racecourse, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me. Ah God! The swift feet of the runners!” (213). Such a use of Lucretius' discussion of permanence and mutability fits the theme of the story well, but the effect is marred by the theatrical-hysterical atmosphere.⁶⁰

All of the classical references in the 1905 version “A Death in the Desert” suffer because there are so many of them. “The things that make up Katharine's life are all Greek to me,” says her self-disparaging Wyoming brother (203); and it does seem that things Greek (and Latin, too) make up a large part not only of her life but of that of the man for whom she lives. Adriance became famous overnight when he published a cantata called “Proserpine”; Katharine remembers that a contralto “had once said of him that the shepherd boys who sang in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde” (209); she recalls a visit she once paid him in Florence: Sick, despondent, and expecting his wife to return after a trip, he was seated in the library, “a long, dark room full of Latin books. …” Katharine's own personality is also largely described in terms of classical themes. In the first version of the story, Adriance's complex-ridden brother compares her to a Greek goddess: “That sixth sense, the passion for perfect expression, and the lustre of her achievement were like a rosy mist veiling her, such as the goddesses of the elder days wrapped about themselves when they vanished from the arms of men.”⁶¹ Although this passage was deleted in 1905, Everett is still allowed to remember that her eyes used to glow “with a sort of perpetual salutat to the world.” He is also able to recall that there had always been “a little of the imperatrix” about her, a statement which makes Katharine's subsequent mention of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire look like an allusion to her own decline and imminent demise as much as a recognition of the erudition of the local parson (204—206).

Even more than in “Flavia and Her Artists” (there is no irony involved), the classical references in “A Death in the Desert” are supposed to be a mark of sophistication. It is interesting to find Cather still using them for that purpose in her early thirties. Yet even a classical scholar may not be happy to see the author throw in—for good measure, as it were—some lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and having Katharine bid Everett farewell in the words with which Brutus says goodbye to Cassius before Philippi.⁶²

In “The Marriage of Phaedra,” the problem is different. Instead of an excessive number of disparate and sometimes superficial classical references, we are here faced with a story in which one single classical theme appears to be central and yet in some ways hard to relate to the over-all argument in a precise manner. One is willing to try because the theme in question is an interesting one. It can be related to Cather's earlier-mentioned review of Sardou's play Gismonda. There, it will be remembered, she dwells on what she sees as its central theme—the struggle within the early-medieval queen between the spiritual exigencies of the Christian religion and the pagan power represented by Venus; she makes it clear that she prefers the passions of Gismonda's world to “the severely classic Athens” of an earlier day. The same turbulent medievalism marks the painter of the “Portrait of Phaedra,” Hugh Treffinger. Of plebeian extraction and deprived of formal schooling, he is said to have drifted into the night classes of the Albert League, where he acquired a “superficial, yet facile, knowledge of the classics” and steeped himself “in the monkish Latin and medieval romances which later gave his work so naive and remote a quality” (225). The conflict between the spirit and the senses reflected in this orientation is explicitly stated: “There was in him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism which lay well back of the fifteenth century” (225).

The great painting he worked on for so long and left unfinished at his death is the best illustration of this quality: “As in all Treffinger's classical subjects, the conception was wholly mediaeval. This Phaedra, just turning from her husband and maidens to greet her husband's son, giving him her first fearsome glance from under her lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos. The daughter of heathenesse and the early church she was; doomed to torturing visions and scourgings, and the wrangling of soul with flesh. The venerable Theseus might have been victorius Charlemagne, and Phaedra's maids belonged rather in the train of Blanche of Castile than at the Cretan court. In the earlier studies Hippolytus had been done with a more pagan suggestion, but in each successive drawing the glorious figure had been deflowered of something of its serene unconsciousness; until, in the canvas under the skylight, he appeared a very Christian knight …” (225).

This is certainly a striking conception, and it makes sense as the masterpiece of a pre-Raphaelite painter. But what is its larger significance in the story? Does not the strength of Lady Treffinger's hatred of this picture suggest that there is a connection between the conflict it portrays and the artist's disastrous marriage, a connection going well beyond the stereotype making the wife jealous of her husband's work? In pondering this question, one is not necessarily helped by the author's adoption of a Jamesian technique. Basically, “The Marriage of Phaedra” is written from the point of view of Macmaster, a painter who is normally a resident of France but has come to London because he wants to write a book about Treffinger. But the point of view often shifts to that of James, the family servant, who has much to report about his former master and Lady Treffinger and wants to prevent the latter from having the masterpiece shipped off to Australia. There is also a lengthy interview with Lady Treffinger's sister. None of these observers can be called “a large, lucid reflector,” and in the case of James, the author seems more interested in his colorful personality than in building him up as a reliable witness. The shifting focus therefore results in obscurity rather than illumination. We never get close enough to the center of the storm supposedly reflected in Treffinger's unfinished picture.⁶³

It would, however, appear that the frigid and rather empty Lady Treffinger—a kind of caricature of Cather's “severely classical Athens”—is the very opposite of the medievalized Phaedra imagined by her husband. He in his turn is, to the extent that he indulges the sensual-brutal side of his own medievalism, the opposite of the chivalrous knight ready to help Phaedra in the struggle between spirit and flesh raging in the depths of her soul. The knight is no doubt the painter's ideal self-projection, and one may assume that the painting represents what he would have liked his marriage to be like.

One can also dimly make out that in real life the painter and his lady become each other's victims and that their conflict may be stated in two ways against the background of the Kingsley epigraph. Thus Treffinger can be seen as the barbarian knocking at the door of the fairy palace of art. It is true that he was born in a great metropolis, but he was not born into London society; he enters it by breaking with the traditions of his class and becoming a painter and by marrying the aristocratic Ellen Percy, the incarnation of classical beauty.⁶⁴ The pre-Raphaelite painter finds out that he does not know how to deal with the marble serenity of his wife. As a result, his medievalism takes a crude form; he tries to crush her, as her sister tells Macmaster (223). The latter imagines what happened in surprisingly sexual terms: “He could well understand what manifold tortures the mere grain of the man's strong red and brown flesh might have inflicted upon a woman like Lady Ellen” (228). But then again the wife can to some extent be seen as the barbarian or forest child. Ellen Percy met Treffinger when she was still an innocent girl straight from the family country seat. Her sister calls her a romantic soul. She was dazzled by the brilliant Treffinger and yearned to be admitted to the fairy palace of art. But she is not flexible enough to cope with the situation that arises when he turns out to be a troll. Subjected to Treffinger's “torture,” she allows herself to grow harder. Far from being crushed, she breaks him in the end. Her final triumph is to send “The Marriage of Phaedra” into down-under oblivion.

I shall now turn to a couple of pieces the main point of which is only too clear: “The Sculptor's Funeral” and “A Wagner Matinee.” They are skilfully executed although, in my judgment, not exactly great. Both contain just a few, very explicit, classical references. Comparing the way they are used with “Flavia and Her Artists” and “A Death in the Desert,” one might be tempted to say that the number of such references in the Troll Garden stories tends to be inversely proportionate to their artistic merit.

First “The Sculptor's Funeral.” This story fits the Kingsley pattern to a certain extent. It deals with the experience of a provincial Western boy, Harvey Merrick, who went East to become a great artist. The people of his home town assume that his early demise is due to the corrupting influences of urban Bohemia. On the other hand, the reader is given to understand that his tragedy began much earlier, at home: The one Kansan who realizes Merrick's greatness, a lawyer destroyed by his milieu, tells the disciple who is escorting the sculptor's body home: “The old woman [the artist's mother] is a fury; there never was anybody like her for demonstrative piety and ingenious cruelty” (178). The metropolis, by contrast, has helped him triumph in his chosen pursuit, although this is not understood by his fellow Kansans.⁶⁵

It is in order to make this point that the chief classical references are introduced. Some time before he died, Merrick anticipated the scene later witnessed by his disciple, noting: “The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say I shan't have much to fear from the judgment of God. The wings of the Victory, in there … will not shelter me” (182). As he utters these words, the sculptor makes a weak gesture toward his studio, and we may assume that he is referring to a copy of the Victory of Samothrace, one of the show-pieces of the Louvre.⁶⁶ The image symbolizes his success as an artist as well as the classical background of his art. So does the classical allusion that remains to be mentioned: the palm leaf on his coffin. The puzzling effect this sign of victory has on his relatives and the other townspeople relates their ignorance of the classical tradition to their inability to understand that the fact that his body is returned to them in this manner does not mean that he is a failure.

The harsh criticism of the brand of Christianity represented by Merrick's mother and the other people around his coffin, delivered by the artist's one defender in his home town, may be said to reinforce the classicism of “The Sculptor's Funeral” in a manner reminiscent of “Eric Hermannson's Soul.” We must not, however, exaggerate the classical inspiration of this story or look for it in the wrong place. I do not believe it is a good idea to suggest that the literary merit of the story may be due to the influence, conscious or subconscious, of the classical pastoral elegy.⁶⁷ Rather, it should be linked to the saeva indignatio of Juvenal already glimpsed in “Flavia and Her Artists.” It is, in fact, only as satire that this story can be considered effective. Viewed in any other light, it is too one-sided in its negative depiction of life in general and Western life in particular.

“A Wagner Matinee” has a good deal in common with “The Sculptor's Funeral.” In this case, too, the relevance to the “restored” text of Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton is a bit vague, although the difficulty is of a somewhat different nature: The heroine, Aunt Georgiana, is a former musician. Aged thirty, she resigned from a position at the Boston Conservatory to marry a handsome but shiftless lad from her Western village. He fathered six children upon her in addition to subjecting her to back-breaking labor in an early pioneer setting. Already old and broken, she returns to Boston to attend to some legal business, and a young relative (the observer-narrator) invites her to go to a Wagner concert with him. To hear good music well played once more after thirty years of Western farm life is too much for her in the end, and she breaks into tears. She does not want to go home. Yet the point is hardly that she is succumbing to the dangerous influences of the big city after having escaped them for so long. Boston is viewed as a very good thing in this story.

As in “The Sculptor's Funeral,” the classical references are few but not to be ignored in looking for the point of the story; the classics, it is intimated, are also a good thing. As Clark, the young narrator, stealthily observes his aunt during the performance of the prelude to Tristan and Isolde to see what her reaction might be, he notes that she remains “silent upon her peak in Darien”—an obvious allusion to the sonnet in which Keats compares his discovery of Chapman's Homer to Cortez' first look at the Pacific Ocean (240). This allusion is not entirely arbitrary since Aunt Georgiana's classical background is stressed.⁶⁸ The narrator says he owes her “most of the good” that ever came his way; more specifically, she helped open up the world of the classics to him. Clark remembers her hearing him “recite Latin declensions and conjugations” at the time when he was staying with her on the farm and gently shaking him when his drowsy head “sank down over a page of irregular verbs.” Her “old textbook on mythology” was the first to enter his “empty hands” (236-237).

Clark proceeds to speak of how she also taught him to play a small parlour organ she had, and since he mentions an old score with the Greek-sounding name Euryanthe in this context, a connection is established between classical studies and the enjoyment of classical music.⁶⁹ As if to underline the connection, Cather's old tendency to view her own Protestant background as hostile to life and art also surfaces in various unfavorable references to religion, like the sardonic suggestion that a submissive female piety was part of Aunt Georgiana's problem: “She was a pious woman; she had the consolation of religion and, to her at least, her martyrdom was not wholly sordid.” Later on, the church she belongs to is specified; we learn that for many years she had only been able to listen to “Gospel Hymns at Methodist services” (241).

In spite of this apparent commitment to a classical humanism, the story cannot be considered completely satisfactory from that point of view for reasons that also prevent one from feeling that it possess the highest artistic merit. Without being satirical, it paints a picture in black and white, or rather in black alone: unlike Harvey Merrick, Aunt Georgiana is not granted any kind of victory, only utter defeat. The description of her Western scene could have been the inspiration of Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. And yet she has helped open up the prairie and make it safe for civilization. She has given birth to and raised six children. These are the very kinds of achievement celebrated in some of Cather's later works, but in “A Wagner Matinee,” they count for nothing. The ultimate symbol is the worn-out wedding-ring on a bent and knotted finger (240).

The one-sidedness of this attack on romantic love and the frontier is such that one might easily assume that the author was off balance when she wrote it; there is no perceivable distance between her and her narrator. But “The Garden Lodge,” written about the same time, belies that impression. This story is also about a woman who withdraws from the troll garden, but it presents a very balanced picture and betrays an acute awareness of the ambiguities and compensations of life. The explicit classical references are reduced to a minimum, but there are also some significant “hidden” ones. The story has considerable merit as a work of art.

The heroine of “The Garden Lodge” is Caroline Noble, a pianist who grew up in Brooklyn and at the age of twenty-four married a pleasant and successful businessman fourteen years her senior. Her marriage reflects her desire to control her own destiny, developed as she saw her father and brother neglect all other duties in their ill-starred attempts to succeed as artists (the brother shot himself in the end). Caroline and her husband live very comfortably in a large house close to the sea but at some distance from the metropolis. Her life is coming along smoothly until the great singer d'Esquerré comes visiting and practices with her in the garden lodge. His genius and charm and interest in her as a woman conjure up romantic dreams of what could have been, dreams which pursue her even after he has left. When her husband suggests that it might be a good idea to tear down the lodge and put up a newer bulding, she balks at first because of the memories it holds. But she changes her mind after a night spent there during which d'Esquerré apparently possesses her in a dream.

The story was not included in Youth and the Bright Medusa; it has never been a favorite with critics. One suspects, however, that it is the heroine or the message they disapprove of rather than the art in this case. It is apparently possible to see Caroline's attitude as defeatist and her marriage as a surrender. The story has also been viewed as a panegyric of bourgeois life. But are interpretations of this extreme type really warranted by the text? The fact that both seem possible already suggests that the truth falls somewhere in between.

Consider the notion that Caroline Noble is a cowardly figure who accepts defeat much too easily. It is true that at one point after the singer's departure she feels that her “happy, useful, well-ordered life” was not enough, failed to satisfy, and was less “real” than the illusions pursued by her father and brother (195). Nevertheless, we find her laughing happily with her husband at the end of the story. Moreover, the portraits of the father and the brother who “tried” are clearly satirical, the satire reaching a kind of climax in the passage depicting the father writing a symphonic poem, “Icarus,” dedicated to the memory of his son, while leaving it to others to defray the funeral costs (189). As for Caroline's infatuation with d'Esquerré, she realizes that she shares it with all the women who flock to the Metropolitan. This category is said to include even “business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt far from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses” (193). But not least in her own case this feeling is a sign of lingering immaturity, an unrealistic desire to make up for the years she spent drudging to make both ends meet for her family: “She had observed drastically to herself that it was her eighteenth year he awoke in her … It seemed to her that ever since d'Esquerré first came into the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of life” (194-195).

Then there is the portrait of d'Esquerré himself, which suggests that he is not entirely worthy of being worshiped as an idol. He is definitely a dangerous goblin or troll. Under the glamorous facade of success he is disappointed and unfulfilled. He makes Caroline yearn to “make it up to him”; and while she realizes that this is an “illogical” impulse, there is at least a hint that he might have corrupted the wife of his host, had she been as forthcoming as Helen in the same situation. Fortunately, Caroline is really the very image of chastity. Cather may substitute the image of Freya for Aphrodite in preparing us for the self-control her heroine betrays at the most critical moment of the singer's visit, but Artemis, the classical opposite of Aphrodite, is alluded to in the later scene depicting her alone in the moonlight, dressed in a white night-gown, and struggling with the temptation to which she is subjected by his lingering “ghost.” It is only after she falls asleep that—to her own subsequent horror—she lets herself go.

There is absolutely no indication that Caroline has lost or suppressed anything essential in herself because she chose the good life over the hazardous flight of an Icarus. The very fact that d'Esquerré comes to visit and work with her suggests that she retains some stature even as an artist. She is also portrayed as the stronger of the two in some ways: He came “because Caroline was what she was” and because “he, too, felt occasionally the need of getting out of Klingsor's garden, of dropping down somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a cool head, a strong hand” (190).

On the other hand, it can hardly be said that “The Garden Lodge” is a reckless extolment of bourgeois life. The limitations of the lifestyle and situation chosen by Caroline Noble are made clear enough. What we have here is a careful balancing of two different ways of life which is different from the fatal opposition of the same ways of life in Alexander's Bridge. Another way of putting it is to say that reason, a human capability dear to classical humanism, here gets its due. Reason is a function of human intelligence which restrains us from acting in an impulsive and often in a foolish way. It is the voice of moderation that whispers, “In nothing go too far,” the motto quoted by Cather in one of her discussions of classical drama.⁷⁰

As we turn to the final story in Troll Garden, “Paul's Case,” the cognitive pattern changes drastically again; the excesses of Paul may perhaps be adduced in promoting the classical ideal of the golden mean, but there is no reason to think that preaching of any kind is part of the author's design. On the other hand, the tendency to replace explicit classical references with subtle allusion which we noticed in “The Garden Lodge” is even more pronounced in “Paul's Case.” What is more, this story is charged with hidden autobiographical meaning. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it heralds the coming revolution in Cather's narrative technique. Nor can it be doubted in this case that there is a very close relation between the effectiveness and artistic merit of the story and her use of the classics.

“Paul's Case” fits the Kingsley theme quite well. The hero is a provincial (Pittsburgh) high-school student who hates his situation both at school and at home but loves the glitter and glamour of the theatre and opera. Barred from Carnegie Hall and the theatres by his irritated father, the motherless youth steals some money and boards the train to New York, where for a few days he indulges in his favorite pleasures and luxuries. When he runs out of money, he kills himself by throwing himself before a train. Significantly, the description of his metropolitan revels highlights a bath he takes at the Waldorf Astoria—bathing was a favorite occupation of the Roman leisure class. To prevent us from missing the allusion, Cather depicts him covering himself with “a Roman blanket” as he steps out of his sumptuous bathroom (254). She also notes that he is misguided enough to think that he is “one of those fortunate beings born to the purple” (259) and that only money stands between him and the perpetual enjoyment of the fairy palace of art. What she is referring to is the imperial purple, in her early articles very insistently and very explicitly associated with the decadent phase of the Roman Empire.⁷¹

Almost forty years after Cather wrote “Paul's Case,” she says in a letter that the story is based in part on her memory of a student in her Pittsburgh Latin class, in part on the feeling she herself had about New York and the Waldorf Astoria at the time when she taught that class.⁷² Coming from Nebraska, Cather was even more of a provincial than Paul; yet her projection of her own feeling on her young hero is intriguing not only because she was already in her late twenties at the time, but because the story so obviously goes beyond the simple Kingsley pattern: It comes close to making the appearance of the word “fairy palace” in the Kingsley epigraph look like a pun of the kind one so often finds in the early articles and reviews, although the sexual ambiguity of fairies is otherwise only alluded to in the reference to Schubert's Erlkönig music in “Flavia and Her Artists” (167).

This complex story may be about the problems of the aesthetic life, as suggested by a German critic.⁷³ But the American critic Larry Rubin is certainly correct in noting that there is also a homosexual motif.⁷⁴ Indeed, the two themes are linked in a manner worthy of Ovid. Cather alludes to the story of Narcissus, the decadent boy who rejects the advances of Echo and ensconces himself in solitary self-adoration. I have already shown, in discussing “Jack-a-Boy” and the article about Ethelbert Nevin, that “jonquil” and “narcissus” are used interchangeably in Cather's writings. Here the reference to jonquils (and violets!) perfectly fits the context in which they are introduced—his traipsing around in his “new silk underwear” between trips to the theatre or opera (254). His narcissicism is thus neatly linked to his peculiar kind of aestheticism, so much more passive than Pygmalion's or Orpheus'.

Narcissicism is not quite the same thing as homosexuality, but the two conditions are related, as Ovid himself suggests. Moreover, this veiled and somewhat ambiguous classical allusion is supported by so many other hints that the relation in question is as hard to miss as the one between the Problematik of the aesthetic existence and the narcissistic-homosexual syndrome. Paul is said to harbor a secret he cannot look in the eye (255). He is insistently portrayed as effeminate. Women play no role in his fantasies—unless they are quite old, like a certain German soprano, “the mother of many children” (246). His female English teacher inspires in him “a physical aversion”; indeed he is, like Narcissus, wary of the touch of both men and women (244). There is the incident involving his incipient friendship with the “wild San Francisco boy”—abortive, it is hinted, because he had no use for women in their revels (257). Above all, there is his relationship with his father. His fantasies about his father killing him with his revolver can easily be taken as a suppressed desire to kill his father (249). From a classicist point of view, the most impressive aspect of Cather's treatment of the Oedipal theme is the manner in which she integrates it with the allusions to the Roman Empire in the one entirely explicit classical reference: As he runs downstairs from the picture gallery in Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh early in the story, he is said to make a face “at Augustus, peering out from the cast-room” and “an evil gesture at the Venus Milo. …”⁷⁵ Augustus is clearly a symbol a fatherly authority—of Roman power before decadence set in. The reference to Venus Milo also fits in: It echoes the mention of his physical aversion to his English teacher on the previous page.

In spite of the undesirable character traits of her young hero, Cather apparently went quite far in identifying with him. There is a letter she wrote Dorothy Canfield-Fisher at a time when they were both established novelists and Cather yearned to restore their old intimacy. In this letter, she speaks of how much she once loved Dorothy and suggests that such a love comes back, although altered—more chaste, more reasonable—at a mature age. In apologizing for her old behavior, which destroyed their early intimacy, she compares herself to the untractable Paul, adding in essence that she has since straightened herself out through the therapeutic effect of her writing.⁷⁶

Having said this, one has by no means exhausted the autobiographical dimension of “Paul's Case,” nor has one said everything that needs to be said about Cather's use of her classical background in projecting herself onto her fictional hero. In spite of the comprehensive metropolitan-Roman framework, the Mediterranean also plays an important role in the story. The denizen of grimy and smoke-palled Pittsburgh has an alternative dream—“his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine” (252). The blue water of the Mediterranean is again used as an image of the secret place in Paul's mind in the next paragraph, where we learn that he does not want to become a musician himself, only to listen to music—“float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.” As for the “perpetual sunshine,” it may here be taken as an allusion to Apollo, lover of Hyacinthus and Cyparissus. Note the final reference to the Mediterranean, as Paul throws himself before the train: “As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands” (260). The reference to “Algerian sands” may sound like an allusion to Gide's The Immoralist, published in 1891.⁷⁷ But both the sands and the sea associated with Emperor Hadrian appear along with Apollo in a passage from Ruskin's Stones of Venice quoted by Cather in an early article; and since Venice is repeatedly mentioned in “Paul's Case,” one is willing to wager that this is one of her sources.⁷⁸

Here, then, we encounter for the first time in Cather's fiction the symbolic use of a theme that also appears in the journalism, beginning with her 1894 exclamation: “The Mediterranean at noonday is not moral.” That passage is based on reading that early on caused her to associate this part of the world with a free and Dionysian approach to life; but her first-hand experience of the Mediterranean did nothing to dispel her bookish impression, witness the effusion inspired by her and Isabelle McClung's stay at Lavandou. The same theme will appear in other stories, but never more subtly or more artfully than in “Paul's Case.” Everything is perfectly integrated, and objectivity marries sympathy as if Dr. Cather were speaking.

LOVE IS A DREAM

Between The Troll Garden (1905) and O Pioneers! (1912), roughly her years with McClure, Cather published nine more stories, seven of which reflect her continued commitment to the classics as a writer of fiction. These seven stories also have a number of other things in common. Just like the Troll Garden stories, they deal with artists or artistic people. (Even the ambassador-narrator of “On the Gulls' Road” quite literally draws a picture of the woman he admires; Eleanor and Harold Forscythe in “Eleanor's House” definitely have remained at what Kierkegaard calls “the aesthetic stage of life”; Nils Ericson in “The Bohemian Girl” plays the flute and is well versed in the art of living.) As in a number of her earlier stories dealing with creative people, the sexual dimension of life is a central concern.

A difference between the stories … and those published in The Troll Garden is that the opposition between the provinces and the metropolis has throughout been replaced by a dichotomy between America and Europe. It is a Jamesian theme, and to the extent that Cather's real and personal subject matter is supposed to be Nebraska one may say that she is still indulging in the kind of “literary excursion” that Bennett finds her guilty of in stories like “Flavia and Her Artists” and “The Marriage of Phaedra.”⁷⁹ In my own view, however, her real and personal subject matter are the themes that she keeps dealing with regardless of whether the story is set in the Midwest or England or some other place. In these terms, love and sex in particular is “her material.” She is a troubled woman in the process of “straightening herself out” by writing fiction, as she herself retrospectively sees it in a letter to Dorothy Canfield-Fisher.⁸⁰

This function of her writing is having its effect on her narrative method. To be sure, the influence of Henry James is far from waning; several of the stories (notably “The Namesake,” “The Willing Muse,” and “Eleanor's House”) reflect it so far as the handling of point of view is concerned. Perhaps only one story in this group, “The Bohemian Girl,” can be considered entirely free from it. On the other hand, an examination of the classical allusions shows that the narrative pattern is changing. Her use of Jamesian observer-narrators notwithstanding, Cather is resorting more and more to the personal, symbolic-poetic way of writing fiction she is to use in her novels. This also affects her use of classical allusion. She no longer “sows with the sack,” to paraphrase Corinna's criticism of the early Pindar. Not one story is replete with explicit but often superficial and disparate classical references of the kind found in, say, “The Treasure of Far Island” or “Flavia and Her Artists.” A simple central theme may dominate, in the manner already tried in “The Marriage of Phaedra”; this happens in “The Profile” and in a sense also in “The Willing Muse.” More often, there is a pattern of a relatively few, often hidden classical themes. The explicitness of the early articles and most of the early stories is thus rapidly being replaced by what Bernice Slote has aptly called a “secret web.”⁸¹ This manner is in keeping with the increasing depth of the self-exploration begun in “Paul's Case” and continued during these years. Sometimes this depth is revealed in subtexts that do no nothing for the artistic coherence of the story.⁸² Yet at least two stories approach perfection.

In terms of classical-humanist values, the group of seven stories I shall be discussing reflects the uncertainties of an author who is not only still groping for the form that is right for her but in a sense also for personal sanity. There is much that is positive. “The Bohemian Girl” is impeccable. “The Willing Muse” satirizes the triumph of commercialism at the expense of excellence. “The Joy of Nelly Deane” succeeds in glorifying feminine beauty, friendship between women, and even motherhood. In the same story Cather comes down hard on life-denying religious bigotry while singing the praises of Aphrodite. Yet it cannot be said that classical themes are invariably used as part of a wholesome fictional argument. “The Namesake” is story of a bachelor artist who worships and identifies with the dead sixteen-year-old boy who bore his name. Cather's use of the classics is also characterized by what must be called a touch of necrophilia in “Eleanor's House,” “On the Gulls' Road,” and “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” in spite of insistent allusions to the immortals. One might think she wants to emulate Poe, a fellow Virginian for whom she shows great sympathy and admiration in an early article.⁸³ In these three stories, the object of affection is a beautiful dead woman. A man is supposed to be the worshiper in two of them, but, as we shall see, the virility of these men is in some doubt. Marriage is usually denigrated or ridiculed. There are several cases of arrested development. Above all, one notices a strange disenchantment with actual life and a flight into the might-have-been. If there is another theme common to all these stories, it is a tendency to construct dream worlds.

I shall take the stories in the order in which they first appeared, thus beginning with “The Namesake.”⁸⁴ This story is different from the others in that the dream is associated with the Americanism of the main character, not with a yearning for Europe. The narrative technique is rather slavishly Jamesian, with its two narrators, one of whom simply introduces and comments on what the central character narrates about himself. To be sure, there are some classical references which in themselves constitute a more or less integrated pattern, but there is also a subtext crying out for our attention and creating some uncertainty as to what the author is really up to.

The setting is the Paris studio of an American sculptor, Lyon Hartwell, often visited by other American artists. Hartwell is not only the most successful of them all, but also the most “American” in the eyes of his brethren. An object of special admiration in his studio is a new work called The Color Sergeant, “the figure of a young soldier running, clutching the folds of a flag, the staff of which had been shot away.” A Scout, a Pioneer, and The Gold Seekers are said to be typical products of this great man, “who had thrown up in bronze all the restless, teeming force of that adventurous wave still climbing westward in our own land across the waters” (139).

The congregated artists feel somewhat depressed on this particular occasion because one of them, Bentley, has been called back to the United States, and they are really there to bid him farewell. As Bentley exclaims that Hartwell is able to see America “like that” only because he is not really an American at all, the normally taciturn master both grants the point and refutes it by telling them, most apropos, how he belatedly found his American roots when he was called home at the age of thirty. Thus we learn that he was born and educated in Rome, where his father, following the example of William Wetmore Story, had settled in the hope of lifting the “willing, irridescent bird” of art from “its native bough” 140). His father was not very successful in doing this, but kept “chipping away at his Indian maidens and marble goddesses,” an unhappy exile until his death. Lyon Hartwell followed in his father's footsteps by becoming an artist himself, but did not achieve much until his grandfather's death caused him to return to his father's birthplace in western Pennsylvania to look after a frail maiden aunt. What he faces there is the grimy, polluted landscape and the energetic, though reckless exploitation of natural resources that are part of the author's own experience of Pennsylvania. Hartwell finds nothing he can relate to except for a portrait of an uncle who enlisted in the Union army and was killed in action at the age of sixteen—the model of The Color Sergeant. The body suddenly comes alive when his nephew opens an old leather trunk with his own name on it and containing, among other things, a copy of the Aeneid with the same name on the flyleaf (145).

This copy, on inspection, suggests that the young uncle was not much of a Latinist. But the Aeneid is obviously quite important in the story: “I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the Greeks believed, watched from birth over those marked for a violent or untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the shine of the morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing eyes looking straight before him, and at his side that grave figure, hidden in her draperies, her eyes following his, but seeing so much farther—seeing what he never saw, that great moment at the end, when he swayed above his comrades on the earthen wall” (146). Many things come together in Cather's symbolic references to the Aeneid in this story: Rome as Hartwell's birthplace; the idea of Empire taking its westward course (the theme-to-be of his art), and the “Roman” manhood incarnated by the boy he identifies with.

One can see how it all is supposed to work. In a moment of illumination the vision of his heroic and patriotic namesake with his copy of the Aeneid gives the Rome-born Hartwell a feeling of belonging in the land of his fathers: “It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me.” All of a sudden he becomes not only an American, but an inspired American: “It was the same feeling that artists know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of union with some great force, of purpose and security …” There are phrases here which anticipate Jim Burden's experience of union with the Earth-Mother in My Ántonia, where Virgil plays so important a role. But the allusion to the Great Mother is somewhat marred by previous references to the polluted environment. One feels a bit sorry for anyone who achieves union with the land described in this story. There is, in other words, an ironic lack of realism in the feeling that is said to sustain this expatriate. It is a dream.

Then there is the mentioned subtext, which cannot but bring the author and her problems into this ostensibly “authorless” text. One must perforce think of Hartwell's failure to identify with his father when one reads that he thinks there is a good deal of him in the boy's face, but that it is his father “transformed and transfigured” and that his young uncle seemed to have “possessed all the charm and brilliancy allotted to his family” (143-144). What is more, Cather makes the great artist who failed to identify with his father a bachelor concentrating on the depiction of glamorous male figures. By contrast, it will be remembered, the father whom he despises spent his life fabricating “Indian maidens and marble goddesses.”

Obviously there is more here than just another anticipation of Freud. Since the person serving as an idealized father figure is really a handsome young boy, there is a hint of the same-sex Platonic love which in the Phaedrus and the Symposium is said to inform all higher creative activities. It seems, in fact, that Cather has manipulated things to make the young uncle call to mind the ephebe involved in the Platonic scheme: The “namesake” is identical with the Virginian uncle killed in the Civil War with whom she so proudly identifies in the poem of the same name, and yet she has cut his age from twenty to sixteen in the story. It is another instance of Cather's old fascination with male love/friendship, with a special twist: The uncle is both the party whose youthful beauty inspires the older party with courage and the older man to whom the ephebe can look up as a role model.⁸⁵

The next story, “The Profile,” as mentioned, has a classical theme that can be called central.⁸⁶ It opens with a description of Circe's Swine, a picture done by a young German artist which becomes a subject of controversy at the Impressionists' Club in Paris. It is “a grotesque study showing the enchantress among a herd of bestial things, variously diverging from the human type—furry-eared fauns, shaggy-hipped satyrs, apes with pink palms, snuffing jackals, and thick-jowled swine, all with more or less of human intelligence protecting mutely from their hideous lineaments” (125). This conception is denounced as barbaric by an old, conservative painter, according to whom “the only effects of horror properly within the province of the artist are psychological.” The human body, he feels, is sanctified by the purpose for which Nature evolved it. It is also both decent and comely in its natural functions and attitudes. “But lop away so much as a finger, and you have wounded the creature beyond reparation.”

The relevance of this comment as a clue to the meaning of the story is underlined by the embarrassed departure of the central character, a painter from West Virginia called Aaron Dunlap. The remainder of “The Profile” focuses on the reasons for this departure. Dunlap has been married twice, both times to a woman disfigured by a hideous scar on her face. His first wife, a wealthy young woman from California, most closely fits the image of a human form wounded beyond repair, and there are added suggestions that her physical degradation is not without its psychological consequences. He is shocked by her disfigurement as she first sits to him and relieved when she casually suggests that they make it a profile—seen from the side she looks very nice. The girl has completely suppressed the pain caused by the cruel damage done to her good looks, and we are given to understand that her supreme “unconsciousness” has been bought at the price of an eclipse of the spiritual side of her being; her world is an entirely material world. At first her husband does not fully understand what has happened to her; he admires her unconsciousness, which he sees as a reflection of great personal courage. But he is subject to a growing feeling of uneasiness, of lacking intimacy, of being shut out. His situation becomes unbearable when she neglects their baby daughter, a sickly little creature that apparently reminds her of her own physical imperfection. Dunlap is more and more tempted to tell his wife to her face that her expensive “toilets” only draw attention to her deformity. When he finally does, she leaves the house and divorces him. Dunlap marries a young cousin of his wife, whose face is disfigured by the mysterious explosion of an oil lamp immediately after the latter's departure.

The Circe-theme is alluded to here and there in the depiction of the spiritual degradation of Dunlap's first wife. More than once, the image is that of a transformation into an animal. At one point Dunlap is compared to “a man who knows that some reptile has house itself and hatched its young in his cellar, and who never cautiously puts his foot out of his bed without the dread of touching its coils” (131). When he finally mentions the scar, she points him to the door, “her eyes as hard as shell, and bright and small, like the sleepless eyes of reptiles.” He goes to bed “with the sick feeling of a man who has tortured an animal” (134).

Strictly speaking, however, serpents are not among the animals featured in “Circe's Swine.” Why does Cather highlight this image and depart from the framework of the impressionistic painting described at the beginning, as well as that of Homer himself? Is it simply an instance of creative liberty? Clearly some other variations on the theme are non-classical, as when Virginia's smile reminds Dunlap of the distorted grins sometimes encountered in medieval art (128) or her disfigurement to the deformities which in fairy tales are “imposed by enchantment to test the hardihood of lovers” (129). On the other hand, it is virtually certain that another classical myth is superimposed on that of Circe in the mind of the author. As the Homeric myth enters Cather's tale through the influence of Victorian artists, so a more obscure classical story becomes part of it thanks to Cather's memory of Keats' “Lamia.” It is the story of a young Corinthian who marries a beautiful woman who is really a serpent. Keats specifically calls Lamia's head “Circean” (in the vague sense of dangerously alluring), and Dunlap's cruelty is paralleled by the sadistic feelings Lamia's apprehensive posture triggers in her lover.⁸⁷ (In the end, her fears are justified as she is returned to her ophidian nature through the intervention of the young man's tutor, the philosopher Apollonius.⁸⁸)

This mixture of sources is not a serious flaw in itself; pile-ups of convergent images are sometimes found in Cather's best stories. But there is some doubt as to the point or moral which the central classical image is supposed to help bring out (unless it is a pure horror story in the style of Poe). The stress on the commercial background of Dunlap's Californian first wife is likely to make some readers suspect a satirical intent—a suggestion that her materialism and lack of self-knowledge somehow mirrors the state of the modern society that produced her. Such a reading would be more or less in line with Homer's description of the life Odysseus and his men led in the palace of Circe. But there is hardly enough to go by in attempting to tie Cather to an interpretation of that kind.

Moreover, there appears to be a rival theme which is definitely not satirical. It involves the parallel between Virginia's suppression of her awareness of her cruel fate and Dunlap's own flight from the pain caused by his memory of the suffering inflicted upon the women of (West) Virginia, including his own grandmother, and mother, and little sister. He experiences happiness as a painter of beautiful and well-to-do Parisian women, but one cannot escape fate. His marriage to the unfortunate young woman opens the old wound that he himself has sustained, and “his early destiny” closes about him (130). In a sense, his wife can be viewed as a distorted and ironic image of himself: His flight has a spiritual dimension that hers lacks, but in the end his own resentment at finding his pain renewed triggers a cruelty in him that almost matches hers. It is all very ingenious if it is all intended by the author, as no doubt it is. Yet there is a vagueness in the conception and execution of this story that calls “The Marriage of Phaedra” to mind. Like that story, “The Profile” fails to fully engage the reader.

“The Willing Muse,” published in Century in August, 1907, is the story of another American artist destroyed by an American wife. In this case, however, the argument is very clear, and the satirical intent is obvious throughout.

The reference to the Muse in the title of the story identifies it as the chief classical image. There are also a couple of subsidiary classical allusions. Thus the male hero, a writer named Kenneth Gray, is originally from Olympia, Ohio. The juxtaposition of names sounds ironic, but the chief function of the classical name is to symbolize, along with Gray's primarily European orientation, a situation diametrically opposed to the feverish commercial pressures encountered by writers in New York City, where he ends up moving and where he lives after marrying. Although Olympia is not to be confused with Mount Olympus, Cather's choice of name certainly has something to do with her hero's refusal to descend into the market place—an idealism that makes him take his time in finishing a work, as if he had an eternity at his disposal. There is a mountain, and the suggestion of an aloof thinker, in the title of his first book, Charles de Montpensier (114). Besides, the image of Mount Olympus is glimpsed in the description of his friends' reaction to the work. This internal émigré had been working on it for years, and they were clearly expecting something Olympian. But the book he finally publishes at the age of thirty-five is only two hundred pages long; and, says the friend-narrator, most of his readers “must have recalled the fable of the mouse and the mountain.”⁸⁹

The muses are residents of Olympus, according to Homer, and Gray's friends are heartened by his more impressive second book. They are also pleased to hear that he is going to marry Bertha Torrence, a promising young writer in her own right: She if anybody should be able to inspire their old school-mate and help him meet their expectations. To the astonishment of his friends, however, Gray dries up “like a stockfish” after the wedding, while Bertha surpasses “all legendary accounts of phenomenal productiveness” (123 and 117). She produces an absolutely torrential stream of best sellers, each of them more best-selling than the previous one; and her husband, as the friend-narrator finds out when he visits them, is reduced to acting as if he were her secretary. Yet he is clearly more than that: “There was every evidence that she had absorbed from Kenneth like a water plant, but none that she had used him more violently than a clever woman may properly use her husband” (117). Somewhat later, there is a reference to “his varied usefulness to Bertha,” and we are told that the narrator-friend found her “taller, straighter, younger” than he had left her—“positively childlike in her freshness and candor” (120). It is a terrible awakening for Gray. Prematurely greying and losing all self-respect, he finally runs away to hide on the other side of the globe. Having to rely entirely on her own resources, Bertha for the first time fails to meet the deadline for her new book (121).

Never has Cather's use of classical imagery been more ironic. “The Willing Muse” stands on its head the relationship between a female muse and a male poet as pictured from Homer on. On the other hand, it respects the ancient and archetypal view of woman as the receiver of the male influxus. The story is one of many signs that Cather was not an ardent feminist.⁹⁰

“Eleanor's House,” published in McClure's in October, 1907, is another story that on one level is written in a Jamesian manner: It has an observer, Mrs. Harriet Westfield, and much of it consists of her conversation with the main characters and the running commentary on events with which she provides her husband. The plot, on the other hand, seems to have a good deal in common with Poe's “Ligeia,” the story of a man who spends his second marriage mourning the loss of his first wife, who in the end takes over the body of his dying second wife and triumphantly returns to him—in an opium dream. The male hero of “Eleanor's House,” Harold Forscythe, also idolizes his first wife, Eleanor, and spends his time missing her and half-expecting her to return to him. He keeps doing so even after acquiring a second wife (Ethel), whom he, in the words of Poe's hero, loves “but little.” Among other things, he tends to sneak off to stay at Fortuney, the place where he used to live with Eleanor, and where, so far as he is concerned, she is still alive. When Ethel, in the company of the observer, seeks him out in this sacred place, he is so outraged that he utters a terrible insult. But everything changes after the poor girl collapses on the floor of Eleanor's room and is later found to be pregnant. Harold now becomes a solicitous husband, apparently chastened by Ethel's suggestion that Eleanor would not have wanted him to treat her successor in that manner; in the end, he takes her back to America. Significantly his change of heart is explained in terms of a resurrected Eleanor: When Harriet, who has bought Fortuney, lets him know that he will always be welcome in the house where he was once so happy, he rejoins that he is not likely to return because Eleanor has come back to him “as much as she ever can.” Harriet innocently wonders if she has come back “in another person.” No, he says—“in another way” (109).

From the point of view of classical humanism, the improvement over Poe's ending is obvious. The story is, however, marred even in this respect by the observer's hysterical complaint that Harold is “giving up everything” now that he is taking his wife and children home to the U.S. (110). Both she and Harold emphasize his generosity. There is no indication that he loves Ethel for her own sake; he seems to be consenting to a great sacrifice in a last-ditch effort to become more like the man Eleanor wanted him to be, and remain united with her in that way.

A look at the classical background of the story will shed further light on this problem; it looms large in the description of what Harold is giving up—what his life with Eleanor was like. There are two different but closely related classical images, the first of which is the blue ether of Olympus, the heaven of Greek mythology. At the end of “The Treasure of Far Island,” two lovers oblivious of circumstances are said to be “as the gods, who dwell in their golden houses”; Harold and Eleanor remained in their golden house for ten years: “They had all there is—except children,” says Harriet. “I suppose they were selfish. As Eleanor once said to me, they needed only eternity and each other. But, whatever it was, it was Olympian” (98). The theme is followed up a page later, where we learn that Harold's and Eleanor's happiness had “kept them young, gloriously and resplendently young”; they had, in other words, been eating ambrosia. If they had not achieved much while doing so, they had at least “kept the edge of their zest for action; their affection had never grown stocky and middle-aged.” They moved around a great deal, but the marvelous part of it all was that the places they went to and the people they met “didn't in the least matter, were only the incidental music of their drama” (102).

The other, related, classical image is the Mediterranean. One of the places to which Harold and Eleanor went was a small fishing-village near Hyères in Provence. The description of their way of enjoying the place suggests the same unwillingness to accept the limitations of the human condition. After marrying Ethel in India and taking her to the vicinity of Fortuney in Normandy, Harold also likes sneaking off to Provence at the time of the year he and Eleanor had been there. Eleanor, we are told, cried when they left the fishing-village and vowed that they would be coming back every year “when the grapes were ripe.” This Dionysian urge was thwarted in her case by her sudden death, but Harold feels going back there is a holy rite—that missing her there is almost like meeting her there. The observer, pondering Eleanor's uncharacteristic crying as they left that place, concludes that it was not “the blue bay and the lavender and the pine hills” they were leaving, but “some peculiar shade of being together.” It did not matter to them that other shades of being together were available in other places: “They wanted it all. Yes, whatever they were, those two, they were Olympian” (102-103).

In forcing Harold to choose between her and Eleanor, Ethel actually forces him to accept limitations and descend into the sphere of mortality and generation. If the account of his life with his first wife were clearly satirical, we might look upon “Eleanor's House” as the tale of a man who is slow to mature but finally does so and shoulders some of the more obvious responsibilities of a husband and father; we might consider it as edifying as certain tales of James. But once again the attitude of the observer complicates things and makes the argument go two ways. Harriet, a great admirer of both Harold and Eleanor, is not only depressed to see Harold “giving up everything”; she tells her husband that living with Eleanor had been a maturing experience for Harold (98). In other words, he may have had a temporary relapse into immature behavior after her sudden death, but the observer does not consider his and Eleanor's “Olympian” way of life a sign of immaturity.

That is not all. There is a subtext which clearly involves the author herself and which does not suggest that Jamesian moralizing is part of her design. If Cather does not have her observer disapprove of the life led by Harold and Eleanor, it certainly has something to do with the fact that the fishing-village “not far from Hyères” is easily recognizable as Lavandou, the place where she spent an unforgettable week looking at the Mediterranean in the company of Isabelle McClung.⁹¹ Nor is it a coincidence that the author's first experience of “the Mediterranean” is also alluded to in “Paul's Case,” another story that fails to point a conventional moral. In this case, too, we are dealing with a dream that the author herself has dreamt. Indeed, there is no reason to think that she has given it up entirely by 1907; she certainly has not chosen to descend into the sphere of generation. What is more, the relationship attributed to Harold and Eleanor is definitely one that two women could have. Harold is male only in name.

Another character whose virility is in some doubt is at the dreamy center of “On the Gulls' Road,” published in McClure's in December, 1908, and reflecting the author's recent visit to the Bay of Naples in the company of Isabelle McClung. The story is narrated by a middle-aged ambassador who, prompted by a visitor, reminisces about something that happened to him when he was still young. The future ambassador met Alexandra Ebbling, the lovely young woman whose portrait stuns his visitor, on a boat cruising in the Mediterranean. Her situation did not in every way favor romance: She was married and had a little daughter; moreover, her health was declining—she was, in fact, already doomed and knew it. She was, however, neglected by her husband; this gave the future ambassador his chance. They became friendly right away; indeed, he fell in love with her, and the ravishing Norwegian seemed to reciprocate his feelings. But she did not listen to his suggestion that they run away together at the next port of call. She was very grateful to have experienced a sentimental attachment so completely different from her marriage, just as she was glad to have realized her old dream of seeing the Mediterranean; yet she felt it was her destiny to return to her native village in northernmost Norway. Needless to say, the narrator found this very depressing, but he did have his portrait of her, and later on, after Alexandra's death, he received another souvenir: a coil of her yellow hair, along with a white magnolia flower and some pink sea shells.

Bradford dismisses “On the Gulls' Road” as “romantic bathos.”⁹² And to be sure it may look like that if one reads it only for the ostensible meaning, or the meaning conveyed by means of a Jamesian technique.⁹³ But there is also a good deal of hidden, or semi-hidden, symbolism here, anticipating Cather's more mature style—not to mention a subtext that makes this undeniably flawed tale supremely interesting to the student of her developing thought and art. As usual, her classical orientation is particularly important at these deeper levels.

There are also a few explicit classical references: to Baiae, the favorite seaside resort of wealthy Romans (83); to the first line of the Aeneid—“of arms and men” (86); and to “the tidings of Actium,” a phrase that calls Antony and Cleopatra to mind, along with Horace's Nunc est bibendum (86). These Roman associations are not very important in themselves, but they do illustrate the classical background of the two chief characters, which again seems calculated to cause the reader to look for more significant connections with the ancient Mediterranean world. The essential message is conveyed through an underlying pattern of images from Greek mythology, most visible to the naked eye perhaps in the allusion to Homer's “purple sea” (85) and the vivid description of the city at the foot of Vesuvius, that gem of Graecia Magna (83).

It is not irrelevant that Cather, as mentioned, saw this part of the world in the company of Isabelle McClung.⁹⁴ She always associated Isabelle with Aphrodite, the goddess born out of this sea, and Aphrodite is doubtless the central image elaborated in this story. The goddess of love is alluded to again and again in the description of Alexandra Ebbling's physical appearance. She is, in fact, the first instance of a female type that occurs fairly frequently in Cather's fiction, always associated with Aphrodite: She has the yellow-hazel eyes of Marie Shabata and Lucy Gayheart (81, 82, 87); her yellow hair, on the other hand, makes her an anticipation of Nelly Deane and other heroines uniting these two physical characteristics. The narrator tells her that her hair reminds him of a yellow vine they call “love vine” where he comes from; this image also appears in later stories and novels, like “The Bohemian Girl” and Alexander's Bridge. On one occasion, Alexandra wears a pale green gown and is said to “come up” out of it “regally white and gold” (89); this certainly looks like an allusion to the well-known sculpture of Aphrodite in the Pompeii Museum, which Cather had just visited. The whole atmosphere is shot through with gold, Cather's chief symbol of love, as if to indicate that Alexandra-Aphrodite is here chez elle (83, 84, 85).

Perhaps one needs to have read a good deal of Cather to perceive all of this imagery, but one probably only needs some knowledge of Greek mythology to see how she ties the figure of Alexandra Ebbling to the birth of Aphrodite out of the sea. Early on, one will find this passage: “Her splendid, vigorous body lay still and relaxed under the loose folds of her clothing, her white arms and red-gold hair were drenched with sunlight. Such hair it was: wayward as some kind of gleaming seaweed that curls and undulates with the tide” (80). Later on, we learn that the narrator and the beautiful lady talked mainly of the sea, “for it was the substance of Mrs. Ebbling's story. She seemed always to have been swept along by ocean streams, warm or cold, and to have hovered over the edge of great waters.” It is true that she was born far north of the island of Cyprus, “but she was always reading and thinking about the blue seas of the South” (85). The image is followed up insistently until the very end, where we find the narrator taking his souvenirs out of their box and having Alexandra's hair fall over his arm, curling and clinging about his sleeve “like a living thing set free” and stirring under his breath “like seaweed in a tide.” The two “pink sea shells” make it almost impossible not to get the hint.⁹⁵

The significance of this imagery is fairly obvious. We have seen Cather clandestinely adapt the image of the goddess of love to her personal needs along the lines of Sappho, author of a hymn to Aphrodite for which she expresses great admiration in one of her early articles. The admirer of female beauty in “On the Gulls' Road” is ostensibly male, but in this respect, too, Cather may be said to be trying out a technique which she will often use later on in her career. Moreover, the young man whom Cather allows to worship Alexandra Ebbling, to the extent that this shadowy character can be grasped at all, seems even less male than Harold Forscythe in temperament. To play it really safe, the author makes it an impossible love; the beautiful lady is dying from consumption and hardly budges from her deck-chair. But Cather forgets this in the already cited passage describing the heroine's “splendid, vigorous body.” She forgets it again in her enthusiasm over her “splendid, vigorous hair” (87).

There is, however, more to the story than an image of Aphrodite looking out over her sea, more than an elegy of a beautiful young woman, more even than a covert celebration of feminine beauty in the spirit of Sappho. As mentioned, Cather stresses the idea of an affinity between Alexandra Ebbling and the Mediterranean, which made her dream of this sea from childhood on in her arctic fishing-village.⁹⁶ When she returns the smile of Naples, the smiling betokens a mutual recognition as in the poem “Recognition” also inspired by Cather's and Isabelle McClung's visit to the area; one is reminded that the poetic name of this city, used by Virgil in his epitaph, is that of a beautiful nymph, Parthenope.⁹⁷ Heine's The Gods in Exile is also part of the background. In the light of that text, Alexandra is Aphrodite in exile near the North Pole—the place where Niels Andersen finds Zeus pathetically “hidden among icebergs.” If the goddess is allowed to make a brief comeback in the guise of Alexandra Ebbling, it has to do with another point glimpsed in “On The Gulls' Road.” The story opposes two ways of life: One associated with the North Sea and the modern industrial world, the other with an older, more graceful mode of existence which Cather associates with the Mediterranean and especially with the Bay of Naples.⁹⁸ In her view, there is a sense in which we are all in exile from the latter kind of life, although we may be able briefly to dip back into it for an experience that will help us to live and die in the bleak modern world. The hero of “Paul's Case” has a vision of the blue Adriatic before “the picture-making mechanism” is crushed. Alexandra Ebbling's last thoughts will surely take her back to the smiling sea and landscape of Naples.⁹⁹

“The Joy of Nelly Deane,” the next story to be discussed, is both similar and different from “On the Gulls' Road.” In this case, too, the image of a beautiful dead female is projected by a an admiring narrator whom life separated from her but who seems to find some consolation and even inspiration in remembering her. Some of the classical imagery deployed is also familiar to the reader of the earlier story. But “The Joy of Nelly Deane” is superior from an artistic point of view. This again may be due in part to the circumstance that it was written at a time when Cather was beginning to disengage herself from her journalistic duties to become a full-time writer of fiction, but the different manner in which the story is written certainly also has something to do with it. The narrator-admirer is very explicitly feminine this time, and although “the thing not named” is present on each page, there is no subtext of the kind that does not entirely fit the ostensible meaning of the story. All levels are perfectly integrated.

The narrator got to know Nelly Deane because they once sang in the same choir although the latter belonged to the Methodist church while the former had some sort of Baptist background (which she soon enough put behind her). Everybody is enchanted with the beauty and good spirits of Nelly. In due time she is secretly engaged to a traveling salesman who impressed her with his air of knowing the world; but he leaves her in the lurch, and she ends up marrying a local man, Scott Spinny, who has long had his eye on her. The narrator dislikes the virile figure of Scott; on one occasion, she calls him “grim and saturnine” (62). He is also a Baptist, and he forces Nelly to join his church. After this event, the narrator, a college graduate and long-time resident of Rome, loses touch with her. Eventually she receives the news that Nelly has died, soon after the birth of her second child. On a visit to her Midwestern hometown, the narrator lavishes her affection on this child, who to her is the very image of the joy and charm she associates with the mother.

The central classical image that “The Joy of Nelly Deane” shares with “On the Gulls' Road” is that of Aphrodite. I have already mentioned that Nelly has the same kind of eyes as Alexandra Ebbling: The old Baptist ladies who are allowed to admire her “pretty figure” are also said to be proud of her “yellow-brown eyes, which dilated so easily and sparkled with a kind of golden effervescence” (56). The male infant which so emphatically engages our attention at the end of the story is more clearly than Mrs. Ebbling's little girl an allusion to Eros.

Like “On The Gulls' Road,” this story also contains some Roman references, but they are easily related not only to the “philosophical” point of the story but also to the central image. Nelly's first suitor and fiancé, says the narrator, “always reminded me of the merchants in Caesar, who brought into Gaul ‘those things which effeminate the mind’, as we translated that delightfully easy passage” (60). The association may seem whimsical at first sight. But the word “always” should be noticed: It suggests that Caesar's De Bello Gallico and the classics in general play an important role in the narrator's imagination, as they do in the author's.¹⁰⁰ More specifically she can be trusted to be aware of the special connection between Aphrodite and Julius Caesar—the latter broadcast the notion that he was a descendant of this goddess via Iulus, the son of Aeneas, who was the son of Aphrodite and Anchises. In Cather's story, the connection is reinforced through the obvious inclusion of the narrator's Aphrodite figure, Nelly, among those who were delighted with the easy Caesar passage. Thus we can see why the narrator should be sitting among the ruins of “the palaces of the Caesars” in Rome as she opens the letter announcing the death of Nelly.¹⁰¹ From her vantage point of the Palatine hill she cannot but look down on the temple of Venus which Julius Caesar erected on the Forum Romanum. No less important is the fact that Cather in this passage has the narrator dreamily remember the golden afternoon she and Nelly spent in an empty class-room together learning the names of the seven hills of Rome. The image of Aphrodite is flashed at us at this very moment: “In that place … how it all came back to me—the warm sun on my back, the chattering girl beside me, the curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes …” (64). The idea of a special link between classical studies and female love/friendship could hardly be conveyed in a more subtle-yet-clear way.

The nexus of Greek and Roman associations brings the whole Mediterranean world and what it morally stands for in Cather's mind to bear on the argument of the story. In view of the connection I have suggested between her classicism and her early religious position, the close parallel between her development and that of her narrator is worth noting. The admirer of Nelly Deane is like her creator a Baptist by birth and a classicist by choice. Indeed, the rejection of her religious background so obvious in Cather's early letters has never been more forcefully reflected in her fiction than it is in this story. It is actually suggested that Baptist doctrine is against human nature: The old Baptist ladies are said to have loved Nelly for what she was, “and yet they were always looking for ‘influences’ to change her”—make her less happy and gay and join their church (57). The description of the ritual immersion Nelly's Baptist husband makes her undergo could not be grimmer. As she is “buried with Christ in baptism,” the narrator feels pained and thinks: “It will be like that when she dies” (63). The thought is prophetic; this moment is, as it were, the beginning of the end for Nelly. Her marriage is not a happy one, and her premature death is due to a cold she contracts because her husband forces her to move into a new house before the plaster has dried (66).

If anything makes “The Joy of Nelly Deane” fall short of perfection in artistic as well as in human terms, it is the manner in which the author's hostility to her Baptist background fuses with an extremely unflattering view of adult males (they seem utterly irrelevant in the final analysis as our attention is focused on Nelly's little Cupid of a boy, the surviving image of her joy and charm). This pattern is not repeated in “The Bohemian Girl,” the long story that is in every way the crowning achievement in Cather's early career as a writer of fiction.¹⁰² Like “Paul's Case,” it is impeccable from a humanist point of view. It is also much less depressing, because in this case Cather writes without a chip on her shoulder—as a vates and teacher rather than a confessional writer bent on working out her personal problems. There is an unhappy marriage in this story, too, but there is no overt attack on the Christian religion (it does not seem to exist). What is more, at the center of “The Bohemian Girl” is heterosexual passion, and this time it is allowed to run its natural course.

The male hero is Nils Ericson, a Nebraskan farm boy of Norwegian extraction who is visiting his family after several years in Scandinavia, where he has secured a position with an important shipping line. He is portrayed as a superior man of sorts, someone who is very much at his own disposal and keeps his options open as long as possible. He does not even rule out the possibility of remaining in Nebraska, where he stands to inherit land. But what has brought him back is his erstwhile sweetheart, Clara Vavrika. She has not forgotten him, but she is married to Nils' fiftyish brother, an overweight farmer interested in local politics. The only way of solving the problem seems to be to leave the country together. But bad as her marriage is, Clara hesitates. She is not only an attractive woman but a complex character. Nils chides her for having lost her love of life and her capacity for joy; he describes to her the pleasures and glamour of Stockholm and other cities overseas. Clara is torn between her desire to live and her love of the land (the land as a metaphysical entity, not as an economic asset). In the end, though, she is carried away by Nils' power of persuasion. The two leave for the East on the Midnight Express.

Realistically enough, “The Bohemian Girl” contains only one explicit classical reference: Nils is on one occasion made to think of the “Herculean labors” performed by the old immigrant women (29). It is a cliché known to everybody and not very significant from a classicist point of view. But there is a well-integrated hidden pattern of classical allusions that could not be more important. Thus Nils Ericson is cast in the role of Pan; one of his attributes is a flute, and he plays it for Clara (24-25). “The more I thought about you,” he tells her on his return, “the more I remembered how it used to be—like hearing a wild tune you can't resist, calling you out at night” (30). This is the tune sounded by Hamsun in Pan. It is the tune that in the end literally calls Clara out to join her Norwegian at night.

Pan is even more known as a pursuer of wood nymphs than for his pipes. But he is not restricted to that class of females; and, as Bernice Slote has seen, “The Bohemian Girl” is in a sense based on a story mentioned in Virgil's Georgics—the story of how Pan successfully lured the moon goddess herself out into the woods to be his love.¹⁰³ Accordingly, this goddess—commonly identified as Artemis/Diana—is insistently alluded to in the portrayal of Clara Vavrika. Her eyebrows are “delicate half-moons” (14). She is tall and likes to dress in white (13 and 29). In an attempt to resist Nils, she once sits “frigidly with her white skirts drawn tight about her” (25). She is unwilling to bear her husband children and is generally not very domestic but likes the great outdoors, specifically “tearing about” on horseback (9).

However, there is another side to Clara, a side associated with Aphrodite, a goddess at which Pan is also known to have made a pass.¹⁰⁴ There is something in her that wants to resist Nils, but she is torn between opposite impulses, and the allusions to Aphrodite are as frequent as those to the moon goddess. We have, in other words, the same opposition of Aphrodite and Artemis as in the portrait of Margie Van Dyke in “The Treasure of Far Island,” except that the stress on the conflict between the two is as much greater as the study of Clara goes deeper.¹⁰⁵

To Nils Ericson, Clara has always been an Aphrodite image (whether he ever heard of the ancient goddess of love or not). Once he asks her if she remembers the time he squeezed cherries all over her clean dress—how mad she was when he made the juice fly all over her (27). Cherries are also an image of love in O Pioneers!, and significantly Clara's eyes are immediately afterwards said to have something fiery in them, “like the yellow drops of Tokai” in the brown glass bottle to which her father is treating them. Those are the eyes of Marie Shabata (and of Alexandra Ebbling and Nelly Deane). The fact that Clara's father so clearly represents Bacchus fits this pattern: as we have seen, Bacchus is not seldom the companion of both Aphrodite and Pan in Cather's early articles and reviews. Nor is the pattern broken when Nils and Clara gallop away under a full and golden midsummer moon (34). This moon is the symbol of romantic love, and no better image could have been found for the final ascendency of Aphrodite over Artemis in Clara Vavrika's heart and soul.

The greatness of “The Bohemian Girl” is not due solely to the author's skilful use of classical mythology. Among other things, there is that often unrecognized master-stroke: the epilogue in which Nils' younger and weaker brother Eric fails to follow in the former's footsteps and use the one-way ticket to Bergen sent him by mail. Eric is tempted by the dream of a glamorous life overseas, and he thinks he hates the land on which he was born as much as he resents being pushed around by his over-bearing seventy-year-old mother. But in the end he finds that the bond tying him to both are stronger than he is. In this manner, a pleasant balance is achieved. The victory of Aphrodite and Nils Ericson is not complete; Artemis and the land retrieve something of their own. It is, in fact, suggested that the land remains undiminished after the passage of the “two shadows” (38).

Yet even here the central importance of the “hidden” classical imagery is perceivable. Once it has been perceived, it is hard to imagine the tale without it. The very fact that it can be overlooked is paradoxically a triumph, the triumph of Cather's new poetic manner of using such imagery.

As noted, this manner is particularly suited for “confessional” purposes. An autobiographical dimension is undoubtedly present in this story, although it, too, risks going unnoticed because of the perfect functional integration of all themes. It is really only revealed through the persistence of the central theme—the conflict between Aphrodite and Artemis—in other texts, including her first novel. Thematically as well as technically, “The Bohemian Girl” has much in common with Alexander's Bridge.

OBSCURE DESTINIES

On completing Shadows on the Rock, Cather did not immediately turn to another novel. The very year in which the Quebec book came out, she wrote two of her most well-known stories, “Old Mrs. Harris” and “Two Friends.” In 1932, they were grouped with “Neighbour Rosicky,” written as early as 1928, to form Obscure Destinies, a title alluding to Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”¹⁰⁶

This is Cather's first volume of stories since Youth and the Bright Medusa. The dearth of stories written after 1920 is quite striking. When Cather selected the three mentioned stories for Obscure Destinies, it meant that she rejected two stories written in the twenties: “Uncle Valentine” and “Double Birthday.”¹⁰⁷

These two stories are not devoid of merit, but one can see why they were not included in the new volume. They are marked by the same elegiac tone; “Double Birthday” even features another allusion to Gray's poem.¹⁰⁸ Yet nobody really dies in “Double Birthday,” and in neither story are the destinies sketched as uniformly “obscure” as in the 1932 volume; Uncle Valentine in particular is supposed to have enjoyed a considerable reputation as a composer. Moreover, these are Pittsburgh stories dealing with the problems of artists or persons with a strong interest in art and may as such be regarded as throw-backs to the troll-garden or Medusa theme.¹⁰⁹Obscure Destinies, by contrast, takes us back to Cather's Nebraska and people of ordinary orientations and circumstances.

The book definitely has unity, and this unity is enhanced by a classical theme complementing and overarching the allusion to Gray's elegy: the idea that human beings live out their destinies under the moon. This idea is clearly connected with the Aristotelian world-view with its distinction between the superlunary sphere—the realm of eternity and immutability—and the sublunary sphere, the domain of mutability and mortal life.¹¹⁰ Such a theme goes well with the focus on obscure, humble, and earth-bound lives, as well as with the fact that all the central characters die.¹¹¹ Scenes lit by the light of the moon are used more and more insistently with each story, each story being somewhat less chatty than the previous one and more dependent for its meaning on symbolism and allusion. Other classical allusions, along with the treatment of religious themes, help make this book memorable for what it tells us about the relation between Cather's classicism and her humanism.

To begin with the first story, “Neighbour Rosicky,” it may suffer in purely artistic terms from the comparison with My Antonia that imposes itself because the hero and his wife are modeled on the same real-life characters as Antonia Shimerda-Cuzak and her husband. Perhaps some readers will also find the story a bit insipid; the happiness and satisfaction that this erstwhile resident of Prague and London ends up finding in his prairie home may easily seem too complete to be true. But in humanist terms “Neighbour Rosicky” has considerable merit. Rosicky is about to die from a heart attack, and we get to see this marriage mainly in retrospect; but what we see is a happy and harmonious marriage, not unlike that of the Auclairs in Shadows on the Rock, although rare enough in Cather's earlier fiction. Rosicky is not portrayed as childish, the way Cuzak is. There is no trace of the Earth Mother in Mrs. Rosicky.

The balance of the male and female principles reflected in the picture of Rosicky's marriage is also present in the manner in which the marriage of heaven and earth (Ouranos and Gaia) is made to bear on his ultimate fate. He is buried in a spot which is as unlike an urban cemetery as possible—a small, barely fenced-in graveyard in the open country with “nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-colored fields running on until they met that sky.”¹¹² It is the image of the marriage of earth and sky given in O Pioneers!, minus the suggestions that the marriage of man and woman is less worthy of celebration.

The author stresses not only that this is a fitting burial for a former city-dweller who has always longed for the country-side, but also and more specifically that he in this manner escapes the loneliness of walled-in city cemeteries. He remains in the midst of life: “The horses worked here in summer; the neighbors passed on their way to town; and over yonder, in the corn-field, Rosicky's own cattle would be eating fodder as winter came on. Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place. …” Here, too, there is an obvious classical connection. The ancients also believed that the dead would feel lonely unless buried in the open country just outside a city, by a road on which people travelled.¹¹³ The underlying idea—that man's only heaven is life on this earth, is of course also pagan, not Christian.

Superficially at least, “Neighbour Rosicky” may thus be said to end on an optimistic note; there is a good deal of emphasis on the idea that Rosicky got what he wanted out of life. But it is also possible to detect a touch of sadness in the implicit suggestion that there is no transcendent destiny in store for man. This suggestion is reinforced by the manner in which the sublunary theme is used in this story. Dr. Ed, the family doctor and an old friend, stops his car by the graveyard on his way to visit the bereaved family for the first time after Rosicky's death. It has just occurred to him that Rosicky is not on the hill where the house stands marked by a red lamplight but “here in the moonlight.” The whole scene surveyed and pondered by the doctor is, in fact, bathed in the light of the full moon; and while he may feel that the old man is still part of everything that goes on, his thoughts also suggest that man's destiny is confined to the sphere under the moon.

That Dr. Ed, a mere healer of the body, should get the last word and deliver the moral is significant in itself. That the moral he delivers should be what it is is a matter worth noting by those who wonder what Cather's religious stance may actually have been a year after the publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop and six years after she and her parents joined the Episcopal Church.¹¹⁴ Perhaps a doctor can indulge in reflections of this kind and still believe that good souls are destined for heaven, but there is no indication that this doctor does. Nor is there any suggestion that the realm of the transcendent was ever a concern of Rosicky's. On the contrary, he is retrospectively portrayed as a man determined to live life to the fullest even in adverse circumstances, and in this context his pagan freedom of behavior is contrasted with that of the only clergyman who appears in the story (48). The latter is very unflatteringly portrayed as embarrassed by the sight of Rosicky romping naked with his children in the horse tank. What we have here, preserved in only slightly mellowed form, is the critical view of (non-Episcopalian) Protestantism aired in the early articles and reviews.

Religion plays a somewhat more important role in “Old Mrs. Harris”; she is said to find it comforting to repeat to herself “The Lord is My Shepherd” and a passage in Pilgrim's Progress: “Then said Mercy, ‘how sweet is rest to them that labour’” (94 and 184). No doubt Cather is here simply respecting biographical truth; Mrs. Harris is, after all, her maternal grandmother. Even so, the old lady does not seem concerned with the hereafter; she belongs, like Rosicky, to this world. The focus, so far as she is concerned, is entirely on her interaction with the people with whom she lives, and more specifically on her last great effort—to make sure that her granddaughter, Vickie Templeton, will go to college.

Moreover, Mrs. Harris has to share the spotlight not only with the other members of the household but with the neighbors, the Rosens. They, interestingly enough, are modeled on a Jewish couple who were the Cathers' next-door neighbors in Red Cloud. In a sense they serve the same purpose as Dr. Ed in “Neighbour Rosicky”—that of bringing a non-Christian point of view to bear on the characters and events in the story. Cather makes a point of stating that the Rosens “belonged to no church” but “contributed to the support of all” (120). They are not above giving Christmas presents and participating in church socials. Their posture is given such emphasis that one cannot but think that this aspect of the story reflects another modification of the author's views on religion making her favor a universalism going beyond the pale of Catholicism and even ecumenism to embrace the Judaic religion from which Christianity sprang.¹¹⁵

Such universalism is incompatible with dogmatic beliefs of any kind. It says something about Cather's lingering negative attitude to non-Episcopalian Protestantism that the only thing resembling a spiritual experience in “Old Mrs. Harris” is attributed to the Rosens; without them, the Methodist church social would have seemed as insipid as the Methodist ice-cream social commented on in an early article. Before having ice-cream with their neighbor, Mrs. Templeton, the Rosens are said to take a walk along a road leading out through the sage toward the sand-hills surrounding the town (Skyline, Colorado). This is, incidentally, where the sublunary theme makes its first appearance in this story. The dunes of this desert country are bathed in the light of the full moon—it is always the full moon in Obscure Destinies. There is no mention of stars, and much stress is placed on the idea that both the sky and the moon seem to be “very near.” Mrs. Rosen is made to compare the skies and moons of different regions where she has lived in such a way that one gets the feeling that so far as she is concerned the essential quality of a “country” is revealed under the moon (121).

It is true that Mr. Rosen is credited with a tendency to “soar” a little on occasion, and his wife is said to revere him for his “transcendental quality of mind” (159); in the account of their desert walk he is portrayed as a man who finds all countries beautiful because he “carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness.” In this respect he reminds one of Cather's Quebec nuns, who are also said to carry their true home and country with them. But there is no indication that Mr. Rosen is religious in a formal sense, in spite of the Biblical allusion. Moreover, his alleged transcendentalism is tempered by another quality of his mind which causes him to impress on Vickie the truth of what “a great man” (Michelet) once said: “The end is nothing, the road is all” (158). The sentence neatly sums up the humanist ideal he and his wife come to represent through their life style as much as through anything they say. They, too, insist on living life to the fullest and astonish their neighbors by using their best china and linen every day (102). In accordance with this attitude, they also feel that old people should have something in their lives, rather than be shrugged off as ready for the next world; they are much nicer to old Mrs Harris than her daughter and son-in-law are (97).

Last but not least, the Rosens understand the importance of education on the road to personal fulfillment, unlike Vickie's parents, who are portrayed as charming but somewhat frivolous and comparatively empty people. The Rosens thus become the allies of Mrs. Harris in her desire to send Vickie to college; asked by the old lady, they agree to extend the loan that will enable the girl to take advantage of the scholarship she has received (169).

The Rosens' house is an education in itself, “the nearest thing to an art gallery and a museum” that Vickie has ever seen (103). In the description of it, the classics, including the sublunary theme, enter the picture in a more explicit manner. The display of art works in the Rosen home includes a number of watercolor sketches made by Mr. Rosen himself during a sojourn in Italy in his early youth, and great emphasis is placed on an engraving of “cypress trees about a Roman ruin, under a full moon.” It is mentioned again and described in more specific terms as Vickie comes to tell the Rosens that she has received a scholarship. Mr. Rosen is on this occasion seen against the background of the engraving in question: “The dark engraving of the pointed cypresses and the Roman tomb was on the wall just behind him” (157). The analogy with the moral pointed by the final scene in “Neighbour Rosicky” is clear. It is on this occasion that Rosen tells Vickie that “the end is nothing, the road is all.” His point is that she will not be disappointed if she seeks education for its own sake. To be entirely profitable, it must not be engaged in for some purpose which is basically extraneous to it, just as life itself can only be fully enjoyed if it is viewed as its own purpose.

This attribution of a classical background to Mr. Rosen must be related to Cather's suspicious attitude to the Methodist-Baptist environment in which she grew up (never associated with the classics in her works). An additional suggestion of a humanistic syncretism making room for Judaism occurs in the pages devoted to the Rosens' large library (102). Significantly, their collection of books includes a translation of Wilhelm Meister, a work also read by Niel Herbert in Judge Pommeroy's office along with the works of Ovid. Vickie has not yet learned any German, but she does know some Latin, and when she comes across the Dies irae hymn in a German edition of Faust, she translates it for Mrs. Rosen: “Day of wrath, upon that day / The world to ashes melts away, / As David and the Sibyl say.”¹¹⁶ The latter may not know any Latin, and the Latin text is irrelevant to classical-humanist concerns, but considering the general context one may surely view the conjunction of David and the Sibyl as symbolic of the fusion of Judaic and Hellenistic elements in Western culture.¹¹⁷

The third story in Obscure Destinies, “Two Friends,” may at first strike one as rather different from “Old Mrs. Harris” and “Neighbour Rosicky” in some ways. It, too, draws on early memories from Nebraska, but the imagination plainly plays a greater role in the account of the friendship of Dillon and Trueman than in the sketching of the Templetons and the Rosens or, for that matter, Mr. and Mrs. Rosicky. As the author herself noted in a letter to Carrie Miner-Sherwood, the purpose of the story is not to give a portrait of the two men but rather to try to capture what they suggested to a child.¹¹⁸ What she has in mind is quite clear from the text itself. On one level, the story may be “a literary farewell to Nebraska that allows Cather to objectify her emotions about Nebraska and deal with its loss.”¹¹⁹ But it is also her final word on male friendship, a subject that she had earlier explored in Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor's House, and One of Ours—not to mention the 1893 story “A Son of the Celestial.” “Two Friends” suggests that her fascination with this subject goes back even father.

Because of this focus, one is almost surprised to find that “Two Friends” was also published in Woman's Home Companion (1932). It is true that the story is told from the point of view of a female narrator, but Cather's conception is nevertheless somewhat out of line with the ordinary concerns of women: The narrator remembers herself as a pre-puberty girl eavesdropping on two middle-aged men as they get together to talk or play checkers in the evening. She tells us how she still literally dreams about them as an adult, still mourning the break-up of their friendship and yet finding consolation and moral support in the proved possibility of friendship such as theirs.

On the other hand, this aspect of the story must not be exaggerated. While women are left in the background in “Two Friends,” their relevance to the lives of men is not ignored in the manner of, say, Emerson's essay on friendship. Not only are both Dillon and Trueman portrayed as normal males—their normality is an essential point in the account of their relationship. Also noteworthy is the fact that their friendship is not bound up with any kind of transcendental yearning, as it tends to be in Cather's earlier treatment of the subject. In short, this story does not really contradict what I have said about her new philosophical orientation, although it reminds us that she never changed her point of view completely.

In accordance with the relatively down-to-earth treatment of male friendship, the importance of traditional religion is also down-played in “Two Friends” just as in the other two stories. Dillon is said to be a good Catholic, but this is relevant to the subject of the story only in that, like his being a good family man, it underlines his normality. The religious affiliation of Trueman, a widower, is left unspecified, but his poker-playing and association with “a woman who ran a celebrated sporting-house” suggests indifference (215-216).

The role of the classics, by contrast, is quite important in this story, not least in terms of subtle allusion and hidden symbolism. This technique, incidentally, fits the subject very well. Symbolism and allusion are oblique modes of expression; they conceal as much as they reveal. Another way of putting it is to say that symbolism is part silence, only part speech, and it is clear that Dillon and Trueman rely on silence in expressing their friendship for one another. They like to talk, but they can also sit for quite a while without uttering a word (205), and this again must be related to the fact that their friendship is one thing they are never made to touch upon in conversation.

Even the explicit classical references in “Two Friends” appear to contain an element of silence. Dillon is said to have “a bold Roman nose” and Trueman's ring shows “the head of a Roman soldier cut in onyx and set in pale twisted gold” (195 and 199). But only the reader familiar with Cather's earlier treatment of the subject of male friendship will be able fully to appreciate the significance of these seeming details in the over-all picture. They become important clues only if seen against the background of other texts showing the importance of Rome to Cather's ideas about friendship between men—The Professor's House showing St. Peter and Outland reading Latin poetry together; “A Son of the Celestial,” with its quotation from an ode dealing with the friendship of Horace and Maecenas; the essay on Shakespeare, in which the youthful author waxes lyrical in discussing the friendship of Caesar and Mark Antony. Clearly she prefers the more “manly” setting of Rome to connotations of “Greek love” in discussing this subject.¹²⁰

On the other hand, there are absolutely no signs of a lingering admiration for Caesarian ruthlessness of the kind found in The Song of the Lark. The author's concept of friendship has a good deal in common with Cicero's discussion of the subject in Laelius de amicitia. Scipio Minor, the friend of Laelius, was also a soldier, but he seems to have been much else besides, and the description of his friendship with Laelius given by Cicero is marked by the latter's humanitas.

In view of the slight interest in Cicero shown by Cather earlier in her career, it may seem hazardous to suggest an actual connection between her story and Cicero's treatise. Yet the parallels between the two texts are numerous, and they even extend to the settings. Dillon's and Trueman's friendship is associated in the narrator's mind with the warm summer evenings on which they would be found on the sidewalk outside the former's store, sitting in chairs whose backs form a half-circle to enclose the sitter (203); Cicero's Laelius, as he speaks of the friendship he once had with Scipio, is sitting on a hemicyclium (a semi-circular bench) in his garden. Perhaps this in itself could be a coincidence, but how likely is that explanation in the context of Cather's explicit association of her two friends with Rome and the manner in which she describes them moving through their little Kansas town: proud, erect, conscious of their superiority—just the way one would imagine two Roman patricians like Scipio and Laelius.¹²¹ Dillon and Trueman are “great men” to Cather's observer, head and shoulder above other members of the community, the “nervous little hopper men, trying to get on” (197), “the little, unsuccessful men” (224). Both are specifically referred to as “my heroes” and “my two aristocrats” (202 and 208).

At any rate, the concept of male friendship put forward by Cather in “Two Friends” bears a striking resemblance to the ideal relationship sketched by Cicero in Laelius de amicitia. There is the same stress on the non-utilitarian nature of perfect friendship. Because of their ability and success in life, Scipio and Laelius do not “need” each other; theirs is what one might call a pure relation. Trueman's and Dillon's friendship is also based on their success and raised above mundane concerns; neither would dream of trying to use the other or ask for a favor in business (225-226). Friends like these are thus free to admire in each other the quality that made their friendship possible in the first place; and in “Two Friends” no less than in Laelius de amicitia this quality is virtus. Dillon and Trueman, like Scipio and Laelius, may be dissimilar in their personalities and personal circumstances, but their essential quality is the same. Virtus attracts virtus, and the friend is another self.

The role of the moonlight in “Two Friends” is more difficult to relate to anything in Cicero's text. But this is where another classical theme comes in. In the modern literary tradition, the light of the moon is of course associated with romantic love, and there may be a romantic quality to Cather's picture of Dillon's and Trueman's friendship; it certainly has a mystic quality to it which she associates with the moonlight and more specifically with “the strong, rich, outflowing silence between two friends, that was as full and satisfying as the moonlight” (226). More than anything else, though, the insistent references to the moon calls to mind the sublunary theme met with in the two other stories in Obscure Destinies. The narrator concedes that her two friends may have met on moonless nights sometimes, but she remembers them all flooded by moonlight (210). There is also a suggestion that even friendship like theirs may be subject to the limitations of sublunary life. Thinking back on it years afterwards, long after it has gone to waste, it is still associated with the idea that man lives and dies under the moon: “More than once, in Southern countries where there is a smell of dust and dryness in the air and the nights are intense, I have come upon a stretch of dusty white road drinking up the moonlight beside a blind wall, and I felt a sudden sadness. Perhaps it was not until the next morning that I knew why,—and then only because I had dreamed of Mr. Dillon and Mr. Trueman in my sleep” (229-230).

A special application of the sublunary perspective in “Two Friends” is the occultation of Venus witnessed by Trueman and Dillon and the little girl observing them (212-214). The allusion to the Aristotelian conception of the universe here becomes virtually explicit. The wording strongly suggests that we watch spectacles of this order from below the moon, or the lowest of the spheres, with the sphere of the planets up above. On the emergence of Venus on the other side of the full moon, the narrator notes (italics mine): “The machinery worked fast. While the two men were exclaiming and telling me to look, the planet swung free of the golden disk … The planet did not seem to move, but that inky blue space between it and the moon seemed to spread.”¹²²

What we have here is certainly another way of placing Dillon's and Trueman's friendship sub specie aeternitatis as well as sub luna by having them view together this ennobling spectacle—the very kind that Cicero's Laelius says one needs to share with a friend in order to fully enjoy it.¹²³ The episode may also be supposed to foreshadow the more permanent occultation of their friendship, Venus representing a celestial love/friendship of which specially favored humans are capable and the moon the threat to such love-friendship posed by the hazards of our sublunary situation. The eclipse of Dillon's and Trueman's friendship is definitely foreshadowed as they proceed to discuss the occultation and other astronomical matters. Trueman is impressed, but Dillon chooses to see the grand spectacle as a thing of little import compared with the political problems facing the nation. Trueman blandly rejoins: “Mustn't be a reformer, R. E. Nothing in it … Life is what it has always been, always will be” (214). But politics is what is going to separate them. Talk as well as action can be fatal to friendship, and soon Dillon's enthusiasm for Bryan's silver plank loses him Trueman's regard and their friendship breaks up, tragically and unnecessarily, as the author points out at the end.

The circumstances of the break-up of this friendship are definitely of the very kind deplored by Cicero's Laelius, according to whom friendship between two virtuous men should never be stamped out suddenly but be allowed to die gradually like the embers in a fire that has burned for a long time. Nor does the denouement Cather finds for her story in any way belie Laelius' contention that there is no life after friendship. Dillon's sudden death from pneumonia is not unrelated to the loss of his friend. Nor is Trueman's subsequent removal to San Francisco, where he spends his last years playing poker at night and staring out over the Pacific Ocean in the daytime.

Obscure Destinies is not a particularly late item in the Cather canon. Yet it must be considered an important part of her spiritual testament. The didactic element in this work is quite obvious. The moral is carefully stated at the end of each story, not only in the relatively expository first two stories but also in “Two Friends,” where the subject matter makes the author rely more heavily on symbolism and allusion.

Since this volume of stories is virtually contemporary with Shadows on the Rock—“Neighbour Rosicky” was actually written earlier—it would not be accurate to speak of an evolution beyond the humanism reflected in the Quebec novel. But Obscure Destinies certainly confirms the tendencies already noted in my previous chapter. In some respects it even goes further along the same road. One notes the utter disappearance of Virgil and the imperial-metropolitan tradition, still present in Shadows on the Rock, where the Aeneid through a kind of tour de force is made instrumental in a new balancing of the sexes. The Catholicism related to this tradition both in that novel and in Death Comes for the Archbishop, is also a fading theme, although one character has a Catholic background. Cather seems to be groping for an ever-broader cultural-religious synthesis. The emphasis, one may say, is on culture, and human relations as affected by culture; religion does not seem very important in Obscure Destinies.

The sublunary perspective common to all three stories must be seen against the background of these tendencies. In a sense it represents a darkening of the scene, especially as the stress falls so heavily on the last part of life. But the down-to-earth quality cannot as such be said to seriously upset the humanist balance. It can be seen as the expression of a sober and modest attitude toward life, a refusal to disregard the limitations of human nature which in a sense is the very essence of classical humanism and the sine qua non of a true appreciation of life as lived here and now.

One more volume of stories by Cather was published posthumously in 1948. It would hardly be fair to Cather to discuss it on the same basis as the works she herself prepared for the press without noting that it is not certain that her final book would have included “The Old Beauty,” had she lived and retained her ability to work a little longer. She might, for instance, have finished and published her Avignon novella; or she might have written another short story and found it more fit to be grouped with “The Best Years” and “Before Breakfast,” stories written during her last years.¹²⁴ “The Old Beauty” was after all written much earlier (in 1936). Moreover, the author seems to have withdrawn it permanently when it received a lukewarm reception from the editor of Woman's Home Companion that year.¹²⁵

“The Old Beauty” is good and clear prose. But the artistic effect is seriously impaired by the symbolic burden the once-beautiful Madame de Coucy (Gabrielle Longstreet) has to shoulder. Beauty may be “its own excuse for being,” but Cather does not let it go at that; she makes her British-French heroine represent the beauty of a vanished civilization—“the deep, claret-coloured closing years of Victoria's reign.”¹²⁶ This is not a particularly convincing characterization of the 1890's, and Cather makes things worse by having the heroine dwell in memory on the aristocratic society which she adorned, while remaining utterly blind to the beauties of the modern world. It simply does not work. Nor can the story be saved, ideologically or artistically, by pretending that “the old beauty” is not supposed to be taken entirely seriously, that the author's attitude to her is somewhat mocking.¹²⁷ Some passages may sound ironic today, but Cather takes Gabrielle Longstreet very seriously, indeed.

The story must be judged a failure or near-failure indicative of the perilous situation of every writer, no matter how established. Yet it has its interest in the present context. Different as it is from the other selections, it does suggest the theme of the volume as a whole: There is a sense in which all three stories deal with something that could be called “the old beauty,” each of them representing a significant variation on the theme. To examine these texts together is an appropriate way of closing this inquiry into Cather's classicism. It will allow us to see in a final way how much she has changed and how much she has remained what she always was during more than fifty years of writing.

The relation between Cather's classical humanism and her attitude to religion acquires a special interest at this point, and I shall therefore begin with a few observations about the religious stance reflected in the posthumous volume. It will be remembered that Cather formally joined the Episcopal Church in 1922 and for some time thereafter shows a certain fascination with Roman Catholicism in her literary works. She does not, however, at any time come through as a person in possession of the gift of faith.¹²⁸ Indeed, her attitude to non-Episcopal Protestant denominations has been shown to be marked from the outset by a coolness which is, as it were, the reverse side of her classicism. Anyone who expects her to sound a more pious note in her last stories will be disappointed.

The references to religion are most numerous in “The Old Beauty”; yet Brown already notes the lack of real religious concern in the story about the last days of Madame de Coucy.¹²⁹ She appears to have changed her religious affiliation on marrying Sir Wilfred; when he first perceives his future wife on her tropical French island, she and her mother are just leaving church (most likely a Catholic one); in Aix-les Bains, she once quotes “the English Prayer Book” in conversation with Henry Seabury, the old acquaintance she runs into there (48). But she betrays absolutely no signs of religious-mindedness in her old age. Instead of going to church, she goes dancing at the tea-room in the Hôtel Splendide. Her worship is the study and remembrance of the great men of the past who used to admire her beauty. After her death, Seabury agrees with her close friend and companion, Cherry Beamish, when she suggests that Gabrielle is now “with her own kind” (71). But that is hardly intended to imply that “the old beauty” has retired to a select Anglican heaven; the remark is more naturally read as a nice way of saying that she has escaped the vulgarity of the modern world, as have her distinguished old statesmen and generals. After all, she has already bought a lot for herself in Père-Lachaise, the exclusive but religiously neutral Paris cemetery also chosen, says Cather, by Adelina Patti and Sarah Bernhardt (the great Jewish actress). No less significant with respect to the religious attitude reflected in “The Old Beauty” is the account of the trip to a monastery high up in the mountains the day before the heroine's death. The arrival at the religious institution is described as an anticlimactic relapse “down into man's world” after the exhilaration of the ascent itself, in which spiritual exaltation and “a delicate physical pleasure” combines in a manner that calls the Homeric imagery of Plotinus, not Christian piety, to mind: Seabury and the two ladies “were each lost in a companionship much closer than any they could share with one another,” and “one had the feeling that life would go on thus forever in high places, among naked peaks cut sharp against a stainless sky” (62).

In “The Best Years,” the names given to the Ferguesson boys—Homer, Hector, Vincent, and Bryan—hardly suggest a preoccupation with the Christian faith. It is stated, in passing, that Mr. Ferguesson goes to church on Sunday, but the emphasis is on the political meetings he attends (his hero is William Jennings Bryan). Mrs. Ferguesson, we are told, is a joiner; she has joined everyting, even “the Methodist Win-a-Couple” (although she won't attend the meetings). There is a reference to “angel cake” (95) and another one to a picture of two angels in the room of the “little school-teacher” Leslie (the only Ferguesson girl), who dies in a blizzard (118). Yet John Murphy rightly contrasts Lesley's concept of home—being with her parents and brothers—with the religious feeling that our true home is in heaven, entertained, for instance, by the Quebec nuns.¹³⁰ As the family is pictured still remembering and mourning her twenty years after her death, there is absolutely no hint that they hope to be reunited with her in heaven. One is not surprised to find Daiches comparing the young girl to Proserpine, who “gathering flowers / Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis / Was gathered.”¹³¹ The very idea that she “knows” when her grave is being visited implies that she inhabits the earth (134). One is reminded that in O Pioneers! the final statement that the earth is to have Alexandra is preceded by her vision of the god of the underworld, as well as by various indications that her ideas about our state after death are quite unorthodox.

“Before Breakfast,” finally, must be said to ignore the Christian religion altogether. On one occasion, as Henry Grenfell sits down on a rock on his beloved island, he is said to have left his burden behind at the bottom of the hill “like Christian of old” (161). But this allusion to The Pilgrim's Progress is purely literary. Grenfell is not a Christian pilgrim; on the contrary, he is, as we shall see a little later, in the process of working out his salvation in an entirely classical-pagan spirit.

The significance of this religious stance can only be enhanced by the obvious autobiographical element in these stories. “The Old Beauty” is set in a place that Cather liked to visit for the same reasons as Madame de Coucy. The latter's attitude to the present in some degree mirrors the author's own increasing feeling of alienation in the modern world. The love of high places that made Cather elect to be buried in full view of Mount Monadnock is also present in this story. “The Best Years” draws, like “Old Mrs. Harris,” on personal childhood memories, the focus this time being on her relations with her brothers, already celebrated in “Dedicatory,” as well as on her memory of her favorite teacher, Evangeline King.¹³² The later part, setting forth the family's faithfulness to Leslie's memory, reads like a fantasy about what would have happened if the author had perished among the corn-fields at an early age, as she at one time feared she might. Cather identifies with the young school-teacher to the point of working in what looks like a justification of her own lying about her age.¹³³ Again, Henry Grenfell's rocky Atlantic island is clearly Cather's own refuge, Grand Manan; his cottage is a replica of hers.¹³⁴ In his comments on science he speaks for her.

Are there also themes traceable to the urge to air personal problems of the kind that I have related both to her turning away from the religion of her youth and to her strong interest in the classics? Possibly Grenfell's peek at Miss Fairweather getting into the water ought to be seen against the background of similar peeks in much earlier works, notably Don Hedger's in “Coming, Aphrodite!” Leslie Ferguesson's complete identification with her brothers and complete lack of interest in her little sister may raise an eyebrow here and there. On the other hand, it is very difficult to make much of plain Miss Evangeline Knightly's relationship with Leslie (the girl is not even said to be beautiful). Both “The Best Years” and “Before Breakfast” are on the whole perfectly in line with the balanced view of life I have attributed to her final phase. The only exception—the one that confirms the rule—is “The Old Beauty.”

The heroine of this story has been roundly criticized for her preoccupation with the past and her cold-shouldering of the present. But there is another side to “The Old Beauty” suggesting that the incomparable beauty of the past is not the chief and certainly not the only thing on the author's mind. Even in her youth Gabrielle Longstreet was often considered “cold,” and her coldness is related to the impression she gave of being “unawakened” (18). The point is emphasized through reiteration (44), and Cather signals that she means “sexually unawakened” by also speaking of the young woman's “unconsciousness of her body” (24). Indeed, everything combines to suggest that Gabrielle has always been not only indifferent but pained by the thought of sex.¹³⁵

This character trait is integrated with the heroine's preoccupation with the past in that she as a young beauty welcomes the attentions of older men while letting younger ones feel that they are suffered (23). But it also fits her relationship with her female companion, a former actress. During her brush with the theatre, Cherry Beamish “always did boy parts,” and Seabury recalls that he last saw her in an Eton jacket and with her hair cropped (28). It is underlined that Beamish sought Gabrielle out because of her beauty (44-45), and one is not surprised to find a sober observer like Woodress characterizing the relationship as “lesbian” in a recent article.¹³⁶

In spite of the presence of this element, the classics do not play a very important role in “The Old Beauty”; the story is something of an exception in that respect, too. It is set in an old Roman spa (“Aix” comes from Aquas, “Waters”); Longstreet and the other characters in the story are specifically said to have tea near the Roman Arch (12), and the mention of this time-worn monument may be related to the comparison of the old beauty's face to “a ruin” (25). But there is no attempt to associate her traits with those of Roman portrait busts or her speech with the economy of good Latin prose as in the portrayal of Madame Grout given in “A Chance Encounter,” where the Roman Arch is also referred to. Greek mythology is also neglected, except for the seeming comparison of the air of the Jura mountains to the aether of Homer's Olympus. This absence of the mythical element which we have come to associate with her best work does suggest that the author's involvement is not as deep as the autobiographical angle might lead one to believe. The story is relatively cerebral in conception.

In “The Best Years,” the classical element is already more important, although not as overtly central as in “Before Breakfast.” The mentioned analogy between Leslie Ferguesson and Proserpine cannot be pressed; the dead girl inhabiting the earth lives in the memory of those who love her in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the ancient legend, but Mrs. Ferguesson is not otherwise portrayed in such a way as to recall Ceres. On the other hand, the classical names given to two of Leslie's brothers certainly reflect an allegiance to classical ideals going beyond the intellectual situation in the author's family in the days inspiring the story. The choice may have something to do with the acceptance and indeed praise of life that also characterizes the last books Cather herself saw through the press and which is in line with classical humanism in the best sense.

It is true that Mrs. Ferguesson is not completely happy with the new prosperity of the family and mourns not only her daughter but the period she has come to symbolize; “the best years,” as a phrase, sounds like a variation of the optima dies theme in My Ántonia. But the story is not told chiefly from Mrs. Ferguesson's point of view. Nor is the use of a young girl to symbolize the incomparable beauty of the past combined with a sense of impotence in dealing with the beautiful present, as it is in Jim Burden's case. Even Mrs. Ferguesson's yearning for the best years of her life implies an appreciation of vitality and struggle that is not present in the story of Antonia's passive admirer. Certain beautiful pages in the early part of the story written from Miss Knightly's point of view also help clarify the author's position. Particularly signficant is the description of the level Nebraska land: “The horizon was like a perfect circle, a great embrace, and within it lay the cornfields, still green, and the yellow wheat stubble, miles and miles of it, and the pasture lands where the white-faced cattle led lives of utter content …” (78). Not only is the picture Virgilian; here we again come upon heaven and earth in close union, the classical theme dear to humanist poets from the Renaissance on. Even the barbed-wire fences are mobilized to urge the classical ideal of wholeness as Miss Knightly muses that they do not cut the land up the way the rail fences and stone walls of her native New England do.

This concern for wholeness—the idea of a world where man is at home—is also present in “Before Breakfast,” where the classical framework is not only central but in part also more explicit. Although apparently written after “The Best Years” (in 1944), this story has fittingly been placed at the end of the posthumous volume. It has all the appearance of a deliberate statement of Cather's final humanistic outlook.

“Before Breakfast” is set on Grand Manan, the New Brunswick island on which Cather had a cottage in her later years. The hero, Henry Grenfell, has a refuge in the very same spot. He is a successful, middle-aged businessman, but also something of a humanist manqué. As the story opens, he has had a bad night in the cottage which he has just reached after a long trip from New York. He is tortured by the thought that his life is not what it should be. Neither his professional career nor his married life seems very satisfactory. He realizes he cannot blame his problems on his wife, but suspects that his desire to marry her set him on the wrong road as a young man. Symptomatic of his malaise is his feeling that his son, a promising physicist, is forming a “corporation” with his wife and shutting him out.

In a sense, science, not business, is his chief problem that night. He is bothered by the thought of the geologist, Professor Fairweather, who is spending that summer on the island, studying it and talking about it in a perspective that makes his own possessive feeling about it seem arbitrary and presumptuous; among other things, Fairweather notes that their end of the island is one hundred and thirty-six million years old. The problem posed by the scientist is aggravated as Grenfell rises before dawn and beholds a “white-bright, gold-bright” spot in the sky: Venus, the morning star. Its planetary indifference seems ironic against the background of Venus' mythological function as the goddess of love: “Behind her rose-coloured veils, quite alone in the sky already blue, she seemed to wait. She had come in on her beat, taken her place in the figure. Serene, impersonal splendour. Merciless perfection, ageless sovereignty. …” For a moment Grenfell feels sorry for himself; then he rallies and gallantly attempts to enlist Venus as an ally in fighting the impact Fairweather has been having on his thinking: “And what's a hundred and thirty-six million years to you, Madam? … The rocks can't tell any tales on you. You were doing your stunt up there long before there was anything down here but … Let's leave that to the professors, Madam, you and me!” (144).

This outburst does not have a calming effect on Grenfell, however; the immortal beauty of the celestial Venus, “terrible and splendid,” keeps bothering him (158). It is only as he issues forth on his morning walk filled with a desperate desire to “find his island” that the tide of the battle turns in his favor and the basically positive message of the story begins to emerge. He finds his island. Grand Manan suddenly becomes Grande Maman, something very much like Lucretius' alma Venus.¹³⁷ Nature is described in archetypal feminine and motherly terms: “The path underneath had the dampness, the magical softness which his feet remembered.” It does not make any difference that the island, like everything else, was once a bare rock submerged in the sea; the important thing is its present “green surface,” where all living things produced by the teeming Mother exist together—men and trees and blue flags and butter-cups (159-161). This metamorphosis of Venus from an image of cold heavenly beauty to the source of all earthly beauty is accompanied by so many parallels with Lucretius' text that one must assume that the author has the well-known beginning of De rerum natura in mind.¹³⁸

That Cather is here alluding to Venus, and specifically to the goddess's birth from the sea, is shown by some of the imagery used to describe the scene as Grenfell emerges from his cabin: “There was not a breath of wind; deep shadow and new-born light, yellow as gold, a little unsteady like other new-born things. It was blinking, too, as if its own reflection on the dewdrops was too bright. Or maybe the light had been asleep down under the sea and was just waking up.” The color symbolism refers back to the earlier mention of Venus-the morning star, called “gold-bright,” as does the “blinking” of the new-born light. The allusion to Venus' birth from the sea hardly needs to be explained, but it is worth noting that the passage seems to echo the 1896 review of a performance of Massenet's Eve in which Cather at one point transforms the vision of the mother of mankind into a vision of “the mother of all things-to-be opening her eyes upon her world … Aphrodite rising from the foam of the sea.”¹³⁹

The passage thus serves as a kind of preparation for the third and final manifestation of the pagan goddess. After the appearances of the celestial Venus and the mother of all earthly beauty, Grenfell is granted a glimpse of Aphrodite Anadyomene in the guise of Fairweather's beautiful daughter getting ready for her morning swim. Her bathing suit is pink, and, says the executive to himself, “if a clam stood upright and graciously opened its shell, it could look like that.”¹⁴⁰

As mentioned, the hero's peeping at Miss Fairweather through the pines cannot but remind one of Don Hedger peeping at Eden Bower through a knothole in his pine-boarded closet. But the erotic element is subdued in this case; if Grenfell begins taking off his clothes as soon as he sees the beautiful woman, it is because he fears she is unaware that the North Atlantic is not the Mediterranean. The scene is perfectly integrated into the optimistic argument of the story, which is in essence that there is always new beauty equal to the old beauty.

The fact that the inspiring image of Aphrodite emerging from the waves is presented by the daughter of the geologist whose conversation Grenfell used to find so painful thus establishes the triumph of myth and symbol over science. Professor Fairweather may generate scientific data, but he has also been instrumental in bringing a new generation of beauty into the world. Life absorbs science and remains what it was in the days when the Greeks envisioned Cypris rising from the primordial sea.

To the extent that Cather's argument is hostile to science, it obviously deviates from Lucretius' position. But then the Roman poet contradicts his own scientism in the introductory mythical part of his work, the part that seems to have made the most lasting impression on her. Moreover, Grenfell's final attitude to science is one of acquiescence rather than hostility. On the last page, the author rejoins Lucretius by bringing evolution into the picture and explicitly linking her hero's vision of Miss Fairweather to the moment when amphibious forms of life opted for land and started the “long hop” leading to man. In this way Venus by implication becomes what she was to the Epicurean philosopher-poet: a symbol not only of beauty encouraging the propagation of the species but of life's urge to rise toward higher forms of beauty. Indeed, the conflict between the higher and the lower Aphrodite marking much of Cather's earlier writing is in a sense resolved in “Before Breakfast” along with the problem that befuddled Grenfell all night.

Today we are not so sure that science is not capable of radically changing our relation to nature and with it our view of ourselves. Yet this part of the argument of “Before Breakfast”—and it is the chief point of the story—is hardly assailable from the point of view of classical humanism. One is pleased that Cather should end her career by invoking once more the image of Aphrodite and that she should do so in a new key as well as in a manner so satisfactory in purely artistic terms.¹⁴¹ There is both a final confession of faith here and a final vindication of her poetic-symbolist approach to the art of fiction.

Notes

1. Throughout this part of the book, I shall be using Willa Cather's Early Short Fiction 1892-1912, ed. Virginia Faulkner and with an introduction by Mildred Bennett (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), unless otherwise indicated. Parenthetical page numbers in the texts will refer to this volume.

2. As an example of Cather's hostility to any attempt to revive or in any way focus attention on her early stories, one may mention the angry letter with which she responded to Edward Wagenknecht's request for some information concerning them (December 31, 1938).

3. Curtis Bradford, “Willa Cather's Collected Short Stories,” American Literature, XXVI, 4 (1955), p. 550.

4. One such indication is Cather's uncharacteristic approval of one scholarly work written about her: Yvonne Handy's L'oeuvre de Willa Cather (thèse présentée à L'Université de Rennes, 1940). Handy, apparently unaware of the uncollected stories, portrays Cather as the celebrator of the frontier.

5. Sharon O'Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, p. 196.

6. O'Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, p. 198 ff.

7. Like “The Tale of the White Pyramid,” this story was published in the Hesperian (January, 1893).

8. ”We shall go together, you leading the way, two companions ready to make the final journey” (Horace, Odes, 2:17:10—12).

9. In view of the like-sounding names (Cather/Ponter, Pound/Yung) and Louise Pound's philological bent, Ponter's sentimental frustration may be the author's.

10. In the first of these stories, Peter Sadelack recites the beginning of the Lord's prayer in defective Latin: Pater noster, qui in coelum est. But that can hardly be called a classical reference. The quotation is of some interest in that it suggests a certain linguistic naiveté on the part of the author: If that was “all the Latin he had ever known,” Sadelack was hardly in a position to substitute qui in coelum est for qui es in coelis. Such mistakes are reserved for preparatory Latin classes.

11. A young man called Horton, while playing college football, tries to remember something in all the books he has read that would fit the desperate situation of his team, but can only recall “some hazy Greek, which read to the effect that the gods sometimes bring madness upon those they wish to destroy” (511). What happens in Horton's mind is presented as further warning that the world is out of joint: “It was not a normal thing for him to remember any Greek.” In the end the truth of the Greek saying he remembers is demonstrated in an arena much larger than the football field: The story ends with a messenger bringing the news that the people of Ohio have reelected McKinley Governor.

12. Although everybody is said to call the heroine “Tommy,” both her friend Jessica and Jay Ellington, whom she forces to marry Jessica in spite of her own interest in him, insistently call her by her real name, “Theodosia.” The imperial name fits her character perfectly.

13. “The Prodigies” is about two gifted children who are driven too hard by their ambitious mother, who pretends that she has no right “to curb them or stop the flight of the Pegasus” (418). Their health is declining. The story ends with one of the children, a boy, stealthily turning his head toward the visiting doctor and smiling: “It was,” says the author, “the smile which might have touched the face of some Roman youth on the bloody sand, when the reversed thumb of the Empress pointed deathward.” Pace Mildred Bennett—who comments on the story in her pioneering anthology, Early Stories by Willa Cather (New York: Dood, Mead, 1957)—we are here confronted with a devouring mother of the Jamesian type. It is the only case in which the imperatrix theme is used in a clearly negative sense.

14. Cf. Marilyn Arnold, Willa Cather's Short Fiction (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University press, 1984), pp. 18-20.

15. A curious, and equally inept, echo of this reference occurs at the end of “Flavia and Her Artists.” For an explanation of the discrepancy between Cather's allusion to Marius'sitting in the ruins of Carthage and Plutarch's account of the affair, see note 14 to my chapter on The Troll Garden.

16. Possibly the author herself wants to show off. This story is also replete with Graecisms, Latinisms, Italianisms, and Gallicisms.

17. This article is discussed in Chapter Three.

18. Actually, this description of Brownville is lifted from an entirely different context, her 1894 article about this city (The World and the Parish, p. 109).

19. What literal devotees of river gods Cather has in mind is hard to tell. It could be the Trojans, who were not helped by their worship of the Scamander. It could be Achilles, who perished in the end, although he had vowed to cut off his hair and give it to Spercheius, the river god of his native Phthia.

20. Cather's interest in the anchorites of the Thebaid transpires as early as her essay on Carlyle (The Kingdom of Art, p. 424). It was fed by fictional works like Flaubert's La tentation de Saint-Antoine (Seibel, p. 197), and Anatole France's Thaïs (The Kingdom of Art, p. 328). What she means by suggesting that “the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid” is by no means clear. Possibly she is thinking of the many Romans who followed St. Anthony's example and withdrew to southern Egypt or other desert places, a phenomenon mentioned by Gibbon (Chapter xxxvii).

21. Etymologically, “gypsy” means “Egyptian.”

22. As mentioned, Cather cannot have visited the Louvre before 1902, but sometimes speaks as if she had, based on hints picked up through her reading. Her idea of the Doryphorus fits William Story's discussion of this sculpture in Excursions in Art and Letters (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), p. 89.

23. Cather is here paraphrasing one of her early articles (cf. Chapter Three). But the drift of the argument, and hence her use of the classical references, is different.

24. The work by (George Gottlieb Philipp) Autenrieth referred to must be his Wörterbuch zu den Homerischen Gedichten für den Schulgebrauch (Leipzig, 1873). It was published in English as A Homeric Dictionary for Use in Schools and Colleges (New York, 1882). Why the Professor does not have a more advanced research tool is a matter left unexplained.

25. Especially in the case of the story of the horses of Rhesus, one is glad that the version is expurgated. On the other hand, this caution contradicts the unfavorable view of expurgated children's versions of Homer expressed in an 1901 article (The World and the Parish, p. 853).

26. In elaborating the analogy between Jack-a-Boy and Keats, a Greekless Hellenist who also died a premature death, Cather seems to have drawn not only on the latter's own works but on some recently published biography—either Sidney Calvin's Keats (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1887) or W. M. Rossetti'a Keats (London: Walter Scott, 1887).

27. Jack-a-Boy's association of Helen's eyes with the two stars perfectly fits Flaxman's picture of Helen waiting for Paris to join her in bed. Flaxman highlights her alluring eyes, while the rest of her is artfully concealed by the sheets, the attractions of female nudity being expressed in the body of Aphrodite huddling with a maid near by.

28. Flaxman's picture of Hector and Andromache actually shows the Trojan champion with his helmet on.

29. As Mildred Bennett points out in her introduction to Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction 1892-1912, this passage reflects the author's painful memory of her little brother Jack's sickness in the summer of 1893 (p. xxxv).

30. The reference to “the marble children of the Borghese Gallery” made in this context is likely to have been inspired by the early pages of a three-volume fictional work by Ouida, The Story of Ariadne: A Dream, which is mentioned repeatedly in the early articles and reviews.

31. Romantic Platonism is not only behind the allusions to the doctrine of anamnesis and pedagogical eros but also transpires in Cather's use of Flaxman's illustrations of Homer, in which the human body is portrayed in a manner inspired by Winckelmann as much as by Greek vase painting. A similar ideological ambiguity is present in Cather's account of Keats: She is clearly mindful that he wrote a “Hymn to Pan,” but she also invests him with a Platonic spirituality which is more characteristic of Shelley. In an article she does couple the two as exponents of a spirituality which sets them apart from other Romantic poets (The Kingdom of Art, pp. 398-399).

32. It will be remembered that Cather in one of her early articles dwells on Israel Zangwill's distinction between the Greek stress on “the holiness of beauty” and the Hebrew emphasis on “the beauty of holiness.”

33. Horace, Odes, 3:30.

34. It is worth noting that Cather herself taught for several years in a Pittsburgh high-school resembling the one described in “The Professor's Commencement.” The criticism of faculty members retaining a fascination with grammar is voiced again through another of her partial alter egos—the hero of “Paul's Case” (modeled on one of her Pittsburgh pupils).

35. The World and the Parish, p. 297.

36. ”Horatius on the Bridge” appeared in the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842). Cather quotes the first four lines of the first stanza, then two lines from stanza 26, and finally a passage from stanza 27.

37. The image is from the third book of the Iliad.

38. The image is lifted from an early essay (The World and the Parish, p. 162).

39. In “The Treasure of Far Island,” Douglass is also made to associate Margie with the agile “women” of Diana (p. 278).

40. Ultima Thule is Tacitus' name for the extreme North of Europe (in Germania). It is a phrase used by many who never read the book.

41. Some of the classical machinery used in “The Treasure of Far Island” will also be found in “The Poet.”

42. Cather's wording reflects Emerson's paraphrase of the Odyssey, 6:41-46. The final paragraph of “The Poet” is also quoted and praised in one of her early articles (The World and the Parish, p. 353).

43. Willa Cather, The Troll Garden (New York: McClure, Phillips and Company, 1905).

44. This work has for subtitle: A Series of Lectures Delivered Before the University of Cambridge. It was first published by Macmillan (London, 1864).

45. This is also Marilyn Arnold's view (pp. 43-45).

46. In later stories, Rome frequently appears as the home of the arts, but the city Cather has in mind in these instances is not imperial Rome, but the Rome of the Renaissance and later times.

47. E. K. Brown sees two groups of stories, one tied to the Kingsley epigraph (“Flavia and Her Artists,” “The Garden Lodge,” “The Marriage of Phaedra”), the other to the Browning epigraph” (“The Sculptor's Funeral,” “A Death in the Desert,” “A Wagner Matinee”). He describes the former group of stories as “sophisticated tales” which present “artists in relation to persons of great wealth,” whereas the stories with which they are alternated are said to portray “an artist or a person of artistic temperament from the prairies who returns home in defeat. “Paul's Case” is supposed to represent a “coda” interweaving the two themes (pp. 113-114). Another problem with this dichotomy is that it ignores that the rural West is opposed to a metropolitan center of the arts in all the stories.

48. Cf. O'Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, pp. 272-274.

49. As mentioned by Susan Gubar in “Sapphistries,” Christina Rossetti wrote poems about Sappho that her brother William Michael preferred to excise from her collected works.

50. L.V. Jacks says the book contains thirty-seven classical references in “The Classics and Willa Cather,” an article published in Prairie Schooner, 35 (Winter 1961/62), p. 289. To this number must be added not a few “hidden” allusions of the kind that are often most important in measuring the influence of the classics on a given author.

51. This dynasty is curiously referred to as “the house of Flavia” in Saltus' Imperial Purple (1892).

52. The Kingdom of Art, p. 97.

53. Line 165.

54. This is the place to mention the intriguing circumstance that Dorothy Canfield's mother was called “Flavia”; she is referred to by that name in a letter to Mariel Gere (January 10, 1897). By the time she wrote her story, Cather had learned to dislike this Flavia, possibly because she played a role in ending her intimate friendship with her daughter. Cf. O'Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, p. 266, note 7.

55. Plutarch emphasizes that she gave her sons the best education available, but also notes that it was only after their death that her house became a meeting place for intellectuals. Cornelia is mentioned fairly often in Victorian fiction. Meredith alludes to her twice in The Egoist.

56. Donald Sutherland has commented on the ending of “Flavia and Her Artists” in “Willa Cather: the Classic Voice” (p. 175). He thinks that Cather is here guilty of not remembering Plutarch's “Life of Marius” very well. The problem may, however, rather be that she remembers a canto in Byron's Don Juan (12:78) too well. On speaking about the situation of British ladies whose reputation has become tarnished, Byron exclaims: “Society, that china without flaw, / (The Hypocrite!) will banish them like Marius, / To sit amidst the ruins of their guilt: / For Fame's a Carthage not so soon rebuilt.” This fits Flavia Malcolm's situation quite well.

57. XXXIII (January, 1903), 109—121.

58. The letter in question is dated October 15.

59. One may also note that Cather put something of her old friend Ethelbert Nevin into Adriance Everett, author of a Proserpine, just as Nevin is author of a Narcissus. The comparison of Adriance to a shepherd from the valley of Tempe is particularly noteworthy in this respect since it is lifted from one of her essays about the American composer (The World and the Parish, p. 533).

60. For the lines referred to, see De Rerum Natura 2:75-79. The Professor's House and “Before Breakfast” suggest that Cather was not entirely unacquainted with Lucretius. But this particular allusion just might be inspired by Daudet's use of the same lines at the end of Chapter Four of Sapho. As we have seen, this was one of her favorite novels.

61. Quoted from Woodress' variorum edition of The Troll Garden (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 155.

62. ”Forever and for ever, farewell, Cassius; / If we do meet again, why we shall smile; / If not, why then, this parting was well made” (Julius Caesar 5:1:117-119).

63. It does not help much to learn that the story is partly inspired by a 1902 visit to Burne-Jones' Kensington studio described in one of Cather's dispatches to the Nebraska State Journal (The World and the Parish, pp. 911-916). Cather reports that she saw a painting called The Passing of Venus still sitting on the stand there, but I have been unable to find any information about such a work by Burne-Jones elsewhere. Possibly she is thinking of his Bath of Venus and/or Mirror of Venus. In any case, the connection with the central theme of the story is vague.

64. In spite of the difference in personality, her name is likely to be an allusion to Helen.

65. Alice Hall Petry argues in “Harvey's Case” (South Dakota Review, 1986, 24, 3, 108-111) that we are to read between the lines that the underlying reason for the townspeople's hostility is that Merrick is a homosexual.

66. The Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, which Cather frequently visited, contained a copy of this sculpture. It can, in fact, still be viewed there in the Hall of Architecture between the copies of the “Prima Porta” Augustus and Venus Milo referred to in “Paul's Case.”

67. Cf. David Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), pp. 80-81. To me, such an influence seems not only unverifiable but unlikely. The “Lament for Bion” traditionally attributed to Moschus may have been important to Virgil (Tenth Eclogue), as well as to English poets like Sidney (Astrophel), Milton (“Lycidas”), and Arnold (“Thyrsis”), but the point and focus of Cather's story is as different from all these texts as her mode of delivery.

68. Significantly, Aunt Georgiana seems to be modeled on Cather's Aunt Franc, who married George Cather and moved out to Nebraska with him in the 1880's.

69. The connection is solid even though the name of Weber's opera is not strictly speaking picked from Greek mythology.

70. The World and the Parish, p. 75.

71. See The World and the Parish, pp. 159, 330, 374.

72. The letter, addressed to Phillipson, is dated March 15, 1943.

73. Horst-Dieter Loebner, “Willa Cather:’Paul's Case’: Die Problematik der ästhetischen Existenz” (Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 1972, 5:215—232).

74. Larry Rubin, “The Homosexual Motif in Willa Cather's ‘Paul's Case,’” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 12, 2 (Spring, 1975), 129-131.

75. Cf. note 24 to this chapter.

76. The letter is undated.

77. In England, too, late-nineteenth-century homosexual writers like Symonds used the dichotomy between North and South to “contrast a fault-ridden puritanism with a joyful and literally unbuttoned paganism.” See Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 292.

78. ”Deiphobe of the sea, the Sun God measures her immortality to her by its sands. Flushed above the Adrian Lake, her spirit …” (The World and the Parish, p. 298).

79. Preface to Collected Short Fiction 1892-1912, p. xxxvi.

80. The letter in question has already been referred to in Chapter Nine (note 33).

81. Bernice Slote, “The Secret Web,” in Five Essays on Willa Cather: the Merrimack Symposium, ed. John J. Murphy (North Andover, Massachusetts: Merrimack College, 1974).

82. Even the two stories from this period which are devoid of classical references confirm, in their own way, the impression that there is a special link between Cather's airing of intimate personal problems and her use of the classics during this period. In “The Enchanted Bluff,” the absence of classical references matches the escape from her adult situation which the author manages in that story. Sex is equally irrelevant to “Behind The Singer Tower,” a tale which is something of an anomaly in the 1907-1912 group and looks like a throw-back to the social criticism of very early stories like “Lou, the Prophet” and “The Clemency of the Court.”

83. The World and the Parish, pp. 157-163.

84. ”The Namesake” was published in McClure's in March, 1907.

85. O'Brien notes that Cather “envisioned creativity as a male privilege” and suggests that she was able psychologically to inherit this privilege by identifying with a male ancestor (Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, pp. 109-110).

86. This story was published in McClure's in June, 1907.

87. See 1:114 and 2:64-83.

88. The ultimate classical source is Philostratus' De vita Apollonii.

89. Parturient montes; nascetur ridiculus mus (Horace, Ars Poetica, line 139).

90. O'Brien has suggested that the story reflects the author's feeling that she was being sucked dry by her “willing muse,” that is, Samuel McClure (Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, p. 295). It is an ingenious suggestion, but had Cather really worked long enough for McClure at the time of writing (early in 1907) to have so strong a feeling of this kind as to feel subconsciously impelled to give it well-concealed fictional expression?

91. Cf. the end of Chapter Three. Lavandou is close to Hyères. What is more, much of the description of the fishing-village in the story (down to details like the figs and the goat's milk consumed) is lifted from Cather's “special correspondence” from Lavandou (The World and the Parish, pp. 942-946).

92. Bradford, p. 546.

93. In a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, Cather herself tends to dismiss the story as too Jamesian.

94. A curious echo of the dying Alexandra Ebbling gazing at the bay of Naples and Vesuvius is Cather's description of Isabelle's death in Sorrento on October 10, 1938. Cather tells Irene Miner in a letter dated October 14, 1938, that Isabelle wrote her last letter to her in the garden of her hotel looking out toward the bay and Vesuvius.

95. Yet the first critic to note the Aphrodite imagery in “On the Gulls' Road” seems to be O'Brien (“The Thing Not Named: Willa Cather As a Lesbian Writer,” p. 593).

96. The bottle with water from the Mediterranean brought by a woman artist which figures in this context (85) is significantly also mentioned in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett written in Ravello and dated May 10, 1908. The artist in question is there said to be from Nebraska.

97. See my chapter on My Ántonia.

98. The previously cited letter to Jewett illustrates Cather's feeling about felix Campania, as do the 1908 letter to Mrs. Goudy and a letter to Elizabeth Sergeant dated June 15, 1912, in which she specifically refers to the civilization documented in the Naples Museum.

99. ”The Joy of Nelly Deane” was first published in Century (October, 1911).

100. The cited passage in De Bello Gallico is 1:1:3.

101. There is also a cross-reference between this passage and the letter to Elizabeth Sergeant (April 20, 1912) in which Cather speaks of the poppies on the Palatine as a suggestion that those who lived keenly survive, even in the dust.

102. “The Bohemian Girl” was first published in McClure's (August, 1912).

103. Georgics, 3:393-396. For Slote's comment, see The Kingdom of Art, p. 101.

104. In Pan, the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (1969), Patricia Merivale distinguishes between a “romantic Pan”—an abstract pantheistic symbol—and a “Victorian Pan”—the Arcadian goat-god restored to his old status as an individual figure (p. 76). In these terms, Cather seems to lean toward the Romantic conception in “Jack-a-Boy,” but in “The Bohemian Girl” she even goes beyond the Victorian pattern in projecting Pan's individuality on a man.

105. Perhaps one can say that Cather's use of the Aphrodite-Artemis dichotomy in her portrayal of Clara Vavrika has more in common with the similar—though more explicit—symbolic scheme Hardy resorts to in portraying Bathsheba Everdene in Far From the Madding Crowd.

106. The phrase “destiny obscure” occurs in line 30 of this poem, the theme of which matches Cather's stories quite well.

107. ”Uncle Valentine” was first published in Woman's Home Companion (February-March, 1925); “Double Birthday” in Forum (February, 1929). Both stories have been reprinted in Uncle Valentine and Other Stories.

108. At the end of the story, Cather has Dr. Engelhardt haughtily mutter, Even in our ashes (line 92 of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”).

109. Classical themes and references are relatively unimportant in these stories. The most interesting one occurs in “Double Birthday,” where old Dr. Engelhardt prides himself on having the pointed ears of a satyr along with the large pendulous nose that according to him is “the index of an excessively amorous disposition.” Cather, a great fan of Dr. Engelhardt, says this almost approvingly (Uncle Valentine and Other Stories, p. 46).

110. Just a few years earlier (in 1925), Erik Axel Karlfeldt, the (Nobel-prize-winning) Swedish poet, had used this theme in a more explicit way in “Sub Luna.” Written when Karlfeldt was almost exactly the same age as the author Obscure Destinies, this poem is marked by the same acceptance of the human condition.

111. The sublunary theme also appears in “Uncle Valentine” (Uncle Valentine and Other Stories, p. 25 and pp. 29-30).

112. Willa Cather, Obscure Destinies (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1932), p. 71. Further references to this work will be made in parentheses in the text.

113. The most well-known stretch of road used for this purpose, Via Appia near Rome, is mentioned by Cather as early as her essay on Shakespeare (The Kingdom of Art, p. 434).

114. Cather's letters to Beecher, her Episcopal bishop, could have been written by Benjamin Franklin, so absolute is her lack of interest in the hereafter.

115. This development could have something to do with Cather's friendship with the Menuhins, whom she first met in Paris during the summer of 1930.

116. It is thus slightly ironic that Cather in an early lecture accuses Pearl Craigie of insulting her readers by translating for them the dies irae hymn, which according to the former is “as common as a nursery rhyme.”

117. ”The Sibyl” here refers to the forged Sibylline oracles used, for instance, by Lactantius in his Institutiones divinae to prognosticate the ultimate fate of the world. Involved is Virgil's Sibylla Cumana, also featured in the Sistine Chapel along with David.

118. This letter is dated July 4, 1932.

119. Arnold, p. 153.

120. Even the reference to the Dorian-Italian friendship of Damon and Pythias [Phintias] is not really an exception. Cather may have read about their exemplary friendship in Lemprière, but, as mentioned in Part One, the chief literary sources of information about it, besides Porphyry's and Iamblichus' Vitae Pythagorae, are Cicero's Tusculanae Disputationes (5:63) and De officiis 3:10).

121. A certain interest in Publius Cornelius Scipio is also suggested by the reference to a “Villa Scipione” in “Double Birthday” Uncle Valentine and Other Stories, p. 55). Scipio being of the Cornelian gens, one is also intrigued by the prominence assumed by the word “carnelian”—a variant of “cornelian”—in “Two Friends.” First the brick wall by which the friends sit is said to take on a “carnelian hue” after dark (211). Then Trueman drops “a piece of carnelian”—a red seal that the she had always admired—into the narrator's hand before leaving for San Francisco (228).

122. There is also a Ciceronian text describing the Ptolemaic “machinery”: the Somnium Scipionis, and the Scipio involved happens to be the friend of Laelius. Dante refers to the spheres as “eternal wheels” in a passage familiar to Cather judging by a letter to Edith Lewis dated October 5, 1936, in which Venus also plays a conspicuous role. Yet his point of view has nothing in common with hers.

123. Cicero, Laelius de amicitia, 23:88.

124. A detailed account of what is known about the projected novella is given by George N. Kates in “Willa Cather's Unfinished Avignon Story,” an article included in Five Stories by Willa Cather (New York: Vintage Books, 1956).

125. Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, p. 256.

126. Willa Cather, The Old Beauty and Others (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), p. 36. Further references to this volume will be made in parenthetical references in the text.

127. Cf. Arnold, p. 160 ff.

128. McClay also concludes that Cather's personal doubts remained until the end (p. 142).

129. Brown, p. 305.

130. John J. Murphy, “Willa Cather and Catholic Themes” (Western American Literature, 1982, 17, 1, 53-60), p. 55.

131. Daiches, p. 171.

132. Hector is Cather's brother Roscoe (Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, p. 265).

133. From her late thirties on, Cather consistently maintained that she was born in 1876 rather than in 1873. Leon Edel discusses this matter at some length in “Homage to Willa Cather,” his contribution to The Art of Willa Cather.

134. See George Greene, “Willa Cather's Grand Manan,” Prairie Schooner (Spring-Summer, 1981), 233-244.

135. In Aix-les-Bains, Gabrielle compares couples dancing in the modern way to “reptiles coupling,” and her companion tells Seabury that she is completely put out by the sight of young people “bathing naked” (58 and 44). Her panic when the dark-complexioned banker makes a pass at her is clearly excessive for a woman of the world “close upon forty” (52-55 and 25). One notes that her first husband soon demands a divorce.

136. Cf. Part One, Chapter Four, note 12.

137. The reference to Lucretius at the end of Book One in The Professor's House leaves no doubt as to Cather's familiarity with the Roman advocate of Epicurus' philosophy.

138. The fact that Mother Nature alone is capable of restoring Grenfell's peace of mind fits Lucretius' “Nec sine te … fit laetum neque amabile quicquam.” The calming power of the goddess is in both texts mirrored in the behavior of the elements under her influence: “There was not a breath of wind,” says Cather; Lucretius has “Te fugiunt venti.” Again, as the ancient poet matches Cather in stressing the earthly along with the heavenly aspect of Venus (“alma Venus … caeli subter labentia signa”), so he pays equal attention to her association with the sea: “Tibi rident aequora ponti.” Indeed, Cather's whole landscape—sea, rocks, waterfalls—is summed up in one of Lucretius' lines describing the progress of the goddess: “per maria ac montis fluviosque rapacis.”

139. Note in particular Cather's quotation from the libretto: “A pure light is spread over creation, and from the new-born earth light vapors illumined by the sunrise on the horizon. A soft breeze undulates the flowers of the field and the waves of the sea” (The World and the Parish, p. 377).

140. Dorothy Tuck McFarland says the description of Miss Fairweather reminds her of nothing as much as Botticelli's Birth of Venus (p. 134).

141. Slote justly praises “Before Breakfast” as “one of the most remarkable things Willa Cather wrote: at the end, a reaffirmation of the beginning” (The Kingdom of Art, p. 92).

Bibliography

A. Primary Sources

1. Letters

Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Elizabeth Sergeant (typed copies), Carrie Miner, Louise Pound, Viola Roseboro, Zoë Akins, Cyril Clemens, Will Owen Jones.

Bailey Memorial Library of the University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. Dorothy Canfield-Fisher.

Beinecke Library of Yale University. E. K. Brown, Johnson.

Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City. Mariel Gere (copies), Marie M. Meloney.

Houghton Library of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ferris Greenslet, Sarah Orne Jewett.

Huntington Library and Museum, San Marino, California. Zoe Akins and Mary (Hunter) Austin.

Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska. Mariel Gere, Bishop George Allen Beecher.

Newberry Library, Chicago. Irene Miner Weisz, Mary Miner Creighton, E. K. Brown, Mr. Glick.

New York Public Library, New York City. Sara Teasdale and H. L. Mencken.

Perkins Library of Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina. Louise Pound.

Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York City. Elizabeth Sergeant (the originals), Elizabeth M. Vermorcken, Edward Wagenknecht, Laura Coombes Hills.

Willa Cather Historical Center, Red Cloud, Nebraska. Carrie Miner Sherwood, Mariel Gere, Alice Goudy, John S. Phillipson, “Dear Little Neddius” (Ellen Gere).

2. Essays, Articles, Reviews, Lectures

The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893–1896. Selected and with a commentary by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

“New Types of Acting.” McClure's (February, 1914).

Not Under Forty. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1936.

“Plays of Real Life.” McClure's (December, 1913).

The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews 1893–1902. Two volumes, selected and edited with a commentary by William M. Curtin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

“Three American Singers.” McClure's (December, 1913).

Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Selected and edited by L. Brent Bohlke. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Willa Cather on Writing. With a foreword by Stephen Tennant. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1949.

3. Poetry

April Twilights. Edited with an introduction by Bernice Slote. 1903; rpt. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.

April Twilights and Other Poems. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1923.

Shively, James. Writings from Willa Cather's Campus Years. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1950.

“The Star Dial.” McClure's, December, 1907.

4. Short Fiction

Early Stories of Willa Cather. Ed. Mildred Bennett. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1957.

Obscure Destinies. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1932.

The Old Beauty and Others. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948.

The Troll Garden. 1905; rpt. New York: Signet Classics, 1961.

The Troll Garden. A definitive edition edited by James Woodress with introduction, notes, textual commentary, emendations, and table of revisions. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction 1915–1929. Ed. with an introduction by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction 1892–1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner and with an introduction by Mildred Bennett. First revised edition. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

Youth and the Bright Medusa. 1920; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

5. Novels

Alexander's Bridge. 1912; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977.

A Lost Lady. 1923; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927; rpt. New York: Vikings Books, 1971.

Lucy Gayheart. 1935; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

My Ántonia. 1918; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

My Mortal Enemy. 1926; rpt. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972.

One of Ours. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1922.

O Pioneers!. 1913; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1940.

Shadows on the Rock. 1931;rpt. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973.

The Professor's House. 1925; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

The Song of the Lark. 1915; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1978.

B. Secondary Sources (limited to Cather scholarship)

Albertini, Virgil. “Willa Cather and Football: A Strange Duality.” Platte Valley Review 14 (Spring, 1986): 7–18.

———. “Willa Cather's Early Short Stories: A Link to the Agrarian Realists.” Markham Review 8 (1979): 69–72.

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather's Short Fiction. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984.

Auchincloss, Louis. Pioneers and Caretakers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965.

Bennett, Mildred. Introduction to Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction 1892–1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

———. The World of Willa Cather. 1951; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

Bloom, Edward and Lillian Bloom. Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962.

Bohlke, Brent. “The Ecstasy of Alexandra Bergson.” Colby Literary Quarterly 11 (1975):139–149.

Bradford, Curtis. “Willa Cather's Collected Short Stories.” American Literature 26. 4 (January, 1955): 537–551.

Brown, E. K. Letter to Dorothy Canfield-Fisher. June 1, 1950. Bailey Memorial Library of University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont.

———. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. Completed by Leon Edel. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953.

Byrne, Cathleen D., and Richard C. Snyder. Willa Cather in Pittsburgh 1896–1906. Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1980.

Canby, Henry Seidel. “Fiction Sums Up a Century.” A Literary History of the United States. Ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. Fourth edition, revised. New York and London: Macmillan, 1974. 1208–1236.

Canfield-Fisher, Dorothy. Review of Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Book of the Month Club News. (December, 1940): 2–3. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Willa Cather. 284–286.

Connolly, X. Francis. “Willa Cather: Memory as Muse.” Fifty Years of the American Novel. Ed. Harold Gardiner, S. J. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951. 69–87.

Cooperman, Stanley. World War I and the American Novel. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1967.

Daiches, David. Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1951.

Dillman, Richard. “Tom Outland: Emerson's American Scholar and The Professor's House.” Midwest Quarterly 25 (1984): 375–385.

Edel, Leon. “A Cave of One's Own.” Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. 216–240.

———. “Willa Cather's The Professor's House: An Inquiry into the Use of Psychology in Literary Criticism.” Literature and Psychology 4 (February, 1954): 66–79.

———. “Homage to Willa Cather.” The Art of Willa Cather. Ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. 185–204.

Eichorn, Harry B. “A Falling Out With Love: My Mortal Enemy.” Colby Literary Quarterly 10 (September, 1973): 121–138.

Epstein, Joseph. “Willa Cather: Listing towards Lesbos.” The New Criterion 4 (December, 1983): 35–43.

Geismar, Maxwell. The Last of the Provincials. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.

Gelfant, Blanche H. “The Forgotten Reaping Hook: Sex in My Ántonia.” American Literature 43 (March, 1971): 60–82.

———. “Movement and Melody: The Disembodiment of Lucy Gayheart.” Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1984. 111–143.

Gerber, Philip. Willa Cather. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.

———. “Willa Cather and the Big Red Rock.” College English 19 (1958): 152–157.

Giannone, Richard. Music in Willa Cather's Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968.

———. “Willa Cather and the Human Voice.” Five Essays on Willa Cather: the Merrimack Symposium. Ed. John J. Murphy. Andover, Massachusetts: Merrimack College, 1974. 21–49.

———. “Willa Cather and the Unfinished Drama of Deliverance.” Prairie Schooner 52 (1978): 25–46.

Greene, George. “Willa Cather's Grand Manan.” Prairie Schooner 55 (1981). 233–240.

Griffiths, Frederick T. “The Woman Warrior: Willa Cather and One of Ours.” Women's Studies 11 (1984). 261–285.

Handy, Yvonne, L'oeuvre de Willa Cather. Rennes: Thèse présentée à l'université de Rennes, 1940.

Helmick, Evelyn Thomas. “The Broken World: Medievalism in A Lost Lady.” Renascence 28 (1975): 39–46.

———. “Myth in the Works of Willa Cather.” Midcontinent American Studies 9.2 (Fall 1968): 63–69.

Hinz, John P. “Willa Cather: Prairie Spring.” Prairie Schooner 23.1 (Spring, 1949): 82–86.

Jacks, L. V. “The Classics and Willa Cather.” Prairie Schooner 35 (Winter, 1961/62): 289–296.

Jones, Howard Mumford. The Bright Medusa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952.

Kates, George N. “Willa Cather's Unfinished Avignon Story.” Five Stories by Willa Cather. New York: Vintage Books, 1956. 177–214.

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. 1942; rpt. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956.

Keeler, Clinton. “Narrative Without Accent: Willa Cather and Puvis de Chavannes.” American Quarterly 17 (Spring, 1965): 119–126.

Klein, Marcus. Introduction to My Mortal Enemy. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.

Kronenberg, Louis. Review of My Mortal Enemy. New York Times Book Review (October 24, 1926). Rpt. in Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Ed. John J. Murphy. Boston: K. G. Hall, 1985. 228–230.

Lambert, Deborah. “The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia.” American Literature 53 (1982): 676–690.

Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living: A Personal Memoir. 1953; rpt. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.

Loebner, Horst-Dieter. “Willa Cather: ‘Paul's Case.’ Die Problematik der ästhetischen Existenz.” Literature in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (Kiel). 5 (1972): 215–232.

Martin, Terence. “The Drama of Memory in My Ántonia.” PMLA 84 (March, 1969): 304–311.

McLay, Catherine M. “Religion in the Novels of Willa Cather.” Renascence 27 (1975): 125–144.

McFarland, Dorothy Tuck. Willa Cather. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972.

Michaud, Régis, Le roman américain d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Boivin, 1926.

Miller, Bruce E. “The Testing of Willa Cather's Humanism: A Lost Lady and Other Cather Novels.” Kansas Quarterly 5.4 (1973): 43–49.

Miller, James E. “Willa Cather and the Art of Fiction.” The Art of Willa Cather. Ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. 121–155.

Moseley, Ann. “The Dual Nature of Art in The Song of the Lark. Western American Literature 14 (1979): 19–32.

Murphy, John J. “A Comprehensive View of Cather's O Pioneers!” Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Ed. John J. Murphy. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. 113–127.

———. “Euripides' Hippolytus and Cather's A Lost Lady.” American Literature 53 (March, 1981): 72–86.

———. “’Lucy's Case’: An Interpetation of Lucy Gayheart.” Markham Review 9 (1980): 26–29.

———. “Nebraska Naturalism in Jamesian Frames.” Great Plains Quarterly 4 (1984): 231–237.

———. “Willa Cather and Catholic Themes.” Western American Literature 17 (1982): 53–60.

———. “One of Ours as American Naturalism.” Great Plains Quarterly 2 (1982): 232–238.

———. “Willa Cather's Archbishop: A Western and Classical Perspective.” Western American Literature 13 (August, 1978): 141–150.

Nichols, Kathleen L. “The Celibate Male in A Lost Lady: The Unreliable Center of Consciousness.” Regionalism and the Female Imagination 4, 1 (1978). 186–197. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Willa Cather, 13–23.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1986.

———. “The Unity of Willa Cather's ‘Two-Part Pastoral’: Passion in O Pioneers!”. Studies in American Fiction 6 (1978): 157–171.

———. “The Thing Not Named: Willa Cather As a Lesbian Writer.” Signs 9.4 (1984): 576–599.

Pers, Mona. Willa Cather's Children. Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell, 1975.

Petry, Alice Hall. “Caesar and the Artist in Willa Cather's ‘Coming, Aphrodite!.’” Studies in Short Fiction 23 (1986): 307–314.

———. “Harvey's Case.” South Dakota Review 24 (1986): 108–111.

Randall, John. “Willa Cather and the Pastoral Tradition.” Five Essays on Willa Cather, ed. John J. Murphy. Andover, Massachusetts: Merrimack College, 1974. 75–96.

———. The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.

Robinson, Phyllis. Willa: the Life of Willa Cather. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1983.

Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

———. “Willa Cather's Female Landscapes: The Song of the Lark and Lucy Gayheart.” Women's Studies 11 (1984): 233–246.

Rosowski, Susan, and Bernice Slote. “Willa Cather's 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: The Genesis of The Professor's House.” Prairie Schooner 58 (Winter 1984): 81–92.

Rubin, Larry. “The Homosexual Motif in Willa Cather's ‘Paul's Case.’” Studies in Short Fiction 12.2 (Spring, 1975): 127–131.

Rule, Jane. Lesbian Images. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Salo, Alice Bell. “The Professor's House and Le mannequin d'osier: A Note on Willa Cather's Narrative Technique.” Studies in American Fiction 8 (1980): 229–231.

Schwind, Jean. “The Benda Illustrations to My Ántonia: Cather's ‘Silent’ Supplement to Jim Burden's Narrative.” PMLA 100.1 (January, 1985): 51–67.

———. “The ‘Beautiful’ War in One of Ours.” Modern Fiction Studies 30 (1984): 53–71.

Seibel, George. “Miss Willa Cather from Nebraska.” New Colophon 2.7 (September, 1949): 195–208.

Sergeant, Elizabeth. Willa Cather: A Memoir. 1953; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.

Shively, James. Writings from Willa Cather's Campus Years. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1950.

Skaggs, Merrill. “Nellie Birdseye.” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter. 30 (Summer, 1986): 14–16.

———. “Willa Cather's Experimental Southern Novel.” Missouri Quarterly 35 (1981–1982): 3–14.

Slote, Bernice. Introduction to Uncle Valentine and Other Stories by Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

———. Preface to the 1903 April Twilights. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968.

———. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893–1896. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

———. “The Secret Web.” Five Essays on Willa Cather; the Merrimack Symposium. Ed. John J. Murphy. Andover, Massachusetts: Merrimack College, 1974. 1–19.

Stouck, David. “Cather's Archbishop and Travel Writing.” Western American Literature (17 May, 1982): 3–12.

———. “O Pioneers! Willa Cather and the Epic Imagination.” Prairie Schooner. 46 (1972): 23–34.

———. Willa Cather's Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

Sutherland, Donald. “Willa Cather: The Classic Voice.” The Art of Willa Cather. Ed. by Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. 156–182.

Trilling, Lionel. “Willa Cather.” After The Genteel Tradition. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. 1937; rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.

West, Rebecca. The Strange Necessity. New York: The Viking Press, 1928.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Letter to Willa Cather. 1939. Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York.

Wild, Barbara. “‘The Thing Not Named’ in The Professor's House.” Western American Literature 12 (1978): 263–274.

Wilson, Edmund. Shores of Light. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952.

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1987.

———. “Willa Cather and Her Friends.” Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Ed. John J. Murphy. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. 81–95.

———. Willa Cather: Her Life and Art. 1970; rpt. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Yongue, Patricia Lee. “Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Dutch Genre Painting.” Renascence 31 (1979): 155–167.

———. “Willa Cather on Heroes and Hero-Worship.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 79 (1978): 59–66.

Zabel, Morton. “The Tone of Time.” The Nation (7 December, 1940): 574–576.