SOURCE: Salemi, Joseph S. “The Measure of the Music: Prose Rhythm in Willa Cather's ‘Paul's Case.’” Classical and Modern Literature 10, no. 4 (summer 1990): 319–26.

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

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

Just a cursory glance at language provides elementary instances of my point. We can all sense (or rather hear) that the phrase “rife with corruption” is superior to “full of dishonesty,” not because one is any different from the other in meaning, but because the combination of a dactyl and a trochee (rífe with corruption) simply sounds better than a hobbling double dactyl (full of dishonesty). Similarly, the closing words of the Gettysburg Address depend for their effect as heavily on contrived stresses as on somber economy of expression:

government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Here the three prepositional phrases are in accentual agreement, and this metrical identity gives extra strength to the isocolonic structure of the phrases. Moreover, the stresses on the last six words are arranged in such a way as to emphasize the unbowed hope and fixed determination of the speech's meaning.

I have chosen this last example deliberately, for prose rhythm is especially noticeable in the final words of a sentence or textual division. It is particularly effective, as Cicero has shown, at the conclusion of a complex periodic sentence, where rhythm can bring an argument, description, or narration to a close with singular power. In classical rhetoric such cadenced endings were called clausulae, and had fixed patterns. Of course, in Latin prose these clausulae were measured quantitatively rather than accentually, that is, they were based on the length of individual syllables rather than on the stress patterns of words. But English prose can use the paradigms of Latin clausulae to create artfully accented endings of sentences that have the same effect upon a reader as a Ciceronian period had upon its audience.¹

Most writers who use prose rhythm in English do so in an instinctive rather than a calculated manner. In the case of Willa Cather, however, there are strong indications that her cadences were based on careful training in classical prosody. We know that she received a respectable if not extensive classical education, first from the Englishman William Ducker, who tutored her in Latin and Greek when she was a schoolgirl,² and later at preparatory school and the University of Nebraska, where she studied the major ancient authors.³ As an undergraduate she published creditable translations of Anacreon and Horace in her campus literary magazine.⁴ Further, when Cather left home to start out on her career, one of the first positions she held was that of Latin teacher in a Pittsburgh high school.⁵ Such a background, certainly more common in Cather's time than it is today, ought to alert us to the possibility of classical influences on her style. And indeed when we look at her prose, we find evidence not just of a professional writer's attention to graceful word arrangement, but also of cadences that are deliberately reminiscent of stately Ciceronian periods.

Donald Sutherland, commenting on the Vergilian sonorities of Willa Cather's style, says of her prose that “not only every word counts, but every syllable counts, as in a poem.”⁶ Certainly her writing shows meticulous craftsmanship, and careful attention to the flow of words. However, Sutherland's view is that the rhythmic element in Cather's prose is the result of an aural sensibility steeped in the classical tradition, rather than any conscious use of clausulae on her part. I hope to show, by an analysis of her story “Paul's Case,” just how carefully constructed—and deliberate—some of the cadences really are.⁷

“Paul's Case” has been widely anthologized, and the story is probably familiar to most teachers of American short fiction. A young Pittsburgh student named Paul, progressively sickened by the numbing routine of his bourgeois family and dreary schoolwork, absconds with a thousand dollars to New York City. There he lives for a week, satisfying all the hunger for luxurious indulgence that had gone unfed in his respectably ordinary existence. At the end of the week, with no money left and his father in town to find him and reclaim him, he chooses to commit suicide rather than return to the leaden monotony of his former life. The story makes extensive use of sensory allusion; colors, odors, textures, tastes, and sounds are lovingly, even morbidly dwelt upon. Paul's drab life in Pittsburgh and his stolen pleasures in New York, the homespun provincial homilies of his town and the frank urbane hedonism of the city, are vividly and effectively counterpoised. Cather's normally solicitous search for le mot juste is intensified in the hothouse of sensuous imagery that the development of her theme demands. The story is deliberately tinged with a fascination for the sort of artificiality associated with Nineties Decadents, towards whom the mild irony of the story is probably directed in part.⁸

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

The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.⁹

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

mass of everyday existence.

This particular clausula pattern will be familiar to readers of Cicero. They will recall that Cather's everyday existence is metrically equivalent to esse videatur, as illustrated in the First Catilinarian 14.5. Now it is possible, of course, that this collocation of stresses in Cather is merely coincidental, but I am not inclined to think so. First of all, this same cretic and spondee pattern is repeated several other times in the story, and second, the pattern always occurs in end position. It would take the credulity of an invincible skepticism to believe that these cadences are purely fortuitous.¹⁰

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

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

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

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

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

(127)

Most conspicuous, of course, is the heavily trochaic pattern of the adjectives (gassy, brilliant, ugly). But notice the final clause, in which the elements of the compound verb are divided by two contrasting adverbs. The words delicately fired form the clausula, but the four syllables that precede it mirror the resolved cretic:

deliciously, yet delicately fired.

This arrangement adds extra power to the paragraph's ending, but even more important, it helps Cather to awaken the auditory sensibility of her readers, and through that sensibility, their imaginative communion with Paul's experience. The point to be made here is this: cadence is never just an abstract pattern imposed upon language; the human ear and its innate hunger for a felicitous coupling of sound and sense are the motivating forces behind prose rhythm.

For yet another instance of the cretic and spondee clausula, let us turn to the close of a paragraph recounting Paul's flight from Pittsburgh and his arrival at an elegant New York hotel:

He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

(130)

The clausula drowsy retrospection is perfectly patterned after esse videatur, even to the detail of a final tetrasyllabic word. It serves to conclude a lengthy section filled with the hurried movement of Paul's impatient escape. The clausula marks the end of the description, in medias res, of that escape, and is followed by actual retrospection—a detailed flashback explaining how it was accomplished. Here we see Cather using the clausula in its two traditional functions: the winding down of prose movement, and the dividing of text.

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

his dictis impenso animum flammavit amore

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

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

(132)

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

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

(133)

The last six words (impossible for anyone to humiliate him) contain another series of three resolved cretics, with elision of the word to and the aspirated first syllable of humiliate. The elision is in the same metrical position as in the previous example, and a triple resolved cretic with such blending may be a favored scheme with Cather; further study of the prose rhythms in her other works must confirm or reject this suggestion.¹¹

After such evidence of conscious prose rhythm in the story, it would be natural to expect some pyrotechnic artifice at the ending of “Paul's Case.” Along with the protagonist, at this point readers have “caught the measure of the music,” flowing with it through crescendo to finale. And in fact we are not disappointed; Cather's description of Paul's suicide fully justifies the high estimation of her metrical gifts that the already quoted material urges. Here is the paragraph—the penultimate one in the story—depicting Paul's leap to death before a locomotive:

The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet, remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

(137-138)

What is immediately evident is the marked pause in the last line:

the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

These two noun phrases are grammatically connected as the compound subject of a periodic sentence, but visually divided as disparate images. The pause between them, which is noticeable on sight reading alone, sets up what in formal rhetorical terms is an antithetical structure: blue water, yellow sands. But notice the stress pattern, and how it subtly reinforces the antithesis. On one side of the pause is our old friend the resolved cretic, coupled with a double trochee. On the other side is the same cretic followed by a choriamb. The variation is enough to unite the sea and sand in their one capacity (images of Paul's desire) while separating them in another (irreconcilable elements that suggest, by their opposition, the disorder of that desire). This contrived tension is crucial, for like the ending of a fugue, the last paragraph of the story will bring all contrapuntal chords to resolution. Listen to how Cather ends her tale:

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

(138)

This ending is a metrical tour de force, and one that is appreciated not only by specialists. Students untutored in metrics have commented on the powerful “beat” in the lines. We have to examine this truly remarkable piece of rhythmic craftsmanship closely to see exactly what happens. Look at the last line:

the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

The cadence begins with an unusual measure: a choriamb. The force of the two separated stresses, followed by a pause, puts an audible end to the “disturbing visions” (and by implication, Paul's entire dream-filled life) with a hideous finality—all the colors, sounds, shapes and textures disappear in an instant. After the pause there is the highly unusual molossus tribrach: three stressed followed by three unstressed syllables. With the triple stress of “Paul dropped back” we can literally feel the fall of his body to earth, the fatality heightened immeasurably the rhyme of black and back. The three unstressed syllables which follow are a movement away from this peak of emphasis. They lead into a perfect trochee and cretic clausula: the immense design of things. And it should be pointed out that Cather's elision of the immense is no mere chance, but a sign of metrical virtuosity of the highest order.¹²

I anticipate the objection that one can hardly picture Willa Cather or any other great writer slavishly counting syllables and stresses in the heat of literary creation. Even if I were sure of the validity of that objection—which I am not—it would only serve to support my earlier contention that prose rhythm is judged solely by aural criteria; the cadence is there because we hear it, as the artist instinctively heard it in the toil of composition. It is not necessary to assume that every good author knows the minutiae of cadence, but what is certain is that fine prose has definite, stable rhythms to which its most masterly practitioners are drawn again and again, as to recurrent patterns of harmony. As one commentator has said, “This kind of artful prose is not so much the product of conscious effort as the overflow of a sensibility thoroughly saturated in a tradition, to the extent that the esthetic unity of form and content has become second nature.”¹³

Willa Cather was certainly gifted with such a sensibility, but I am also persuaded that she attempted to carry into her writing the graceful elegance embodied in the periodic and cadenced structure of Ciceronian Latin. The evidence of “Paul's Case” convinces me that she strove not just for excellent prose, but for a prose that registered, acoustically, the very heartbeat of her esthetic impulse. Cather once wrote that “[A great story] must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality that one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden.”¹⁴ There is no better description of the achievement of “Paul's Case” than these words, which remind us that language, even when silently read, evokes the memory of sound, and the resonance of imagined music.

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

Notes

1. For a wide range of examples of prose rhythm in English see George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm (London: Macmillan, 1922). Other useful studies are Norton R. Tempest's The Rhythm of English Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge U Pr, 1930); and Paull Franklin Baum's The Other Harmony of Prose (Durham: Duke, 1952).

2. See James Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (Lincoln: U of Nebr Pr, 1982), 42-43.

3. See Writings from Willa Cather's Campus Years, ed. James R. Shively (Lincoln: U of Nebr Pr, 1950), 16.

4. Ibid., 110 and 112.

5. See E. K. Brown and Leon Edel, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (New York: Knopf, 1953), 92.

6. Donald Sutherland, “Willa Cather: The Classic Voice,” In The Art of Willa Cather, ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: U of Nebr Pr, 1974), 164.

7. Sutherland is not the only critic to comment on the aural dimension of Willa Cather's prose. See also Richard Giannone's excellent essay “Willa Cather and the Human Voice,” in Five Essays on Willa Cather: The Merrimack Symposium, ed. John J. Murphy (North Andover, Mass.: Merrimack College, 1974), 21-49, wherein he argues that “sound is part of a complex sensorium that shapes Cather's writing.”

8. Paul's Case was first published in 1904. Dorothy Tuck McFarland comments that the story (along with others collected in The Troll Garden) deals with “the allure and the dangers of the world of culture and art.” See her book Willa Cather (New York: Ungar, 1972), 11.

9. This and all subsequent quotations from Paul's Case are taken from Willa Cather, The Troll Garden (New York: NAL, 1961), 117-138; 123.

10. Other examples of the cretic and spondee clausula not dealt with in this paper are unimaginable splendor (121); and a sleep and a forgetting (126). Note that the last syllable in a clausula is anceps […], that is, it is reckoned long or short to suit the metrical scheme.

11. A double resolved cretic with elision appears in the very last words of Cather's novel My Antonia: the precious, the incommunicable past.

12. The words can also be construed as echoing (though not reproducing exactly) a molossus and cretic clausula with a resolved variation: into the immense design of things. As such, Cather's phrase would closely correspond to the Ciceronian tacitorum perspicis (Cat. 1.20.12).

13. Anonymous introduction to The Rule of St. Benedict, 1980 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Pr, 1981), 101.

14. Willa Cather, On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (New York: Knopf, 1920), 50.