SOURCE: Wasserman, Loretta. “Part 1: The Short Fiction.” In Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 3–78. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

INITIAL BEARINGS AND THE QUESTION OF MODERNISM

To describe the working habits of Professor St. Peter, the writer-historian in her novel The Professor's House, Willa Cather drew on an extended simile: “Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,—working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves.”¹ This fanciful image of parallel paths serves for Cather's own writing as well—her novels being “the big pattern” for which she is best known, and her short stories “the little playful pattern.” The comparison holds if not pushed too far: Cather did indeed write short stories, some sixty of them, throughout her life (true, more earlier than later), and at times she was experimental in her short works—sketches, tales of the supernatural, fables, vignettes. Her best are not decorative birds and beasts, however; they are, like her novels, “chronicles” of her world. And they are indeed “a story in themselves.”

That being so, it is puzzling that Cather's short fiction has not risen in popular and academic esteem along with her novels. A glance at any dozen well-known short story collections turns up only “Paul's Case,” and that sporadically. Texts for American literature survey courses are more generous, usually including “Neighbour Rosicky” as well. If, as seems likely, interest in the stories is merely lagging behind critical consideration of the novels, anthologists will soon venture others—perhaps the delicate “Enchanted Bluff,” or the equally subtle “Two Friends.” Most deserving of all is “Old Mrs. Harris,” perhaps Cather's greatest work in this genre. This story of three generations of women under one roof indeed throws “a luminous streak out into the shadowy realm of personal relationships,” as Cather described the best of Katherine Mansfield's stories.²

In fairness, I must add that Cather herself made it difficult to encounter her short stories. A severe self-critic, she preferred to forget her early work, some of it written under the press of deadlines or the need for money. She usually refused to allow republication in anthologies, except for “Paul's Case,” which helps to explain its popularity, and she left copyright restrictions as to what stories could be reprinted. When she arranged for book publication she rejected many, pruned those she did select, and gave careful thought to sequence of subject and theme—care that extended to book design and typeface. Only three collections appeared in her lifetime. Clearly she thought of these books as more than simple collections and disliked having stories wrested from them.

For these reasons, and for others having to do with the vagaries of literary reputation, Cather's short stories have served only as dim background in the picture of Cather the writer.

Cather the writer—the phrase conjures up more than the works themselves. Increasingly, we seek the person behind the artist—mind, sensibility, life experiences—a chancy business at best, and doubly so for Cather, who gave careful thought to frustrating future biographers. She left no journals or diaries, no early drafts of her works remain for study, and she destroyed letters and asked correspondents to destroy those she had written to them. Still, memoirs and biographies have accumulated—finding questions, guessing at answers, filling out the picture. And the life touches the works in illuminating ways. The least confessional of writers, Cather nevertheless wrote from observation and experience. It is a rare Cather story whose locale is not a spot she knew firsthand, and intimately: a hallmark of her writing is its sure sense of place, of particular light or atmosphere. Former Nebraska neighbors entertained themselves with guessing which of them had gone into what characters. Further, Cather's beliefs—moral, aesthetic, even philosophic, though never held as a system—infuse her stories. What she thought about shapes her fiction.

We begin, then, with a glance at the woman Willa Cather, conscious, always, that the ill-marked path between the life and the writing runs two ways. The stories discussed here illumine the cast of the author's sensibility and vision even as the facts of her life provide a frame and context for her stance toward the world.

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

In her memoir of Cather, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, herself a writer and journalist, makes a striking statement: “Willa Cather stands out as closer than any other writer of stature I have known to living Goethe's dictum: We approach the world through art, and art is our link with it.”³ Sergeant's account of her long friendship with Cather, focusing on their endless talk about writing and authors, gives us the best picture we have of Cather in the years when she was turning from professional journalism to writing full-time. Biographers of the earlier years, of her girlhood and student days, and of her first efforts at writing, point in another direction—to dislocations and struggle rather than studious leisure; to the sharp pains of homesickness and to jobs with hard deadlines and demanding bosses.

Cather, the oldest of seven children, was born in rural Virginia, a descendant of families long settled there. When she was nine her father moved the family to Nebraska, still in the 1880s a raw land of red-grass plains and scattered railroad towns. In later life she described it as being “thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron.” Here lies the basis for both her love and her fear of the great plains, land and people—feelings that vibrate through so many of her stories. She never lost the shiver of dread she felt on that first bumpy wagon ride out to her grandfather's farm, when the immense land seemed to threaten “an erasure of personality.”⁴ Her first attempts at writing were sketches of lives on this land, and in the end she came to see beauty in its bleakness and drama in the pinched lives of the settlers and immigrants peopling the land around Red Cloud, the town whose wooden sidewalks and treeless streets appear in all her fictional small towns, whether placed in Nebraska, Kansas, or Colorado. Although as an adult she did not live on the plains that so filled her imagination, she never lost touch with family and friends in Red Cloud—even in the thirties, with her parents dead and brothers and sisters scattered, she sent gifts and cash to old friends hard pressed by depression and drought.

Cather's earliest ambition was to study medicine,⁵ an interest lying behind her extraordinary high school graduation speech, in which she lectured the townspeople on the need for vivisection. The Red Cloud Chief noted laconically that “her line of thought was well carved out and a great surprise to her many friends.”⁶ Indeed it was thought out: she placed vivisection in the context of “all human history,” terming it the latest battle in the long war against superstition, a mark of the human “exodus from barbarism.” On one subject she is cautious: she does not mention Darwin, though she had been discussing evolution with Mr. Ducker, an Englishman regarded in the town as an eccentric dreamer (she always liked talking with older people). Cather read Latin and Greek with him, helped with scientific experiments in a little home laboratory, and, according to the memoir written by Edith Lewis, Cather's longtime companion and friend, “had long talks with him—about Christianity, about good and evil, about evolution.”⁷ Though she avoided this one topic, the voice is brash—it does not mind saying shocking things, and it loves the sound of words.

At sixteen, Cather enrolled in the University of Nebraska, first majoring in science, but soon, sometime in her second year, in literature. The move to Lincoln and to literary studies marks the second great displacement in her life, this a cultural one. Less abrupt than the move from Virginia to Nebraska, and less dramatic, it carried an anguish of its own—the painful fear of being already too far behind, of discovering intellectual gaps where others, accustomed to sophisticated families and foreign travel, moved with ease. In Lincoln, Cather became a friend of Louise Pound and the young Dorothy Canfield (later Fisher), both to become distinguished scholars and writers, and both from homes where learning was taken for granted. Cather's sense of inferiority rankled long. Sergeant states that Cather “could at any time feel impatient with the limits of her prairie education” (Sergeant, 65). Resentment can be detected in stories written some eight or ten years later—for example, in the 1902 story “Flavia and Her Artists,” in which Cather modeled Flavia, a silly collector of “interesting” people, on Dorothy's mother, a notable art patron whose name was Flavia.⁸

Yet such inferiority as there was in Cather's prairie education she made up for with voracious reading, as the newspaper writing that she did while still a student makes abundantly clear. In her junior year Cather began to write theater and book reviews for the Nebraska State Journal and Lincoln Courier, launching a journalistic career that would last some twenty years. Her authoritative tone in these pieces (the voice had lost none of its brashness) was such that her opinion of actors and performances was dreaded by traveling companies more than the reviews in metropolitan papers (“that meat-ax young girl” her editor called her).⁹ Indeed, to read the volumes of her collected early journalism is to be first amazed at the erudition, and finally, recalling her youth, amused—she handles classic and contemporary authors with equal aplomb, neatly pigeonholing as she goes, shifting without qualm from lavish praise to withering scorn. This pose of self-assurance, and the ease with which she alluded to all of literary and cultural history, made her a presence in Lincoln by the time she graduated in 1896. The story of her first meeting with Stephen Crane suggests the cost of all this work: Crane, on assignment in Nebraska for his newspaper syndicate, stopped at the office of the Journal after midnight and was startled to find a girl there asleep standing up (Lewis, 37).

Also while still a student, Cather began writing stories herself, short pieces about the people on the Divide, the ridge of hard land outside Red Cloud that defied all but the hardiest settlers. A suicide (“Peter”), an eccentric (“Lou, the Prophet”), a primitive wife abduction (“On the Divide”), these sketches testify to Cather's deep response to the land she had been thrust into, and to the lives it molded and distorted.

To learn about art and to create art oneself—these were exalting aspirations, and the young Cather wrote about the devotion they required in transcendent terms: “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 women who are strong enough to take the vows.”¹⁰ Together, these desires—to know all about “the kingdom of art” and to enter it herself as a writer—took hold of Cather, and never weakened their grasp.

The final major displacement of Cather's life came shortly after graduation with her move to the East, first to Pittsburgh for ten years, and then in 1906 to New York, which remained her home. She went to Pittsburgh to edit a small periodical aimed at domestic improvement, the Home Monthly, but soon moved to the more congenial atmosphere of the Pittsburgh Daily Leader, where she worked on the news desk and wrote theater and music criticism. Her friends were fellow journalists, actresses, and musicians, some of whom appear, transmuted, in stories she would write long after leaving Pittsburgh. In 1901 Cather began teaching high school, which she had turned to in an effort to find time for her own writing.

Her writing soon led to her move to New York. A sheaf of stories submitted to McClure's caught the attention of S. S. McClure himself, who impulsively offered Cather a position on the magazine and promised to publish her stories as a book. Present-day journalism offers no analog to McClure's Magazine and its adventurous editor: he and it were a force both for literature (he printed fiction and poetry by Kipling, Stevenson, Conrad, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Housman) and for social reform (his muckraking writers—Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffans—were the most aggressive in the business).

Cather's career at McClure's was by all accounts a brilliant one. It began with long months researching the life of Mary Baker Eddy in Boston, where she met Sarah Orne Jewett, who quickly became a friend and mentor, and other figures in Boston cultural life. As an editor, and later managing editor, Cather went on manuscript hunts to London, where she met William Archer, the theater critic, who took her to see the Abbey players, seating her in Yeats's box, and who introduced her to H. G. Wells, Ford Maddox Hueffer (later Ford), and Lady Gregory. It was a life at the heart of things, heady, as her friend Edith Lewis wrote, “to one born on the far frontiers of the world, where only the faintest trickle comes through of the great traditions” (Lewis, 55). But it gave her little time for herself, and in 1912 she at last made up her mind to leave the magazine to try supporting herself by her writing. This she did, at first precariously, but as novel followed novel—Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia—with greater assurance. After she received the Pulitzer Prize of 1922 for One of Ours, Cather's position was secure, and her life took on a more leisurely aspect. She traveled—to Europe, to an island off New Brunswick where she built a summer cabin, to the Far West, and always back to Red Cloud for long visits. (Social historians of American railroading would do well to read Cather: lonely Western depots, swaying coaches, baggage cars, brakemen, telegraphers—all are there. One little tale of the supernatural, “The Affair at Grover Station,” depends on detailed knowledge of freight scheduling.) But mostly she read and wrote, approaching life, as Sergeant noted, through art—books, painting, and music, especially opera and especially Wagner.

The coming of World War II oppressed her. She patiently answered the many letters from servicemen who wrote her, touched that they found her books comforting in faraway places. She died in 1947 and is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in a country graveyard near an inn that she liked.

THE QUESTION OF MODERNISM

What was the nature of the art that was Cather's “link to the world”? Answers have varied, depending on where in the literary spectrum the critic places her work. Clearly the deepest layers of her consciousness were formed by the great nineteenth-century romantics: a yearning for an ineffable completeness pervades her writing, early and late, and her penchant for the strenuous in the late romanticism of Carlyle, Wagner, and Turner is well documented (Rosowski, Chapter 1 and passim). However, so protean is romanticism that to assert its primacy leads to other questions—most importantly, to how its assumptions entered the currents of intellectual life at the turn of the century, and how Cather responded. These are matters hard to pin down, but increasingly critics are asserting that after all Cather belongs in her own time, the twentieth century—that is, with the modernists.

This has not been a placement arrived at easily. By date of birth, 1873, she could fit with the precursors of modernism—Stephen Crane, for example, or Sherwood Anderson—and she wrote during the heyday of modernism itself. But her narrative style, only gently experimental, and her settings—the monotonous plains (not even the real West)—consigned her at first to the local colorists, or realists of the everyday. Katherine Anne Porter recalled that Cather's simplicity “finally alienated me from her, from her very fine books, from any feeling that she was a living working artist in our time.”¹¹ Ezra Pound, writing about Frost in a review of North of Boston, neatly articulates the prejudice of the self-conscious modernists against anything smacking of the homespun: “A book about a dull, stupid, hemmed-in sort of life, by a person who has lived it, will never be as interesting as the work of some author who has comprehended many men's manners and seen many grades and conditions of existence.”¹² With two counts against her, as it were, critics have only slowly perceived the modernist elements in her style and themes.

As it happens, Frost may serve as a doubly useful analogue. In a number of ways Cather and Frost suffered similar critical vicissitudes. They were born in the same decade, only one year apart (oddly, both gave for a time later birth dates). They knew each other's work. Cather “took him for her own at once,” Sergeant says (Sergeant, 133). She felt that he, too, was “one of the roughs,” that they shared a “passionate dependence on the world of nature,” and that they both “liked a bare and timeless world” (Sergeant, 212). Both resented being classified as simple realists, portrayers of the countryside and rural folk. A better self-publicist than Cather, Frost lived to see the philosophical core of his work perceived; only in recent years have critics noted the similar underpinning of Cather's writing.

Cather's reputation, then, falls roughly into two periods. The first, that hers is a retrograde art, changes colors through several decades: first she was seen as a regionalist of the Hamlin Garland variety, a categorization Cather always found irksome; then, for a time in the thirties, when the proletarian novel was the standard, she was dismissed as a prettifier of life; that view shifted in the fifties toward toleration for her elegaic pictures of the pioneer past. Then a new critical view began to form, focusing first on elements of her style: structures taken from myth and folktale, networks of symbol and allusion, oral stories and tales, broken chronologies, images and motifs from painting and music—in short, the techniques of the early modernists.

Gradually, too, critics are finding that her themes and preoccupations are those of the early modernists. This latter point, so important for reading her stories, needs further elaboration. Modernism, like romanticism, is a constellation of many ideas, prejudices, and postures, not all of which Cather shared.

This is not the place to pursue the much-debated question of how modernism is to be understood, nor is there any need. Now that it has receded, its lineaments are apparent and generally agreed to: there was indeed a striking movement in all the arts in the first three decades of the twentieth century; it was international; it absorbed the latest in thought from anthropologists, linguists, and cosmologists; and it sought new forms of expression. Perhaps the weight of historical and cultural experience had reached a critical mass, demanding the breakup of old notions of sequence and logic. This challenge to old forms gave a revolutionary flavor to what was a loose movement. Certainly Cather was no part of a group, though she knew, for example, Frieda and D. H. Lawrence and admired his work (“Have you ever read Sea and Sardinia?” she asked Sergeant, “Lawrence there used the language of cubisme” [Sergeant, 200]). Sergeant tells us that she read widely among the modernists and made her judgments. She liked Virginia Woolf, who dealt with “the inner side of things,” and she found Ulysses a “landmark.” Her devotion to high culture might have recommended Eliot to her, but apparently she found him pretentious. Stein and Pound were too anarchic, and O'Neill too gloomy. Proust was an early favorite. Her essay on Katherine Mansfield's short stories comments on Mansfield's ability “to approach the major forces of life through comparatively trivial incidents,” a description that encapsulates, as it were, the aesthetic of literary modernism (OW 94).

Sergeant could not persuade her to take Freud seriously, nor, later, Jung. But “though she rejected Freud, she was a reader of Henri Bergson” (Sergeant, 203). Bergson and to a somewhat lesser degree William James, his older American contemporary, are two of the thinkers central to forming the modernist sensibility, as studies of Eliot, Faulkner, and Frost—to confine examples to American authors—have abundantly shown.¹³ Cather read James and Bergson as their works came out, as did everyone interested in ideas. A friend from her Pittsburgh days has written that Cather was then “a devoted disciple” of William James.¹⁴ Her enthusiasm for Bergson came later. She would have heard his ideas discussed on her trips to London for McClure's, for Bergsonianism was then the topic of the day among artists and advanced thinkers. In 1912 Cather wrote to Sergeant praising Bergson's Creative Evolution, just then translated.¹⁵ In 1922 she alludes to Bergson in asserting that a writer must depend not on conscious faculties only, but on “what Mr. Bergson calls the wisdom of intuition as opposed to intellect.”¹⁶

An expanded view of the powers of mind was indeed what James and Bergson were developing. James wrote that it is “the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.”¹⁷ Bergson similarly propounded an essential role for intuition in the economy of mind: linked to involuntary memory, intuition serves as a conduit not only into the personal past, but, mysteriously, into the heart of the universe, into the flow of energy (his famous phrase, the élan vital) uniting the physical and human worlds. Sergeant was right to juxtapose Freud and Bergson: Cather preferred the Bergsonian version of the protean power of unconscious memory—sensual, but not narrowly sexual, bringing comforts of a metaphysical nature.

Important for their contemporary fame, and for Cather's interest, was the welcoming stance James and Bergson gave to evolution. James's Principles of Psychology (1890) and the later Psychology: Briefer Course, widely used as a college text to introduce the new science of mind, were commissioned by Henry Holt for a science series to popularize evolution to an American audience. But the picture of evolution that emerges in James, and even more eloquently in Bergson's Creative Evolution of 1907 (its publication date in France) is not of imponderable material forces, of chance and mortal struggle, but of vital, dynamic change driven by mind, or spirit. The universe is not closed, bound by iron determinacies, but open and free, still being made. Connected to this evolving world, the individual consciousness does not feel isolated, or overwhelmed, as in a novel by Hardy, but enhanced and made whole.

Bergson's theory of the twofold aspect of memory (voluntary recall, which orients us in practical and scientific matters, and involuntary surges of personal memory and insight) is related to his ideas about the dual nature of time, for which he is best known today. Clock time, or chronological time, is a series of measured, separate units—time spatialized, or geometrized. Necessary for daily life and for science, it is essentially artificial. The other time, Bergson's durée (duration), is experienced, or lived time, felt in the ceaseless flow of qualitative change—layered, simultaneous moments that interpenetrate the present. (To offer one example of these ideas fictionalized: in “The Bookkeeper's Wife,” a slight sketch Cather wrote in 1916 about a life entirely crushed under the weight of chronological time, Bixby, the bookkeeper, spends his life working to pay for his wife's furniture, including a Mission clock “as big as a coffin and with nothing but two weights dangling in its hollow framework.”)¹⁸

This core of ideas about the nature of consciousness, time, and memory entered the ground of Cather's thinking during the early years of her serious writing, reorienting her early romanticism. Indeed, the ideas of James and Bergson may be interpreted as validating many insights of the great romantics. Bergson's intuition resembles Coleridge's shaping power of imagination, and Woolf's “moments of being” or Joyce's “epiphanies” seem very like Wordsworth's “spots of time”—sudden and evanescent insights into a central meaning. But James and Bergson did more than give a new spin to old ideas: with their grounding in science (Bergson was trained as a biologist and James in medicine), they gave the generation coming of age in the early years of this century—the modernists—confidence to confront the scientism and pessimism of the late nineteenth century. Evolutionary vitalism underlies many Cather stories.

CATHER'S AESTHETIC

Despite an early enthusiasm for Poe and his theory of the short story (“Poe found short story writing a bungling makeshift. He left it a perfect art. … He first gave the short story purpose, method, and artistic form”),¹⁹ Cather did not really bother about careful definitions. Some of her own stories are novella length (“Coming, Aphrodite!” and “Uncle Valentine”), almost as long as My Mortal Enemy, which is considered a novel. At least two novels began as short stories: O Pioneers! was first two stories, “The White Mulberry Tree” and “Alexandra,” and the middle section of The Professor's House, called “Tom Outland's Story” in the novel, in fact has been published separately as a story, “The Blue Mesa.” It seems clear that when ideas or subjects occurred to Cather she let them seek their own length and form. This notion is borne out by her comments on how she composed.

It is important to note that when Cather wrote or spoke about writing as a technique, her references, always to “the novel,” apply equally to narrative in general. She did not write much: her views appear in a few brief essays, a few discussions of the writing of others, and, in the early years, some interviews and speeches. In all of these she stresses the same points—brevity, concentration, concern for a hard-to-define authenticity. In her best-known essay, “The Novel Démeublé,” she argues for an austere selectivity of detail, for “unfurnishing” the social-historical surroundings and even the moods and emotions of characters (she thinks D. H. Lawrence overdoes the data of emotions). The notion of art as selection is hardly a new one; Cather appears to be reacting against the school of everyday realism. Of greater interest is her second point, that the true subject does not appear on the page; rather, it inheres in the “inexplicable presence of the thing not named.”²⁰ She points out that the true work of the “furniture” is to convey something about figures in the story, not to lend verisimilitude to a scene: Tolstoy's interiors “seem to exist, not so much in the author's mind, as in the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves” (OW, 40).

In a speech given in 1925 Cather speaks of the “spiritual” plot inside the “crude” or “coarse” plot,²¹ and of the moment when emotion “flares up”—the end toward which everything has been converging, which may not be the actual conclusion. Stories of great love, she says, are successful only “when they flame up as volcanic fires through the crust.”²² Here the “flaring up” imagery inescapably reminds us of Joyce's epiphany: perhaps they were both thinking of the same tongues of flame.

Cather's comments on the artistic process itself, on how writers “get ideas” for stories, stress the inexplicable: A writer must depend on Bergsonian intuition. Only young writers have specific opinions that they want to defend; serious writers must let something that “teases the mind for years” finally find its form (Sergeant, 107). The beginning of a story lies in “a personal explosional experience” that is allowed to wait until “the form fixes itself.” Hence experimentation must be expected: “The arts cannot stand still; if they mark time, they die. There must be experimenting, if that is the right word for it.”²³

Cather's aesthetic accords well with the modern short story as it has come to be defined. The “epiphanic moment,” the moment of illumination so labeled and exemplified by Joyce, has been widely accepted as the hallmark of the modernist short story emerging from the traditional tale and the realistic sketch. (I leave untouched the question of whether such a moment of coming together cannot be discerned in the stories of earlier writers like Hawthorne.) Oft-repeated definitions stress, too, that the epiphany strikes, or arises from, the ordinary events of the story—for example, Hortense Calisher's “An Apocalypse, served in a very small cup.”

It remains to place Cather's stories against these tenets of modernism, to see whether, in the main, her work is clarified and enhanced by that frame. Two stories from different periods will serve as test cases. Cather was still at McClure's when she wrote “The Enchanted Bluff”; she completed “Before Breakfast” in the late forties, only shortly before she died.

THE MODERN SHORT STORY: TWO EXAMPLES

“The Enchanted Bluff.” In her memoir, Edith Lewis recalls that during the McClure's years Cather was not satisfied with the stories she was trying to write, with one exception—“The Enchanted Bluff.” Lewis writes, “It was as if she had here stopped trying to make a story, and had let it make itself, out of instinctive memories, deep-rooted forgotten things” (Lewis, 70).

The setting is a sandbar in a western river very like the Republican River as it runs just outside Red Cloud, a favorite haunt of the Cather children and their friends on hot summer days. A group of six adolescent boys—one has finished high school, another is older still—build a campfire on the sandbar and spend the night. Gradually their idle talk focuses on one boy's dream of someday journeying to New Mexico and scaling the Enchanted Bluff, a mesa that no one has visited since an ancient people, cliff dwellers, perished there, marooned by storm and accident. The boys vow that whoever gets there first must tell the others, and with that promise they sleep, happily ignorant of what will be their true destinies, told in a coda by the now grown-up narrator.

The story quickly individualizes the boys. Fritz and Otto Hassler, sons of the German tailor in Sandtown, earn money selling catfish; they are “as brown and sandy as the river itself.”²⁴ Percy Pound spends his high school days reading detective stories behind his desk; that night on the river the other boys try again, futilely, to show Percy the Little Dipper. The oldest boy, Arthur Adams, has “fine hazel eyes that were almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy,” but a habit of idleness, of “lounging with a lot of us little fellows,” has set him on the path that will lead to a seat under a cottonwood behind one of the town's saloons (CSF, 71). Tip Smith works in his father's grocery store every afternoon and mornings before school. Even so, he spends hours with a little scroll saw. He values relics that a Baptist missionary peddled to his father, “seeming to derive satisfaction from their remote origin” (CSF, 71). The devotion to design and the fascination with an exotic past are significant traits, and it is Tip who tells the legend of the Enchanted Bluff. A sixth boy, never named, narrates the story. He has finished high school and is about to begin teaching school out on the Divide (as did one of Cather's brothers), “a windy plain that was all windmills and corn fields and big pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands, and no chance of unfamiliar birds—such as often followed the watercourses” (CSF, 70).

The river, always changing, dominates the story. It is an image for the evolving natural world, ever building, providing tenuous “homes”—the sandbars that are “a little new bit of world” (CSF, 70):

The channel was never the same for two successive seasons. Every spring the swollen stream undermined a bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of corn field somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly … and with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand.

(CSF, 69-70)

The river, too, dominates the talk of the boys: As they lie back under the stars, under the “dark cover of the world” (CSF, 72), they begin to speak of distant times and places. “My father says that there was another North Star once, and that maybe this one won't last always,” Otto asserts (CSF, 72). The moon rising over the river bluffs, “an enormous, barbaric thing, red as an angry heathen god” (CSF, 72), makes Percy think of Aztec human sacrifices, which Arthur confirms (“The moon was one of their gods” [CSF, 72]). The current over a log boils up “like gold pieces,” and Fritz wonders about the gold hidden in the river, gold that, Arthur says, Coronado and his men came to hunt for. “The Spaniards came all over this country once.” “Before the Mormons went through?” says dull-witted Percy. “Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce,” he is told (CSF, 73). Inspired by the river, its vitality, its renewing force, the boys have peopled their universe with the remotest past of the great continent—not a thin veneer of civilization, but a rich, many-layered simultaneity of past lives and forms.

Then Tip tells about the Enchanted Bluff, a story his Uncle Bill, “a wanderer, bitten with mining fever,” had told him (CSF, 74). Tip's account of the lost civilization takes the boys to an unspecifiable time “before the Spaniards came,” far to the West where “there aren't no railroads or anything” (CSF, 74). Someday, somehow, Tip will reach the top. What will he find? Fritz asks. “Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of their idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want to see.” And so do they all—to journey, to see.

Suddenly the narrator, grown up, tells us that no one made the journey. He has gone to college and returns to Sandtown only on visits. On one he sees Arthur, who even in the saloon backyard (where later he will die) recalls “Tip Smith's Bluff.” Percy is a stockbroker in Kansas City and obsessed with motor cars. The Hassler boys and Tip himself never leave Sandtown, but Tip still talks of going to New Mexico, and now he plans to take his boy Bert with him, who, the last line of the story tells us, “has been let in on the story, and thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff.”

Without violating the surface naturalism of her story, Cather transfigures a memory from her childhood into a meditation on the human condition. Through the boys' talk, moving by fits and starts, by association, and through impressionistic glimpses of the river, the sand, the night, the reader is led to see the little group enveloped and enmeshed in a vibrant cosmos, just as the little willow roots enmesh the sand. The night sky is “the dark cover of the world,” and past time (the Mormon trek, Coronado's explorations, the Aztec sacrifices, the ancient people of the mesa) joins dreams of possibility, both near (“we could embark at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans” [CSF, 73]) and distant (climbing the mesa). Inspired by the river and the night sky, as was the young Wordsworth by the lake at Grasmere, the boys imaginatively move through the logic of dream and association to feel the unity of the natural and human worlds.

But the ending is sad: forgetting (Percy's obsession with motor cars), early death (Arthur), accident (Fritz loses his foot working on the railroad), vain hope (Tip's deflection of the dream to his son, Bert), and disillusion (the narrator now calls “the Project” only “the romance of the lone red rock”). The sadness shocks the reader—a moment of illumination—into realizing the darker implications of the boys' talk. Unlike the young Wordsworth, who absorbed serenity and reassurance from surrounding nature, the Sandtown boys sense instability—a post-Darwinian universe of cruel superstition, extinct peoples, stars that may shift or burn out. The river speaks with two voices: “Our water had always these two moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate regret” (CSF, 72). The river speaks of the precariousness and transience of existence: not only is the river subject to change; the bluff itself was brought by a glacier, and its base is worn by wind and sand. Only the “enchantment” survives—the “romance” held in the human imagination and perpetuated by story, from Uncle Bill to Tip to Tip's son. The themes are romantic (the link to the natural world, the power of imagination) but also Bergsonian (the world in process, the élan vital surging through both physical and human forms). While not sunny, this insight mitigates the regret voiced so passionately by the river.

Like Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, the bluff, an ultimate destination promising fulfillment, is never to be reached. Nevertheless, both give meaning and direction across the gulfs of time, though what that meaning is must remain ineffable: both lighthouse and bluff are in the real world, built by man or touched by him (the lost civilization), inevitably subject to change, their meaning an endowment of human imagination.

Cather had written an earlier story, “The Treasure of Far Island,” about children playing on a river sandbar. She encumbers it with a grown-up love affair and many allusions to Treasure Island. To compare the two is to see what Cather meant by throwing out the furniture.

“Before Breakfast.” A similar insight into the essential unity of the physical and human worlds informs “Before Breakfast,” one of the last stories Cather finished. The setting is an island in the North Atlantic off the coast of Nova Scotia—in fact, a large rock brought there by a glacier, like the New Mexico mesa. How to think about the rock is the question of the story.

The island, with its cool dark spruces and high cliffs, is modeled after Grand Manan, where Cather had a summer home. She loved its remoteness and quiet, feelings she gives to Henry Grenfell, the businessman who is the central figure of the story—indeed, the only one; others enter only through his memories and thoughts.

Fatigued by business and family affairs, Grenfell has come to the island for a rest, and the story covers the first morning of his solitary vacation. Grenfell has passed a sleepless night, disturbed initially by thinking of an annoying geologist he had encountered on the boat train. The scientist had insisted on speaking of statistics: the island is 136 million years old, pushed here by a glacier, and, oddly, the two ends of the island are from two different periods. “And about how old would our end be, Professor?” Grenfell had asked, feigning indifference, but giving himself away by the possessive pronoun.²⁵ Now, in the morning, he remembers again, resentfully, the loss of his private ownership to the indifferent ages. How like a scientist, he thinks, not to have a real home on the island, but instead a “portable house” (his tent) that he will take up next year and move to some island in the South Pacific. Only the professor's attractive daughter, who seemed to sense Grenfell's love of the island as a refuge, had relieved the trip.

Grenfell's sleepless night has led to other revelations about sources of irritation in his life, and to a picture of his past. His life has been all struggle, though successful struggle, from the age of thirteen, when he quit school to help his family, through reading law late at night, to his own bond business in New York and to a marriage that has “worked out as well as most” (OBO, 151) and that has given him three sons, now grown. The cost of his success is high: only with difficulty can he quell his “hair-trigger stomach.” At times he eats like an anchorite, on graham crackers and milk. He finds some relief in long annual hunting trips for North American big game, taking satisfaction in convincing the guides that he is not just a delicate dyspeptic. His doctors tell him that he takes everything too hard. “Apparently it was not the brain that desired and achieved,” he thought, but something more primitive: “Perhaps he was a throw-back to the Year One, when in the stomach was the only constant, never sleeping, never quite satisfied desire” (OBO, 157).

Grenfell's memories during the night suggest a man fiercely independent and private, who has attacked life with will and intellect alone. Just the day before, he “triumphed” over his son Harrison, who had asked where his father would be staying and for how long. Grenfell cut him off by stating that his secretary had all the necessary information. Then, when Harrison picked up a book that his father was packing (Henry IV, Part One, about a king who finds ruling a burden, whose only comfort is reconciliation with his son), Grenfell cuts off his interest. Perhaps, he reflects, he had been too short, but then, his son “had no business to touch anything in his father's bag” (OBO, 154). Grenfell “resented any intrusion on his private, personal non-family life.”

As the night wore on, Grenfell felt “everything that was shut up in him, under lock and bolt and pressure … spread out into the spaciousness of the night, undraped, unashamed” (OBO, 149-50). It had been “one of those nights of revelation, revaluation, when everything seems to come clear … only to fade out again in the morning” (OBO, 149).

Grenfell prepares for his morning walk by getting out eye drops (a scientific aid to clarity), but stops suddenly at the sight of the low-hung morning star, Venus, “serene, impersonal splendour” older even than 136 million years (OBO, 144). Grenfell salutes her as an ally: “And what's a hundred and thirty-six million years to you, Madam? … the rocks can't tell any tales on you. You were doing your stunt up there long before there was anything down here but—God knows what!” Thus reassured of a mystery in the universe unsolved by “professors” (and without eye drops), Grenfell sets out to reclaim “his” island.

On his walk, Grenfell gradually feels better; he sees white mushrooms lifting a heavy thatch of pine needles, and salutes the dead branches of a huge spruce that has weathered another year. Reaching a rocky headland, he sits down, feeling, he tells himself, like Pilgrim, who has left his burden at the bottom of the hill. Then occurs the one “incident” of this slim story. Down below in the surf, the geologist's daughter prepares to swim in the chill Atlantic. From a distance, the figure in the pink bathing suit emerging from her robe, “a grey thing lined in white,” becomes both sea creature and myth—Venus rising from the waves. “If a clam stood upright and graciously opened its shell, it would look like that” (OBO, 164). Irrationally, for a moment, Grenfell thinks he should descend to rescue the girl. When he sees her resolutely face the cold water and successfully complete her swim, he is able to laugh at himself, but also, with a feeling of uplift, to participate in her youth and vitality.

The resolution is Bergsonian. Countering the cold, heavy weight of scientific time—the glacier, the eons of time—is the force, the energy, flowing through both matter and spirit: Venus (star, girl, and myth), the evolving sea creature, the story of Pilgrim seeking perfection, the girl's courage. Grenfell returns to his cottage meditating on the mysterious continuity of creative energy still moving through evolution: “Anyhow, when that first amphibious frog-toad found his water-hole dried up, and jumped out to hop along till he could find another—well, he started on a long trip” (166). Grenfell's thoughts are expressed discursively by Bergson in Creative Evolution: “by the sympathetic communication which it establishes between us and the rest of the living, intuition introduces us into life's own domain, which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued creation.”²⁶

But has Grenfell read his two encounters with Venus fully? Could a design not yet apparent to him be at work? Grenfell's wakeful night revealed a man who “had got ahead wonderfully … but, somehow, ahead on the wrong road” (OBO, 158). What the reader perceives, and Grenfell cannot admit, is that he stands in need of the emanations from Venus not for intellectual reassurance only, but for emotional healing, for guidance in accepting the love and family affections he so successfully resists. (In the middle of his black night he momentarily saw this: “The bitter truth was that his worst enemy was closer even than the wife of his bosom—was his bosom itself!” [OBO, 156]).

There is something of John Marcher in Grenfell—the same obstinate fidelity to an obscure desire for fulfillment and the same blindness to the figure in the carpet that is pointing the way he should go. Whereas James's story ends with Marcher's shattering realization of what he has lost, Cather's avoids closure. Perhaps, after his epiphanic insight into the unchanging laws that govern the universe, after having responded to one lesson from Venus, Grenfell will be able to receive the overtures of his family (there is some evidence that his wife Margaret, like Harrison, has been more forebearing than Grenfell thinks). Perhaps he will avoid Marcher's awful fate.

In this small sketch, then, Cather tells two stories. The account of the objective present (Grenfell's morning) is juxtaposed to the subjective, unresolved past, both stories concerned to reveal a state of affairs to human consciousness—both unraveling the modern plot of revelation.

Like “The Enchanted Bluff,” “Before Breakfast” ends without concluding: the perspective is vast (glaciers, stars, the impossibility of possessing even so solid a thing as an island of rock). Such a cosmos may be speaking to human understanding, but even if it is, we may not hear all that it is saying. Both stories are thoroughly in the modern idiom: condensed, allusive, suggesting the larger structures of existence beneath trivial incident.

TWO EARLY COLLECTIONS

THE TROLL GARDEN

The Troll Garden, Cather's first book of stories, came out in 1905, just before Cather joined the McClure's staff. The stories were all recent, written while Cather was teaching in Pittsburgh. Varied and uneven though they are, a common thread runs through all seven: in each, the central situation has to do with the nature of art and the artist's relation to life—problems of definition, of talent, of deluded self-perception, of sacrifices demanded, and rewards. Although the fictional artists are either sculptors, painters, and musicians or patrons of these arts, rather than writers (the sole exception is the devious M. Roux in “Flavia and Her Artists”), the young Cather, barely thirty, is no doubt writing from a personal concern, questioning the nature of this priestly kingdom that demands so much of its votaries. Her subject, the preeminent subject for modernism, is art itself, and the problem of understanding its place in the objective world.

The title of the collection refers to the book's epigraph, drawn 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.” The first edition carried as well a second epigraph from Christina Rosetti's poem “The Goblin Market,” four lines beginning “We must not look at Goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits.” Critics have explored the possible significances of these two excerpts, some searching the imagery for clues to Cather's subconscious sexual fears or longings.²⁷ However that may be, what is clear is that Cather is thinking of art as a world unlike any other, a world apart, a place of magic—and not all white magic. She strikes this note of menace again in the title of her second collection, Youth and the Bright Medusa, published seventeen years later, in which art presents a face that turns its followers to stone. Trolls, goblins, and the stony-hearted are not comfortable companions: what art demands of life was a question that worried Cather all her life.

“Paul's Case,” the best known of the Troll Garden stories, and deservedly so, is the only story set in Pittsburgh, where Cather was writing, and its scenes have the immediacy of observed experience: a high school faculty meeting, the stoops of row houses on a Sunday afternoon, Carnegie Music Hall. Years later Cather stated that Paul had been composed from two memories, one of a nervous boy in her Latin class who claimed friendships with actors in the local stock company, and the other her own feelings on first seeing New York and the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.²⁸

The story falls into two parts. In the first Paul is facing expulsion from high school for what seem minor kinds of insubordination and disrespect, the underlying cause being his exasperating contempt (as the teachers see it) toward the whole educational enterprise. In the opening scene he is called before a disciplinary committee to explain himself. The teachers are not unkind, but Paul's insouciant air (he enters “suave and smiling” with a red carnation in his buttonhole) both baffles and angers them. At the end of the hearing, they leave feeling “dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy.”²⁹ Paul rushes off to his ushering job at Carnegie Hall, first going up to the picture gallery in the Hall, where “he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself” (TG, 104). Later, after helping patrons to their seats, he falls into a similar dreamy state as the symphony begins (“he lost himself as he had before the Rico” [105]).

The concert over, Paul delays long enough to follow the singer's carriage and watch her enter her hotel: “he seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease” (107). A gust of cold wind and rain in his face rouses him, and he takes the cars to Cordelia Street, “where all the houses were exactly alike” (107). He pictures to himself his upstairs room, with its “horrible yellow wallpaper, … and over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto ‘Feed My Lambs,’ which had been worked in red worsted by his mother” (107). His father, with his endless questions and complaints, will be standing at the top of the stairs. (Paul's mother died when he was a baby, and Paul lives with his father and sisters, shadowy girls who barely appear in the story.)

When the school principal reports that Paul has not improved following the faculty hearing, Paul's father takes him out of school and finds a place for him as a cash boy with Denny & Carson—the first step, as Cordelia Street sees it, to a solid future. Further, Paul is required to quit ushering, and the doorkeeper is to see that he does not enter the theater.

The second half of the story begins with Paul on a train to New York. On arrival he takes a cab to an expensive men's furnishing establishment, where he outfits himself with street and dress clothes, then to Tiffany's for a scarfpin and silver articles, and last to a trunk shop where his purchases are put in traveling bags. He registers at the Waldorf for a sleeping room, sitting room, and bath. In a brief flashback we learn that Paul has quietly stolen almost a thousand dollars in cash from Denny & Carson. It had been “astonishingly easy,” and now Paul looks ahead with relief to a few “precious days” of ease: “This time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs” (115). He luxuriates in his surroundings—the lavishly furnished hotel, hothouse flowers, the music in the dining room, and the city itself, including a night out with a freshman from Yale and an evening in a loge at the Metropolitan: “Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be” (115). On the eighth day he learns from the Pittsburgh papers that his theft has been discovered, and that his father is in New York looking for him: “It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels” (118). He enjoys one last evening in the hotel dining room, drinking more wine than usual, drumming nervously to the Pagliacci music in the background—a sound track signaling the inevitable tragedy and also the sad clownishness of the deluded boy in his masquerade. (Revising the story, Cather cut the reference to Pagliacci, possibly to remove the suggestion that Paul's true self was hidden, rather than revealed, by his new clothes.)³⁰ The next day Paul takes the ferry to New Jersey, then hires a horse cab to drive him into the countryside by the railroad track, where he dismisses the cab, walks to a high bank, and launches himself before an oncoming train. Before he jumps he takes one of the red flowers he has been wearing in his coat and buries it in the snow.

Critics generally follow the lead of Cather's title, which seems to hint that this is a “case study,” a sociological or clinical examination of a completed, enclosed incident or pathological state. The most frequent reading sees a sensitive, artistically inclined youth crushed by a withering environment, the dreary rigidities of Pittsburgh Presbyterianism and the physical ugliness of Paul's home (“the cold bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spiggots” [107]). Adherents to this view in its most extreme form hold that in this story “environment is consistently portrayed as the inexhaustible determiner of human lives.”³¹ The two faces over his bed, Washington and Calvin, represent the failures of state (high school) and church.

Countering interpretations point out that Paul gives no evidence of suppressed talent or even fine-grained love of art; in fact, he appears to use art only as a vehicle for escapist dreams. Paul himself is the “case,” and the story poses a psychological question: what is the etiology of such maladjustment? Early deprivation, the loss of his mother, is one explanation (“he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there—behind him or before, or on either side” [114]). The motto embroidered by his mother, “Feed My Lambs,” symbolizes his poignant longing for love, a need not met by his father, a figure of judgment and punishment. In accord with this view of Paul as emotionally infantile, Cordelia Street is interpreted as an ordinary working-class community, full of children and plans for the future, its dreariness and ugliness a reflection of Paul's distorting vision. Possibly an older psychology, one less attuned to the importance of early childhood experiences, is behind Cather's portrait. Reading William James, Cather would have come across his discussion of types of “diseased will,” including cases marked by an inability to plan or act. She would have been particularly sensitive to his speculation that too much theatergoing, or too much music listening, has a debilitating effect on forming constructive life habits (James, especially chapters 1, “Habit,” and 17, “Will”).

That “Paul's Case” responds to such contrasting readings is sufficient evidence that Cather succeeded in balancing the competing claims of the old arguments between nature and nurture, heredity and environment, freedom and determinism, and that the beauty of the story inheres in just this tension. Reflecting on the story, readers must reluctantly side with Paul's teachers (voices for the best understanding his culture could provide), admitting, as each does, “that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of the trouble” (102).

More remains to be said. Accomplished as the whole story is, its real glory lies in the second half—the realization of the dream. Here is the source of the fascination the story continues to exert on the young and the not-so-young: to win without desert or guilt, to be queen-for-a-day, to be the lost heir. Against all odds, this wish is indeed fulfilled in the story, however temporarily. All the little failures that could have spoiled Paul's week are avoided. He does know what he wants, and he enjoys fully the feel of his clothes, the white linen, the flowers blooming under glass, the red velvet carpets, the sound of popping corks. He is not embarrassed or gauche, as an uneducated, callow boy might be in such surroundings (“he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous. … His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones” [117]). The experienced clerks at the Waldorf take him at his own estimation; apparently he could spend an evening with a college boy without betraying his ignorance. Most intriguing of all is his mental poise (“He was not the least abashed or lonely. … He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself” [117]). No qualms about his crime disturb him; apparently the long lessons of Sabbath School gained no niche in his consciousness—in fact, he feels virtuous (“The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect. … He felt a good deal more manly, more honest, even” [117]). Later, facing death, he still “had a feeling that he had made the best of it” (119). What he believes now with even greater certainty is “that money was everything” (119).

In giving Paul this irreverent final thought, Cather is doubtless playing with discreet irony against the sentimental moralists of her day, who would have anticipated a wave of guilt and remorse (in this regard, at least, she is like her admired Mark Twain). That this is her intent is underscored when Paul, falling before the train, sees “the folly of his haste … with merciless clarity”; but the “folly” is not his crime, not his suicide, not his false moral sense; rather, it is his failure to escape further, to more distant lands, to “the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands” (121).

Modern psychologists say that we excuse, even find amusing, the extreme narcissists, who can take and enjoy without conscience (comic figures like Falstaff; great criminals), because deep down we understand these longings embedded in us from early infancy. Cather evokes these long-suppressed desires, and we accept as humanly right the forgiveness implicit in the delicate compassion of the lines ending Paul's story (not really a “case” at all): “Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things” (121).

Among the many delicate touches in the narration of Paul's story are a few hints that his apparent self-destructiveness is rather his fidelity to some dimly felt ultimacy, the “immense design of things.” When Paul is forced to give up the theater, Charley Edwards, the stock company juvenile, feels sorry because “he recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term ‘vocation’” (110). An odd term, vocation, for the boy's obsession. The suggestion of a religious votive appears also as the narrator describes the childish dream of escape to another world that Paul builds to comfort himself through school and work. “So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine” (111). The vision of sand and blue water that blesses Paul's final hour is the “secret temple” that has sustained him, and to which, in his fashion, he has been faithful.

Although a lesser story entirely, “The Garden Lodge,” the third story of The Troll Garden, offers an interesting contrast to “Paul's Case.” The “case” of Caroline Noble reports what may happen when conditions are reversed, when a child grows up in a household rich in artistic aspiration: “Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the house had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant, intangible and unattainable … in talk of masters and masterpieces” (48). But the devotion to higher things on the part of her composer father, painter brother, and the mother who serves both entails not only nagging poverty (“boiled mutton and the necessity of turning the dining-room carpet”) but demeaning humiliation (living in “cowardly fear of the little grocer on the corner” [48]).

Cather's irony is heavy: the father and brother are deluded, egoistic misfits: the father keeps his students waiting while he discusses “Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist”; her brother sleeps late, then wanders about the house, “a Turkish cap on his head and a cigarette hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers” (48). Caroline thinks only of escape, but where Paul drifts and dreams, Caroline plans and works. After her first modest success as a piano instructor, “she never permitted herself to look further than a step ahead, and set herself with all the strength of her will to see things as they are and meet them squarely” (49). Her final escape comes with marriage to Howard Noble, a widower and “a power on Wall Street” (49). At the time of the story, Caroline is a highly regarded, efficient patron, no longer one of art's victims. In that role she entertains at her home a famous tenor on tour. Playing accompaniment as d'Esquerré practices Siegfried's arias in her garden lodge, Caroline slowly, unconsciously, feels long-buried, never-acknowledged desires growing in her for something other than this “happy, useful, well-ordered life” (55). She is haunted by a buried self in the form of “an imploring little girlish ghost … wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of life” (54). In the end, d'Esquerré is gone and Caroline has regained her usual control, agreeing with her husband that the garden lodge should be pulled down and replaced by a more modern structure.

Different though they are, both “Paul's Case” and “The Garden Lodge,” while acknowledging the superficialities that may attend a devotion to art, assert art's primacy: it is no less than life giving. Behind the tinsel and falseness of Paul's art and behind the disorder and pretensions of Caroline's family lies an undeniable reality—sustaining, the source of vital desire and meaning.

The satiric thrust of “The Garden Lodge” is more marked in “Flavia and Her Artists,” the lead story of The Troll Garden, but in this story the object of ridicule is a group of artists who have achieved a modicum of fame rather than the would-be artists of Bohemia. They have been gathered by Flavia Hamilton at her Hudson River summer home—a pianist, a tenor, a Russian chemist, a professor “who has dug up Assyria,” an advanced German woman (8). As a story, “Flavia and Her Artists” is too complicated for summary, and ultimately not very successful. What is notable is that the “villain,” who publishes a scurrilous piece on his hostess, an act of the basest ingratitude, is “the best” artist (Flavia's favorite category)—M. Roux, the French novelist whose fame is secure. And the man who counters the insult in a selfless effort to protect Flavia is Arthur Hamilton, Flavia's businessman husband. What makes for excellence in the artist is in this story neatly sliced away from what makes for human excellence. “Flavia and Her Artists,” along with the even more convoluted “The Marriage of Phaedra,” is frequently termed Jamesian (Cather unfailingly acknowledged Henry James a master craftsman). Undeniably, both stories introduce a number of psychological crosscurrents—so many that the reader wearies of following them. Cather was right in never reprinting either.

Only two stories in The Troll Garden depend on Western settings or images of life on the prairies, but these—“The Sculptor's Funeral” and “A Wagner Matinee”—can rank with “Paul's Case” as among Cather's best. (Another, “‘A Death in the Desert,’” is also set in the West, but it offers almost no glimpses of landscape or Western life, and indeed its major setting, a sickroom, borders on the claustrophobic.)

Had “The Sculptor's Funeral” been her only Western story, Cather could rightly be listed as a writer in the revolt-from-the-village tradition of Garland and Lewis. The inhabitants of the Kansas town who receive Harvey Merrick's body for burial are, with one exception, vulgar, grasping, and mean spirited. The exception is Jim Laird, Merrick's boyhood friend, now the town lawyer, an alcoholic filled with self-hatred for what the town has done to him. Laird has comforted himself with thinking of his friend's escape from “this place of hatred and bitter waters, … of him living off there in the world, away from this hog wallow” (44). Now early death has cut short Merrick's career, one marked by foreign awards, financial success, an adoring student.

This student, young Steavens, has accompanied his master's body from Boston back home, and through his eyes we are led to discover a deeper truth—that Merrick had never truly escaped, that he had never rid himself of the scars inflicted by this raw, grasping town or his appalling family, “a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his” (39). True, Merrick had never seemed happy; the public, Steavens remembers, had suspected wine or disappointed love. Steavens now knows that “the real tragedy of his master's life” lies in the town, “a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness” (39), and even more in his home—the mother a grotesque, driven by violent emotions, her most striking feature large square teeth set far apart (“teeth that could tear” [36]),³² and the father, sister, and abused servant, the mulatto Roxy, cowed and meek. Steavens senses the raw power emanating from the mother—even he feels himself being “drawn into the whirlpool” (36). What must Merrick have felt? The face in the coffin appears still resisting and struggling (“there was not that beautiful and chaste repose which we expect to find in the faces of the dead. … the chin was thrust forward defiantly … as though he were still guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him” [36-37]).

Not only the life, but the art, Steavens now sees, bears the marks. He remembers that once Merrick had returned from a visit home bringing a “singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief” (38). This piece, the only one described in the story, depicts a boy with a butterfly trying to catch the attention of a “thin, faded old woman” sitting sewing. Steavens had assumed the woman to be Merrick's mother, a guess that had brought a burning flush to the sculptor's face. Seeing the scarcely controlled brutality of the real Mrs. Merrick, Steavens understands the reason for the blush: the “tender and delicate modelling of the thin, tired face” in the sculpture was a sentimentalized vision, something other than truth. Perhaps the iconography of the bas-relief shows more: through the butterfly, an ancient symbol for the soul, Merrick may have been protesting the soul-destroying effect of early rejection and ignorance. That Cather meant to focus on this one piece of sculpture is indicated by a deletion she made when revising the story for republication of mention of another piece, entitled “Victory,” as though to remove any indication that Merrick felt his success to be a final escape and triumph.³³

Try though he may, the artist never truly leaves home. Dying, Merrick had said, “it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end” (42).

The West of “The Sculptor's Garden” is not the world of the pioneers, but a later, less adventurous time of second- and third-generation money-grubbers, fixated on deal-making and gossip—“side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks,” Jim Laird calls them, in his final burst (again Cather resembles Twain). In contrast, The West of “A Wagner Matinee” is the harsh, backbreaking world of the first homesteaders.

Admirably condensed (the shortest in The Troll Garden), “A Wagner Matinee” is actually placed in Boston, where the narrator, Clark, a student, receives a visit from his aunt Georgiana, who took care of him in her frontier home when he was a motherless boy. She had once lived in Boston, a music teacher, and now she has made the trip from Nebraska to collect a small annuity. From his first sight of Georgiana's withered figure at the train station to the afternoon concert a few days later, when she sobs to him, as the concert hall empties, “I don't want to go!,” Clark, in flashes of memory, recalls what her thirty years on the plains have been.

Bit by bit, a chronicle forms: the quarter section fifty miles from a railroad, measured by revolutions of a wagon wheel on which she and her new husband had tied a red handkerchief; the dugout, “one of those cave dwellings”; roving Indians; six children; her stiff fingers on a little parlor organ purchased after fifteen years and the “Gospel Hymns at Methodist service in the square frame school-house on Section Thirteen” (100); milking in the straw-thatched shed; sewing canvas mittens for the raw hands of the corn huskers; and over all “the inconceivable silence of the plains” (98). Left behind now, and ready to receive her again, is “the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower” (101).

The immense physical and psychic costs of civilizing the land are tangible. Aunt Georgiana wears “ill-fitting false teeth, and her skin was as yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to a pitiless wind” (96). Spiritually, too, she seems inert, or embalmed. At the concert, she first sits like a “granite Rameses in a museum” with the same aloofness as “old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at Denver, … solitary as though they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon” (98).

In a wonderful phrase—one belonging more to Clark's creator than to Clark—this cost is acknowledged: “the conquests of peace, dearer bought than those of war,” have been purchased at great price (99). For Clark, it is a new and humbling realization (“I understand,” he says, at the story's end, listening to his aunt sob). And it is newly felt, too, by Aunt Georgiana, as the music of the concert breaks down her stony exterior. The potency of art brings to both a moment of common suffering that, because it is mutual, is also comforting.

Not quite all the images of the West in this story are of deprivation and ugliness. A few suggestively link the two worlds of the story—the world of art and music and the world of the vast plains. Looking at the order and variety of the instruments of the orchestra, Clark remembers coming “fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving shadow of change” (98); the violin bows “drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer shower” (99); and when the orchestra leaves, the stage is “empty as a winter cornfield” (101). Here Cather hints, just hints, that there is a link between the austere beauty of the plains and the designs of musical form.

Dreadful though the years of toil have been, and continue to be, Georgiana's life and the story we read are not dispiriting. Watching his Aunt's resurgence of feeling as she listens to the afternoon concert, Clark meditates, “It never really died, then—the soul that can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only” (100). Aunt Georgiana has borne her fate stoically, even heroically. Clark had known this, and been superficially grateful for the love of music she had nurtured in him, but at the same time she had dwindled in his thoughts to a figure “at once pathetic and grotesque” (94). Now he sees her true worth.

Along with “Paul's Case” and “A Garden Lodge,” but more explicitly, “A Wagner Matinee” confirms Cather's faith that art is necessary for the spirit, that without this gift, life dwindles into gray sameness. Among the wonderful touches in “A Wagner Matinee” are the contrasting musical sounds—so different, yet speaking to the same need: the soaring orchestral strains of the Ring, and behind these the reedy parlor organ, the Methodist hymns, an accordian belonging to a Norwegian farmhand, the idle singing of a tramp cowpuncher who, as a boy in Germany, had heard Wagner's “Prize Song.”

The Troll Garden stories—the best of them—make clear that Cather was an accomplished short story writer before she moved to New York. They show, too, her abiding preoccupation with the topics troubling artists of her time: art versus illusion; the power of the imagination to synthesize, but also to distort; the relation of seeing to visualizing; the relation of art and nature.

YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA

By 1918 Cather might have felt that her success as a writer was assured. She had published three novels, and her long story “The Bohemian Girl,” which had come out in McClure's, was much admired. But she still felt insecure about her income, and she proposed to her editor at Houghton Mifflin that she publish a series of “light and breezy” stories about musicians and opera singers.³⁴ To the two already written, “The Diamond Mine” and “A Gold Slipper,” she would add three or four others. The project came to nothing, partly because Cather shortly turned her attention to writing My Ántonia, but she revived it, in altered form, two years later when Alfred Knopf, her new publisher, proposed reissuing The Troll Garden. The book that came out in 1920, Youth and the Bright Medusa, is, then, something of a hybrid: it opens with four stories about singers, sprightly in tone, and concludes with four Troll Garden stories—“Paul's Case,” “The Sculptor's Funeral,” “A Wagner Matinee,” and “‘A Death in the Desert.’”

The first four, if not uniformly “light and breezy,” have in common a knowing, sophisticated narrative voice, detached and a bit sardonic; it assumes familiarity with the world of the great prime donne, including the habits and manners of the society circling around these stars. Of the four, two, “The Diamond Mine” and “A Gold Slipper,” are good, and one, “Coming, Aphrodite!” is great. …

Cather had followed the international careers of famous singers since her student days in Lincoln. The years that she worked at McClure's and after were one of the great periods of the New York Metropolitan Opera Company, and Cather's friend Edith Lewis states that they went constantly, hearing Caruso, Mary Garden, Chaliapin, Tetrazzini. While writing feature articles for McClure's, first on the ballet and then on operatic voices, Cather found her way behind the scenes, where she met the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, who became her friend and served, in part, as the model for the singer-heroine of The Song of the Lark. Thus the pose of the cultivated and knowing observer that Cather assumes in these stories is authentic: she knew singers and the combination of temperament, control, and discipline their craft demands.

The Song of the Lark did not exhaust what Cather had to say about singers. What apparently fascinated Cather were the demands that a career in the public eye makes—the need to project the self, to charm, so different from the silence and solitude necessary to the painter or writer. She perceived the consuming attention to detail, the treatment of the self as artifact, that the art of performance entails.

The “diamond mine” in the story of that name is Cressida Garnet herself, who in the course of her long career supports a great number of persons “out of the mortal body of a woman”³⁵—not only her inept and pretentious brother and sisters, but also a series of four husbands, a feckless son, and a Svengali-like voice coach, the Greek Jew Miletus Poppas. Carrie, the friend who tells the story, knew the Garnet family back in Columbus, Ohio, and encounters Cressida frequently enough to follow her fortunes. What Carrie extols is Cressida's “force of will” and “unabated vitality” (YBM, 72): “Her sterling character was the subject of her story” (88). Carrie skips over the first two husbands, one a boy who died young, the other a source of wealth, but not otherwise important; she devotes the longest section of the story to the third, the Czech composer Bouchalka, younger than Cressida, whom she rescues from obscurity and near starvation. Cressida seeks him out in his shabby rooming house, sees that his songs are given a hearing, introduces him to society, and marries him. Her very bounty is her undoing, for Bouchalka finds himself so comfortable and secure that he ceases to accompany his wife on her trying cross-country tours (her work at the Metropolitan dwindling) and finally is discovered in bed with the cook, more out of inertia, it would seem, than lust. He is regretfully dismissed. From him Cressida turns, somewhat later, to an ill-starred businessman whose investments never prosper. The story concludes as Carrie, knowing that Cressida has taken passage on the Titanic, goes to the White Star offices to search the list of survivors. There she sees four men waiting in Cressida's limousine: the brother, Buchanan; the son, Horace; the current husband; and Poppas.

A short epilogue tells us that the “mine” had been well-nigh exhausted. After payment of the fifty thousand-dollar bequest to Poppas (and Carrie, as executor, sees to it that Poppas receives his money, believing that to be Cressida's first intention) little is left, and that is fought over in endless legal battles by the remaining heirs. Cressida herself, it seemed, had awaited death fatalistically; no one reported seeing her on deck or in the lifeboats.

When this story came out, it was widely seen as a reference to the career of the singer Lillian Nordica, who had died in a shipwreck and whose will was contested with much publicity. The man figuring in the story as the last husband threatened a libel suit, but did not carry through.

There is a second source for this story, one that provides a clue to what emerges as the most significant of Cressida's ties. Though the story of Bouchalka looms largest in the telling, and largest in Cressida's feelings, a second relationship has supported her life in art. The resemblance of Poppas to Svengali, the hypnotic voice teacher in George du Maurier's notorious novel Trilby, is made explicit in the story, and indeed the most interesting question of the story is the nature of Poppas's power over Cressida. Carrie recalls that Cressida had not liked the novel, a sensation when it was published in 1894. “When ‘Trilby’ was published she fell into a fright and said such books ought to be prohibited by law; which gave me an intimation of what their relationship had actually become” (86). As Carrie knew, Poppas was essential from the beginning because “Cressida was not musically intelligent” (86); only with the help of Poppas's musicality and intelligence was she able to climb and cling to the heights of her profession. There is nothing sexual in the tie: when Bouchalka hints at such, he quickly acknowledges the implausability of such a charge (113). Poppas was simply indispensable: “He possessed a great many valuable things for which there is no market; intuition, discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida” (86). To the relatives, the husbands, and even, at first, to Carrie, Poppas is an annoyance, an embarrassment, or worse—a “vulture,” as Carrie terms him (75). Only after Cressida's death does Carrie appreciate his knowledge and devotion.

In Trilby, true to its Gothic style, the singer loses her voice with the death of Svengali. Cather cleverly reverses the situation: with Cressida's death, Poppas retires to the middle of Asia, as he always said he wanted to do, where it is always hot and dry, and his headaches from the wretched climate of New York and London will cease. From there—and this is the moment when Carrie sees into the long years of his devotion—he sends Carrie a verse, in German, that hints at the selflessness of his service. It is Carrie's sudden insight into Poppas's true role, she states, that “prompted this informal narration” (120). What is most proper and true, the poem hints (“Traulich und Treu”), is always found in the most profound and hidden depths (“der Tiefe”).

Suddenly, the fairy-tale substructure of this story emerges. Poppas is the hidden gnome with the secret, the Rumpelstiltskin who can help the poor man's daughter spin the raw material of straw into the gold of art. He is Cressida's submerged self, in charge (bizarrely) of her very memories: “He was like a book in which she had written down more about herself than she could possibly remember—and it was information that she might need at any moment. He was the one person who knew her absolutely” (87).

Inescapably, we wonder why Cather chose a Jew to serve as the figure of the hidden, intuitive self, and further, why she stresses physical and racial stereotypical characteristics. As Carrie sees Poppas waiting in the limousine, she thinks he appears “old as Jewry” (118). It is ancientness, timeless endurance, that Cather is evoking: Poppas might be an Old Testament Jew, retiring to his “sainte Asie” (a holyland, perhaps [119]), a timeless realm. That he is a Greek Jew may indicate that Cather is linking the twin roots of Western myth, the classical and the Hebraic. Unfortunately, however, the description of Poppas has led some critics to the view that in this story Cather indulges in an underlying anti-Semitic bias, a view that obscures her many hints that Poppas represents the deep psychic levels that must be plumbed—mined, rather—before the diamond of art can be achieved.

Kitty Ayrshire in “A Gold Slipper” at first seems a lesser portrait, though elegantly executed. Where Cressida Garnet is magnificent and commanding, Kitty is flirtatious, her sexual charm a conscious part of her art. Her antagonist is Marshall McKann, a Pittsburgh businessman and Presbyterian (an upper-class version of Paul's father, as it were), a “person of substance, … solid and well-rooted” (123). They first meet on the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall, where Kitty is singing and where McKann, to his chagrin, finds himself seated with his wife and her dreaded artistic friend, Mrs. Post, when the concert managers add a series of folding chairs to accommodate the overflow audience. The velvet train of Kitty's gown (designed by a “conscienceless Parisian” and “a little disconcerting, even to the well-disposed” [126-27]) brushes against his trouser leg as Kitty enters and leaves.

The sly humor of this story lies in the contrast of these two on the Carnegie Hall stage—McKann, “hot and uncomfortable, in a chair much too small for him, … among a lot of music students and excitable old maids,” and Kitty, amused at the consternation her gown is causing in this “hard-shelled” audience, assured that she will win back their approval with her artistry (127). Much depends on that gown, with its narrow train that “kept curling about her feet like a serpent's tail, turning up its gold lining as if it were squirming over on its back,” and on the “alarming” cut of the sleeves. When the “prehensile train curled over his boot,” McKann looks up to see Kitty's “bright, curious eyes” rest on him for a second. During that second, McKann “beheld himself a heavy, solid figure, unsuitably clad for the time and place, with a florid, square face, well-visored with good living and sane opinions …, upon which years and feelings had made no mark—in which cocktails might eventually blast out a few hollows” (129). But the self-examination provoked by this brush with art is momentary. When they meet a second time, as they do later on the overnight train to New York, McKann's equanimity has been restored by a lunch at the Schenley and a good cigar.

Their talk on the train comprises the second half of the story (it is only a conversation—“A Gold Slipper” is not Mary McCarthy's “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt”). Kitty had seen him glower and squirm at the concert, and she challenges McKann to say why he dislikes her and her kind, only to hear “you are, all of you, according to my standards, light people. … You don't help to carry the burdens of the world. You are self-indulgent and appetent” (140). At bottom, he has a “natural distrust” of all art, artists, and their admirers as “fake” (138-39). Kitty's defense is worth looking at closely: yes, she is self-indulgent, but she gives pleasure to others and “something more” to the “gifted” ones, those able to receive it: “my wish,” which is “like giving one's blood” (141). Warming in her argument, Kitty alludes to “Count Tolstoy” (“I had a long talk with him once, about his book ‘What is Art?’”) and his belief that we are sad because “a divine ideal” has been revealed to us, and given us “a new craving” so that “happiness lies in ceasing to be and to cause being, because the thing revealed to us is dearer than any existence our appetites can ever get for us. I can understand that. It's something one often feels in art” (142). But McKann is impervious. Tolstoy is a “crank,” an extremist, and anyway, “McKann hated tall talk” (142-43). Then he delivers his final defense, his manner “judicial”: “With a woman, everything comes back to one thing” (143). Though Kitty's poise is unshaken by the crass insult, her final pleasant good night takes the form of a subtle curse: “Anyhow, thank you for a pleasant evening. And, by the way, dream of me tonight, and not of either of those ladies who sat beside you” (146).

The next morning McKann, to his profound irritation, finds that she has flung him an added challenge: in the little hammock for clothes over his Pullman bed is a single gold slipper. The slipper eventually comes to rest in a lockbox in McKann's office vault, safe from prying eyes. McKann tells himself that he keeps it as “a reminder that absurd things could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment” (148)—an apt reference to people who live only in Bergson's chronological time. But physical instruments like clocks and vaults cannot contain the power emanating from this little slipper. Our last glimpse of McKann suggests a haunted man: ill and “sadly changed,” he often puts the gold slipper on his desk and looks at it. He doesn't see in it any of the transcendent gifts of art that Kitty had tried to speak of (desire, or Tolstoy's divine ideal, or even simple pleasure); but “somehow it suggests life to his tired mind” (148). Where the more elevated lures fail, the memory of a beautiful woman wearing gold mesh stockings, gold slippers, and a gown with a prehensile train has persisted. Kitty has had her revenge.

“A Gold Slipper” is Cather's lightest story, but beneath its charm intriguing themes are introduced, notably the link between the potency of art and the power of sex. One senses throughout the pleasure Cather takes in Kitty—her elegance, her intelligence—and in planning McKann's richly deserved fall. (Kitty appears also in “Scandal,” the fourth opera singer story, but here her personality is subdued, and the story is less successful.)

Cressida and Kitty are memorable women, strong and vibrant, bearing the deprivations their art entails with courage and style. Without them as standards, it would be harder to understand what Eden Bower chooses in her story, “Coming, Aphrodite!”

FOUR LOVE STORIES

In “The Garden Lodge,” Cather depicts her well-disciplined heroine, Caroline Noble, thinking disparagingly of sexual attraction and of that desire to which women owe “most of their mistakes and tragedies and astonishingly poor bargains” (TG, 52). In effect, Cather has been equated with Caroline's attempt to keep sexual passion at a cool distance. Cather's first biographer observes that “‘love,’ in the conventional literary sense, scarcely figures in her novels.”³⁶ Later commentators typically echo this generalization, finding that Cather neglects sexual passion, either out of overnicety (her “bluff, middy blouse suspicions of both sexuality and vulgarity,” as one writer puts it)³⁷ or, a reason common in later criticism, out of repressed sexual fears in her personal life (“normal sex stands barred from her fictional world”).³⁸ Those biographers who assume a lesbian orientation look for, and find, evidence for same-sex attractions behind her fictional relationships.³⁹ However all this may be, her writings of all kinds, especially the letters that have survived, make clear that Cather's nature was deep feeling, indeed ardent. She had warm and enduring attachments to family, friends (old and new, male and female), even business relations—she flung her arms around S. S. McClure when they met after many years, and she had a loyal, thoughtful friend in the publisher Alfred Knopf. There was nothing of the cool recluse in the way she entered human relationships. This capacity for passionate attachment gives intensity to the few stories she wrote in which a love interest is central.

“COMING, APHRODITE!”

“Coming, Aphrodite!” clearly shows both Cather's awareness of the play of erotic energies and her skill in conveying these tensions. The story itself, one of Cather's best, is solely concerned with the advent of passionate love; in addition, its printing history provides evidence that Cather was consciously pushing the limits of sexual explicitness for that time. To make the story acceptable for magazine publication in 1920, Cather altered the text in a number of ways, making the affair more a matter of implication and toning down the sensual overtones in her descriptions.⁴⁰

Opera buffs of the time would have seen in the title an allusion that we now miss, as Mary Garden, the first true American diva, had recently appeared in the role of Aphrodite in Erlanger's opera of that name. Quite apart from that information, however, readers would see in the title “Coming, Aphrodite!” (changed for magazine publication to “Coming, Eden Bower!”) the promise that a story of erotic love would follow.

The setting is a rooming house on New York's Washington Square just after the turn of the century, “almost the very last summer of the old horse stages on Fifth Avenue” (YBM, 2). The leisureliness and ease of the great city in summer creates the right background for the brief love affair between the reclusive painter Don Hedger and Eden Bower (born Edna Bowers of Huntington, Illinois), who moves into the room next to Hedger's. Cather had lived on Washington Square the first year she worked in New York, and the handsome square (as it then was) with its arch and fountain, the nearby Brevoort Hotel, oyster houses, and basement restaurants all appear in the story.

Hedger and his bulldog, Caesar III, have lived here in a third-floor studio for four years, content with the dim north light that painters prefer. Even among self-sufficient artists, Hedger is a loner. Brought up in a school for homeless boys, he has educated himself through travel and by following his bent wherever it might lead. He is meticulous only about his painting and his dog, who “was invariably fresh and shining” (4). Although Hedger hears Eden's trunk and piano being moved in, he does not meet her until one day, emerging from bathing Caesar in the floor's one bathroom, he finds “a tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown” who says, “I wish you wouldn't wash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I've found his hair in the tub, and I've smelled a doggy smell, and now I've caught you at it” (14). Hedger is badly confused, and faced with “her white arms and neck and her fragrant person” something flashes through his mind “about a man who was turned into a dog or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath of beauty” (15).

Hedger's next brush with Eden—a peculiarly one-way encounter—occurs as he is cleaning out the clothes closet separating their two rooms. Without thinking, Hedger stoops to squint through a knothole to the other side, where, in a pool of sunlight, wholly unclad, Eden is going through an exercise routine. Accustomed though he is to the sight of the nude female body, Hedger feels that a piece of charcoal would explode in a hand trying to capture “the energy of each gesture … discharged into the whirling disc of light” (18). Day after day Hedger crouches amid the old shoes in his closet, oblivious to manners or morals: “Hedger scarcely regarded his action as conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. … It was a heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness” (31). He has no desire to meet the Miss Bower “who wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago,” who practices Puccini and goes out with young men wearing white flannel suits and carrying canes. His business is with “a room full of sun, a little enchanted rug of sleeping colours, and a woman who emerged naked through a door, and disappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having been clad … for him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, or Alexandria, or Veronese's Venice. She was the immortal conception, the perennial theme” (22). The link to Venus is underscored by Eden's delight in watching a flock of pigeons (not quite Venus's doves) soar and wheel over the square about five every afternoon. Hedger and Eden speak, finally, about these pigeons, and their acquaintance grows.

Cather's particular achievement in this story lies in how she conveys the growing intimacy of Hedger and Eden. It is a mutual courtship, not a series of advances by the male: a primitive mating ritual, full of preening, yet challenging and wary, its pace like the crescendo of two flamenco dancers.

Eden performs first. On a Sunday she agrees to go with Hedger to Coney Island, where one of his models, Molly Welch, is scheduled to make a balloon ascent, a stunt that adds to her earnings. Besides, Hedger says, it is nice to see “tailors and bar-tenders and prize-fighters with their best girls, and all sorts of folks taking a holiday” (33). Not Eden's people at all. She can't say why she likes this funny painter, with his black eyebrows. But that afternoon they watch the balloon together as the bathers cheer, the band plays, and the girl in green tights steps out of the basket and sways on a trapeze. “Not many girls would look well in that position,” says Hedger, and then blushes a “slow, dark, painful crimson” (36). Eden stays in the tent with Molly as she gets ready for the second ascent, but when the balloon finally bumps off, the crowd sees that it is a new girl—“You're a peach, girlie,” they call (37). As Hedger, dripping with cold sweat, watches, Eden goes through the whole act: she takes off the black evening skirt, descends on the trapeze in black tights and silver slippers, and floats down on the beach, a “slowly falling silver star”—a Venus emerging from the foam (39).

Now it is Hedger's turn. But he doesn't answer with a comparable show of bravado; instead, as Eden sips champagne in the restaurant where they go for dinner, he tells her a grim story, an Aztec rain legend called “The Forty Lovers of the Queen,” which he once heard from a Mexican priest in the Southwest.

In a well-known observation about the structure of her novel The Professor's House, Cather said that by inserting a novella into its midst she was using a technique suggested by Dutch genre painters who show a window to the outer world in their interiors—“the masts of ships or a stretch of grey sea” (OW, 31). It is such a device that Cather also uses in “Coming, Aphrodite!”: Hedger's legend is a chilling glimpse of a cold, dangerous current, unlike the warm surf at Coney Island or Venus's silvery foam. This aspect of Venus—“the perennial theme”—is dark, hinting at compulsive desire, pain, and danger.

One day a beautiful Indian princess, who has been dedicated to the rain gods, sees among a group of warrior prisoners a young chief, taller than all the rest, with arms and breast covered with the figures of wild animals “bitten into the skin and coloured” (43). The princess begs the young chief's life, and asks him to “prick upon her skin the signs of Rain and Lightning and Thunder, and stain the wounds with herb juices” (43). For many days the princess submitted to the bone needle, and the women of the tribe wondered at her courage. Before the tattoo artist she had no shame, and one day the guardians called in alarm that he had fallen upon her “to violate her honour” (43). For this crime he is gelded, his tongue is torn out, and he is given to the princess, now married and a queen, as her slave. She orders the slave to bring to her chosen lovers, and then to lead them away through a cavern where one stone has been loosened so that they fall through into a cold underground river. The story ends with the execution by fire of both the queen and the slave when, out of jealousy of a lover growing in favor, the slave tells the king of the queen's infidelities—“and afterward there was a scarcity of rain” (46).

Hedger was not trying to please her, Eden thinks. “He was testing her, trying her out” (46). Back in her room, she cannot sleep: “Crowds and balloons were all very well, she reflected, but woman's chief adventure is man” (47). She climbs the steep ladder to the tenement roof for fresh air, and as she steps through the trap door, the bulldog's sharp little teeth catch her ankle. Her courage roused, so it seems, by the teeth, Eden stays on the roof with Hedger and they become lovers. Some days later, at Eden's suggestion, they break open the doors between their rooms. Eden takes up a bronze Buddha and strikes the painted bolt with the idol's “squatting posteriors” (50). They seem to know that their happiness will not last. “I won't always be the only one, Eden Bower,” Hedger says; “What does that matter? You are the first,” she answers.

The end comes abruptly. Eden, whose taste in painting runs to “Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen” (27), urges Hedger to let her introduce him to a “successful” painter. She doesn't understand his fury, or his contention that he already has the luxury he wants, the luxury of being able “to please nobody but myself” (52). Hedger leaves, but after five days he rushes back, only to find Eden gone: a sudden chance to study abroad. For Hedger, “it was as if tigers were tearing him” (57), or like the biting hounds he had dimly sensed on first seeing Eden.

From an epilogue, set eighteen years later, we learn that both Eden and Hedger are successful artists, though in their different ways. Hedger is a painter's painter, “the first man among the moderns,” the gallery dealer tells Eden, when she inquires. As Eden's limousine drives away, the street lamps flash on a hard and settled face, “like a plaster cast” (63). But tomorrow, on the stage, it will be the “golden face of Aphrodite.” The Medusa of art has transmuted the passion and energy of life into a settled form. Eden is now an artifact, a conduit for beauty and love.⁴¹

Though the story maintains a consistently light, even mildly satiric, narrative tone, the images it leaves in the mind are intense, lurid, like those in an expressionist painting: a carnival balloon, an artist-voyeur, death in a cold river. The boldest is the sharp tattooer's needle (felt again as the dog's teeth seize Eden, or when the tigers tear at Hedger), where the union of art and sex is made explicit in the pictures “bitten in the skin.” These images, and all of the other narrative devices Cather uses—the game-playing tone, motifs from legend and myth, animal imagery (the identification of Hedger and his dog), and the context of sharply contrasting urban scenes—strongly identify her as an artist working in the idiom of her time. Included in this idiom is erotic knowing, an acknowledgment of love's golden moments, its ambiguities (she had read her friend D. H. Lawrence), and its desolations.

“ERIC HERMANNSON'S SOUL” AND “THE BOHEMIAN GIRL”

Cather often made fun of the conventional love story, but in “Eric Hermannson's Soul” and “The Bohemian Girl” she comes close to the popular journalistic fiction of the time. She sold both to magazines, but never included them in later collections. In truth, they suffer from overwriting (“ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable chances, do the unrelenting gods bring us our fate!” [CSF, 362]), their chief interest being the tug between East and West, art and life, or love, as these tensions were playing out in Cather's imagination.

The better of the two, “Eric Hermannson's Soul,” is early (1900)—Cather's first really accomplished piece of fiction. The setting is the Divide, the bleak high land near Red Cloud that Cather knew so well and had used for her earliest student attempts, sketches about the effects of terrible solitude on the early settlers. The love affair is between Eric Hermannson, a blond young giant, who emigrated from the north of Norway with his mother when he was eighteen, and Margaret Elliot, from New York, “beautiful, talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four” (363). She is engaged to be married, and has come West with her brother Wyllis for a last taste of freedom: “It comes to all women of her type—that desire to taste the unknown which allures and terrifies, to run one's whole length out to the wind—just once” (363).

A love story about a girl from the East and a brawny Westerner was by 1900 a cliché (though Owen Wister's The Virginian had yet to be written). What lifts Eric Hermannson's story above the banal is that Cather supplies a countering plot, Eric's conversion by a frontier preacher, that adds a dimension to his avowals of which Margaret, in her sophistication, is scarcely aware. The story begins, “It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse—a night when the Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller” (359). The descriptions of Asa, shouting of mercy and vengeance, and the men and women “trembling and quailing” before the power of some mysterious psychic force are free of rhetorical excess. The excess is all Asa's as he exhorts Eric, “the wildest lad on all the Divide,” to come to the mourners' bench: “Lazarus, come forth! Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the life line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!” And so Eric, with a groan “like the groan of a great tree when it falls in the forest,” comes forward and breaks the neck of his violin (the very incarnation of evil desires for the Free Gospellers)—“and to Asa Skinner the sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder” (362).

Eric keeps his sworn faith for two years, until he goes for a week to help Jerry Lockhart thresh and hears Margaret pumping on Mrs. Lockhart's old parlor organ. She plays for him the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana (no doubt this knowing girl takes pleasure in the aptness of playing this music to a rustic cowboy), and then, in a scene that points ahead to “A Wagner Matinee,” she is unexpectedly moved by the “tears in his voice” as he tells her that he had never known there was music like that in the world. “Think of it,” Margaret says later to her brother, “to care for music as he does and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on earth!” (366). But it cannot occur to her that for a segment of Eric's world music is a danger to the soul.

Two scenes convey the growing passion between Eric and Margaret without exceeding the limits permissible in magazine fiction of the time. In the first, rearing, scarcely tamed horses, imagery as classical as Hedger's biting hounds, but here merging realistically into the Western setting, portray their roused feelings. Eric accompanies Margaret on a ride to the next town for mail, and on the way home, a herd of wild mustangs, their drivers negligent, tempt Margaret's and Eric's horses to run. In a scene of great intensity, Eric subdues the biting, kicking animals, then openly declares his love in language that sounds extravagant, though he speaks simple truth: “You are the only beautiful thing that has come close to me. … I love you more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven” (372).

Back in her bedroom in the ranch house, Margaret reads a long, bored letter from her fiancé, in which he complains that the actress playing Rosalind in an amateur production of As You Like It “insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings … wholly out of harmony with the pastoral setting” (373). The irony, though perhaps too obvious, is powerful in expressing the theme of this story, the impossible distance between West (energy, raw feeling) and East (beauty, art, understanding).

At the close of the story, Margaret arranges—to please herself—a farewell dance party at the ranch house, and here Eric picks up the violin again, playing folk songs from the North, and dances (“no longer the big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet. … Tonight he was Siegfried indeed” [375]). In a memorable scene, the last between Eric and Margaret, he takes her from the dance and together they climb the windmill, as other couples have done, to be alone and to feel the closeness of the Western sky. Stung by the appeal in his eyes, Margaret kisses Eric, and knows “that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable always” (378). It is the romantic's yearning cry, and it has a peculiar appropriateness here “on a windmill tower at the world's end” (377).

Cather ends the story with another outpouring of anguished feeling, though from another world, as Asa Skinner, “pale and worn with looking after his wayward flock,” confronts the unrepentant Eric: “And it is for things like this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O foolish and perverse generation!” (379).

“The Bohemian Girl,” written twelve years later, was sold for a good price, helping Cather decide that she could live by her writing. More slackly written than “Eric Hermanson's Soul,” and almost twice as long, it is set in the West of a later time: the Norwegian immigrants who had crowded into Asa Skinner's meetings “driven by toil and saddened by exile” (360) have been transformed into the prosperous Ericson family—eight sons with farms of their own, and high-handed Old Lady Ericson, who takes pleasure in driving her new automobile herself, living on the old place with her last son, the boy Eric.

The gulf between West and East is no longer unbridgeable, and indeed the terms have taken on different meanings, connoting character types: the East gaiety-loving, musical, and unconventional, the West property-loving, slow, and conventional.

The story opens with the return of Nils, the Ericson prodigal, who had run away twelve years before—run very far East, to Sweden and Norway, where he works for a Bergen ship line. He has begun to remember Clara Vavrika, his “Bohemian girl,” and he tries to win her back, never mind that she is now his sister-in-law, having married his brother Olaf in response to community pressure when Nils stopped writing her. Nils tells her about life in easygoing Stockholm: “Sit out in the streets in front of cafés and talk all night in summer. … Jolliest people in the world, the Swedes, once you get them going. … Always drinking things—champagne and stout mixed, half-and-half” (CSF, 33).

In contrast are the stolid Ericsons, especially Olaf, who will soon sit in the legislature, “weighing a thousand tons” (35). Nils sets about to pry Clara loose, visiting her at home and at her father's, Joe Vavrika's pleasant saloon. He plays his flute while Clara plays the piano, and dances with her at Olaf's barn raising. Finally, on a moonlit night, he intercepts her horseback ride and persuades her to leave with him that night. Her mettlesome horse (she is most often seen riding restlessly across the country) becomes a symbol of her passion (as for Margaret Elliot), and as Clara struggles to decide whether to run away with Nils or to stay, the land she loves pulls one way (“The great silent country seemed to lay a spell upon her”) and the waiting horses another (“Beside her she heard the tramping of horses in the soft earth” [38]). The scene ends with “a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road, two dark shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still land stretched untroubled under the azure night” (38).

Cather is very easy on her careless lovers. Nils, handsome and engaging, seems untroubled by having neglected to write Clara, and completely untroubled about running off with his brother's wife. Clara is spoiled and willful, her old aunt Joanna having all the care of the housework. They escape to live happily, carrying no burden of guilt or regret. Their fathers are on their side: Joe Vavrika receives letters from Clara about their travels in Bohemia, and Nils's father, before he died, had secretly sent Nils money. Only Mrs. Ericson is harsh and unforgiving: she forbids young Eric to speak to Vavrika, and the closing incident of the story is in a minor key: Nils has sent Eric money to join him in Bergen, and Eric starts on the journey, but stumbles off the train at the last minute, unable to bear the thought of his mother alone on the farm. Not everyone who wishes can escape.

The theme of escape from the West (this time a small town) appears in another story written shortly before “The Bohemian Girl”—“The Joy of Nelly Deane.” Moments in the story are haunting: a kind of Erlkönig fatality hangs over bright, pretty Nelly (like Clara, a fount of energy and lightness). Her avenue of escape is her secret engagement to a traveling salesman from Chicago. A sexually charged life force in her responds imaginatively to “the great city pulsing across the miles of snow, … throbbing like great engines” (CSF, 61). Jilted by her salesman, Nelly marries Scott Spinny, the hardware merchant, whose strong, cold hands are hard “like the castings he sold” (58). He has dogged Nelly since she was a girl, like a nemesis, or like death, prefigured further in Nelly's induction into the Baptist church—total immersion into the waters of a cement pit at the front of the church. As she rises from the dark water, three Baptist ladies, the ominously named Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny, receive her. It comes as no surprise that Nelly dies a few years later of neglect in childbirth. The ironic title of this story seems to point to entrapment in the West as a death, even though Nelly's vitality and joy in life continue in her little girl.

It is worth noting that, although Cather later wrote sympathetically of religion and religious feeling, for example in the novels My Mortal Enemy or Death Comes for the Archbishop, she pictures organized religion in her early work as stifling: Presbyterian Calvinism in “Paul's Case” and “A Gold Slipper,” evangelical revivals in “Eric Hermannson's Soul,” and the Baptist church in “The Joy of Nelly Deane.” It appears that Cather gradually included religious aspiration and experience as akin to, or the same as, aesthetic experience, which she always spiritualized (Eric's violin was “his only bridge into the kingdom of the soul” [361]). In this equating of art and religion as avenues for spiritual energy she would have been following Henri Bergson, who speaks of the similarity of great artists and saints, both able to break into the flow of duration where others are oblivious.⁴²

In “The Bohemian Girl” Cather makes a distinction, made before but less explicitly, that is important for her later work: the West of the land—the yellow fields, the poplar groves, the white rivers of dust—is set apart from the dull people, the generations who succeeded the pioneers, now weighing it down. Only a few see the land freely without wanting to master and possess it. Clara is one. The land itself, not her family attachments, calls to her, urging her to stay. In the novels Cather was shortly to write—O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia—this love of the land dominates, but its people, even small-town people, would be included.

“Eric Hermannson's Soul” and “The Bohemian Girl” interest us for the primacy they give to erotic attraction, and for the link they suggest between sexual energy and artistic sensibility, but they also record how the West was filtering through Cather's imagination.

“UNCLE VALENTINE”

“Uncle Valentine” remains the most puzzling of Cather's major stories, although critics who comment on the short fiction treat it respectfully and admire its portraits, its even, autumnal tone, and its word pictures.⁴³ Certainly it shows careful, deliberate workmanship. By 1925, when “Uncle Valentine” was written, Cather was a fully established author and was not writing magazine stories to sell. Indeed, she wrote few stories after 1920.

“Uncle Valentine” pretends to be a memoir, written in a somewhat meandering style, about a magnetic personality, the musician Valentine Ramsey. It is clear that Cather is modeling him on the composer Ethelbert Nevin, who had been an important figure for her during her early years in Pittsburgh (he was the first famous artist she knew well). She wrote about Nevin in her pieces for the Nebraska journals and in letters to friends, and her rapt admiration shines through both. The similarities between her view of Nevin and of her fictional Valentine are clear. For example, this characterization of Nevin could well apply to Valentine: “He had been unable to place any sort of non-conducting medium between the world and himself, no sort of protection to break the jar of things.”⁴⁴

Imitating the memoir frame, Cather takes as her narrator a girl, Marjorie, who at sixteen had been fascinated by her “uncle” Valentine. In the first scene of the story, Marjorie, now a mature woman, visits the Paris studio of Louise Ireland, once an intimate of Valentine, who is giving a voice lesson. A song she is teaching brings back the “golden year” when Valentine was a neighbor.

The story's leisurely form—thirteen short numbered parts—resembles a mind recalling loosely associated scenes from a lost past: musical evenings, walks, teas, a Christmas Eve. The subtitle, “Adagio non troppo,” suggests also a musical form, and Cather may have had in mind a song cycle (Nevin composed songs somewhat in the manner of Schubert), or a tone poem (Wagner, Debussy, and Saint-Saëns are mentioned in the story). Cather maintains a tone of delicate melancholy throughout, viewing the events, such as they are, through a scrim of idyll and sentiment; a problem of the story, in fact, is whether the sentiment may be too indulgent.

A lost place as well as a lost time is evoked. Cather as a young woman had been a guest of Nevin and his wife at their estate, Vineacre, in the hills outside Pittsburgh, and she recreates this ambience as Greenacre, a rural area enclosing the Ramsay estate, Bonnie Brae, and its close neighbor, Fox Hill, the home of the Waterfords, where Marjorie lives with her aunt Charlotte. Its gardens, orchards, and hay fields form a refuge—a temporary one—from the encroaching dark, satanic mills of industrial Pittsburgh. There is a feel of old, perhaps Southern, aristocracy about Greenacre.

As always, it is a mistake to read Cather too literally. True, she is paying homage to an admired figure, but she goes to considerable trouble to rework her material and to frame her central figure. Her focus, I think, is the love that Valentine (surely a significant name, even though prefixed by a thoroughly unromantic term of relationship) inspires in women. It may be relevant that Adriance Hilgarde, the composer in “‘A Death in the Desert,’” thought to be Cather's first attempt to portray Nevin, is also supremely attractive to women.

Marjorie first tries to portray Aunt Charlotte, though she says, significantly, that “it was not until years afterward, not until after her death, indeed, that I began really to know her” (UVOS, 8)—that is, to realize that the affection between Charlotte and Valentine was love, or the memory of an earlier, hopeless love.⁴⁵ At the time of the story Charlotte is in her mid-thirties (ten years older than Valentine), married to Harry Waterford (not unhappily), the mother of four girls, and the guardian of Marjorie and her sister. Marjorie remembers her special qualities: she only cautiously made any change in her beloved house, where she was born, as though she was afraid of losing something; she had “wonderful taste” (Marjorie adds, surely speaking in Cather's voice, “Our old friends considered taste as something quite apart from intelligence, instead of the flower of it” [8]); her love of music was a “way of living” (“what other people learned from books she learned from music” [9]).

Charlotte had known Valentine since he was a child, and watched over him after his mother died. She had not approved of his early marriage to Janet Oglethorpe, of the enormously rich Pittsburgh Oglethorpes. The marriage had failed. Leaving his wife in Italy, Valentine ran off with the beautiful and notorious Louise Ireland. Janet is remarried, living again in Pittsburgh. Now Valentine has returned from abroad in mild disgrace to live again next door in that strange household of men—his aging father, Jonathan; his Uncle Roland, who had once been a musical prodigy; and his older brother, Morton, who still makes a pretense of going to work in the city, though persistent drinking means that his accountants need to repair his figures at the end of each day. They are tyrannized by their Swedish housekeeper, Molla Carlsen. Roland's career came to nothing, and a sense of doom can be felt whenever he is present, his death-in-life existence suggesting what could happen to Valentine were his talents to fail.

But during the “golden year” Valentine's talents flourish, following the arid years of his marriage. Under the influence of his beloved gardens, hills, and woods—and under the influence of Charlotte—he writes the thirty songs for which he is best remembered. Marjorie's memory, moving through the year from November to the next autumn, picks up scene after scene of Charlotte and Valentine, despite the fact that, as Marjorie recalls, “she almost never saw him alone” (17). They do have one excursion together, a trip into the city at Christmas time (Cather had had just such a shopping expedition with Nevin [Woodress, 359]), and when they return “their faces shone like the righteous in his Heavenly Father's house” (16). It is after that day that Valentine begins to compose, his first song the “Ballad of the Young Knight,” beginning “From the Ancient Kingdoms, / Through the woods of dreaming, …” Valentine wrote both music and words for his compositions, “like the old troubadours” (19).

Gradually, the pattern of the love between Charlotte and Valentine emerges: it is the legendary one—the fated love of the young knight for the queen. It is only for Charlotte that he can write: as a schoolboy, he says, he neglected lessons, probably “writing serenades for you, Charlotte” (12). When he was a boy Valentine had been “her squire” (6), and later when Harry Waterford came courting “the spoiled neighbor boy was always hanging about” (6). Music is their love, and Wagner their passion: “Charlotte, do you remember how we used to play the Ring to each other hours on end, long ago, when Damrosch first brought German opera over?”(25).

One day, on a walk in the hills, as the mist drifts over the water and Charlotte and Valentine breathe together “The Rhinegold,” something in the two voices awes even the little girls. Later Valentine plays the Rhine music “as if he would never stop” (25). (During 1925 Cather also wrote a preface for the republication of a book on Wagner's operas, so that his romantic themes would have been much on her mind; see OW 60-66). The significance of Wagner's music is underscored by Valentine's recollection of an incident in his marriage—almost a comic anecdote: he had thought to escape to Bayreuth, but Janet had pursued him and arrived in the middle of the Ring. “My God, the agony of having to sit through music with that woman!” (13).

An evening in full summer, when there was “a languorous spirit of beauty abroad—warm, sensuous, oppressive, like the pressure of a warm, clinging body” (29), gives fullest expression to their frustration. Marjorie looks for Charlotte, who speaks impatiently, “I can't be with anyone tonight” (29), and Valentine sends her abruptly away. The next day he goes into the city. He has been hearing from Louise Ireland (five purple letters received at once), but when he returns he announces to Charlotte that he is not leaving (“I do seem to be tied to you” [31]). She “looked radiantly happy” (30).

It is probable that Charlotte has been a faithful wife (“her life was hedged about by very subtle and sure conventionalities” [27]). Still, Harry once makes an odd comment to her about the roses he cultivates on a retaining wall, “I like their being without an odor; it gives them a kind of frankness and innocence.” Charlotte flushes at the peculiar use of the word: “Innocence? … I shouldn't call it just that” (28).

The golden, timeless year ends abruptly. In the autumn Valentine and the Waterfords learn that the large neighboring estate, long empty, has been sold, and on a walk they meet the purchasers—Janet and her husband. Valentine feels hunted and trapped, and in truth Janet appears something of an ogress, with a red, shiny face and “teeth too far apart, something crude and inelegant about them” (35). (We recall the same feature in the awful Mrs. Merrick.) Her reason for moving nearby, however, seems laudable—she wishes their son to know the Ramsay relatives. Valentine behaves rudely and excessively, as is his usual style. Like the real Nevin, he had in his character “no sort of protection to break the jar of things.” In November he leaves, and two years later he is accidentally killed by a motor truck near Louise Ireland's apartment.

The twilit world of “Uncle Valentine” resembles the robust world of “Coming, Aphrodite!” hardly at all. They are alike only in reiterating Cather's belief that the life given to art can have little to do with life's ordinary passages—“marriage, money, friends, the general social order,” as Louise Ireland lists them (3). The distinction of the Troll Garden stories persist, as Cather moves from the social concerns of the earlier fiction to more abstract, philosophical patterns. “Aesthetics come back to predestination, if theology doesn't,” Valentine tells Charlotte, emphasizing the other-worldly mystery—inexplicable, anarchic—that attaches not only to artistic creation, but to the phenomenon of beauty itself, and those sensitive to beauty. Wagner's myth that the Rhine gold can be possessed only by one who renounces love seems to underlie Valentine's strange character: he inspires love—Charlotte, Louise, even Janet, and possibly the young Marjorie—but accepts none fully. The distortions imposed by a life given to art is a theme Cather will turn to again in almost her last story, “The Old Beauty.”

The charge that Cather ignores the erotic is a serious one, but not, I think, a justified one, as these four stories demonstrate.

“FOR WHICH THE FIRST WAS MADE”: OBSCURE DESTINIES

The three stories comprising Obscure Destinies—“Neighbour Rosicky,” “Old Mrs. Harris,” and “Two Friends”—represent the peak of Cather's accomplishment in this form. Although each story stands by itself, all have the same Nebraska locale, the places and persons of her girlhood that Cather remembered with such luminous exactitude. They blend seamlessly with the earlier works based on Red Cloud memories—The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, “The Enchanted Bluff”—though the town of the story may be placed in Colorado or Kansas. The fact that Cather's youthful self is a character in two of the stories adds to our sense that she is looking back intently at pictures long harbored in her imagination.

Cather's father died in 1928, and during the following four years, as Cather worked on these stories and on her novel Shadows on the Rock, her mother lay ill and dying. A sense of life's transiency, but also of its completeness, underlies all three short stories: in two, a death follows a long life, and in the third a narrative coda tells us how the two friends died.

Cather's topic is time itself, in the double aspect that Bergson explored—in human terms, its ravages and its transformations. In each of the stories (though only faintly in “Rosicky”) a moment occurs when the narrative voice moves suddenly to a new and distant perspective, holding the time of the story in its grasp. Paul Ricoeur, in his treatise on temporality in narrative, speaks of “aporias” in the experience of time, disorienting disjunctions in perspective.⁴⁶ A famous—the most famous—literary example is the removal of Troilus to the eighth sphere at the end of Chaucer's poem, so that we see Troilus look back on his life, with all its intensities, and watch it dim and fade. Closer to our time, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a work Cather liked, dramatizes the disjunction. Chaucer relies on clear medieval cosmology, and Wilder has his characters speak from beyond the grave. Cather works more ambiguously. In her stories, the long perspective is still within time, tied to the persons and things of the objective world, with only a hint of transcendence.

“NEIGHBOUR ROSICKY”

“Neighbour Rosicky” is a portrait of the last year of Rosicky's life, more precisely of Rosicky remembering his life—remembering it not nostalgically but actively and purposefully, mining it to form the future. It is a picture of the interpenetration of the past and the present, of the world being made, a Bergsonian concept fictionalized.

In the first scene, Rosicky comes to town to make a professional call on his friend Doctor Ed, who tells him that he should pamper his bad heart and leave the heavy work of the farm to his sons. Rosicky can afford this; he has willing sons and a loving wife. But he worries about Rudolf, his oldest son, who has recently married and is trying to make a go of farming on his own. Rudolf's wife, Polly, is a town girl, not used to the farm or Bohemian ways, and Rosicky fears that another drought will drive them from the land. In his life, full of hardship, Rosicky has found that poverty itself is bearable; what is truly “terrifying and horrible” is “the look in the eyes of a dishonest and crafty man, or a scheming and rapacious woman,” sights he associates with city living.⁴⁷ Once in his life Rosicky had to take money from the hand of a hungry child, because it was owed his employer. He wants his sons to be spared this dreadfulness.

Rosicky sets about making Polly's life more pleasant. He washes her dishes and loans Rudolf the car for a Saturday night at the picture show. Most important, he tells them a story.

Rosicky has lived in three countries: first in Bohemia, on land his grandparents worked; then in England, where as a young man he lived in London; and finally in America, where he stayed in New York for fifteen years, working as a tailor, until his feeling for the land and growing things drove him to risk moving to the opening fields of Nebraska as a farm hand. At Christmas Rosicky tells Rudolf and Polly the story of his Christmas in London, a time full of such wretchedness that he has left it buried, “a sore spot in his mind that wouldn't bear touching” (OD, 27). But “he wanted Polly to hear this one” (51). He describes his life as a tailor's apprentice, living in a curtained-off corner of his employer's flat, and tells how, driven by cold and hunger, he woke at night and ate the family's Christmas dinner goose before he could stop himself. Walking the streets in despair, he is miraculously rescued by four strangers, to whom he appeals when he hears them speaking Czech. These travelers from the east give him money to replace the Christmas dinner, and later aid him to leave for America. It is a story of deprivation and humiliation—also of deliverance—and it touches Polly.

That the memory Rosicky uses is a Christmas story told on Christmas day suggests an extension of meaning. Not personal memory alone, but the commemorative recollection—the common human pattern of remembrance and renewal—is being tapped. Another anecdote embedded in the story suggests this same pattern. Rosicky remembers that it was on the Fourth of July, sitting in Park Place, when he realized that big cities “built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground” (31). That was when he decided to risk moving West. Later, we learn of another Fourth of July. Rosicky's wife, Mary, recalls a time when the boys were little, and the terrible prairie heat had just killed that year's crops, and how Rosicky insisted anyhow on a celebration. While the Methodists were gathering in the church to pray for rain, Rosicky stayed at home, frolicked in the horse tank with his boys, and picnicked on chicken under the young mulberry trees. Personal memories blend with larger sacred and communal rituals to renew and give hope. In William James's terms, Rosicky is of heroic mold, heroes being those persons who not only face fate but embrace it, who celebrate even as the crops wither.

Rosicky dies from a heart attack brought on by raking Russian thistles from Rudolf's alfalfa, a field Rosicky loves because “when he was a little boy, he had played in fields of that strong blue-green colour” (62). His attachment to the beauty of the field, his desire to preserve it, overrides any consideration for his own life. Stricken in the field, Rosicky leans on Polly. As she helps him to bed and cares for him, she senses his “special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music” (66). It was something like an “awakening” to her (69). Rosicky dies knowing that “Polly would make a fine woman,” and that she and Rudolf will stay on the land.

Later that summer Doctor Ed stops at Rosicky's grave, within sight of the homestead. Close by the wire fence is Rosicky's mowing machine. The boys had been cutting hay that afternoon, and “the newcut hay perfumed all the night air” (70). Here is the undercurrent of time's “duration”: the lovely blue-green alfalfa, recalled by Rosicky, led him to save the field here in the new world, to carry forward its beauty, its perfume. Rosicky was “a very simple man” like “a tree that has not many roots, but one tap-root that goes down deep” (32). His intuitions radiate from his family, to the communal patterns that bind humans together, and finally to vegetable life, to the very ground itself.

The rhetoric of this story is simple, unliterary; indeed, Rosicky's dialect (“Dat widder woman bring her daughter up very nice” [7]) skirts comic book idiom at times. Cather's accomplishment lies in conveying Rosicky's unspoken sensitivities, in giving voice to his sense of the unity of the human and natural world. Driving home from that first doctor's visit, Rosicky stops by the graveyard next to his fields to watch the first snow of autumn: “… a fine sight to see the snow falling so quietly and graciously over so much open country. On his cap and shoulders, on the horses' backs and manes, light, delicate, mysterious it fell; and with it a dry cool fragrance was released into the air” (19). Later in the year, walking home at night after doing Polly's dishes, Rosicky meditates—if that is the right word—even more explicitly on the simultaneity of two times, two loves, one near (his home) and one the encircling cosmos: “That kitchen with the shining windows was dear to him; but the sleeping fields and bright stars and the noble darkness were dearer still” (41). Stylistically, Cather has brought the two worlds together (“sleeping fields”; “noble darkness”) joining the everyday objective world and the unfathomable other.

One aspect of “Neighbour Rosicky” is unique in Cather's work: her stress on patriotism through her pointed references to Independence Day. As a writer, Cather is singularly unconcerned with sociopolitical problems or contexts. Her interests are elsewhere, with the personal and, ultimately, the metaphysical. In this one story, however, she dwells on her version of the American dream—actually the original, Jeffersonian American dream of the yeoman farmer, independent and virtuous. Rosicky has been an American success, we might say, yet he wants for his sons not greater success but goodness and the freedom of personal action. He wants to perpetuate the possibility of virtuous living. As Cather well knew, the American dream had been thoroughly tarnished; in thus reasserting its oldest lineaments, she was recreating an early America of the imagination.

“OLD MRS. HARRIS”

“Old Mrs. Harris,” the second of the stories in Obscure Destinies, has come to be the most admired of the three, and Cather herself thought it her best. She must have felt that she had succeeded in catching something precious to her, for she scarcely bothers disguising the richly autobiographical detail.⁴⁸ Anyone visiting the old Cather home in Red Cloud (now restored and open to visitors) immediately recognizes the crowded little rooms of the Templeton house.

The large Templeton family itself is the focus of the story, in particular the grandmother, the Mrs. Harris of the title; her daughter, Victoria; and her fifteen-year-old granddaughter, called Vickie (as Willa was called Willie in her family). Vickie, ambitious and intent on making her own way, is impatient with family claims, though she likes to read stories to her young brothers. The household also includes Mandy, a “bound girl,” who resembles a simple young woman who came with the Cather family from Virginia and lived with them throughout her life. Neighbors of the Templetons, Mr. and Mrs. Rosen, are drawn from the real-life Wieners, German Jews educated in the European fashion, who loaned the young Cather books from their extensive library. The story makes us sense the pleasure Cather takes in sheer remembering. Her style is expansive and unhurried, seeming to have room for everyone in the family and in the town itself.

The town, called Skyline, Colorado, is more than a backdrop. We need to feel its ethos to understand the Templetons and the Rosens, neither of whom fit easily into the town's fabric—the Templetons because they are Southerners, with ancestral roots in Tennessee, and the Rosens because they are from a larger, cosmopolitan world.

The town prides itself on its firm standards in ethics and deportment. It is a “snappy little Western democracy,” with egalitarian notions about each person's due (OD, 133). Not that the town lacks a hierarchy: the poor Maude children, who may have different fathers, stand outside the fence at the ice cream social until Mrs. Templeton invites them in; a Mexican with a cart and two mules hauls away tin cans and refuse. The businessmen are “hard money grubbers,” different from boyish Hillary Templeton, who refuses to call in loans when times are hard, or from Mr. Rosen, who has leisurely lunches away from his clothing store. Disagreeable Mrs. Jackson, another Templeton neighbor, appears to act for the town when she deliberately insults Victoria Templeton at the ice cream social, letting her know that her neglect of her mother, Grandma Harris, has been observed and condemned. Mrs. Harris, not Victoria, made the cake the Templetons brought, and Mrs. Jackson sniffs that she would never keep someone in her kitchen to bake for her. Only gradually does the hurt sink in. For Victoria, it was “another of those thrusts … she couldn't understand” (128).

In truth, Victoria's treatment of her mother has bothered Mrs. Rosen, too. To outer eyes, Grandma Harris occupies a position in the Templeton family little above that of Mandy. Mrs. Harris gets up early to give breakfast to the children, then serves Victoria and Mr. Templeton in the dining room. Her “room” is not a room at all, but a passage-way from kitchen to dining room, cluttered with the children's rocking horse and the clothing they throw off as they rush by. Her calico dresses and the tobacco box holding her soap are behind a cloth curtain in one corner.

Gradually we learn the nature of the position Mrs. Harris occupies in this family. It is understandable only against a Southern “feudal society” (133), of which Mrs. Harris is a remnant. Keeping her handsome daughter a “belle,” and then the properly treated mistress of the house (so different from being a mere housekeeper), is the last mark of distinction she can preserve. To see Victoria a household drudge would have meant “real poverty, coming down in the world so far that one could no longer keep up appearances” (134). Mrs. Harris's sense of the fitness of things goes further than appearances, however. The one time she shows anger is in defense of proper burial for Blue Boy, the family cat. This time she defies Victoria, who would have Blue Boy taken away as trash, and tells the little boys to get up early and bury him in a little grave next to the sand creek. In protection of the right way to behave Mrs. Harris can be assertive, though for herself she is undermanding.

Grandma Harris must be understood in the context of the world of the old South; she finds her identity within the group, formerly a big kinship and surrounding community, now shrunk to her daughter and her family. But when the old forms are sufficiently kept, she feels content—indeed, happy. Aging, becoming ever less an individual, a personality, Mrs. Harris attains a kind of animal dignity (“There was the kind of nobility about her head that there is about an old lion's: an absence of self-consciousness, vanity, preoccupation—something absolute” [81]).

Despite her passive acceptance of what life has offered, Mrs. Harris, like Rosicky, acts out of a deep wisdom to protect the future. When Vickie wins a scholarship through hard competition, but finds that she still needs three hundred dollars to finance her first year of college, her father weakly hopes she will postpone her plans, and her mother fails to understand her distress; she thinks tears appropriate only for a broken romance. Unknown to all, even to Vickie, proud Mrs. Harris secretly asks the Rosens to grant Vickie the necessary loan.

The story moves toward simultaneous but individual crises in the lives of the three Templeton women, as if to illustrate a truth about family living that Cather had found in the stories of Katherine Mansfield: “every individual in that household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavour” (OW, 108-9). Vickie, having gotten her loan, thinks only of preparing to leave, and of all her needs. Victoria, in despair at finding that she is pregnant for the sixth time, locks her bedroom door. “She was sick of it all; sick of dragging this chain of life that never let her rest” (178). And old Mrs. Harris is dying. As she rests on her narrow cot she is ministered to by one of the ten-year-old twins, who spreads his own handkerchief on a box for a bedside table, brings fresh water in a real glass tumbler, and reads Joe's Luck to her. “Grandmother was perfectly happy” (184).

When the family learns just how ill Grandma Harris is, they begin to fuss, as Grandma had known and feared they would. The doctor is called, and Mrs. Harris is lifted from her cot and put in Victoria's bed, dressed in one of Victoria's nice nightgowns. Of all this Mrs. Harris knows nothing; she had received the appropriate attentions from her young grandson.

A remarkable paragraph closes the story. Abruptly the narrative voice moves us to a distant future time, leaving us disoriented, caught in an aporia between two perspectives. It is an old narrative device, but also modern, in its disquieting refusal of closure:

Thus Mrs. Harris slipped out of the Templetons' story; but Victoria and Vickie had still to go on, to follow the long road that leads through things unguessed at and unforeseeable. When they are old, they will come closer and closer to Grandma Harris. They will think a great deal about her, and remember things they never noticed; and their lot will be more or less like hers.

How can intense young Vickie or touchy Victoria be like self-effacing Mrs. Harris? How can “their lot” resemble hers? Only the mysteriously beneficent dissolutions of time hold the answer.

“Old Mrs. Harris” tells us much about Cather's deepest, most abiding themes and loves, among them her desire for learning, for the larger sphere of knowledge that high culture confers. Though young Vickie's intensity is handled with gentle satire, her aspiration is not. She yearns to have the breadth of understanding of Mr. Rosen, who “carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness” (121).

“Old Mrs. Harris” responds to a variety of approaches. Obviously there is much to engage the biographer and the student of social history. Feminist historians and critics find scenes relevant to the position of women at that time: Grandma Harris, trying to find the three hundred dollars Vickie needs for her education, first approaches her son-in-law, who sold Mrs. Harris's old home in Tennessee. She finds that the funds are invested and safe, but not available (“Invested; that was a word men always held over women, Mrs. Harris thought, and it always meant they could have none of their own money” [165]). Other scenes speak to questions of gender. Victoria's sense of entrapment at becoming pregnant again is fully voiced: “She had had babies enough; and there ought to be an end to such apprehensions some time before you were old and ugly” (178). Yet this scene must be placed against an earlier one, her loving pleasure in nursing the last baby, beautiful little Hughie (115). Cather writes with a deep appreciation of woman's paradoxical biological destiny. In fact, it is hard to leave off thinking about “Old Mrs. Harris,” so rich and teasing are its many facets.

“TWO FRIENDS”

The young Cather is also a character, a listener, in “Two Friends,” the last of the three Obscure Destinies stories—doubly a presence, for the narrator is the youth grown up, now experienced, one who has traveled in “Southern countries” yet remembers the breach that she saw growing between two friends as “an old scar” (229-30). True, the narrator remains nameless—in fact, genderless—but it is impossible not to hear Cather's own voice. Further, the two friends of the story are recognizable as two men prominent in the Red Cloud of Cather's girlhood. When “Two Friends” was published, Cather wrote to her old friend Carrie Miner, whose father served as the model for Mr. Dillon, hoping that Carrie will find the portrait acceptable. She adds that in any case she was not attempting to portray the men exactly; rather something they suggested.⁴⁹

What they suggest is friendship, an affectional bond little explored in modern literature, though it engaged classical thinkers, as Cather would have known. One may fancy that she was remembering Aristotle's discussion of friendship, or Cicero's, and was testing their ideas in a little town in the New World.

The quality of this story is meditative throughout. The narrative voice begins with an observation in the tone of a moral philosopher, speculating on a basic human need: “Even in early youth, when the mind is so eager for the new and untried, while it is still a stranger to faltering and fear, we yet like to think that there are certain unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things” (OD, 193). This opening contrasts decidedly with the way the other two stories begin, where we are immediately in the middle of some personal worry. The mutual regard between friends is calmer, steadier, than the intricate loves within families, with their hurts and emotional intensities. Indeed, the friendship between Mr. Dillon and Mr. Trueman is markedly set apart from family. When Mr. Dillon, married and with children, goes home after their evening talks, Mr. Trueman, a widower, takes up his own private life, usually playing poker with gambling cronies. Free of the entangling needs and responsibilities of family life, the bond of friendship should be one of the “unalterable realities … at the bottom of things.” When this proves not the case, it leaves a “scar” on the developing soul of the young girl that she takes with her all her days, a reminder of all the uncertainties of a world in which change is the principle.

The friendship is important to the girl not only for the solidity it represents, but because the two men, in their talk and deportment, explain and enlarge her world. From their secure vantage points—town banker and store owner (Mr. Dillon) and cattleman (Mr. Trueman)—they transmit to the listening girl what a community should provide its young: accurate knowledge about the world and the wisdom of experience. She is educated by “the old stories of the early West … ; the minute biographies of the farming people; the clear, detailed, illuminating accounts of all that went on in the great crop-growing, cattle-feeding world; and the silence—the strong, rich, out-flowing silence between two friends” (226). She hears ethical judgments. Mr. Dillon defends the Swedish farmers who work their women hard (“It's the old-country way; they're accustomed to it, and they like it”), but Mr. Trueman does not acquiesce (“Maybe. I don't like it” [204]). She learns, too, about the world outside Singleton, Kansas, as the men talk of St. Joseph, of Chicago. Their journeys “made the rest of us feel less shut away and small-townish” (202). She observes the forebearance and trust that make friendship possible. Mr. Dillon curbs his tendency to sharp opinions in Mr. Trueman's presence; Mr. Trueman cautions only quietly against quack social cures (“Mustn't be a reformer, R. E. Nothing in it” [214]).

One particular moment in this delicate relationship—two busy men, a quiet girl—is held for us, crystallizing its dynamics. On a hot summer night, with the dusty street before them “drinking up the moonlight,” the three are in their accustomed places. The two men sit and talk, and the girl listens. That night they observe an occultation of Venus. As they watch, the planet appears to move toward the moon, to be swallowed, and then to appear on the other side. The scene is a tableau: the three watching figures; the intense moonlight making the deep dust of the street silvery; the dust that—so the narrative voice tells us—is one of the possible answers, one of the “unalterable realities” (“the last residuum of material things—the soft bottom resting place”); and above the scene, the mysterious heavenly bodies, a cosmos enclosing all. The narrator stops the moment by drawing the scene in painterly fashion, suggesting forms by spots of color. Rickety wooden buildings across the street become “an immaterial structure of velvet-white and glossy blackness, with here and there a faint smear of blue door, or a tilted patch of sage-green.” The brick wall behind the two men “took on a carnelian hue” and the shadows of the men “made two dark masses on the white sidewalk” (210-11).⁵⁰ One is reminded of another writer's attempt to recreate a lost moment: Woolf's Lily Briscoe, as she tries to recapture her memory of Mrs. Ramsey in paint.

But the pattern of the story is of movement and change, unsettling—not just the eclipse of Venus, which prefigures the end of the friendship, but the swiftness with which it happens, when “everything up there overhead seemed as usual” (212).

This is not the first time that we have noted Cather using the night sky as a manifest for lurking questions. In “The Enchanted Bluff,” for example, one of the boys says that the North Star may not last forever, and in “Before Breakfast” Venus seems to radiate reassurances to the irritable Grenfell. Like the mad farmer in Frost's “The Star-Splitter,” characters in these stories turn to the sky for clues. In “Two Friends” what the sky patterns reveal—whether they reveal—is left as a question.

After talk of the eclipse, Mr. Dillon turns impatiently to practical worries, how to get tramps off the railroad or rid the town of one fancy house at least. Mr. Trueman, in contrast, hopes that the cosmos is a coherent one: “Maybe the stars will throw some light on all that, if we get the run of them” (214).

By chance, a surviving letter of Cather's reveals just how personal a wondering contemplation of the heavens was for her. From her letter it is clear that Mr. Trueman and Frost's star-splitter are figures whose hope for transcendence she shared. Writing to Edith Lewis from Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Cather tells of watching Venus and Jupiter in the evening sky for an hour, and questioning whether the movement of these bodies may not signal something more than physical and mathematical forces.⁵¹

Yet what ends the friendship is not a stroke of fate—at least not apparently. Rather it is a human failing, a burst of ego. Mr. Dillon's irritable temperament breaks through his imperfectly acquired habit of patience. Though the narrator throughout the story treats the men as equals, speaking with mild irony of “my heroes” or “my two great men,” it is clear that Mr. Dillon is the lesser man. He is more intelligent, the narrator says; that is, he knows precise commercial values: the worth of the Swede farmers, the mortgage of the homesteader who foolishly has a traveling photographer take a picture of his house and barn, the unacceptable risk of granting a loan to a “foolish, extravagant woman or a girl he didn't approve of,” when the tone of his voice, “though courteous,” was “relentless as the multiplication table” (207). A man of strong prejudices, a good Catholic and family man, Mr. Dillon had curbed his dislike of poker playing, of questionable women, of Republicanism (all habits and interests of Trueman) out of respect for his friend. But on a trip to Chicago Dillon hears Bryan's inflaming “cross of gold” speech, and it unleashes his temper and local partisanship. He sacrifices Trueman's friendship.

In contrast, Trueman (the name suggestive), slow of speech, moves in a world singularly free of calculation: he keeps one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, but leaves his coat hanging in cattle sheds or the barber shop; when he changes banks, he does not know the figure of his account, but writes a check for “the amount of my balance.” More, his generosity is of the spirit (“one felt solidity, an entire absence of anything mean or small” [196]). A magnanimous man, large-souled, he walks “spaciously, as if he were used to a great deal of room” (203). There is something antique about Trueman, indeed heroic; he moves as though “on the deck of his own ship” (214) and the ring he wears is “the head of a Roman soldier cut in onyx” (199). Unlike Dillon, Trueman knows the worth of friendship. When Dillon dies suddenly of pneumonia, Trueman gives the young girl a red seal from his watch chain “as a keepsake,” and moves away from Singleton. We are told that he dies in San Francisco, where the trail leading West must end.

And it is Trueman who tells us what our stance should be toward the mysterious chances that beset us. One of the pleasures of the young observer is hearing her two friends talk of theatrical performances and actors and actresses. Trueman remembers Edwin Booth in Richard II, “which made a great impression on me at the time.” But now, he says, “that play's a little too tragic. Something very black about it. I think I prefer Hamlet” (217). This must be our clue—not the anguish and regret of Richard, but the readiness of Hamlet, the acceptance of a universe where change, and so loss, is one of the unalterable realities.

A hint of transcendence remains. The great natural world of the stars and planets confers an inspiriting beauty on all that lies below; the materialism of the dust may not be the full answer. The silvery glow that moonlight casts on the soft dust of the town's streets, making it lovely, beautifying it, suggests that an ultimate harmony is the answer. “Nothing in the world, not snow mountains or blue seas, is so beautiful in moonlight as the soft, dry summer roads in a farming country, roads where the white dust falls back from the slow wagon-wheel” (212).

The title Cather selected for her three stories, taken from Gray's elegy (“Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, / Their homely joy, and destiny obscure”), fits her collection well enough, but Cather's attitude toward her material carries nothing of Gray's sentimental condescension—no flower “wastes its sweetness on the desert air” here. Missing also are the grotesqueries of Anderson's Winesburg and the boorishness of Lewis's Gopher Prairie. What one carries away from reading Obscure Destinies is a sense of lives lived in full humanity. The West of Cather's imagination had not always allowed this scope, as a glance back at the small towns in, for example, “The Sculptor's Funeral” or “The Joy of Nelly Deane” reminds us.

“LIKE THOSE NICèAN BARKS OF YORE”: THE OLD BEAUTY AND OTHERS

Following Cather's death in 1947, Edith Lewis, named by Cather her literary executor, and Alfred Knopf, her publisher since 1920, brought out The Old Beauty and Others, three stories Cather left in manuscript. The first, “The Old Beauty,” was written in 1936; “The Best Years” and “Before Breakfast” only shortly before her death. As it happens, the three have very different settings. “Before Breakfast” … takes place on Grand Manan, and Cather's love for the silences and vistas of this northern island, where she had a summer home, is palpable; “The Best Years” is her last obeisance to the Nebraska of her memories; and “The Old Beauty” is set in the south of France, in the resort town of Aix-les-Bains. Recalling Cather's pleasure in the French landscape she first saw in 1902, so vivid in the travel pieces she wrote then, we might say that these stories make a farewell gesture toward three of the spots Cather loved best on “the green surface where men lived and trees lived and blue flags and buttercups” (OB, 161).

Taken together, the three comprise a final expression of Cather's particular quality. Only, perhaps, with “The Best Years” do we sense a slackening into self-indulgence. The grim Divide of Cather's early Nebraska stories is missing, replaced by calendar scenes (“Big red barns, rows of yellow straw stacks, green orchards, trim white farmhouses, fenced gardens” [80]), and the landscape feels dimmed into an idea (“The horizon was like a perfect circle, a great embrace, and within it lay the cornfields, still green, and the yellow wheat stubble, miles and miles of it, and the pasture lands where the white-faced cattle led lives of utter content” [78]). True, the human world is not so easily content. The great embrace must encompass human loss—a poignant one, the death of the bright young teacher Leslie Ferguesson. The pain of loss is still an emotional hurt long after her death, though now some of Leslie's pupils are themselves teachers, passing on to yet another generation, we assume, some of Leslie's delicacy of feeling. The story is done in delicate pastels, rather like the tonal qualities of Cather's penultimate novel, Lucy Gayheart, which also tells of the death of a vibrant young woman.

One little passage in “The Best Years” carries a hint of a mystery at the heart—a doubleness in memory, something beyond personal continuity. When Evangeline Knightly, the county superintendent, visits Leslie's little school, she “made a joking little talk to the children and told them about a very bright little girl in Scotland who knew nearly a whole play of Shakespeare's by heart, but who wrote in her diary: “Nine times nine is the Devil”; which proved, she said, that there are two kinds of memory, and God is very good to anyone to whom he gives both kinds” (86-87). We are not told what the pupils in advanced arithmetic thought of this odd “joke.” In darkling fashion, Cather may be inserting herself, the artist, into this simple story, addressing us directly to remind us that without those who, by a gift, see beneath simple figures into other forces (demons, trolls, goblins), personal memory, however loving, would dim into impotence.

This hint at the need for double sight might have been inserted with greater appropriateness, I feel, in “The Old Beauty.” It makes greater demands on attentiveness than is usual for a Cather story, and as a consequence is generally underrated. Readers typically find Gabrielle Longstreet, an aging beauty left over from the Victorian age, an unlikely Cather heroine and her story disappointing. In fact, its very first reader, the editor of the Woman's Home Companion, where Cather sent it in 1936, felt this way. She agreed to print the story, even as she said she did not like it, but Cather withdrew the manuscript. Biographers and critics often pass over “The Old Beauty” with some embarrassment. One appears to speak for most in calling it “the somewhat querulous writing of old age.”⁵²

The chief stumbling block is the central character, Gabrielle Longstreet. Once a celebrated international beauty, she is now, in 1922, a “ruin”; further, she is difficult and forbidding in manner—she sees nothing in the world forming after World War I that pleases her (“I think one should go out with one's time” [46]). The question has to be, How did Cather, at age sixty-three still writing brilliantly (if nothing else, the rhetorical chiaroscuro of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, shows her powers intact)—how did she think of Gabrielle Longstreet?

The faded spa world of Aix-les-Bains is a suitable background for Gabrielle. Though the town is not vividly present, Cather knew it well. She had first seen it in 1923, and in 1930 she had stayed in a resort hotel much like the Hôtel Splendide. She admired its square and gardens, and especially its air of having survived unchanged from an older time. During her 1930 visit she had an encounter that may have prompted her imagination to play over the situation of living beyond one's time. Staying at the hotel was a distinguished elderly woman who, Cather learned in conversation, was Flaubert's niece—someone who had known intimately this great master, as Cather thought of him, and others, such as Turgenev.

Cather wrote a short essay, “A Chance Meeting,” about this occasion, and she included it in a collection of her literary essays, called Not under Forty, that she was assembling in 1936 while also working on “The Old Beauty.”

However, this real-life encounter provides no more than the faintest outline of “The Old Beauty.” Lady Longstreet is quite unlike the vigorous Mme. Grout, as she is unlike the fictional portraits of age—Rosicky, for example, or Mrs. Harris—that Cather had recently composed. We have to look elsewhere for the true lineaments of the story.

“The Old Beauty” is told through the eyes of an American businessman, Henry Seabury, who had been one of Gabrielle's admirers when he was young and she was a reigning beauty. In the opening scene Seabury is approached by reporters outside the Hôtel Splendide. They have just learned that the celebrated Lady Longstreet, who had been registered under another name, has died here the night before. Seabury refuses to help them with their story, but as he watches the litter bearing Gabrielle's body leave the hotel, he realizes that there is no one waiting for the news. Gabrielle has left no family or intimates, and though no doubt remembered by men like himself “scattered about the world,” men who had worshiped her beauty, she has been largely forgotten. Were beauties such as she had been, then, “illusions” (25)? This becomes the question of the story. Searching for an answer, Seabury recalls the past two months here at the hotel after he recognized Gabrielle—teas, excursions, and drives, including the disastrous trip into the mountains the day before she died—and also scenes from Gabrielle at the height of her fame.

These are the “events” of the story. As it ends, Seabury is at the railway station seeing the coffin put on the express that will bear it to Paris and its place in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Gabrielle will rest there, the final line of the story tells us, with “Adelina Patti, Sarah Bernhardt, and other ladies who had once held a place in the world” (72).⁵³

Here we have the puzzle of the story, Seabury's question in a slightly different form: Does Gabrielle Longstreet merit lying next to Patti and Bernhardt—next to two of the greatest artists of their time?

Cather had long ago answered this question with a firm no. In the opinionated arts and theater reviews she wrote for the Nebraska papers while a student, Lily Langtry, then at the height of her fame and notoriety, serves as the exemplar of the actress with looks but no talent that the principled Cather deplored. At the time of the Langtry divorce, then a scandalous event, Cather wrote, “Another instance of the short mutable reigns of these women who travel only on their beauty and wardrobes and unenviable reputations is the inglorious fall of Lillie Langtry.” And “this woman,” the pitiless young voice continues, “was called a genius by an infatuated rabble.”⁵⁴ More significantly, a column of 1897 actually links the three names of Patti, Bernhardt, and Langtry. Cather is scolding a New York impresario for sponsoring Langtry (“the most brazen sham, the ‘Jersey Lily’ … the idol of the London ‘chappies’”) along with Patti (“the most glorious voice in the world”) and Sarah Bernhardt (“the greatest artist in the world”).⁵⁵

But the most telling item among these early pieces is a little anecdote Cather uses to open a column. It is Seabury's question in embryo: Is service to this beauty service to an illusion?

A little while ago a man who had once, years ago, saved Langtry's life, was found dead. In his vest pocket was found Langtry's card, so worn that it was almost illegible. These are the materials for a story if you care to write it. Langtry is neither good nor great, but this poor devil probably went through life with the sublime conviction that he had saved an angel and an artist unaware.⁵⁶

These “materials for a story” were transformed by forty years of thinking and observing before emerging into “The Old Beauty.” The question that is asked is the ancient one, what is the connection of beauty to goodness or greatness?

From these columns, too, we learn what an honor Cather pays Gabrielle in putting her to rest in Père-Lachaise. Even before Cather visited the cemetery in 1902, her romantic imagination had seen it as “that burial ground of genius,”⁵⁷ full of the “mighty graves”⁵⁸ of those like Balzac or Chopin, known by a single name.

In short, Cather's early journalism tells us that “The Old Beauty,” seemingly so uncharacteristic put next to the great Nebraska stories of Obscure Destinies, is yet about persons and questions that had lingered in her mind. The voice of “The Old Beauty” is not the sudden crankiness of old age. With its long gestation, the story fulfills a definition of literature Sarah Orne Jewett once gave Cather, and that she was fond of quoting: “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”⁵⁹

Given her interest in Langtry, however condescending, and her liking for memoirs and biographies (except for her own) it is highly likely that Cather read Langtry's autobiography, The Days I Knew, when it came out in 1925, with a preface by the actor Richard LeGallienne. Something LeGallienne said may have struck her. In any case he articulates a perspective that Cather seems to adopt in her story: “Of all forms of fame that of Beauty is the greatest, in that it is the simplest, for it is not the fame of achievement, … but of a miracle. … such fame has been Mrs. Langtry's all her days.”⁶⁰

Cather clearly had the facts of Langtry's life in mind as she created Gabrielle, for the resemblances are many: both Lily and Gabrielle were born on an island (Lily on Jersey, Gabrielle on Martinique); both were fluent in English and French; both married English yachtsmen who took them to ancestral homes in the north of England and then to London, where their beauty instantly won them a place in the highest society. Both went through a divorce and had shadowy second husbands. Lily loved horses and kept a racing stable; English visitors in Aix-les-Bains recall seeing Gabrielle riding in Devonshire before the war. Lily wore her hair in the “Langtry knot”; Gabrielle wore hers in the “mode Gabrielle” (18). Lily liked to travel with photographs of former friends and admirers; one of the significant scenes in “The Old Beauty” is Seabury's introduction to Gabrielle's gallery. “We carry so many photographs about with us, Mr. Seabury,” explains Cherry Beamish, the former music hall actress who is Gabrielle's companion.⁶¹ Cather does not give Gabrielle a stage career; she leaves her a famous beauty only.

To read The Days I Knew is to be struck with a further parallel, one of greater significance than a matter of style or career. As Langtry's account of her life goes on, one cannot escape the impression of dreadful blandness, an emptiness at the center. Langtry tells of encounters with the great and notable of two generations—the highest royalty, of course, but also men of affairs (Gladstone, Disraeli, President Grant, Rothschild), great actresses (Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry), and always artists and writers. Oscar Wilde was devoted, lying all night at her doorstep, bringing her a single amaryllis, writing a poem for her, “To Helen, formerly of Troy, now of London.” “Jimmy” Whistler painted her, and she knew, or met, Ruskin, Kipling, Rosetti, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, William Morris. But one hopes in vain for telling glimpses of these figures. The pictures Langtry gives are perfunctory, or cold: the devoted Wilde had “pale freckles” and “greenish-hued teeth” (Langtry, 83). The great figures of her time flicker through her pages like so many ghosts.

As Seabury escorts Gabrielle and Cherry about, we learn that one of Gabrielle's chief concerns is that she had been, like Langtry, “indifferent” in the days of her beauty. She had supposed that “a great man's time, his consideration, his affection, were mine in the natural course of things” (33). Now, aged, her beauty gone, she “suffers from strange regrets” (43). She fears she was “cold” to her friends (43), and now she is trying really to know them. “I read everything they wrote, and everything that has been written about them. That is my chief pleasure. … They are dearer to me than when they were my living friends” (33-34). It is as though she is trying to live her life over, correcting its mistakes.

Is her memory accurate? Had she been “cold”? Seabury recalls her “calm grey eyes” and “calm white shoulders.” Her eyes had “no sparkle” in them, but rather a “kind of twilight shadow” (24). She was “flowerlike,” and her London rooms were rather “cool and spring-like” (helped by a rare hot-air furnace). She had not been witty or clever; she said “nothing memorable” in either French or English (17). She was not a coquette; she seemed “unconscious of her body and whatever clothed it,” and her hands lay on her dress forgotten, “as a bunch of white violets might lie” (24). She had “the air of having come from afar off” (24). She did not attract would-be lovers, but rather a series of Great Protectors. The remarkable men around her were either old or young, as Seabury had been, not men her own age.

Seabury recalls one incident of some dramatic tension, a genteel rescue. Calling to take her to dinner, he entered her drawing room to find her struggling against a stout, dark man who has her pinioned on the sofa, one hand thrust in her bodice. The man rushes out, and Gabrielle slowly recovers. Only in this instance, she tells Seabury years later, did a man mistake her manner for sexual invitation.

Despite the absence of the erotic in Gabrielle's appeal, Seabury hesitates to call her cold; rather, he says, she was “unawakened” (he uses the word twice [18, 44]). Hers was a beauty for contemplation, not possession. It gave refreshment to women as well as men. “Wasn't she the most beautiful creature then!” recalls Cherry. “I used to see her at the races, and at charity balls” (44). Mrs. Thompson, the Englishwoman who first identifies the gaunt old woman to Seabury as Lady Longstreet, mourns the passing of “those beautiful ones. … We never have too many of them” (14).

Gradually we perceive that Gabrielle, not at home in the postwar era, was not at home in her own time either. She had “never dressed in the mode” (18). When she talked to the older men who visited her, she asked them “about events and personages already in the past; things she had come too late to see” (19). As her mythic form takes shape, filling in Gabrielle's outline, we see her as indeed coming “from afar.” As Wilde's poem would have it, she was once of Troy. She was simply Beauty (ancient beauty, the idea of beauty) temporally embodied.

Now, with her beauty gone, something like a real self is struggling to be born. Seabury reflects, “in this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever” (15). He sees that Gabrielle is trying (without success) to recapture the life that should have been hers.

Cather frequently expressed her belief that the life given to art demands the sacrifice of personal life. The face of Eden Bower, on the way to sing the role of Aphrodite, is hard and masklike, and the singer Thea Kronborg, in The Song of the Lark, says that her work has become her life. Gabrielle is a poignant instance of this deprivation in that her peculiar gift, simple beauty, has demanded no awareness, no passionate desire, no fires of youth to burn into art. This is the explanation for Gabrielle's rigidity, her inability to adapt or change. An icon for most of her term on earth, she has no memory of having lived. Only those engaged with life (Rosicky, Mrs. Harris) know how to respond. Gabrielle's tragedy (not too strong a word) is that no vestige of a self exists for her to recover.

Gabrielle's doomed search ends during a trip into the mountains on the last day of her life. Seabury has hired a car for a drive up to Grande Chartreuse, a medieval Carthusian monastery. As the climb goes on, it begins to seem a journey into another world. “Ever afterward Seabury remembered that drive as strangely impersonal. … The lightness and purity of the air gave one a sense of detachment from everything one had left behind ‘down there, back yonder’” (62). All gradually grow silent, even the young mountain boy who drives them. Dramatically, the quiet is broken once: “the gold tones of an alpine horn” float down, and the driver stops so that all can listen to this eerie, disembodied trumpet. It seems meant for Gabrielle. The monastery itself, dwarfed by crags, is “superb and solitary.” Seabury has the sense that “life would go on thus forever in high places, among naked peaks cut sharp against a stainless sky” (62).

This operatic preparation sets the scene for some decisive moment, some revelation. But no vision is granted. Hugh Kenner, writing of the narrative pattern of Joyce's stories, speaks of “disappointed epiphanies.”⁶² It is such a blank that we experience here—the journey taken, the destination reached, and then nothing.

Seabury and Cherry go into the monastery; Gabrielle remains behind, looking into a great well at the center of the cobblestoned courtyard. A lone woman at an ancient well, the immensity of nature behind her—it is a richly allusive image, like a painting in the manner of the picturesque sublime. Our attention is held, rather as it is held by the painterly portrayal of the three watching figures in “Two Friends.”

Gabrielle takes a little mirror from her handbag and throws a beam of light into the water below, as though looking more deeply, trying to get to the bottom of things. At first, we are told, “that yellow ray seemed to waken the black water at the bottom: little ripples stirred over the surface,” and Gabrielle “smiled as she threw the gold plaque over the water” (64). Later she is “still looking down into the well and playing with her little reflector, a faintly contemptuous smile on her lips” (64). Why “contemptuous”? Does she perceive the futility of her search for instant selfhood? And are we meant to notice items in the scene that she cannot read—the “gold plaque” awakening “the black water” as an image of beauty and art (the mirror held to nature) enlightening, enhancing, a dark world?

At a minimum, the figure at the well represents a moment of searching wonder. Possibly Cather recalls Robert Frost's use of this same picture of frustrated hope. Like Gabrielle, his well gazer at first sees a vague form; then

… a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.(63)

Gabrielle too sees “ripples” that blur into ambiguity, or nothingness.

On the trip down the mountain the car with Gabrielle, Cherry, and Seabury meets with an accident that, although not serious in itself, leads to Gabrielle's death in her sleep that night. Seemingly unharmed by the jolt, Gabrielle is unduly upset—irrationally repulsed—by the two young women driving the car that caused the accident. They are rough beasts indeed (whatever their ultimate destination)—American girls, smoking, wearing white breeches. A new dispensation has arrived, and Gabrielle's day is done.

Yet Gabrielle's death may not be the seal to personal failure and frustration. It may be that the vision denied Gabrielle at the well visited her as death approached in the night. The next morning, as Cherry and Seabury view her corpse, they note that she had put on her rings, and that they are on hands that look strangely young again. Her face is “regal, calm, victorious—like an open confession” (70). The startling word confession, with its archaic overtones, points to public avowal, to self-definition and assertion, rather than to an acknowledgment of guilt. At the moment of death, it is hinted, Gabrielle understood who she was; was proud of how she had served. Cather does not tell us the source of this understanding, or where Gabrielle came from: Plato's realm of the imperishable, perhaps, or, a not-unrelated spot, the home of Poe's Helen, “the regions which / Are Holy-Land!” Looking at those youthful hands and that victorious face, Seabury must have had his answer—he had not remembered an illusion, but the truest reality.

The story tells us that Gabrielle does indeed deserve her place among the marbles of Père-Lachaise with the two great artists. She had faithfully carried her gift, her beauty, sacrificing the life of the self. “The Old Beauty” is Cather's belated apology to Lily Langtry.

That Cather had long pondered this theme, beauty as a gift to the world, is clear from a much earlier story. In “Jack-a-Boy,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1901, the bearer of the gift is a six-year-old-boy. He has soft blue-gray eyes, like Gabrielle's, and he too is associated with flowers, especially violets—he delivers May baskets to the aging inhabitants of a set of studio apartments. Unlike Gabrielle, he is a source of immediate moral harmony among the residents, and they explicitly recognize his unworldly quality.

In this earlier story, the possible source, or home, of beauty as essence is debated. The old professor of Greek knows that “sometimes the old divinities reveal themselves in children” (CSF, 320). After Jack-a-Boy's early death from scarlet fever, the music teacher wonders whether the boy “heard the pipes of Pan as the old wood gods trooped by” (320), and a third resident, the narrator, thinks of the Christian incarnation. But the Greek professor appears to speak for all when he observes, “Perhaps Pater was right, and it is the revelation of beauty which is to be our redemption, after all” (322).

All three of Cather's last, posthumously published stories have common threads, despite their varying times, places, and situations. Gabrielle's beauty lingers in the minds of all who knew her; Venus, in stellar and clamshell form, invigorates Grenfell; and the memory of young Leslie Ferguesson remains a vital force. Central to all three is a desire for completeness—Gabrielle's restless queries, Grenfell's claim of self-sufficiency, Leslie's homesickness. Though frustrated by the sweep of time, whether the simple generations of a family or the eons of geology, these desires carry their own reward.

It is pleasant, too, to speculate that Cather may have been gently explaining (and ridiculing) herself in one of the portraits. She seems to accent Gabrielle's sniffy attitude toward the modern world, and her stubborn adherence to old fashions and forms—opinions and manners that apparently were Cather's as she grew older.⁶⁴ It may be that she is writing a wryly humorous apologia. The one set apart by a gift, the artist, is paradoxically the one least engaged in life, the one who risks becoming rigid, irrelevant, old-fashioned. A chosen one, a Narcissus, may stay at the well seeking Being in a world of Becoming, trapped by having to use terms (styles, words) that will not hold still.

Cather's stories are—in addition to much else—a record of her long struggle to understand fully the vocation she chose so early and followed with such fidelity.

Notes

1. The Professor's House (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), 101.

2. “Katherine Mansfield,” in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (1949; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 109. Essays from this collection are hereafter cited in the text as OW.

3. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, foreword to Willa Cather: A Memoir (1953; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 2; hereafter cited in the text.

4. Both quotations are from an interview in the Philadelphia Record, 10 August 1913, in Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters, ed., L. Brent Bohlke, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 10.

5. In her doctor phase, Cather affected masculine dress, chopped off her hair, and signed herself “William Cather, M.D.” Biographers treat this episode in differing ways: some as a tomboyish affectation, a posture of rebellion made acceptable by Alcott's Jo March; others as evidence of gender uncertainty, a lesbian orientation underlying her decision not to marry.

6. “Annual Commencement Exercises of the Red Cloud Public Schools,” Red Cloud Chief, 13 June 1891, quoted in Bohlke, xxii; the speech itself is reprinted in Bohlke, 141-43.

7. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 22; hereafter cited in the text.

8. The relation of the story to the Canfield family is discussed in Susan J. Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 23-24 (hereafter cited in the text), and Mark J. Madigan, “Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher: Rift, Reconciliation, and One of Ours,” in Cather Studies, I, ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 115-29.

9. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements 1893-1896, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 17; hereafter cited in the text as KA.

10. Nebraska State Journal, 1 March 1896; reprinted in KA, 417.

11. Katherine Anne Porter, in John J. Murphy, ed., Critical Essays on Willa Cather (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 31.

12. Quoted in William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 80.

13. See, for example, Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years (New York: Holt, 1966), 381 and passim; John F. Sears, “William James, Henri Bergson, and the Poetics of Robert Frost,” New England Quarterly 48 (September 1975): 341-61; Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986); Donald M. Kartiganer, The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979); Frank Lentricchia, “On the Ideologies of Poetic Modernism, 1890–1913: The Example of William James,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 220-49; Tom Quirk, Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). This last important work appeared after my study was completed.

14. George Seibel, New Colophon 2, pt. 7 (1949): 202.

15. Letter of 12 September 1912. The Sergeant letters are held in the Pierpont Morgan Library; photocopies in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Cather's will forbids direct quotation.

16. Preface to Alexander's Bridge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), vii.

17. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (1892; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 150.

18. “The Bookkeeper's Wife,” in Uncle Valentine and Other Stories, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 97. Stories from this collection are hereafter cited in the text as UVOS.

19. “Edgar Allan Poe,” Lincoln Courier, 12 October 1895; reprinted in KA, 82.

20. “The Novel Démeublé,” in OW, 41-42.

21. Speech at Bowdoin College, 13 May 1925, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor, 14 May 1925; reprinted in Bohlke, 156.

22. “An Institute of Modern Literature,” proceedings of the Bowdoin Conference, 1926; reprinted in Bohlke, 164.

23. Interview, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 March 1931; reprinted in Bohlke, 110-11.

24. “The Enchanted Bluff,” in Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912, rev. ed., ed. Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 70. Stories in this collection are hereafter cited in the text as CSF.

25. “Before Breakfast,” in The Old Beauty and Others (1948; New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 147. Stories from this collection are hereafter cited in the text as OBO.

26. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; New York: Random House, 1944), 195.

27. See, for instance, James Woodress's introduction to Willa Cather, The Troll Garden (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), xvi-xvii; Marilyn Arnold, Willa Cather's Short Fiction (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984), 43-45; Sharon O'Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 271-75; and Rosowski, 19-23.

28. Personal letter, Willa Cather to John Phillipson, 15 March 1943, Willa Cather Historical Center, Red Cloud, Nebraska.

29. “Paul's Case,” in The Troll Garden, ed. Woodress. Stories in this collection are hereafter cited in the text as TG.

30. The Table of Revisions in the Woodress edition does not note this deletion.

31. David A. Carpenter, “Why Willa Cather Revised ‘Paul's Case’: The Work in Art and Those Sunday Afternoons,” American Literature 59 (1987): 590-608.

32. Unaccountably, Sharon O'Brien, who is much concerned with maternal images in Cather's early fiction, does not discuss this destructive mother.

33. See Table of Revisions in the Woodress edition. Cather also toned down or omitted other passages that pointed to Merrick's success or escape: she changed “genius” to “man like Harvey,” and omitted, for example, “Upon whatever he had come in contact with, he had left a beautiful record of the experience—a sort of ethereal signature; a scent, a sound and colour that was his own.”

34. James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 288; hereafter cited in the text. Woodress is paraphrasing a letter to Ferris Greenslet, 6 September 1918.

35. “The Diamond Mine,” in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920; Vintage Books, 1975), 119. Stories from this collection are hereafter cited in the text as YBM.

36. E. K. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, completed by Leon Edel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 331.

37. Mary Ellman, Thinking about Women (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 114.

38. Blanche H. Gelfant, “The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia,” American Literature 43 (1971):61.

39. The question of Cather's lesbianism is much discussed in critical and biographical writing. See, for instance, O'Brien, part 1 and passim; Woodress, Life, 141-42; Helen Cather Southwick, “Willa Cather's Early Career: Origins of a Legend,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 65 (April 1982): 85-98; and David Stouck, “Recent Cather Scholarship: A Review,” Literature and Belief 8 (1988): 120-23.

40. The magazine version, called “Coming, Eden Bower!,” is reprinted in UVOS, 141-76; the variants are listed in the Appendix, 177-81.

41. Not all commentators see Hedger and Eden following equal paths; rather, they see Hedger's as the true one and Eden's as false. See, for example, Thomas A. Gullason, “The ‘Lesser’ Renaissance: The American Short Story in the 1920s,” in The American Short Story 1900–1945 (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 58.

42. For explorations of Cather's religious views see the Willa Cather issue of Literature and Belief 8 (1988), especially the foreword by John J. Murphy and “Cather and Religion” by Mildred R. Bennett.

43. See, for instance, Arnold, 119-26; Bernice Slote, introduction to UVOS, xxiii-xxx; and Woodress, 359-61.

44. Nebraska State Journal, 24 March 1901; reprinted in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902, ed. William J. Curtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 638; hereafter cited in the text as WP.

45. O'Brien considers the relationship between Valentine and Charlotte that of brother and sister, and Valentine an androgynous figure (263-64).

46. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), chapter 1 and passim.

47. Obscure Destinies (1932; New York: Vintage, 1974), 59; stories in this collection are hereafter cited in the text as OD.

48. How Cather alludes to her own adolescent masculine-scientific phase is intriguing. In the year before the time of the story, Vickie becomes friends with a group of college boys searching for fossils. Mrs. Rosen thinks that Vickie's ambitions were affected by her admiration for the scholarly professor leading the group, but Victoria, misunderstanding, denies this: “There ain't a particle of romance in Vickie.” To Mrs. Harris's satisfaction, Mrs. Rosen answers, “But there are several kinds of romance, Mrs. Templeton. She may not have your kind” (150).

49. Willa Cather to Carrie Miner Sherwood, 4 July 1932. In a letter of 27 January 1934, also to Sherwood, Cather refers to the effect of the friendship on a girl. Letters in the Willa Cather Historical Center, Red Cloud.

50. Cather told Alfred Knopf that as she wrote “Two Friends” she had in mind the paintings of Courbet (Brown, 292).

51. Willa Cather to Edith Lewis, 10 May 1936, Willa Cather Historical Center.

52. Dorothy Van Ghent, Willa Cather, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, no. 36 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964), 42.

53. There is a slight anachronism here, as Bernhardt did not die until 1923, and “The Old Beauty” is set in 1922. The year 1922 is frequently taken to have special significance for Cather because in her preface to Not under Forty (written in 1936, the same year as “The Old Beauty”) she says that the world “broke in two” that year. She was undoubtedly referring to the universally accepted fact that World War I led to changes that became a great historical watershed (the background of “The Old Beauty”), but the remark is often misinterpreted as referring to her personal psychological state. In fact, Sergeant states that she was in especially good spirits at that time.

54. Nebraska State Journal, 25 November 1894; reprinted in WP, 65-66.

55. Nebraska State Journal, 10 January 1897; reprinted in WP, 472.

56. Nebraska State Journal, 19 January 1896; reprinted in KA, 166.

57. Pittsburgh Leader, 26 December 1897; reprinted in WP, 924-29.

58. Nebraska State Journal, 1 March 1896; reprinted in WP, 184.

59. This 1908 letter is quoted by Cather in her preface to Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (1925; Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1956), n.p.

60. Richard LeGallienne, preface to Lillie Langtry, The Days I Knew (New York: George H. Doran, 1925), v; hereafter cited in the text.

61. At least two critics see the lively Cherry as being the true perspective of the story, and the portrait of Gabrielle a satire. See Arnold, 158-65, and Woodress, 477.

62. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 32.

63. “For Once, Then, Something,” Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1949), 276.

64. See, for instance, Woodress, 473 and passim, and David Stouck, “Willa Cather's Last Four Books,” in Murphy, Critical Essays on Willa Cather, 290-99.