SOURCE: Brown, E. K. “Troll Garden, Goblin Market, 1902-1905.” In Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, pp. 95–124. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1953.

The decade Willa Cather spent in Pittsburgh—from her twenty-third to her thirty-third year—fell evenly into two periods devoted to the two careers; she was a newspaperwoman for five of these years and a teacher for the remaining five. As if to establish, also, a difference between the unsettled, exacting journalism and the settled life of the classroom, the second half of the decade was marked by a change from boarding-house life to residence in a sedate mansion, in Pittsburgh's finest section, where Willa Cather found herself surrounded by the luxuries she had craved when young and a warm friendship that was devoted to providing her with an environment helpful to creative writing.

Willa Cather met Isabelle McClung in Lizzie Collier's dressing-room backstage at the stock company apparently in 1901, and it took very little time for the two to become close friends. Isabelle McClung was the daughter of a conservative Pittsburgh judge, a strict and upright Calvinist of considerable dignity and affluence, who lived with his wife, son, and two daughters in a large house at 1180 Murray Hill Avenue. She had revolted early against the rather rigid pattern of life in her home and gravitated toward the arts. She did not care for the society in which it was thought fit the daughter of a judge should move; she preferred the company of players, singers, writers. She shared Willa Cather's passion for music and the stage. And she was an avid reader. Elizabeth Moorhead, who has written of Willa Cather's life in Murray Hill Avenue in These Too Were Here, thought Isabelle McClung “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen … large of mind and heart, entirely frank and simple with natural dignity of manner. Not an artist in the sense of producing, she could identify herself wholly with the artist's efforts and aims. She had an infallible instinct for all the arts. She never mistook the second-best for the best. She became for Willa Cather what every writer needs most, the helping friend.”

Isabelle McClung proposed to Willa Cather that she leave her boarding-house and come to live in the McClung mansion. Dorothy Canfield Fisher remembers:

The McClungs had a great rich house, with plenty of servants, conducted in the lavish style of half a century ago. Isabelle was simply devoted to Willa always, and was sweet, warm-hearted and sincere—as well as very beautiful, at least I used to think her so, in a sumptuous sort of way. There was a good deal of stately entertaining carried on in the McClung house too, the many-coursed dinners of the most formal kind, which seemed picturesque (and they really were) to Willa.

For Willa Cather the invitation must have been a welcome one. It meant release from boarding-house life and greater freedom to write in ideal surroundings. In a sense she was achieving a childhood dream and reliving a childhood experience; there had always been in Red Cloud the other house, the house where there were books and pictures and cultivated manners—that of the Wieners—which had later been translated into the Westermann home in Lincoln. The McClung residence was the Wiener or Westermann house many times more spacious and elegant. Isabelle McClung offered Willa Cather a quiet room at the back of the house; it had, like the study in The Professor's House, been the sewing-room. Here she could work in peace, looking down over garden and trees to the Monongahela and the hills beyond. It is of this that she wrote when she dedicated The Song of the Lark:

TO ISABELLE MCCLUNG

          On uplands,
          At morning,
The world was young, the winds were free;
          A garden fair,
          In that blue desert air,
Its guest invited me to be.(1)

Judge McClung's house stood high on the top of a hilly street, on a little ridge with steps leading to a front porch banked with honeysuckle.

Isabelle McClung's parents at first wondered at the propriety of having Willa Cather come to reside in the household, though they welcomed her as their daughter's friend. The daughter promptly threatened to leave home if she could not have her way; her parents yielded and Willa Cather settled in Murray Hill Avenue as a temporary guest. She remained there, at Isabelle McClung's urging, during the rest of her Pittsburgh stay. Life for her now became even-paced and less driven; she could spend precious hours in her room writing in a more sustained fashion than hitherto. Elizabeth Moorhead, who called at Murray Hill Avenue after the publication of “Paul's Case,” and became a friend of both Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung, says that evening after evening the two young women would forsake the McClung family group and spend their time reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Balzac, and Flaubert. This was the way Willa Cather appeared to her when she first called at the house:

Short, rather stocky in build, she had a marked directness of aspect. You saw at once that here was a person who couldn't easily be diverted from her chosen course. “Pretty” would indeed be a trivial word to describe a face that showed so much strength of character as hers, yet she was distinctly good-looking, with a clear rosy skin, eyes of light grey and hair a dark brown brushed back from a low forehead—an odd and charming contrast in color. They were observant eyes, nothing escaped them. … She looked me straight in the face as she greeted me, and I felt her absolute frankness and honesty. She would never say anything she didn't mean. …

To the years in Murray Hill Avenue belong the poems that constituted Willa Cather's first book and the tales that were incorporated in her first volume of prose fiction, The Troll Garden.

II

Before Willa Cather published her first two books she had to undergo one further experience; she had to discover the world that lay beyond the Eastern seaboard, beyond the Atlantic. Her first journey to Europe was made with Isabelle McClung during the summer of 1902 when she had completed her first year of teaching. To go to the sources from which much in America was derived, to discover links with a distant past, made the journey a time of exciting intellectual and æsthetic discovery. In England it was not only the present that interested her—and she saw it with the open eyes of a newcomer in its ugliness as well as its beauty—it was the evidence that still remained of the Imperial Rome of her Latin excursions with Mr. Ducker in Red Cloud. So in France later she discovered the sources from which sprang not only New France but the missions of the Southwest. In later years Willa Cather was to say that it takes the right kind of American to go to France—one with character and depth and a passion for the things that lie deep behind French history and French art. In a sense she was describing the qualifications of Claude Wheeler, her hero in One of Ours, and indeed her own. Grounded deeply in American soil, the novels of Willa Cather nevertheless are attached also by visible threads to roots in the Old World. The journey of 1902 was a landmark in the formation of the novelist.

It is possible to follow Willa Cather's European itinerary in the series of vivid letters which she contributed to the State Journal during her travels. She sailed with her companion in June. Presently they were in Chester, where three decades earlier another American novelist, Henry James, had begun his English tour recorded in Transatlantic Sketches. We catch the note of Willa Cather's mood from the first as she and Isabelle spent half of a June day “in utter solitude” at the foot of Chester's reconstructed tower: “The rains and winds of a thousand years have given the masonry of the tower a white clean-washed look, like the cobble-stones of the street after a shower.” The solitude is complete, the swallows nest serenely in the embrasures and loopholes, past and present merge in a timeless synthesis.

Speedily the journey becomes a pilgrimage to literary scenes, to the graves of the great. Under the impulse of Willa Cather's admiration for A. E. Housman there was a lively and enthusiastic trip through Shropshire, and later, as we shall see, a call on the poet himself. But Willa Cather did not confine herself to the arts in her European reportage; her journalistic training enabled her to gather information rapidly and translate it into readable narrative; thus, at this point, she reported to her fellow Nebraskans in a lively and circumstantial manner on English canals, boats, crews. In London they stayed in a comfortable little hotel in King Street off Cheapside and Willa Cather's transition from the world of castles and romance and the English countryside to the sharp Hogarthian picture was complete:

… the living city and not the dead one has kept us here, and the hard garish ugly mask of the immediate present drags one's attention quite away from the long past it covers. If the street life … is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. … Of all the shoddy foreigners one encounters there are none so depressing as the London shoddy. We have spent morning after morning on High Holborn or the Strand watching this never ending procession of men in top-hats, shabby boots, ragged collars; they invariably have a flower in their button-hole, a briar pipe between their teeth, and an out-of-the-fight look in the eyes that ranges from utter listlessness to sullen defiance. … But very few of these night birds are fond of water and next to gin they are enamoured of life; of these muddy skies and leaky night skies, of their own bench along the embankment, of the favorite neighbor they beat or chew or claw, of the sting of cheap gin in empty stomachs and the exciting game of chess they play with the police back and forth across the marble squares.

Willa Cather observed the London shop girl: “She wears flowers and paste jewels but she seldom bathes, never has enough hair pins and considers tooth brushes necessary only for members of the royal family”; and the flower girl: “We have nothing at all at home to correspond with her. Her voice is harder than her gin-sodden face, it cuts you like a whip lash as she shouts ‘Rowses! Rowses! penny a bunch!’” Rowses! Rowses! The cry was to be remembered and despite its whiplash was to acquire a romantic connotation for Willa Cather as the theme for a poem:

Roses of London, perfumed with a thousand years …
Roses of London town, red till the summer is done. …

Joined by Dorothy Canfield, Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung traveled to Paris at the Bank Holiday in August. They took the overnight boat from Newhaven to Dieppe. “Certainly so small a body of water as the English Channel never separated two worlds so different.” In the dawn they had their first glimpse of the twinkling lights of France. Presently they were breakfasting at a Dieppe hotel, and on its stone terrace Willa Cather caught the glare of the sun on white rock and yellow sand and “a little boy … was flying a red and green kite, quite the most magnificent kite I have ever seen, and it went up famously, up and up until his string ran short and of a truth one's heart went just as high.” This vision of escape from the things that bound one to earth was always to haunt Willa Cather. In “Coming, Aphrodite!” the pigeons wheeling out of the dust of Washington Square into the sky were described in the same way, and in the opening pages of Lucy Gayheart, from her sleigh Lucy sees the first star in the frosty sky and it “brought her heart into her throat. … That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely something that had happened to her ignorance and her foolish heart.”

On that memorable day Willa Cather saw from the doorway through which she entered France the play of light and color, the reach of something for the sky, even though but a child's kite, and warm impressions flooded upon her, lighting up France for all the years to come. They proceeded to Rouen with its many associations of Flaubert. Willa Cather's report was sharply personal: “Late in the day we arrived at Rouen, the well-fed, self-satisfied town built upon the hills beside the Seine, the town where Gustave Flaubert was born and worked and which he so sharply satirized and bitterly cursed in his letters to his friends in Paris. In France it seems that a town will forgive the man who curses it if only he is great enough.” She might be writing of Rouen, but she seems to have thought of Red Cloud. “The Sculptor's Funeral” was already in her pen.

They viewed the Flaubert monument and the bust of Flaubert's protégé, Maupassant, and continued their travels. Looking at Paris from a terrace in Montmartre, Willa Cather saw it gleaming and purple across the ribbon of the Seine “like the city of St. John's vision or the Heavenly City that Bunyan saw across the river.” The pilgrimages to the graves of the great continued: Heine's, which Willa Cather found covered with forget-me-nots, Musset's, Chopin's, the Balzac monument, “conspicuously ugly and deserted, but Balzac seems more a living fact than a dead man of letters. He lives in every street and quarter; one sees his people everywhere. He told the story not only of a Paris of yesterday, but of the Paris of today or tomorrow.” To Willa Cather he seemed second only to Napoleon himself.

A visit to Barbizon caused her to reflect that creative artists had worked there leaving “intact the beauty that drew them there. They have built no new and shining villas, introduced no tennis courts, or golf links, or electric lights.” Looking beyond the town, she translated a French paysage into familiar terms for her readers:

The wheat fields beyond the town were quite as level as those of the Nebraska divides. The long even stretch of yellow stubble, broken here and there by … Lombard poplars recalled not a little the country about Campbell and Bladen and is certainly more familiar than anything I have seen on this side of the Atlantic.

She was interested in discovering in the field a reaper of American make.

In September they journeyed into the south, into the warm land of Alphonse Daudet, where the mistral blew “more terrible than any wind that ever came up from Kansas.” Willa Cather drank in the warmth and color of the land and rejoiced in its people. The impressions of Provence garnered now were ineffaceable to the last. She rejoiced in the landscape, the history, the architecture, the food, the wine; she stayed at the hotel in the ancient Papal city of Avignon, which Henry James had affectionately praised in his travel writings. Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung were the only English-speaking people in the town; there seemed to be no other tourists and Willa Cather enjoyed saturating herself with the life and aspect of the place. Here on the bank of the Rhône the young woman from the Divide had found something that touched her more deeply than the metropolitan density of London or the luminous quality of Paris; a life rooted in the centuries—what she later had in mind when she spoke of the things that lie deep behind French history and French art. That art extended to the sense of well-being that comes from sun and light and artfully cooked food; it is reflected in Bishop Latour's remark when he tastes the soup cooked by Father Vaillant: “… a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”

A rapid trip to Nice and Monte Carlo was followed by a return to the heart of Provence, to Arles, where Willa Cather again could discover the Roman past:

It is with something like a sigh of relief that one quits the oppressive splendor of Monte Carlo to retrace one's steps back into Daudet's country. I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. … I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton … nothing at all produced or manufactured there and no life at all that takes hold upon the soil or grapples with the old conditions set for a people.

In Arles she found no pasteboard. The Roman ruins had withstood the centuries; the Roman colonists had “a sort of Chicago-like vehemence in adorning their city and making it ostentatiously rich,” and the great eagle with a garland in its beak mounted on a section of cornice, “the one bird more terrible in history than all the rest of the brute creatures put together,” had the inscription above him: “Rome Eternal”—amid ruins! Willa Cather wondered, as she described this, whether the Latin peoples, inheritors of the Romans, “must wither before the cold wind from the north, as their mothers did long ago.” It was a pity. “A life so picturesque, an art so rich and so divine, an intelligence so keen and flexible—and yet one knows that this people face toward the setting, not the rising sun.” It was difficult for Willa Cather to accept anything that did not endure.

III

The visit to A. E. Housman during the English phase of the European journey deserves to be chronicled apart since Ford Madox Ford made the episode the occasion for one of his finely spun imaginative anecdotes of his late years and because it reflected some of the passion and intensity Willa Cather brought to poetry and to literary achievement during this period of her life. She had discovered Housman's poetry long before he became a celebrated figure. As early as 1900 she had written in her Nebraska column: “I wonder who and what this man Housman may be.” She found his touch “as genuine as Heine's” and its quality “as unmistakable as it is rare.” In writing from Ludlow to the State Journal she observed that anyone “who has ever read Mr. Housman's verse at all must certainly wish to live awhile among the hillside fields, the brooklands and villages which moved a modern singer to lyric expression of a simplicity, spontaneity and grace the like of which we have scarcely heard in the last hundred years.” She related that she went to Shrewsbury “chiefly to get some information about Housman—and saw the old files of the little country paper where many of his lyrics first appeared as free contributions and signed A Shropshire Lad. There was one copy of his book in the public library, but no one knew anything in particular about him.” The Western countryside was full of reminders of the poems; her original enthusiasm for them was natural enough in one for whom Stevenson's verse had so great an appeal. The Housman poems and the Housman countryside, reacting upon each other, produced an excitement that was different from any she had experienced in the work of other living poets. She determined to see the writer.

Ford Madox Ford in his Return to Yesterday, with that fondness for spinning stories which H. G. Wells characterized as “a copious carelessness of reminiscence,” turned the story of Willa Cather's visit into a veritable saga. She and Isabelle McClung are here described not merely as curious young American women seeking out their favorite poet, but veritable emissaries sent abroad by the “Pittsburgh Shropshire Lad Club” to present a solid gold laurel wreath to Housman; Ford tells in detail of their wandering across England and their calls at innumerable parsonages in search of the writer of the lyrics. To make Ford's long story short, they ultimately discovered Housman, laid the wreath on his grand piano, and departed after he had mistaken them for American cousins.

As with all of Ford's elaborate reminiscences, there was only a germ of truth in the story and even that was not accurately recounted. What actually happened was that Willa Cather began to inquire, when she reached London, where Housman lived (he was then teaching Latin at University College). One afternoon, accompanied by both Isabelle McClung and Dorothy Canfield, she made the trip to his lodgings in Highgate. On the bus she was still wondering what he would be like. “We may find he's a blacksmith, working at his trade, or perhaps a retired officer living on half pay.” This was the image his poetry had created in Willa Cather's mind. Dorothy Canfield Fisher remembers:

I think from what he turned out to be in personality that nothing would have induced him to let in three young American women, entire strangers to him, on an incense-burning trip. He came racing down the stairs full of cordiality, holding out both hands, thinking that we were three Canadian cousins whom he was expecting and whom he had never seen. It was a shock to him to find who we were, and I think if he could have managed it without actually pushing us out of the house he would have been very glad to get rid of us with no delay.

What followed was a little comedy of manners, a veritable scene out of Molière. The man envisaged by Willa Cather as a robust retired officer or a brawny blacksmith who could write immortal lyrics appeared to be more prosaic than the Browning of the London drawing-rooms. He had for the young women a reticent presence, perhaps an awkward charm, but a minimum of conversation. Shabbily dressed, as withdrawn as only Englishmen can on occasion be, he lamely, in a flat accent of conventional acceptance of an unexpected social situation, asked his visitors upstairs.

While Dorothy Canfield, who had not had a sight of Shropshire and to whom Willa Cather had not imparted the full extent of her enthusiasm, was looking at their reluctant host, the academically shabby furnishings (totally unendowed with the grand piano Ford Madox Ford later moved into the rooms), and the commonplace books on the shelves, Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung tried to convey to him what the poems had meant to them. This was not a kind of conversation that Housman found easy or even agreeable. Soon an awkward silence enveloped the group. Willa Cather in her newspaper days had met celebrities and knew how to cope with them. But how cope with this shy and seemingly aloof English professor who was not then a celebrity and seemed to be the very opposite of all his poetry suggested? As the silence grew thicker, Dorothy Canfield mentioned her work at the British Museum. Housman was interested; French drama, the study of dubious and corrupt texts, the relation between French and Latin poetry, the kinds of Latin poetry and the difficulties they offered to the research student—on topics like these Housman could be expansive and was. It was the opportunity he needed to depersonalize the situation, to lower a protective curtain between himself and his admiring guests. Indeed, nothing could persuade him to abandon the discussion, which became a dialogue between Dorothy Canfield and the poet. There was no more said about his lyrics or about himself. When the three left, Dorothy Canfield was embarrassed at having monopolized the conversation. Magnanimously Willa Cather said: “But Dorothy, you saved the day.” And then on the bus-top as they rode back to the city she suddenly burst into uncontrollable sobs. They were tears of rage and of exasperation—and of disillusionment. Years later she told the anecdote with amusement and spoke of it as “my very pleasant visit with Housman,” told it, indeed, once too often, to Ford one day at McClure's. To Carl J. Weber, of Colby College, who questioned her about the Ford version, she said that it had all happened “many years ago when I was very young and foolish and thought that if one admired a writer very much one had a perfect right to ring his doorbell. On the occasion of that uninvited call—certainly abrupt enough—Housman was not in the least rude, but very courteous and very kind. I judged he was not accustomed to such intrusions, but he certainly made every effort to make one feel at ease.” And she added: “Some day I intend to write a careful and accurate account of that visit for persons who are particularly interested.” Unfortunately the account was never written. Yet it had undeniably been an emotional experience. The poet Willa Cather imagined in the work seemed, perhaps, difficult to reconcile with the poet she met that day in the flesh. …

V

Publication of April Twilights won Willa Cather a measure of recognition and a marked degree of respect from her fellow teachers and pupils. Ethel Jones Litchfield, a musician and a friend of Willa Cather's for almost half a century, remembers her at this time, when she first met her, as busy with her school work, her writing, her friends, and caught up in the web of calculated social life provided by Isabelle McClung. Yet she found time always for music and the theater and in particular liked to listen until all hours of the night to chamber-music rehearsals, in which Mrs. Litchfield, an accomplished pianist, participated with Pittsburgh's leading musicians as well as guest artists. One such guest, at a later date, was Jan Hambourg, the violinist, who was to marry Isabelle McClung and to whom Willa Cather dedicated two of her later novels. Jan Hambourg was a cultivated musician of a mixed Russian-Jewish-English background, a sensitive performer, an avid reader, particularly fond of the French novelists and a man of considerable general culture. He lived in Canada, in Toronto, where he and his brother Boris, the cellist, and their father taught music. The time was to come when Hambourg would sit for a not wholly flattering portrait as Louie Marsellus in The Professor's House.

Willa Cather's literary output during the three years that followed the European journey was modest. She wrote slowly and with great care and had little difficulty in placing her work in the larger magazines. She appeared in Lippincott's, the New England Magazine, Scribner's, Everybody's, and McClure's, and the publication of “Paul's Case” in the last in 1905 gave her a foretaste of the interest her work would arouse increasingly with an ever-growing public. In retrospect it seems fitting that she climaxed her stay in Pittsburgh by producing her first volume of short stories; when she was assembling it she did not know that it would mark the end of a decade, and indeed of a distinct period of her life; but with the appearance of The Troll Garden in 1905, published by McClure, Phillips & Company, Willa Cather closed a door upon her formative years and by the same token opened another upon her future.

Her first book in prose contained two groups of stories. Three of the stories, the first, the third, and the fifth, present artists in relation with persons of great wealth. Alternating with these sophisticated tales is another series, comprising the second, fourth, and sixth stories, in which an artist or a person of artistic temperament from the prairies returns to them in defeat. The collection closes with “Paul's Case,” the story of a sensitive Pittsburgh youth, for which there is a subtitle: “A Study in Temperament.” The book, dedicated to Isabelle McClung, carries two epigraphs. The first, facing the title page, is a quatrain from Christina Rossetti's “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?

The second epigraph, on the title page, is taken from Charles Kingsley:

A fairy palace, with a fairy garden … inside the trolls dwell … working at their magic forges, making and making always things rare and strange.

When Willa Cather brought out her second collection of stories, Youth and the Bright Medusa, fifteen years later, she discarded the sophisticated stories of the artists living amid wealth and the troll epigraph, but retained the tales of artistic defeat in the West and the epigraph from the “Goblin Market,” thus ratifying the inescapable conclusion that The Troll Garden consists of two interwoven themes, with “Paul's Case” as a sort of coda.

Willa Cather was under the spell of Henry James at this time and quite possibly was struck by the manner in which he always arranged his short-story collections thematically. If one were to seek a parallel to The Troll Garden in James, it is to be found in his volume The Two Magics, published while Willa Cather was in Pittsburgh, in which he juxtaposed a tale of black magic (“The Turn of the Screw”) with what might be considered a tale of white magic (“Covering End”)—the one baleful, filled with suggestions of nightmare and evil, the other bright, sunny, cheerful, fairy-tale-like in substance and denouement. So Willa Cather's two strands in The Troll Garden are the baleful and the sunny, the evil-working goblins and the industrious trolls. Her stories of artists creating “things rare and strange” amid the wealthy belong to the trolls and to that “fairy garden” which was also the “garden fair … On uplands” to which Isabelle McClung had invited Willa Cather. The fairy palace and the fairy garden are the preserves of art; and the trolls are artists or persons with artistic temperament. In each of the stories the trolls come into relation, and usually into conflict, with those who live outside the preserves of art or trespass upon them. The tales of the defeated artists from the prairies are tales filled with an undercurrent of malaise and a sense of nightmare: those who venture into the goblin market, that great and exciting yet treacherous world beyond the prairies, risk eating of the poisoned fruit. The goblins will “get them”—if they don't look out! The sensuous fruits of life and of luxury can be tainted with evil. Success somehow exacts an ominous price. There is always the danger of having to retrace one's steps, back, back into the open stretches. This is the equivalent of death: the stony death that lies in the deceptive stare of the Bright Medusa. The attitude toward the aspect of the prairies, toward the people who live on them and form the ideas that prevail there, is still hard.

VI

The first of the three tales of the “troll” series, “Flavia and Her Artists,” is the story of the wife of a manufacturer of threshing machines. Lacking any æsthetic responses, and unaware of her lack, she collects artists and intellectuals so that from the phrases she forces from them she can make an appearance of cleverness before the rest of the world. An ironic story might have been written about Flavia's parasitic relation with her artists; and that story is in fact here, but entangled with much else. It is entangled, for instance, with the presentation of her artists—some of them persons of the first rank in performance—as sorry, stunted human beings. The crux of the story comes when a French novelist, just after he leaves the house-party, gives an interview in which Flavia's type is ridiculed; everyone who remains, except Flavia, sees the report of the interview; and her loyal husband, believing that what Monsieur Roux has said the rest of the artists think, rebukes them at his own table. “As for M. Roux,” Arthur Hamilton says, “his very profession places him in that class of men whom society has never been able to accept unconditionally because it has never been able to assume that they have any ordered notion of taste. He and his ilk remain, with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people indispensable to our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people whom we receive, but whose invitations we do not accept.” An ironic story might have been written also about the chasm between the artist's devotion to beauty and what is sordid and trivial in the rest of his life; there are fragments of that story here, in the crude manners of one, the simper of another, the “malicious vulgarities” of a third; but only fragments, for just where this story required definition and elaboration, in the rendering of Roux, it evaporates. There does not seem to be anything wrong with Roux except that he is candid where the laws of hospitality require silence or a lie. The center shifts from Flavia to her artists and then to her husband, not with development, but only with vacillation.

The second in the series, “The Garden Lodge,” is essentially a record of an inner conflict. Caroline Noble questions whether the practical stodgy life she lives in reaction against the fecklessness of her musician father and painter brother is not a negation of life. In the rendering of Caroline's bitter, anxious mood one can feel not only Willa Cather's personal sense of the value for one's life of devotion to art, but no less, and for the first time in her writing, a sense that sustained labor, when forced upon one by ambition and determination and directed toward a nonartistic goal, threatens the very core of personality. This was an opinion that Sarah Orne Jewett was soon to preach to her; her own experience was already leading her to feel its force.

The third and most Jamesian of the tales, “The Marriage of Phaedra,” tells of an artist's visit to the studio of a fellow artist after his death and his discovering there an unfinished masterpiece. He decides after talking with the late Hugh Treffinger's servant, whose name is James, to write a biography of the artist. This leads to a meeting with Treffinger's widow. As later, in “Coming, Aphrodite!” he discovers the woman understood neither the artistic aims nor the temperament of her husband. In the end she sells the great unfinished picture to a dealer in a distant land. The story is filled with Jamesian echoes, and notably of those of his tales of artists and writers which appeared during the 1890's. As in “Flavia,” the author writes from a recent superficial absorption of the material. The process Stephen Crane described, the “filtering through the blood,” had not occurred, had not begun to occur.

From the group, the work of an author who had been thinking about the arts more than about anything else for fifteen years, it is unexpectedly difficult to derive any theory, any general idea. Artists do not often appear practicing their art, or theorizing about it, and never do they attempt either theory or practice at length; they appear in their relations with others, usually either with nonartistic persons or with persons who are merely appreciative. One may safely derive the idea that artists are crucially unlike other beings; Roux's discourtesy is an outcome of his radical honesty, his need to tell the truth whatever may fall; Treffinger loved his wife, but he sacrificed her as he sacrificed everything else that threatened his art; the emphasis on the unlikeness of the artist runs through all the stories. The unlikeness often brings havoc into the lives of those who surround the artist. The emphasis on the enriching force of an artist's personality also runs through the stories, and Willa Cather has made no attempt to weigh the havoc and the enrichment in the balance: she is content to suggest that both are real, both weighty.

The most promising source for a general idea about art is “The Marriage of Phaedra,” for here one artist is seeking to unravel the artistic method as well as the personality of another. The narrator discovers that Treffinger was guided toward his method and the range of his subjects by an older painter from whom he learned as much as an artist of genius can learn from anyone; in order to paint his masterpiece he needed to add to what he had learned the fruit of painful intimate experience. The clue to Treffinger's greatness as an artist is in the fusion of experience with instruction. Simple as this formula may be, it is not superficial. It applies generally to Willa Cather's writing—to the few promising pieces she had done before “The Marriage of Phaedra” and to the works she was to do.

The stories in which art and the prairies are brought together were of quite another sort, as Willa Cather herself recognized when she reincorporated them into Youth and the Bright Medusa. These stories arise from old memories, they have the richness that long preoccupation can give. They have been filtered through the blood. In “A Wagner Matinée” the deep source is in Willa Cather's brooding over the life of an aunt for whom the years on a farm in Webster County were a form of slow suffocation to which she was almost inhumanly resigned; in “The Sculptor's Funeral” the source is in her sense of her own differentness, vulnerability, and value during her years in Red Cloud. The incidents scarcely matter, and there is no contrivance in the arrangement of them: the stories take their life and also their shape from the force and fineness of the feelings poured into them. The quality that animated those passages in “The Garden Lodge” where the theme is the woman's feelings about the crucial and irremediable mistake in her management of her life sweeps through “A Wagner Matinée” and “The Sculptor's Funeral.” For “A Death in the Desert”—the title derived from Browning—one cannot say the same. It is like the other two stories about art and the prairies in the rendering of the foreground; but in the background is the world of “Flavia and Her Artists,” evoked as the dying singer and the brother of the great composer she has loved talk away her last afternoons in the Colorado summer, with the same chasm between the artist's devotion to beauty and what is ugly and small in his personal life. The fall in force from the scenes in the foreground to those in the background is always palpable. Only in the rendering of the Western elements is there an effect of moving authenticity or of depth.

In a very direct manner these tales are saying what Thomas Wolfe expressed more crudely as “you can't go home again.” An image of “home” creates the tense and emotional climax of “A Wagner Matinée.” As the music in Boston dies away and the reality of Nebraska replaces it, the aunt sobs: “‘I don't want to go … I don't want to go!’ … For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.”² In “A Death in the Desert” Katharine Gaylord's fate is summed up by her brother: “… She got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, and got a taste for it all; and now she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can't fall back into ours.” The burden of “The Sculptor's Funeral” is that even in death the artist cannot escape the harshness and hostility of his home surroundings where he is fated to be remembered as “queer” because he never conformed, and because he fled to unfamiliar worlds undreamed of by his family and friends. It is the town lawyer who pronounces the strange eulogy over the sculptor's coffin: “There was only one boy ever raised in this border land between ruffianism and civilization who didn't come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels.” One couldn't go home even in death. Or, as Lucy Gayheart was to discover, to go home was to die.

Although different in setting and material, “Paul's Case” is of a piece with these tales. It has been the most widely read of Willa Cather's short stories; for many years it was the only one she would allow to be reprinted in anthologies or textbooks. A surprising number of the aspects in her experience of Pittsburgh are gathered into “Paul's Case.” Paul is a student at the Pittsburgh high school; and in the early scenes the life of the school is given in classroom vignettes and in one long disciplinary incident in which the boy is under attack from principal and staff. The neighborhood where Paul lives has the petty-bourgeois dreariness that Willa Cather had resented during her years of boarding-house living: the ugly dirty plumbing, the kitchen odors, the unbuttoned laziness of Sunday afternoons, the everlasting sameness from house to house and street to street. Into this stagnant world there seeps one romantic element, the legends of “the cash-boys who had become famous.” On every stoop there were tales of the prodigies of effort by a Carnegie or a Frick, and of their costly pleasures, their Mediterranean cruises, their Venetian palaces. The practical deposit of these legends was not inspiriting to a boy like Paul: the whole duty of a boy was to qualify by hard work, miserly economy, respectable living, and the shunning of all distractions. One might almost as well have lived in the small Western town of “The Sculptor's Funeral,” in Red Cloud. From the routines of home and school Paul's regular escape is to the symphonies and pictures in Carnegie Hall; and for him the great “portal of romance” is, as it was for Willa Cather, the stage entrance to the downtown theater where a stock company plays. The doors to the Schenley Hotel, where she had gone to interview so many visitors when she wrote for the Leader, make another such portal: Paul is drawn to them not only because they are the approach to luxury but because the singers and actors with whom he identifies himself are always passing through them. Like Willa Cather and so many others who lived in Pittsburgh, he felt the pull of New York, the wish to exchange Carnegie Hall for the Metropolitan Opera, the Schenley for the Waldorf, to feel himself in the center of “the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations.”

The first half of the story describes Paul amid his circumstances in Pittsburgh, the second his yielding to the pull of New York, stealing a thousand dollars from his employers, buying everything one should have to mingle with the millionaires, and after his few days at the Waldorf carrying out the last phase of his plan by taking his life. In the end Paul too can't go home again; he has burned his bridges and has no wish to rebuild them. The Pittsburgh scenes are vivid beyond anything in the series of sophisticated stories, with sharp strokes from experience both of outer objects and of personal states, never multiplied in excess of what the effects demand. New York is drawn in a contrasting manner, for which there is not a parallel in any of the other stories, as a dream city, snow-covered, with a beautiful thick impressionistic haziness that suits the setting for the dreamlike climax of Paul's life.

VII

The two strands of The Troll Garden belong to one experience. At the end of her decade in Pittsburgh Willa Cather stood at a crossroad: there was disillusionment in the garden and danger in the marketplace. The artist from the cornfields that reached to daybreak and the corrals that reached to sunset was still searching for a path upon which to set her feet. In the houses of the rich the trolls proved to be less magical and less creative than they seemed; in the goblin world the roots of success were tainted with the poison of evil and the threat of destruction. And there was that other world to which one might have to return like Katharine Gaylord, dying, or Harvey Merrick, dead, or even young Paul, frustrated and a suicide, a boy who “got under the wheels,” the world of the Philistine of which Thea Kronborg discovered that “nothing that she would ever do … would seem important to them, and nothing they would ever do would seem important to her.” The inner texture of these stories seems to reflect strong ambiguities of feeling: a continuing resentment of the West, a continuing fear of attaining success in the world into which Willa Cather had escaped and in which, temporarily, she had found a garden sanctuary. How to make peace with these two haunting worlds—this was the problem to which Willa Cather was to address herself, and the very book that stated the problem was instrumental in offering a solution.

S. S. McClure, publisher of the magazine that bore his name, came to Pittsburgh to meet the author of The Troll Garden. The stories had produced a marked impression on him. He dined at Judge McClung's and talked brilliantly all evening. Then he had a talk with Willa Cather. The upshot of it was that at the end of the school year she resigned from Allegheny High and moved to New York to enter upon a new career that mingled the experience of her journalistic days with her literary talents and ambitions. She became a member of the staff of McClure's Magazine. There had been the sudden, unexpected leap from Red Cloud to Pittsburgh ten years earlier; and now, as she neared her middle thirties, Willa Cather made the second leap—from an obscure classroom to a post on an important national magazine. S. S. McClure, with the magic of his talk and his capacity for eloquently pyramiding grandiose plans, had swept Willa Cather into the very path for which all the years of striving in the West and the bright hard years of Pittsburgh had prepared her. The inexperienced young girl who, tense and eager, had stepped from the prairies into the smoky Eastern city a decade before was now a mature woman of thirty-two; and though she could not have known it at this singularly triumphant moment, she was entering the final and most exacting phase of her long literary apprenticeship.

Notes

1. Willa Cather retained the dedication but eliminated these lines in the collected edition of her works.

2. This passage is quoted from the first edition. It underwent slight verbal alteration in the collected edition.