SOURCE: Stouck, David. Willa Cather's Imagination, pp. 35–46, 73–82, 171–81. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

THE PASTORAL IMAGINATION

In pastoral the imagination counters the failures of the present by moving back into the past. In recovering lost time the artist may seek to recapture a world of childhood innocence, or he may attempt to resolve the conflicts in his past experiences which have prevented him from living meaningfully in the present. In either case the term pastoral here signifies not just a rural subject, but a mode of art based on memory. Pastoral, in keeping with its classical etymology, has been a term in literary criticism applied to works of art with a bucolic setting. William Empson, however, in Some Versions of Pastoral expanded the term to indicate the proletarian cause in works of literature that present the dialectic of class struggle. Moving in the opposite direction, I have taken as the common denominator in pastoral the idea of retreat from society, and have expanded the term on a psychological basis to denote the artist's withdrawal into himself and into the imaginative realm of memory.

In its simplest form a pastoral of innocence marks a retreat in time and place to an enclosed, green world, a retreat expressing man's dream of a simplified, harmonious existence from which the complexities of society and natural process (age, disease, and death) are eliminated.¹ Mythically, pastoral seeks to recover a “Golden Age” when existence was ideally ordered and there was no conscious separation of self from the rest of the world—no separation of subject and object, all things sharing an identity of order and purpose. Wordsworth gives powerful expression to the dream of pastoral innocence in “Tintern Abbey” when he discovers in nature a principle of unity that informs “all thinking things, all objects of all thought,” and is the source and nurse of his moral being. The pastoral landscape is ultimately a place of innocent erotic fulfillment wherein the imagination is reunited to the world in a maternal embrace.

A pastoral of experience is more complex: while it embodies the adult's escapist desire to return to childhood, it also recognizes that the past was not the perfectly secure and ordered world that it appears to be in retrospect. A pastoral of experience inevitably moves toward that point of recognition where the past is revealed as a time of rejection and failure, a time of anxiety rather than perfect happiness. The outrage committed by the past on the present is writ large in Faulkner's novels, where the myth of a more perfect past—the antebellum South—is exposed as an illusion and a lie. In a pastoral of innocence the imagination evades crisis and awareness, but in a pastoral of experience the imagination is caught up in conflict again and brought to a point of recognition and acceptance.

Pastoral is constantly preoccupied with the arresting of time, for its passage moves the adult farther away from childhood and innocence. Images of time reflect the protagonist's deepest anxieties and his despair. The extent to which he is reconciled to the fact of mutability measures the degree of awareness and acceptance achieved. Sexual awakening marks the end of childhood, so that in a pastoral of innocence the imagination also attempts to exclude sexuality. In a pastoral of experience, however, it cannot be evaded because it is the failure of sexual initiation which ties the imagination to the past.

Because it is highly subjective, pastoral art is impressionistic in style. Nostalgia is most effectively evoked by a nondramatic, allusive style which charges the subject (and thereby reshapes it) with the artist's emotions: vague outline in painting, lyrical description in literature, the dissolve and soft lens of the camera. The style of pastoral art is also highly selective, for in recapturing the past the artist seeks to evoke certain emotions and exclude others. Although its application is general, Willa Cather's dictum for the unfurnished novel provides a fitting description of the pastoral style. In her essay “The Novel Démeublé,” she asserts that high quality in art derives from what is suggested rather than from what is described in detail, from “whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there.” Realistic detail only assumes an esthetic dimension for Miss Cather when it is subsumed within the “emotional penumbra of the characters themselves.”² Because pastoral is a wholly subjective art, it can be realized only through a style which places value, not on the details themselves, but on the emotion which they inspire.

EARLY STORIES AND APRIL TWILIGHT

Willa Cather's imagination was varied in its responses from the outset. In her early pieces of fiction she explored the different imaginative modes through which her later writing moved in more clearly discernible phases. In “Eric Hermannson's Soul” we find the primitive emotions of epic, in “The Treasure of Far Island” the nostalgia of pastoral, and in “The Sculptor's Funeral” the bitter reflections of satire. In one very early story, “The Burglar's Christmas,” we even find the theme of filial waywardness which was to become a preoccupation in some of her last writings. Many of the stories and novels represent a blending of modes: the emotions of epic and pastoral are inextricably intertwined in “The Bohemian Girl” and O Pioneers! But the mode to which Willa Cather repeatedly returned and which informs to some degree almost all of her fiction is the pastoral, because most of her art was grounded in memory and autobiographical in impulse.

The earliest stories, many of them scarcely more than sketches, are pastorals similar in feeling to Wordsworth's poems about poor beggars and cottage dwellers. Willa Cather's poor country folk are European immigrants on the American plains, but, like Wordsworth, she identifies imaginatively with the humbleness and loneliness of their lives. “Peter” (1892), “Lou, the Prophet” (1892), “The Clemency of the Court” (1893), and “On the Divide” (1896) are all tales motivated by the author's sympathy for the downtrodden social misfit. These tales are pastorals not because of their rural setting, but because they project psychologically the author's imaginative retreat from the world of her contemporaries. Like Wordsworth's old shepherd, Michael, or his Cumberland beggar, the characters in these stories are not the artist's equals in society, but reflect instead her image of self-worth and dramatize feelings of homesickness and failure. The sensitive Peter (an early version of Mr. Shimerda in My Ántonia), suffocated by material concerns and by homesickness for Prague, commits suicide; Lou, a homesick Dane, finds release in mystical visions and preaching until he eventually disappears from the countryside; Serge Povolitchky (“The Clemency of the Court”) is a motherless Russian boy who dies in prison after murdering the man who killed his dog. Only Canute Canuteson, the gloomy Norwegian in “On the Divide,” finally overcomes his despair and with a new bride looks forward to the future. These stories with their numerous cultural allusions seem like folk tales, but the classification is not accurate: no matter how crude or simple, they are the product of an individual imagination rather than a group.

Some of the earliest stories are very crude psychological tales which dramatize vividly the mechanisms of the artist's psyche. These tales may be loosely termed pastorals for, although they do not deal directly with either a rural landscape or childhood, they embody certain psychological preoccupations which are obsessive and which do have their origins in childhood. The crudest and most painful of these stories is “The Clemency of the Court,”³ mentioned above. Here the author identifies imaginatively with the plight of a Russian boy who is brutalized by the prairie environment. His own mother being dead, he is told that the State is his mother and will look after him. But after killing his master in a moment of desperation, he is sentenced to life prisonment and is slowly tortured to death in his cell. Serge is an innocent, and the sympathy we feel for him is that for a child searching for its mother, always a central imaginative preoccupation in Willa Cather's fiction and, broadly speaking, of pastoral art as a whole. (We might note here that Willa Cather's orphans are numerous, especially protagonists whose mothers are dead. They include Jim Burden, Don Hedger, Niel Herbert, Tom Outland, Myra Henshawe, Cécile Auclair, Lucy Gayheart, to mention only major figures. The orphan is more than a romantic convention in Willa Cather's fiction; it suggests a psychological state central to her art.)

In “The Elopement of Allen Poole” (1893)⁴ we find a crude dramatizing of another psychological state—the inevitable frustration of erotic experience. The hero of this tale, set in the Virginia of Miss Cather's earliest childhood, plans to elope with his sweetheart, but he is shot by her relations and only when he is dead does he spend the night with her. Nelly comes to him through the woods “like a little Madonna of the hills,” and as he is dying we are told that “she rocked herself over him as a mother does over a little baby that is in pain,” like an image of the Pietà. The lover identified as a mother figure and the fulfillment of such love through death are persistent preoccupations of pastoral. “The Burglar's Christmas” (1896)⁵ with its Kafkaesque night setting and dreamlike coincidence is a more sophisticated treatment of the mother-child relationship. A destitute young man is about to rob a wealthy house when he discovers that it is his parents' home. He is reunited with his loving mother in a scene of heightened erotic wish-fulfillment: “She leaned over and kissed him, as no woman had kissed him since he left her.” The young man is filled with remorse at having deserted her years before, a theme to appear in Willa Cather's last books, but we leave him with “the assurance of safety in that warm bosom that rose and fell under his cheek.”

Willa Cather's first book was a collection of poems entitled April Twilights, published in 1903.⁶ Like so many of her early stories these poems are written in the pastoral mode, expressing despair with the present and nostalgia for the past. The feeling which pervades the whole collection, more pronounced in some poems than others, is that of youthful insecurity and self-doubt—the hesitation of a university graduate going out into the world. The past, both literary and personal, provides a temporal escape from the dilemma of the present, but at the same time its irrecoverable and anxiety-ridden aspects urge more keenly the necessity of going forward into the future. These conflicting emotions are suggested in the title of the collection: April is the spring and the time for setting forth, but twilight suggests death and the reverting back to winter. The poems weave together what T. S. Eliot would describe as “memory and desire” with no sure movement in either direction, since the past can never be recaptured and the future for the artist is overshadowed by a conviction of certain failure.

The poems divide into two kinds: literary and personal. Just as the author's first novel, Alexander's Bridge, is characterized by a literary quality, so most of the poems in April Twilights reflect their source of inspiration in poetic models. In form and manner many of the poems are conventional and imitative: one hears the melodious romanticism of Hugo, Musset, Verlaine, and their English counterparts in Tennyson, Kipling, and Stevenson. Even more frequently one hears echoed the elegiac sadness of A. E. Housman, whose collection of pastorals, A Shropshire Lad, was probably Willa Cather's greatest enthusiasm at the time she was writing the poetry in this collection. The poem “Lament for Marsyas” is modeled closely on Housman's elegy “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and another poem, “In Media Vita” with its celebration of life undercut by the repeated phrase, “And the dead, under all,” echoes several of Housman's lyrics about life's transience. The literary world of antiquity—Arcadia—provides a retreat in time and place for the poet, but she is aware that classical pastoral is also preoccupied with mutability: et in Arcadia ego. The invoking of Arcadia in several of the poems produces nostalgia for the golden age that has passed with its heroes and lovers. In “Winter at Delphi” the poet knows that life will be renewed in the spring but that “Apollo, the god, Apollo” will not return; and in “Arcadian Winter” the shepherd lads now have silver hair and the maids are no longer fair. The alternate theme in the collection—the artist's sense of failure in the present—is also explored in poems of formal, literary inspiration. Poems such as “The Encore,” “Song,” “Sleep, Minstrel, Sleep” and “The Poor Minstrel” evoke pity for the artist—his suffering for an unrequited love, his early death. The poet is identified as a troubadour or minstrel, and in a traditional “L'Envoi” we are told that only “Loneliness” remains faithful to the poet to the end.

The poems of greatest interest and literary value, not surprisingly, are those which derive from the author's personal past, fusing together the two themes of nostalgia and the artist's suffering. In its imagery and rhythm “‘Grandmither, Think Not I Forget’” gives moving expression to a complex set of feelings. On the one hand, there is the poet's love for her grandmother, which becomes nostalgia for childhood and the protection of the old woman who is dead. On the other, there is the poet's sense of guilt and unworthiness: she wonders that the grandmother could have “loved the lassie so” and accordingly castigates herself for not coming more often to visit her grandmother's “bed beneath the thyme.” The poet's nostalgia and feelings of guilt are occasioned by her failure as a lover. Her rejection in love sends her thoughts back to the old woman who cared for her, and the poem concludes with a death wish: “So when I plant the rose an' rue above your grave for ye, / Ye'll know it's under rue an' rose that I would like to be.” The death wish here is a sober variation on the pastoral dream of being reunited to the world in a maternal embrace. The emotions explored in the poem reappear in the novels (Claude Wheeler in One of Ours, rejected by his wife on their wedding night, thinks of his mother and poor Mahailey at their work) and find consummate expression in the short story “Old Mrs. Harris,” a tragic tale about the same grandmother, written nearly thirty years later. In “The Namesake” similar feelings are evoked: although here the poet assumes a masculine identity and likens herself to an uncle “with hair like mine” who died as a youth in the Civil War, the affinity with the uncle is based on the idea that he was rejected in love and rests in a lonely grave far from home. The conflict of emotions in the whole collection is underscored in this poem. In the next-to-last stanza the poet says to the dead uncle, “I'd leave my girl to share / Your still bed of glory there,” but in the last stanza reconsiders and promises to “be winner at the game / Enough for two who bore the name.” The ambivalent feelings of an April twilight—the excitement of going forth to conquer, the self-doubt and desire to retreat into the past—are carefully delineated in the blank verse “Dedicatory.” The poem is addressed to the poet's brothers, Roscoe and Douglass Cather, who with their older sister “lay and planned at moonrise, / On an island in a western river, / Of the conquest of the world together.” Their dream of a summer morning odyssey, however, is undercut by the April night of the poem, for twilight is a time of memory; moreover, the “somewhere, sometime” of the poem's first line is childhood and the past.

To the contemporary sensibility the short poem “Prairie Dawn” is perhaps the most effective piece in the collection. In eight chiseled lines of blank verse the author has rendered the essence of an emotion; as in the other poems it is that confused feeling of setting forth at dawn and at the same time relapsing into homesickness.

A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
A breaking of the distant table-lands
Through purple mists ascending, and the flare
Of water ditches silver in the light;
A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
A sudden sickness for the hills of home.

The technique of seven exact lines of description in apposition to a concluding statement of feeling is not unlike the Japanese haiku, which Ezra Pound later introduced into the mainstream of English and American poetry. It is interesting that in this early poem the West represents the epic challenge of going forward, the odyssey of conquering, while pastoral emotion, as in “The Namesake,” is associated with Virginia—“the hills of home.” In the 1923 and 1933 editions of April Twilights the new poems, which are all related to personal rather than literary experience, identify the pastoral landscape as Nebraska. Homesickness, which is a persistent emotion throughout Willa Cather's writing, is expressed in “Macon Prairie” as a love for pioneer ancestors, and in “Going Home” the emotion is dissipated only when the narrator crosses the Missouri on the train going west—“the sharp curves and winding left behind.” The feeling of homesickness is probably strongest in the last poem added to the collection, “Poor Marty,” a lament by a fellow servant on the death of the kitchenmaid. The old woman was fashioned after the Cather family servant, Marjorie Anderson, who was also the model for Mahailey in One of Ours and Mandy in “Old Mrs. Harris.” The tensions of her daily round are recorded in the first section; in the second section remorse is evoked by the memory of the thoughtless summons sent to the old servant the morning she died. As in the first poem of the original collection, “‘Grandmither, Think Not I Forget,’” nostalgia is identified with pathos and remorse.

Willa Cather first approached the themes and special qualities of her pastoral novels in two short stories, “The Treasure of Far Island” (1902) and “The Enchanted Bluff” (1909). “The Treasure of Far Island”⁷ is an essential story in the Cather canon, for it embodies in both emotion and dramatic incident the substance of the author's imaginative life which gave shape to the major novels. In this tale a famous dramatist returns to his home in Nebraska to recapture something of his childhood. Margie, his old playmate, says to him that geniuses never grow up, and in her ironic and “adult” mood she calls him “‘a case of arrested development.’” They go out to “Far Island” together, the scene of their childhood play fantasies, and not only does Douglass experience a thrill that surpasses a first night in the theatre, but Margie herself becomes a completely natural and spontaneous woman again. Childhood is seen as the perfect state. The same idea is central to another story from this period, “Jack-A-Boy” (1901), wherein a child, like Wordsworth's “Lucy,” dies and escapes the inevitable disillusionment of the passing years, while the artist is left to reflect on the child's “divinity” in contrast with his own sad mortality. “The Treasure of Far Island” is an important story; but pastoral art achieves its effect through suggestion and the story suffers esthetically from being overexplicit. For example, when Douglass and Margie dig up a treasure box they had buried years ago, Margie explains what is already an obvious piece of symbolism, saying: “‘Why, Douglass, … it was really our childhood that we buried here, never guessing what a precious thing we were putting under the ground.’” There follows an interesting analysis of loss of innocence. Douglass tells Margie that it was when he saw her show fear he first fell in love with her: “‘That night, after our boat had drifted away from us, when we had to wade down the river hand in hand … you cried in a different way from the way you sometimes cried when you hurt yourself, and I found that I loved you afraid better than I had ever loved you fearless, and in that moment we grew up, and shut the gates of Eden behind us, and our empire was at an end.’” This first awareness of desire through fear looks forward to A Lost Lady, in which Niel Herbert's affection for Marian Forrester is aroused by her vulnerability. For all its explicitness, “The Treasure of Far Island” ends with a brilliantly ambiguous love scene in which the former child playmates kiss in the sunset. The scene is effective because the emotion is genuinely felt but, at the same time, recognized by the protagonists to be a hopeless cliché, a romantic parody—“he knew that she had caught the spirit of the play.” The tension of pastoral between desire (desire to recover childhood, desire to have Margie as a lover) and recognition of its impossible fulfillment is perfectly balanced, so that the romanticism in the last lines, evoking cities and romances of old, is wholly moving.

“The Enchanted Bluff”⁸ is very close in subject matter and feeling to “The Treasure of Far Island,” but this time Willa Cather avoided dramatizing the emotion and rendered it in its simplest, unfurnished manner—as a memory. The particular feeling she sought to capture was the romantic wonder of childhood. Through the eyes of a boy on a sandbank in a sluggish western river the untried world appears as a vista of splendid horizons. The story has no plot, but through description, allusion, and association creates a child's feeling for romance and adventure. The six boys watch the night sky fill with stars, and their thoughts are of Columbus taking his direction from the sky and Napoleon reading his fortune in the stars. The image of heroic voyage is extended when the moon comes up over the bluffs “like a galleon in full sail.” The moon is red and also suggests the Aztec rite of human sacrifice, which in turn evokes the story of Coronado, the Spanish adventurer, and his quest for the seven cities of gold. Each of the boys then muses about the places in the world he would like to see. The dream and the excitement of that night's musing is focused in the image of the Mesa Encantada, the great rock in the New Mexican desert which beckons to be explored and conquered. Each of the boys vows that he will some day climb that rock.

The story ends in a fashion similar to My Ántonia, with the narrator twenty years later looking back from the disillusioned perspective of adult life. None of the boys has climbed the mesa: one boy has died, another is a successful stockbroker and goes about only where his red touring car will take him. But even though none of them has been to New Mexico the narrator finds that the children of his friends are now dreaming of that same adventure. The story is shaped by the fundamental paradox of pastoral art: from the adult perspective in the larger world the imagination seeks to recover the experience of childhood wonder, which once imbued the world with the romance of discovery. The boys are impatient to set forth; yet we are aware, because this is a memory, that they are living in the most perfect time of their life.⁹

When Willa Cather came to write her first novels, the theme of memory's potency was subordinate to the drama of struggle and conquest: Bartley Alexander, Alexandra Bergson, and Thea Kronborg are all singled out as competitors and victors, each in his own way. But the pastoral theme is nonetheless important in all three books, for memory and the experiences of childhood carry the seeds of defeat for each of the protagonists. Alexander's desire to recapture his youth, to become a boy beside a campfire again, brings about the collapse of his bridge and his own death. The value Alexandra Bergson places on turning the wild land into a pastoral garden for her brother and Marie Shabata brings about the defeat of her highest hopes as a pioneer. Memories of childhood, which are fraught with hardships and failure, illumine the special defeat of Thea Kronborg as a human being and her transformation into a successful but hardened artist. The Song of the Lark is in fact a particular form of pastoral—a künstlerroman—in which childhood memories form a decisive aspect of the artist's growth to maturity.

Pastoral, however, became the dominant mode of her fiction when Willa Cather wrote her classic novel My Ántonia, published in 1918. Life for the author was changing in this period; the past was becoming more attractive than the present. The first flush of creativity and success for Willa Cather was over; the excitement of discovering her power as a writer was giving way to a more sober and thoughtful practice of her craft.¹⁰ In 1916 Isabelle McClung married the violinist Jan Hambourg. By this time Miss McClung's parents had died and the family mansion was sold, so that for Willa Cather the old friendship had changed in many ways. Olive Fremstad, the opera singer Cather admired and who inspired in part the portrait of Thea Kronborg, also married in 1916, and perhaps the author began to feel a certain emptiness in her own personal life at this time. Also, Elizabeth Sergeant tells us that Willa Cather was deeply affected by World War I: “the conflict loosed in 1914 … soon tore her apart.” To the spectacle of devastation in Europe Willa Cather responded: “‘Our present is ruined—but we had a beautiful past.’” This elegiac note marks the special mood of My Ántonia. In this novel the hero is no longer a strong creative character, but a man whose personal life is wanting, who retreats into the fuller life of his memories. Although the novel's heroine is a strong creative character, her value and significance are illuminated by the thoughts and feelings of a man who is in effect a kind of failure and wanderer. With My Ántonia Willa Cather shifted from the epic to the pastoral mode, no longer looking confidently to the future but celebrating the past. …

THE CRITICAL IMAGINATION IN WILLA CATHER'S SHORT FICTION

Epic and pastoral are imaginative modes which give expression to powerful, universal feelings, but there are many works of art in which our interest is directed principally toward an idea or a different form of consciousness rather than an emotion. In the experimental prose of Gertrude Stein, for example, fictional technique is used to explore levels of being and awareness, and in the plays of Bertolt Brecht our emotions are deliberately alienated in the interest of an idea around which a play has been conceived and constructed. One might loosely term these works of art as products of the critical imagination. Willa Cather, unlike the majority of her twentieth-century comtemporaries, distrusted ideas as a source and raison d'être of art. In her very earliest reviews and critical writings we find her stating repeatedly that a genuine work of art is never “clever”; that literature is not made out of ideas, but out of people and emotions—something quite apart from knowledge. In her fiction her most accomplished artists and critics have similar feelings: in The Song of the Lark, for example, Harsanyi, the pianist, recognizes that Thea Kronborg is not quick to learn, but he sees that she has the emotion and desire to be a great artist; Don Hedger in “Coming, Aphrodite!,” a painter far ahead of his time, avoids fashionable cliques of artists where ideas about art are discussed; Charlotte Waterford in “Uncle Valentine,” one of the most postive characters in Willa Cather's fiction, has “good taste” rather than intelligence about both art and living. This attitude extends to form in Willa Cather's fiction as well: her novels are always built around a feeling rather than an idea of form—something organic that retains the complexity of the living experience. One thinks of Jim Burden with his manuscript about Ántonia which “‘hasn't any form,’” which is just a memoir, or Godfrey St. Peter's finding the form for his histories in the visual impact of a series of mountain peaks. The author herself likened the form of Shadows on the Rock to “a series of pictures remembered rather than experienced” and to a fragment of an old song.¹¹ Although Willa Cather never became an intellectual novelist, ideas did play an increasingly important part in her fiction as she grew older. This is especially true of the novels dating from the mid-1920s, a time in her life when she grew to distrust some of her strongest emotions. In order to illuminate the unique qualities of One of Ours and The Professor's House, this chapter will focus on the intellectual and critical dimensions of Willa Cather's art. The importance of these elements in her fiction is apparent when we recognize that in The Professor's House the author sought to free herself from the grip of self-destructive emotions through the discipline of a traditional structure of thought.

As in a study of epic and pastoral elements in Willa Cather's fiction, one finds in her apprenticeship pieces several examples of the critical imagination as well—in short stories constructed around baldly stated ideas. Through their esthetic limitations one gains another kind of insight into the nature of her craft. Some of the early “idea” stories are of continuing interest because their central theme or idea later became an organic aspect of Willa Cather's art. “A Son of the Celestial” (1893)¹² is such a story, written out of the author's curiosity about the contrast between Western and Eastern cultures. The story concerns a once brilliant American scholar who has taken to drinking heavily and smoking opium with an old Chinese artisan in San Francisco. He discusses philosophy and literature with old Yung and is horrified by the lack of passion in Oriental people: “‘You are so old that you are born yellow and wrinkled and blind. You ought to have been buried centuries before Europe was civilized.’” The idea of civilization gradually depleting itself of energy always fascinated the author and frequently underlay the broad conflicts in her novels.¹³ Jim Burden, for example, feels the pull toward the vitality of the Nebraska farm country as well as toward the sophisticated but effete civilization of the East. In “A Son of the Celestial” the idea is given dramatic interest by the scholar's horror at seeing himself becoming like Yung. Another idea story is “The Count of Crow's Nest” (1896),¹⁴ which picks up the image of a people (here it is the European aristocracy) depleting itself—the blood growing tired and the family dying out. An aging and impoverished count lives in a Chicago rooming house treasuring his memories of a civilized past, while his daughter, a common woman, makes a living as a fifth-rate singer. She wants to publish some old letters that her father has brought from Europe which, because of their scandalous nature, would sell very well. The author resolves the conflict between the new life and tradition by giving her sympathy to what is imaginative, rather than to what is either simply old or new. The central character in the story, Buchanan, aids the count in resisting his daughter's exploitation of the past. Two other interesting ideas emerge in this story though they are not as integral to the plot. Near the beginning the narrator reflects that one hates most intensely where one has failed oneself. This recognition of human motives and behavior anticipates a deeply personal theme underlying The Professor's House. Also, when Buchanan and the old count are talking about art, it is interesting to hear the old man give expression to what is essentially the author's theory of the unfurnished novel; he says “‘the domain of pure art is always the indefinite.’” The value of this esthetic can be fully appreciated by contrasting these early tales to the later writing, where everything is suggested rather than openly stated.

A great number of the early idea stories are distinct failures. “‘The Fear that Walks by Noonday’” (1894), “The Princess Baladina—Her Adventure” (1896), “The Westbound Train” (1899), “The Affair at Grover Station” (1900), “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” (1901) are all particularly flat, unimpressive pieces of writing. What is instructive to note is that in each case the story's failure seems to derive from a common flaw—the author's attempt to develop plot and a clever, surprise ending. The invariable result is a quality of contrivance. In “The Westbound Train” a woman's travel passes are confused with another's and for a while she begins to doubt her husband and the validity of their marriage; when the confusion has been cleared away, so has any interest in the story. “The Affair at Grover Station” is potentially more interesting because it employs a male narrator reflecting on a love triangle and subsequent murder, but the focus falls finally on the narrator's having seen his friend's ghost, so the reader again is betrayed by suspense and a contrived ending. “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” also is a potentially interesting story, this time because the author is using an elegiac setting, a deserted prairie town, for which she clearly has much imaginative feeling. But as in another story called “A Resurrection” (1897) set in a dying town, the author projects our interest toward a conclusion which fails to satisfy our aroused expectations. In “El Dorado” a land speculator, who duped everyone into starting the town, returns for some pictures and artifacts connected with a woman he loved, and is killed by a poisonous snake as he is retrieving his goods. An old colonel who had stayed on in town after it failed is thereby able to get back his invested money. In “A Resurrection,” whose real imaginative subject is the unsung nobility of forgotten, small-town people (one is reminded of Gray's “Elegy”), the heroine finally receives a marriage proposal from the man she once loved and whose son she has been raising. The “happily-ever-after” ending belies both the realistic setting of a dying western town and the stoical conception of the heroine's character. In each of these stories there is a shift away from the original imaginative inspiration behind the story to develop an idea and to fulfill the more conventional demands of a short-story plot.

As Willa Cather's writing matured she turned less frequently to ideas as a source of inspiration for fiction. Eventually her best fiction was to be written out of an emotion and developed largely in terms of setting and character. But one form of idea story continued to interest her and that was the Jamesian ghost story. In “Eleanor's House” (1907)¹⁵ a ghost never actually appears, but a man's second wife finds that she must exorcise the spirit of his dead first wife before they can live happily together. The first wife, Eleanor, represents an idealized romantic youth and her decease must be accepted by the husband as the inevitable passage from innocence into the sober world of experience and responsibility. In its characters and setting (Americans living in Normandy) and in its emphasis on the subtle interplay of consciousness and feeling, “Eleanor's House” is probably the most Jamesian story Willa Cather ever wrote, but like so many of her other stories built around an interesting idea, it suffers from overexplicitness. The central consciousness in the story, a girlhood friend of the first wife, understands too well her friend's situation and we are left with few questions to tease the imagination. The final twist of the friend becoming obsessed by Eleanor—her husband says to her “‘You look like a ghost’”—is just that, a twist, rather than the revelation of a powerful hidden emotion in the story. In “Consequences” (1915)¹⁶ the ghost who haunts the hero in the form of an old man is very real. The old man prefigures everything that Kier Cavanaugh will become, and after several glimpses into the jaded, physically depleted world of his future, Kavanaugh chooses to commit suicide. The contrast between the ruddy-faced protangonist and the decayed old man who pursues him is quite effective, but unfortunately the emphasis in the story falls on a lengthy debate between the hero and an acquaintance as to whether or not all suicides are explicable, and in the context of a thesis being demonstrated Cavanaugh's story is considerably weakened.

A few stories Willa Cather published after leaving her post as managing editor of McClure's Magazine might be described as ideas or current interests worked up into fictional form; they betray that at this time the author still had to sell her work in order to make a living. In “Behind the Singer Tower” (1912)¹⁷ six men, out for a boat ride on the North River, reflect on the nature of a powerful city, their thoughts inspired by a fire in a great New York hotel which has killed hundreds of important people. One of the men, a humanitarian engineer, asks the others to consider also the countless little men, the many workers who are destroyed every day so that the city's great machinery can operate (the average for window cleaners who drop to the pavement, we are told, is more than one per day). When one of the group tells of “Little Caesar,” an Italian day laborer from Ischia who is needlessly killed in a construction accident, the story moves into direct social criticism. But it ends with a vision of evolutionary purpose behind the dynamic processes of the city: the men are left wondering what new “Idea” will be born into human history from their civilization on Manhattan Island. This ending looks forward to a similar theme in One of Ours. David Gerhardt, the violinist, wonders if there is some unforeseen purpose behind the devastation of the war: “‘I've sometimes wondered whether the young men of our time had to die to bring a new idea into the world … something Olympian’” (p. 409).¹⁸ This was an idea, however, which the author never dramatized any further. “The Bookkeeper's Wife” (1916) and “Ardessa” (1918)¹⁹ are two more stories drawn from her experiences in New York. They are both stories about office workers, people who count for little in the city's great scheme of things, but who nonetheless suffer from the ironic twists of fate. Except for their biographical nature (we are given a glimpse of that world in which Willa Cather herself worked for six years), these stories have little of lasting interest, for their ironies are of a wholly conventional and hypothetical kind.

The danger for the critical imagination is overintellectualization—the reduction of esthetic experience to an abstraction. Frequently, art of a critical and ironic nature represents the revenge of the intellect on emotions which the artist himself cannot control. But emotion rather than intellect is the immutable material out of which great art has always been fashioned. Consequently the most powerful form of critical art is satire, for not only does it promote the function of the critical consciousness, but also it gives expression to those emotions—indignation and outrage—which spur on critical judgment. In a satire the artist projects his sense of personal failure and self-disgust (those emotions he cannot handle) on to the world at large, and by pointing to social injustice and to irrationality in the behavior of others he mitigates his own sense of failure and inadequacy. For example, the righteous indignation of Swift at the presumptions of the human animal seems to have had its source in the writer's own emotional instability and a body wracked by disease and pain. Thus while a satirist's professed purposes are rational and corrective—he wants us to recognize and alter an unhealthy state of affairs—he is in fact giving vent to his deepest feelings, and by establishing a moral norm from which all human behavior is accordingly judged aberrant, he is effecting a personal revenge on the world through his art. The central motive in a satirical work of art is to impose one's individual sense of order on the world and, by inspiring hatred or ridicule, to revenge oneself on an unsatisfactory way of life. The emotions out of which critical or satirical art arise include cruelty on the one hand and self-pity on the other, sadomasochism being their psychological extremes.

Self-pity and cruelty are emotions which recur with significant frequency in Willa Cather's fiction and which point to a persistent dark side to the author's imagination. Consider the importance of such despairing, self-pitying protagonists as Claude Wheeler or Godfrey St. Peter, and the unmitigatable cruelty exhibited by Ivy Peters, Myra Henshawe, or Sapphira Colbert. In two very early stories the cruelty latent in the author's imagination finds startlingly direct expression. “The Strategy of the Were-Wolf Dog” (1896)²⁰ is in one sense an innocuous (and artistically unimpressive) tale written for children at Christmas. But at the same time it is almost Iagolike in its conception. The evil werewolf dog, who is despised and in return hates everything and everyone, leads Santa's reindeers out on a lake where the ice breaks and they drown after much struggling to save themselves. The tale ends happily with the other animals helping to deliver the children's gifts on Christmas Eve, but the one strong image in the story is that of the remorseless werewolf dog watching the reindeer drown. In “The Dance at Chevalier's” (1900)²¹ the two rivals' love for Severine Chevalier pales beside the loser's desire for revenge. The latter warns Severine that he likes to kill the things he loves, and before he poisons his rival at the dance he says to himself, “‘Love is sweet, but sweeter is revenge.’”

The author's personal drama of self-pity, cruelty, and revenge is set forth in a rather light-hearted but revealing tale entitled “Tommy, the Unsentimental” (1896),²² written when Willa Cather was about twenty-two. The author's frank, boyish nature with its suggestion of emotional complexity is probably nowhere else presented in such a direct and engaging manner. The plot of the story is not biographical, but one cannot help feeling there is considerable honesty and candor in the characterization of the protagonist and her feelings. The story tells about a tomboy in a small western town who saves her boyfriend from financial disaster and at the same time finds him a very suitable wife. The central character is Tommy Shirley, a rough, boyish young woman (not unlike Willa Cather in some respects), who has the figure of a half-grown lad. Tommy's best friends are her father's business associates, and she can hold her own with them, whether it is at whist, billiards, or making cocktails. However, it is in the relationship between Tommy and two other young people that we catch a glimpse of the complex psychological relationships among characters in the author's major novels, and that the drama of self-pity and revenge reveals itself. Quite out of keeping with her good sense and practicality, Tommy is fond of Jay Ellington Harper, an effeminate bank clerk from the East who, according to Tommy, is good for nothing but keeping his hair parted and wearing a white carnation in his buttonhole. But Tommy is also “sweet” on a girl she brings home from school in the East—Miss Jessica, a vaporous and delicate young woman given to sunshades. Eventually Harper's affection for Tommy changes to love for Miss Jessica and Tommy arranges for her two friends to marry, but not before her own confused emotions find temporary release in a scene of subtle revenge. In order to save Harper's bank from collapse Tommy and Miss Jessica must cycle twenty-five miles upgrade to the next town. The sun is like hot brass and Miss Jessica almost perishes from the heat; but Tommy drives her mercilessly on. Miss Jessica, watching Tommy in front of her, reflects “that Tommy was not only very unkind, but that she sat very badly on her wheel and looked aggressively masculine and professional when she bent her shoulders and pumped like that.” Finally, Miss Jessica, reduced to tears, gives up, collapses by the wayside and Tommy, laughing to herself, pushes on thinking that, after all, it only evened the score. But after saving the bank Tommy is left alone, and there is a touch of pathos to the girl who is a forerunner of Cather's lonely artist figure. However, in the controlled and rather light manner of the tale the heroine bites her lip and then shrugs her shoulders at both the foolishness and loveableness of more ordinary people.

For Willa Cather the emotions of cruelty and self-pity were most strongly associated with the small Nebraska town in which she was raised, and they first emerge as the substance of satire in “The Sculptor's Funeral” (1905),²³ a story set in the West. Without doubt “The Sculptor's Funeral” is one of Willa Cather's best pieces of short fiction: detail is always suggestive rather than explicit and the essential elements of the story—the satire, the pathos—come together in exactly the right relationship. Perhaps this is because the author may have had a formal model for the story in the pastoral elegy, the classical lament of an artist on the occasion of a fellow artist's death. Whether consciously or not, Miss Cather has woven into her story many of the elements of pastoral elegy as practiced by the Greeks Bion and Moschus, and in English by Milton (“Lycidas”), Shelley (“Adonais”), and Matthew Arnold (“Thyrsis”). The artist's body is brought back by one of his students to be watched over by his kinsmen and former neighbors, but as in the traditional poem only the fellow artist truly mourns his loss. For while the professed purpose of a pastoral elegy is to sing a lament for the dead poet, its real motive is satiric—to rail against those forces which diminish an artist's life. In “The Sculptor's Funeral” it is the conformity and ugly materialism of midwestern society which come under attack. The unsympathetic mourners represent all those negative aspects of life from which the artist originally fled.

Point of view in the story is divided between Henry Steavens, the artist's student who accompanies the body west, and Jim Laird, a drunken lawyer from Sand City, who appreciates what Harvey Merrick, the dead artist, made of his life. Steavens's viewpoint distills for us the pathos of the artist's life: through his eyes we feel compassion for Harvey Merrick coming from such raw, ugly surroundings, and we are assured of his significant achievement in the larger world. Laird's viewpoint is the bitter, satirical one; with his “astonishing cataract of red beard that grew fiercely and thickly in all directions,” he is almost a personification of choleric man. In his angry speeches he denounces the drab western town where money is the only measure of success, and thinly disguised knavery the accepted means of acquiring it. Ideals in such a town, though everywhere professed, are destructive to anyone who takes them seriously, for cunning is the only currency with real value. The palm of distinction placed on Merrick's coffin, like the traditional tribute of flowers in pastoral elegy, is without significance to the townspeople; they discuss instead the possibility of a will and agree that Mr. Merrick should have sent his son to a business college instead of a university in the East.

The bitter mood of the story is underscored in the details describing the townspeople and the dead artist's home. The shuffling, ill-defined group of men gathered at the train station speak in a rough country slang and move about “slimily as eels.” The Merrick home with its clover-green Brussels carpet, its plush upholstery and hand-painted china plaques, is the epitome of conventional bad taste. The coffin is taken into the typically unused parlor and set “under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass prisms and before a ‘Rogers group’ of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax.” The satire of bad taste and crude manners in a small western town deepens into personal horror with the portrait of the artist's parents: the violent, terrifying mother whose outburst of grief soon gives way to abuse of the maid for forgetting the dressing for the chicken salad, and the shameful, broken father who looks at his wife “with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip.” Steavens recognizes them to be “the real tragedy of his master's life.” These parents are a caricature of the dominant mother and weak father, but they prefigure the essential nature of several couples in Willa Cather's fiction, perhaps most significantly the Templetons in “Old Mrs. Harris” and the Colberts in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, both modeled to some extent on the author's own parents. …

NEWSPAPER ARTICLES AND EARLY STORIES

The themes in Willa Cather's fiction are many and varied; during a writing career which spanned more than fifty years she found materials for her art in subjects as diverse as the American pioneer experience, World War I, contemporary urban life, and the history of Catholic civilization. One theme, however, which persists throughout Willa Cather's fiction and which helps to bind the whole canon together into a continuous drama is the relationship between art and experience, or, to put it more directly, the dilemma of the artist caught between his commitment to art on one hand and to life on the other.

That art and life should be seen as contraries does not in theory hold. Art and life cannot after all be separated: from life experiences come the materials of art, and art in turn gives to human life a sense of purpose and design. But in practice the artist's pursuit of excellence in his work can place severe limitations on his personal life. Art is an achievement, and like excellence or success in any endeavor requires great concentration and dedication. The goal of art, moreover, is to transcend the human condition—to create something permanent, immutable, outside the world of time and chance—and the commitment required for artistic creativity often excludes the artist from a full participation in and enjoyment of life. Paradoxically, while the values of art are intelligence, order, insight, and sympathy, they are frequently achieved only if the artist denies them in his relations with others. Thus a great artist, exalted in the practice of his art, may well be selfish, aloof, and emotionally empty as a man. Art serves to enhance and enrich human life, but it requires that the artist sacrifice much in his own personal life to achieve its highest ends. Art and life become contraries through the demands they place on the artist.

We know from her early critical articles that even at the outset of her career Willa Cather was aware of the deep split between the claims of art and life. The newspaper articles were written when she was still in her early twenties, but she already seems to have recognized the difficulty for the artist of reconciling these two claims. In countless columns and reviews, whether her subject was painting, music, the stage, or literature, Willa Cather touched in some way on the nature of art and the artist. By temperament she was a romantic and her instinct accordingly was to view art as the highest form of human endeavor. Frequently she raised art to the level of the divine, an experience akin to religion through which man comes closer to God. In describing the great pleasure afforded by a certain actor, she says the enjoyment of his talent is “in watching a man give back what God put into him.”²⁴ She shares in the public denouncement of Oscar Wilde as a criminal, but with the important reservation that the artist in him cannot be killed because “it is of God” and a “heavenly birthright … which makes [him] akin to the angels and to see the visions of paradise.”²⁵ In one column she says it is the writer's task to translate God to man;²⁶ in another she compares the artist's calling to a religious commitment: “In the kingdom of art there is no God, but one God, and his service is so exacting that there are few men born of woman who are strong enough to take the vows.”²⁷ Willa Cather also described the artist in heroic terms and repeatedly refers in her articles to the glory and victory attendant on a great work of art: “O yes, art is a great thing when it is great, it has the elements of power and conquest in it, it's like the Roman army, it subdues a world, a world that is proud to be conquered when it is by Rome.”²⁸ These are the metaphors that Willa Cather would later use in The Song of the Lark to describe the ascendance and triumph of her artist heroine.

But Willa Cather recognized that there was a dark side to the artist's life as well. In a column on the actress Eleanora Duse she says that while the artist is one of God's “elect,” loneliness “besets all mortals who are shut up alone with God.” Referring to a letter published by Duse, Miss Cather writes: “There is something wonderfully beautiful in that letter, it is so full of the loveliness and lovelessness and desolation of art. Of the isolation … of all creative genius. … Solitude, like some evil destiny, darkens its cradle, and sits watching even upon its grave.”²⁹ Frequently during her career Willa Cather felt that loneliness was the inevitable fate of the artist and that great art could be achieved only if the artist sacrificed all other forms of personal satisfaction to that one end. In writing about the forthcoming marriage of the opera singer Helena von Doenhoff she insists that marriage and artistic greatness are incompatible; she implies a comparison between Doenhoff as a pilgrim of the arts and Bunyan's Mr. Doubting, who turns back and is seen no more. In this same rigorous vein Cather argues that the artist who cares only for success eventually will find it “empty and unsatisfying”; and that in art “complete self-abnegation is the one step … between promise and fulfillment.”³⁰ But on another occasion, describing the homesickness and concern that Réjane, the French comedienne, felt for her husband and children when she was on tour, Willa Cather writes that possibly Madame Réjane “knows that there are other things on earth than art, things higher and more sacred.”³¹ Cather also understood that artistic pursuits were sometimes “personal, intense, selfish”; and that some successful artists sustain wounds that glory cannot heal.³²

From the beginning, then, we find Willa Cather very aware of the complexities surrounding the artist's commitment to his craft. An artist may be a conqueror and godlike in his ability to create higher forms of reality or truth, but he does so by denying himself companionship and community with his fellow man. The artist's dilemma—the necessity of choosing between the antithetical values of art and life—appears again and again in Willa Cather's writing; it is the subject of one of her earliest short stories, “Nanette, An Aside,” and I see it as a submerged but powerful countertheme in the last four books. In earlier stories such as “The Marriage of Phaedra,” “‘A Death in the Desert,’” or “The Namesake,” and in The Song of the Lark, although the dialectic may be broken temporarily by a strongly negative view of art, there is a deep underlying conviction that the artist's commitment to his work is ultimately sacred and positive. But in the last books (Obscure Destinies, Lucy Gayheart, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Old Beauty and Others) that instinctive faith, in my view, is gone and what gives those books their peculiar haunting power, in addition to much else, is their mood of doubt and uncertainty and the picture they suggest of Willa Cather in the last decade and a half of her life questioning the validity of both a life's choice and a lifetime's achievements. Willa Cather's vision of life perceived a duality in all human experience, and in much of her fiction she celebrates without contesting the double nature of both man and his world; but as an artist she also strove to find a way of reconciling the opposing claims of art and life which would allow her to be both an artist and a woman. The conflict of art versus life is perhaps the most profound subject for any work of art; not only does it insist on an examination of those values to which art and life lay separate claim, but it touches at the very quick of the artist's desire and need to create. This is the theme, whether it be explicit or concealed, which gives greatness to the art of Mann, Joyce, and Proust, and, as I hope to show, to the art of Willa Cather.

There is an artist figure—the violinist Peter Sadelack—in Willa Cather's first published story, but her first study of a professional artist appears in “Nanette: An Aside” (1897).³³ Here we find an opera singer, Traduttori, who has achieved world renown as an artist, but whose personal life is almost a void. We learn in a brief aside that she has a crippled daughter hidden away somewhere in a convent in Italy and that her husband is a gambler and an alcoholic. Traduttori sadly explains to her maid, Nanette, that when she chose her career as a singer “‘everything dear in life—every love, every human hope’” lay between her and greatness and that she “‘had to bury what lay between.’” Nanette is the only person who has remained faithful to her and has been her confidante. The tragic side of Traduttori's life is dramatically revealed when Nanette decides to leave the singer to marry an Italian waiter. Traduttori wishes Nanette a lasting happiness, but after the maid is gone she puts her head down and weeps bitterly for her own loneliness and misery. The irony of the artist's fate is underscored in the last sentence where Willa Cather writes: “And yet upon her brow shone the coronet that the nations had given her when they called her queen.” The author reworked the story in “A Singer's Romance” (1900)³⁴ to emphasize again the cruel ironies the artist suffers in life. In this story the opera singer believes almost till the end that she, not her maid, is the one being courted by the Italian. When left alone at the end she seems to be even more wretched, for not only is she unloved, but aging as well, although the unsentimental last line of the story (“Then she ordered her breakfast—and a quart of champagne”) suggests she has her consolations and that Willa Cather had learned a thing or two about divas in the three years between the stories.

In two other early stories art is connected with failure in one's personal life. Although the characters in these stories cannot, strictly speaking, be classified as artists, their lives are shaped by their concern with the arts. In “The Prodigies” (1897)³⁵ an ambitious mother dedicates her two children, a boy and a girl, to a life of singing classical music in concert; but the vigorous physical discipline requisite eventually takes its toll on the girl and the final implication is that it will soon kill her. Although on its simplest level the story is about the cruel treatment of children, the fact that the mother's inordinate ambition seizes on music for its realization suggests something sinister as well as exalted about the arts. In “The Professor's Commencement” (1902)³⁶ an old teacher being honored on his retirement looks back with regret on a life devoted to esthetics in an industrial town. The old teacher is not an artist, but a sense of failure in his life derives from a feeling that he has missed his true vocation—that dedication to art in uncongenial surroundings was an evasion of his real test as a man of the arts. In all these stories personal failure is in some way related to art.

THE TROLL GARDEN AND STORIES ABOUT ARTISTS

Willa Cather's first published book of fiction was The Troll Garden (1905).³⁷ The seven stories in this volume are closely related to each other, as they are all concerned with art and the artistic temperament, a subject which from the beginning was as important to the author as her pioneer childhood in the West. Critics have suggested that in theme and arrangement the stories form an intricate design. E. K. Brown sees them as arranged in a pattern of contrasting stories.³⁸ Bernice Slote likens them to seven panels, a variation of the septenary, from which several combinations of figures are possible through association and contrast.³⁹ Whatever their internal relationships, each story comes back to a fundamental problem which teased the author's imagination for years—the relationship of art to life. I shall consider the stories individually, because each story, like the facet of a prism, exhibits the nature of art in a different light. The full complexity of the book's theme, however, emerges through the qualifications that one story imposes on the others.

In the first story, “Flavia and Her Artists,” the practitioners and patrons of the arts are seen mostly in a negative light. The story focuses on Flavia Hamilton, who courts the favor and company of artists with a kind of hysterical desperation even though she has a congenial husband and three well-mannered children. Flavia and her somewhat decadent ménage are seen through the eyes of Imogen Willard, a serious student, who has been a friend of Flavia and her husband in the past. During Imogen's visit, M. Roux, a French writer who has recently been staying at the Hamilton home, cuts Flavia up in an article subtitled “The Advanced American Woman, … Aggressive, Superficial and Insincere.” Flavia's husband, Arthur, destroys the article before his wife can read it, but at dinner, in front of the guests, he condemns M. Roux and his kind as a reprobate class of men who, while indispensable to civilization, are unreclaimed by it.⁴⁰ Flavia's guests are insulted and the next morning most of them depart, leaving Flavia devastated socially and furious with her husband. Arthur Hamilton's view of the artist as reprobate appears to be endorsed by the author. Ironically, Flavia accuses her husband of bad taste; but Flavia's passion for the arts is only a social ambition, while her husband's insight and self-sacrificing sympathy are genuine. In this story Willa Cather makes it clear that an artist to her is not by definition a sacred personage. Indeed, in cliques and fashionable gatherings artists are often insufferably vain and pretentious. Honesty and humility are more valuable qualities than good taste, and here they belong not to the artist but to a quiet man of business.⁴¹

But perhaps Willa Cather intended the word “artists” in the title of the story to be read ironically, for in the second story of the collection, “The Sculptor's Funeral,”⁴² the artist is the very opposite kind of man from Flavia's friends. Instead of the free-loading, fashionable man of the hour, the sculptor is a lonely, suffering figure who engages our complete sympathy. The distinction between the genuine artist and the celebrity is an important one in Willa Cather's fiction because only the true artist is capable of possessing nobility and insight. Tension in “The Sculptor's Funeral” exists between the world of the artist and that of the ordinary man which is seen as both limited and corrupt. As the townspeople rehearse in their crude and callous fashion the details of Harvey Merrick's life, we feel grateful, as does Jim Laird, the drunken lawyer and Merrick's old friend, that for a time he escaped the bleak realities of his home town, with its ugly, tasteless physical surroundings, its greedy, conformity-minded inhabitants, and its painful memories of home life. There is no question in this story but that the escape provided by art is valid and meaningful; only art has the power of infusing the sordid experiences of life with something more noble and lasting. Although “Flavia and Her Artists” and “The Sculptor's Funeral” appear to be antithetical in their view of art, they are fundamentally similar in lauding that which is genuine. Flavia's artists appear shams beside Harvey Merrick; indeed, they are as cruel and thoughtless as the townspeople in Sand City. The genuine response resists the pressures of fashionable conformity, whether it be a clique of esthetes or a group of small-town businessmen and farmers. What also is interesting in these two stories is that the artist is not held up as the sole repository of human values. Arthur Hamilton and Jim Laird, neither of whom is an artist, have the keenest insights into their respective situations.

In “The Garden Lodge” Willa Cather explores an altogether different aspect of art. In the person of Caroline Noble the respective claims of the practical and the imaginative life are at war with each other. Caroline's parents were indigent artists, and the impoverished, unhappy circumstances of her childhood were the result of her parents' excessive and impractical devotion to music. Caroline's brother, similarly enchanted by the muses, “shot himself in a frenzy” at the age of twenty-six. Reacting to these experiences, Caroline has repressed all her imaginative feelings and becomes a practical, successful woman. The crisis in her soul comes after a great opera singer, d'Esquerré, has stayed at her garden lodge; he awakens in her something vital which she has suppressed all her life, but which now demands expression. His singing gives her a glimpse of that spiritual world of the imagination whose existence transforms and gives meaning to what is mundane and assured. But Caroline's unrest is short-lived; when her husband suggests replacing the romantic garden lodge with a new summerhouse she gives her consent with little hesitation. The artists in this story are particularly interesting for their contrasting natures. Caroline's father and brother, who have failed to achieve wordly success through their art, are vindictive and self-pitying, and yet for the father, at least, the magic of great music continues to give purpose to his life. D'Esquerré, on the other hand, who has known great success, is an empty shell and only when he feels the fervent appeal of his audience can he experience again desire for the ineffable something beyond. Willa Cather was haunted from the beginning, as we have seen in her newspaper reviews and in stories like “Nanette: An Aside,” by the fact that artistic success does not guarantee happiness in the artist's personal life.

In “‘A Death in the Desert’” the story focuses directly on the artist's suffering. The central figure is Katharine Gaylord, a well-known singer who has become consumptive and has returned to her home in Wyoming to die. She recognizes her tragedy to be not simply her illness and approaching death, but also her unrequited love for the composer Adriance Hilgarde. Through her eyes we glimpse something of this man: on the surface Adriance is successful, dynamic, and flamboyantly happy, but when Katharine hears his most recent compositions she recognizes a tragic emotion which lies underneath. His tragic vision is that of human mortality, the fact that all of life's efforts must in the end be swallowed up by death. As she listens to his music, Katharine hears “‘the feet of the runners’” as they pass her by, an image of life hurrying on without her; also, an image of life as a dance of death. Katharine Gaylord is not presented to us directly but through the eyes of Adriance's brother, Everett; he loved her for many years, but she always overlooked him because of her passion for his brother. The feeling in this story is not so much that artists are cruel and indifferent to others around them (as Flavia's artists are), but that almost by definition the great ones are caught up in a quest which places them outside the daily round and the framework of values by which ordinary men are judged. Katharine on her death bed sees her whole life in retrospect as a self-destructive quest for punishment, pursued most dramatically in her fruitless love for Adriance. The desert of the title suggests a place of suffering and of tragic recognition.

In “The Marriage of Phaedra” Hugh Treffinger, the painter, is another tragic artist figure. The outline of his life is gradually reconstructed as his biographer, McMaster, gathers information for a book about him. From Treffinger's sister-in-law and from his widow, McMaster learns that the artist's marriage was not happy; he and his wife contended with each other for mastery (they are both described as strong and aggressive) and their marriage stalemated in hate. It is through the servant, James, that McMaster comes closest to the man himself, and it is James who confides that for Treffinger painting the Phaedra was a destructive passion: “‘It was the Marriage as killed 'im … and for the matter 'o that, it did like to 'av been the death of all of us.’” The Marriage, though unfinished, is considered Treffinger's highest achievement. It is a painting filled with guilt and the promise of suffering; the fatal attraction between Phaedra and her stepson is not pagan but Christian and medieval in conception; Phaedra is not a daughter of Minos but of the early church, “doomed to scourgings, and the wrangling of soul with flesh.” McMaster can learn no more about the painting or the artist's suffering translated on to the canvas. There is in the story something incoherent, because the guilt of Phaedra in the Marriage painting does not seem to relate to the failure in the artist's own marriage. Perhaps Willa Cather's chief concern was to dramatize the loneliness and misery of the artist's existence; certainly McMaster finds no one in Treffinger's personal life who cared for either him or his work except the loyal servant, James; and there lies another irony, for James is too uneducated to understand his master. The artist's life, in fact, inspired only hate; the story ends with Treffinger's widow vengefully selling the unfinished painting to a dealer from Australia in order to finance her new marriage.

“A Wagner Matinee,” like “The Sculptor's Funeral,” holds a special place in the corpus of Willa Cather's short fiction because it brings together the world of the arts and the world of the pioneer. The story itself is a simple one: the narrator's aunt returns briefly to Boston after a lifetime of pioneering in the West, and at an afternoon concert she catches a glimpse of everything that she has missed in her life on the frontier. Music here is a disturbing force; it brings not just pleasure but regret and longing for a world unrealized. In the careful juxtaposing of salient detail such as the elegant concert hall with the tall, unpainted house on the empty plains, the aunt's tragedy is poignantly delineated. Because of the point of view from which it is told, the story acquires a further, complex dimension: his aunt's presence evokes in the narrator a disquieting nostalgia. The dreariest details of life on the Nebraska farm—the dishcloths drying before the kitchen door, his aunt's concern for “a certain weakling calf”—bring to his mind the sacrifices she made for him when he was a boy; he owes to her “most of the good that ever came [his] way” in his boyhood, and it is a debt that never can be repaid.

In “Paul's Case” art is again a disquieting element. For the strange youth in this story, music and the theatre provide an escape from everything that is stupid and ugly in his existence. Art becomes a substitute reality which eventually claims him, body and soul. Paul is a classic study or analysis, as the title suggests, of an estranged youth—probably homosexual, certainly neurotic. Before the portrait was drawn the “type” was carefully observed: the hysterical brilliance of the eyes, the theatrical gestures, the twitching lips, and the physical aversion to human touch. The imaginative poverty of Paul's middle-class life with his father and sister, a life consisting of Sunday School picnics, petty economies, and cooking smells, is made tolerable by his work as an usher at Carnegie Hall. But when he is expelled from high school for insolence and forced to quit his job at the concert hall, he ends his compromise with the world, steals some money from his employer, and runs off to New York for a few enchanted days of luxury in a hotel. When his whereabouts is finally discovered, rather than return to his father's house he throws himself in front of a train. The seductive nature of art and the artistic temperament as touched by madness are set forth here in the most direct manner of all the tales in the volume.

The Troll Garden continues to be a vital collection of stories exactly because Willa Cather refused to mold them into a single pattern. Although the stories are built around such essential juxtapositions in her writing as art and experience, East and West, the artist and the “common” man, these dichotomies are viewed from a different perspective in each story, so that the collection as a whole becomes a complex network of interrelated themes. Design in this book touches on many of the author's major themes—the quest for what is genuine and lasting, the moral opacity of material possessions, the artist as tragic figure—and thereby in its own way comprehends the whole corpus of her work.

Notes

1. I am indebted to the late Renato Poggioli for the term “pastoral of innocence.” In his article “The Oaten Flute,” Harvard Library Bulletin 11 (May 1957): 147-84, Poggioli distinguishes two kinds of pastoral: the pastoral of happiness in which the rustic landscape is a place of erotic fulfillment, and the pastoral of innocence, a domestic idyll which celebrates age rather than youth. A good example of the latter would be Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. To denote its opposite I use the term pastoral of experience (with its Blakean overtones) rather than pastoral of happiness, as the retreat into memory more often uncovers sexual nightmare than erotic bliss.

2. “The Novel Démeublé,” Willa Cather on Writing, pp. 35-43.

3. CSF [Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912], pp. 515-22.

4. CSF, pp. 573-78.

5. CSF, pp. 557-66.

6. April Twilights (1903), edited with an introduction by Bernice Slote, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968).

7. CSF, pp. 265-82.

8. CSF, pp. 69-77.

9. The story contains the seeds of much later fiction: the image of the boys on a sandbank in the river occurs in Alexander's Bridge and My Ántonia; the New Mexican mesa looks forward to the Southwest landscape in The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop; the Coronado theme recurs in My Antonia; and in A Lost Lady there are two German boys exactly like the Fasslers who take catfish from the river to sell in town. “The Enchanted Bluff” clearly gives expression to a particularly rich and fertile memory.

10. Elizabeth Sergeant speculates whether the writing of My Ántonia was not for Willa Cather “a real turning point of literary maturity, when encouragement or criticism from without became irrelevant?” See Willa Cather: A Memoir, p. 148.

11. “On Shadows on the Rock” in Willa Cather on Writing, p. 15. There are other examples. According to Elizabeth Sargeant in Willa Cather: A Memoir, Miss Cather wanted the heroine of My Ántonia to be like a Sicilian apothecary jar—“a rare object in the middle of a table, which one may examine from all sides” (pp. 138-40). In a letter she likens the narrative of Death Comes for the Archbishop to two white mules moving slowly forward (Willa Cather to Norman Foerster, May 22, 1933, Love Library, University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

12. CSF, pp. 523-28.

13. This is one of the major themes studied by Randall in The Landscape and the Looking Glass. See also “The Kingdom of Art,” the second introductory essay by Bernice Slote in KA [Kingdom of Art], pp. 93-97.

14. CSF, pp. 449-71.

15. CSF, pp. 95-111.

16. Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929, edited with an introduction by Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), pp. 65-84. Hereafter cited as UVS.

17. CSF, pp. 43-54.

18. One of Ours (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). All references are to this text.

19. UVS, pp. 85-97 and 99-115.

20. CSF, pp. 441-48.

21. CSF, pp. 547-55.

22. CSF, pp. 473-80.

23. CSF, pp. 173-85.

24. Nebraska State Journal, March 3, 1895; collected in KA, p. 124.

25. Courier, September 28, 1895, collected in KA, p. 392.

26. Courier, November 23, 1895; collected in KA, p. 409.

27. Nebraska State Journal, March 1, 1896; collected in KA, p. 417.

28. Nebraska State Journal, January 26, 1896; collected in KA, p. 120.

29. Nebraska State Journal, June 16, 1895; collected in KA, p. 153.

30. Nebraska State Journal, January 27, 1895; collected in W& P, pp. 175-76.

31. Nebraska State Journal, April 21, 1895; collected in W& P, p. 200.

32. Courier, November 9, 1895, and Nebraska State Journal, December 15, 1895; quoted in KA, p. 71.

33. CSF, pp. 405-10.

34. CSF, pp. 333-38.

35. CSF, pp. 411-23.

36. CSF, pp. 283-91.

37. The stories from The Troll Garden are reprinted in CSF, pp. 149-261.

38. Brown, Willa Cather, pp. 113 ff.

39. KA, pp. 93 ff. Bernice Slote also explains in detail the allusions behind the title and the epigraphs (from Christina Rossetti's “The Goblin Market” and Charles Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton).

40. This view of the artist follows through an earlier observation Willa Cather made about literary people in the Nebraska State Journal, June 7, 1896: “It is gravely to be feared that literary people are rather mean folk when you get right down to the selfish little pericardiums that lie behind all their graceful artistic charms. They love humanity in the abstract, but no class of men can treat the concrete individual more shabbily.” Quoted in KA [Kingdom of Art], p. 68.

41. Some of the characters in this story are forerunners of types of figures which recur in Willa Cather's fiction. Arthur Hamilton, the quiet man of genuine good taste who is alienated from his unsympathetic wife and her clique of fashion-conscious friends, looks forward to Jim Burden, Godfrey St. Peter, Count Frontenac, Clement Sebastian, and Henry Colbert, to name only major characters. Imogen Willard, the honest, self-effacing observer, anticipates the shy, scholarly Nellie Birdseye of My Mortal Enemy, and there seems to be a direct line leading from the forthright “Jimmy” Broadwood to Cherry Beamish, the one-time music-hall performer in “The Old Beauty.” The reappearance of so many character types suggests both the unity and complexity of the author's imagination.

42. “The Sculptor's Funeral” has been treated more fully in Part I as a form of pastoral elegy.