SOURCE: Arnold, Marilyn. “Refining the Gift: 1901–1905.” In Willa Cather's Short Fiction, pp. 37–67. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984.

I. A TIME OF TRANSITION

Cather left the Leader sometime during the spring of 1900 and went to visit her cousins in Washington, D.C. There she did some editing work before returning to Pittsburgh. In March 1901, she accepted a position teaching English and Latin at Pittsburgh's Central High School then later moved to Allegheny High School. By the time Willa Cather began teaching in Pittsburgh she had written more than many writers produce in a lifetime. It is estimated that by then, in addition to numerous short stories, poems, and an unpublished volume of drama criticism, Cather had written “more than five hundred columns, articles, reviews, and feature stories.”¹ It was during Cather's teaching years that she composed and published The Troll Garden stories, a remarkable collection for a writer little known in literary circles. The four stories of this period that precede the Troll Garden group date from the spring of 1901 to the fall of 1902. They lack the crisp energy and control of “Eric Hermannson's Soul” and “The Sentimentality of William Tavener.” It was also at this time that Cather became acquainted with Isabelle McClung with whom she was to enjoy a lifelong friendship. That same spring she moved out of her boardinghouse and into the McClung home where she was accorded the privacy and atmosphere she needed for her writing.² And Cather continued writing, in spite of a demanding teaching schedule.

A. AN ABUNDANCE OF SENTIMENTALITY

The four stories alluded to above have a particular flavor, something of a genteel sentimentality, a self-consciousness that had not fretted the best of Cather's earlier stories. One is tempted to credit some of this genteel intrusion to the move from the bumpy cadences of boarding house living to the more gracious rhythms of the McClung household. Two of the stories, “Jack-a-Boy” (Saturday Evening Post, 30 March 1901) and “The Treasure of Far Island” (New England Magazine, October 1902), are highly romantic. The other two, “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” (New England Magazine, June 1901) and “The Professor's Commencement” (New England Magazine, June 1902), are less sentimental, but tend to be overwritten. Nevertheless, these four stories have a memorable quality; they stick in the mind. Perhaps Cather was just reaching the age where she could begin to be nostalgic about childhood, for both “Jack-a-Boy” and “The Treasure of Far Island” are quite different from her earlier treatments of childhood themes.³ “Jack-a-Boy” is written like a juvenile tale, fraught with characters like “The Woman Nobody Called On,” but its little hero is almost oppressively Greek. This is not to suggest, however, that the story is without charm. On the contrary, Cather's facility with language rhythms and sounds mesmerizes the reader as the Golden Age luxuriates across the story's pages like a banquet comprised solely of desserts.

The child Jack-a-Boy moves with his parents into an apartment house verging on decay and wins the hearts of its most crabbed and lonely occupants. But he grows sick with a fever and dies. Cather's narrator (a lonely female occupant of the building) sentimentally describes the boy's passing in terms of his rejoining “some joyous spirit with whom he had played long ago in Arcady.” Noting that “the flowers and the casket and the dismal hymns” are “cruelly inappropriate for such a glad and beautiful little life,” she bravely tries “to forget all that, and to remember only that Jack-a-Boy heard the pipes of Pan as the old wood gods trooped by in the gray morning, and that he could not stay” (pp. 319-20). Another neighbor, an old professor who is immersed in the scholastic dry dust of the Classical Age, is as prodigal as the narrator with his sentimental indulgences, avowing that “sometimes the old divinities reveal themselves in children,” radiating “that holiness of beauty which the hardest and barest of us must love when we see it” (pp. 320-21).

The story has another problem too, a problem with taste. As it draws to a close the old classicist suggests that the young lad was an instance of Walter Pater's assertion that “the revelation of beauty” is perhaps, after all, “to be our redemption.” Taking her cue from the professor, the narrator frames a less than subtle comparison between the boy and the Savior. In light of the story's theme, this comparison is not offensive, but in a context of wood nymphs and Greek divinities frolicking in the fields of Arcady, such an allusion jangles the sensibilities. The story's chief value lies in its poetic fluency and its thematic affirmation of human caring as an antidote for loneliness.

“The Treasure of Far Island,” no less exuberant and sentimental, is not so quaintly storybookish as “Jack-a-Boy,” and hence less justified in its excesses. It is the story of Douglass Burnham, a successful eastern playwright who returns to his childhood home on the Divide to recapture his youth and his love. With his somewhat reluctant pirate playmate of yore, the now lovely Margie Governor, Douglass rows on the appointed day to their childhood island to dig up the treasure they had buried many years ago. For a time, Margie is the pessimistic counterbalance to Douglass's optimism, but Douglass gradually breaks down Margie's reserve and together they recapture the world of their childhood where “the meadows … were the greenest in all the world because they were the meadows of the long ago; and the flowers that grew there were the freshest and sweetest of growing things because once, long ago in the golden age, two children had gathered other flowers like them, and the beauties of vanished summers were everywhere” (p. 276). Their world is shot through with celestial fire and furbished with romantic profusion:

The locust chirped in the thicket; the setting sun threw a track of flame across the water; the willows burned with fire and were not consumed; a glory was upon the sand and the river and upon the Silvery Beaches; and these two looked about over God's world and saw that it was good. In the western sky the palaces of crystal and gold were quenched in night, like the cities of old empires; and out of the east rose the same moon that has glorified all the romances of the world—that lighted Paris over the blue Aegean and the feet of young Montague to the Capulets' orchard.

(P. 282)

The self-imposed curbs and low-keyed restraint that distinguish Cather's later work are absent here, but we can readily recognize in these lines an early manifestation of the lyrical impulse that invigorates Cather's novels.

This story is also interesting because it foreshadows setting and theme in Cather's later work, especially My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart. The river and the island described here and in the novels are part of her own childhood memories of adventures on the Republican River. And like many of Cather's works, “The Treasure of Far Island” testifies that youth is the best time, the time of power, the time of aliveness, the time most worth living, the time too soon gone forever. This theme carries through many of the novels and into later stories like “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” “Uncle Valentine,” “Double Birthday,” “Two Friends,” “The Old Beauty,” and “The Best Years.” So convinced is Cather of the value of youth over age that several of her young characters die in almost merciful escape from the disillusionment that accompanies age. Claude Wheeler, Tom Outland, Nelly Deane, and Lesley Ferguesson (“The Best Years”) are all granted that fate.

Thinking of “the other gallant lads who sailed with us then,” Margie sighs, “It is very sad to grow up.” Douglass counters, “Sad for them, yes. But we have never grown up …” (p. 277). As the two continue to discuss their child selves, Margie cries out that the pirate's treasure they so carefully saved “was really our childhood that we buried here, never guessing what a precious thing we were putting under the ground” (p. 280). Douglass agrees that the burial rites marked the end of their golden childhood days, but he insists that they can find youth again. Margie, however, charges him with losing it for them in the first place by growing up and taking on “the ways of the world” (p. 281). This appears to be an authorial allusion to the earlier story of that title in which Cather traces the calamity wrought in the child world by a sellout to a materialistic ethic. “The Treasure of Far Island” reverses the tragedy of “The Way of the World,” recouping the loss and returning its characters to freedom and light and childlike sharing.

B. BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

The titles of the other two stories in this group, “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” and “The Professor's Commencement,” suggest an interesting contrast which, in fact, is reversed in the stories themselves. “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” ironically ends with an upturn toward a new life while “The Professor's Commencement” moves steadily downward, confirming again that youth once lost is gone forever. The abundant optimism of “The Treasure of Far Island” is absent from these stories, but Cather is as munificent in describing Desolation as she was in describing Arcady. Cather opens “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” with a grim picture of the Solomon Valley through which “a turbid, muddy little stream … crawls along between naked bluffs, choked and split by sand bars” (p. 293), until it plays itself out. The abundance of desolate detail is in absolute contrast to the description of setting in “The Treasure of Far Island” and harks back to the dreary landscape of Cather's early prairie stories. Here again, she peoples the landscape with the most solitary of characters.

Completely alone in the world, Josiah Bywaters sits in his store, the sole inhabitant of El Dorado, a town advertised as “the Queen City of the Plains,” to which he had come from Virginia, like Cather's people, to make a new life. Instead of finding wealth, he found himself the victim of a land fraud. When the other losers pulled out, he stubbornly remained, and watched angry creditors dismantle the town board by board, stone by stone. In the end, however, when the man who had bilked him returns on a sentimental errand, Bywaters discovers him killed by a rattler. He pockets the ten thousand dollars he finds on the body, burns the store, and heads east without looking back.

The story picks up one of Cather's dominant motifs, isolation. It occurs not only in story after story, but in most of the novels as well. Bywaters' store is the town's “solitary frame building,” and it is “the solitude rather than any other hardship” (p. 294) that makes him suffer. He is “a sort of ‘Last Man’ … stranded on a Kansas bluff” (p. 295). Left there alone, he had become “almost a part of that vast solitude, … homesick for his kind” (p. 295). Even the land “seemed as lonely as himself and as unhappy. No one cared for it.” God himself seemed to have grown tired of it and deeded “it over to the Other Party” (p. 303).

The final story of this group, “The Professor's Commencement,” treats both the isolation and the youth themes. Although the professor has the companionship of his widowed sister and various colleagues and friends, he is essentially a solitary man. Facing retirement, he glumly attends the high school commencement services that formally mark the end of his daily communion with teachers and students. Emerson Graves, another of the multitude of Cather characters who mourn the passing of youth, has harbored the conviction that if he could somehow retain his youth, he could forever fend off loneliness. Interacting daily with literature's lyric poets and with high school students had, he felt, “prolonged his youth well into the fifties,” and anyone observing the professor's mouth would note that it “was as sensitive and mobile as that of a young man” (p. 284). Graves fancies himself as one whose “real work had been to try to secure for youth the rights of youth; the right to be generous, to dream, to enjoy; to feel a little the seduction of the old Romance, and to yield a little” (p. 287). The professor regrets that even while his students are still in school the industrialism that will eventually devour them is so close that it fills the classroom with its ravenous sounds, eager to feed upon these youngsters. This is the same industrial threat that Cather describes later in “The Namesake” and “Uncle Valentine.”

The professor faces retirement with a heavy heart, feeling “like a ruin of some extinct civilization,” for “he had been living by external stimulation from the warm young blood about him.” Now, with “the current of young life … cut away from him” he feels “horribly exposed,” drunk dry by “those hundreds of thirsty young lives” (p. 289). In his sense of loss that seems inevitably to accompany the passing of years, Emerson Graves foreshadows Godfrey St. Peter. And just as the discouraged St. Peter thinks on his youth self, so Graves before him asks himself what he has done with his own bright youth and remembers with mixed pleasure and pain his one remarkable student. St. Peter, too, has such a student, Tom Outland, and Cather gives the whole center section of The Professor's House (1925) to “Tom Outland's Story” as St. Peter reads through Tom's notebook one solitary summer. Tom might have been devoured by the material world, as Graves knows his students will be, but Cather rushes him off to war where, like Claude Wheeler, he is killed before the brightness of his youth can be tarnished.

With the facile rhetoric of one who has not yet been there, Cather eloquently describes the bitterness of aging felt by the professor and his colleagues: “With youth always about them, they had believed themselves of it. Like the monk in the legend they had wandered a little way into the wood to hear the bird's song—the magical song of youth so engrossing and so treacherous, and they had come back to their cloister to find themselves old men—spent warriors who could only chatter on the wall, like grasshoppers, and sigh at the beauty of Helen as she passed” (p. 290). Professor Graves tries to recapture his youth self and even correct its mistakes by repeating the poem he had delivered at his own commencement, a recitation he never finished because his memory failed him at a critical moment. Everyone in the audience appreciates the significance of his attempting the poem again some forty years later. Predictably, he stumbles on the same line, time's merciless reminder that the past is irredeemable.

II. THE BLOSSOMING: THE TROLL GARDEN

A. THE LURE OF THE GARDEN

Two of the best pieces of fiction Cather ever wrote appeared in 1905, in McClure's separately and as part of her first collected volume of prose, The Troll Garden. Surely, “The Sculptor's Funeral” and “Paul's Case” deserve the respect they have earned as hallmarks in American fiction. “A Wagner Matinee,” which appeared in 1904 in Everybody's Magazine before it was collected in The Troll Garden, also shows the sure touch of a first-rate writer of fiction.⁴ The whole collection, probably written in the two-year span from the fall of 1902 to the fall of 1904,⁵ demonstrates that for Cather a long and productive apprenticeship was over. In fact, nothing Cather wrote in the subsequent six or seven years is better than the best of this collection, or even as good. Gone is the somewhat stylized literary pose of the “Jack-a-Boy” group and the rather superficial treatment of serious themes.

Perhaps the wisest approach to The Troll Garden collection is through a consideration of its title and the two epigraphs with which Cather introduces it. One epigraph, appearing on the title page, is from Charles Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton: A Series of Lectures Delivered Before the University of Cambridge. More specifically, the lines Cather borrows come from a parable titled “The Forest Children” which Kingsley repeats in one of his lectures.⁶ This is the epigraph as Cather uses it: “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 other epigraph, appearing opposite the title page, is a stanza from Christina Rossetti's “The Goblin Market”:

We must not look at Goblin men,
          We must not buy their fruits;
Who knows upon what soil they fed
          Their hungry thirsty roots?(7)

Cather elides a few words from the Kingsley quotation which, when included, cast a very different light upon the epigraph and indeep upon the whole volume of stories. The parable as Kingsley tells it opens, “Fancy to yourself a great Troll-garden, such as our forefathers dreamed of often fifteen hundred years ago;—a fairy palace, with a fairy garden; and all around the primeval wood. Inside the Trolls dwell, cunning and wicked, watching their fairy treasures, working at their magic forges, making and making always things rare and strange; and outside, the forest is full of children; such children as the world had never seen before, but children still. …”⁸ In appropriating that passage, Cather preserves references to the magic and the creativity of the trolls, but omits references to their evil natures. And, she does not mention the children outside in the forest.

E. K. Brown takes the passage with its elisions at face value. In his view, the pair of epigraphs define the two thematic strands of the book: first, the artist and second, the forces which are unsympathetic and even destructive to art. Brown identifies the artists as the “industrious” trolls, while the “evil-working” goblins are the enemies of art; and each story in the collection, he believes, illustrates the conflict between these two forces. Brown distinguishes between what he calls the “baleful” strand and the “sunny” strand, the baleful strand portraying the defeat of the artist, and the sunny strand portraying the artist at work “in relation with persons of great wealth.” Brown believes that the first six stories deal alternately with the two interwoven themes, and that “Paul's Case” stands as a coda to the two sets. Stories one, three, and five—“Flavia and Her Artists,” “The Garden Lodge,” and “The Marriage of Phaedra”—show “artists or persons with artistic temperament” working “amid the wealthy” to produce “things rare and strange”; this is the troll, or sunny, strand. Stories two, four, and six—“The Sculptor's Funeral,” “A Death in the Desert,” and “A Wagner Matinee”—which comprise the goblin or baleful strand, are “tales filled with an undercurrent of malaise and a sense of nightmare,” the consequences of venturing “into the goblin market” where the goblins destroy with their poisonous fruits.⁹

Bernice Slote, however, pointing to Cather's ardent interest in myth and history, argues convincingly that Kingsley's parable says essentially the same thing as Rossetti's poem. Trolls and goblins alike display their dangerous enticements temptingly before the eyes of childish innocence. Slote also insists that Cather's intent is not merely to invoke the conflict between artist and society that her critics are so fond of describing. Slote points out that in Cather “the greedy and insensitive are everywhere, and even in art there are both Trolls and Forest Children (the overrefined versus the genuine, the real desire versus the false).”¹⁰ Cather uses the two epigraphic items, it appears, less to define the dichotomy (which certainly is present) of the book and the individual stories in it than to give double emphasis to the threat of materialistic seduction. As Slote says, “The Troll Garden is about corruption, the distortion of values; in every human sense there may be goblin fruit to desire, and Trolls who guard their riches.”¹¹

Before The Troll Garden, Cather had defended her values boldly in columns and reviews, but had only occasionally moved beyond simple sentiment or intrigue or entertainment in her fiction. But with her first collection of stories¹² we detect a new sense of obligation to use art as a weapon against its enemies, against the trolls and goblins of this world. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom see The Troll Garden as a battleground where the artist struggles incessantly with a society that is hostile to both art and artist. In keeping with the general thesis of their book, the Blooms regard the collection of stories as “primarily an extended colloquy between the artist as hero and a personified middle-class society as the villain.”¹³ While their position has merit, particularly as it describes a story like “The Sculptor's Funeral,” the force of it is diminished by the truth of Brown's important observation about the stories: “Artists do not often appear practicing their art, or theorizing about it, and never do they attempt either theory or practice at length; they appear in their relations with others, usually either with non-artistic persons or with persons who are merely appreciative.” The problem is “that artists are crucially unlike other beings,” and this “unlikeness often brings havoc into the lives of those who surround the artist.”¹⁴ The Blooms also speak of the social separateness of the artist, but chiefly in terms of the artist's self-immolation, a sacrifice which could never be understood by “‘normal’ ungenerous individuals.” Because the artist has given all, he must be granted special dispensations by society for behavior that would not be tolerated in the ungifted. Hence, “the mutual suspicion” between artist and society in general is probably to be expected.¹⁵

It must be remembered, however, that the Troll Garden stories are not stories of struggling artists. They are, rather, stories that deal with human values and relationships played against genuine art as an index of value. In them Cather is concerned with a much broader value system than that of art for its own sake. She is talking about both art and humanity, refusing to separate the two, insisting that whatever works against art works also against humanity. The connection she discovered and described in The Troll Garden, the connection between aesthetic (or artistic) sensibility and meaningful human life and interaction, became the foundation upon which she built for a lifetime. The troll garden was to become for Cather forever the territory of the enemy, the country of materialism and false art, and hence the country where the artist and the nonmaterialist would forever be aliens. It is this country that Cather explores in the Troll Garden stories, warning against its false fruits, enchantingly delicious, but destructive to art and humanity alike.

B. THE AMBIGUITY OF ART

The first story in The Troll Garden is “Flavia and Her Artists,” appropriately named for the flamboyant woman who adores artists and is happy only when her house and life are filled with them. Assuredly, Flavia's house is the seductive troll garden which lures artists, pseudoartists, and other people of arty or intellectual reputation to partake of its worldly pleasures and in turn to bestow the privilege and the prestige of their company upon their eager hostess. Imogen Willard, the handsome and scholarly daughter of Flavia's friend, arrives as a houseguest, one of Flavia's “chosen” personalities, each one selected because of some supposed talent or celebrity value. Another guest is the square-shooting actress, Jemima “Jimmy” Broadwood. Flavia is married to the sensitive Arthur Hamilton who owns, by virtue of inheritance, a highly successful farm machine manufactory. Some of the guests are trolls themselves, having come in their cunning to exploit Flavia; others, like M. Roux, appear to be genuine, if less than gracious, artists.

Arthur has a blind spot where Flavia is concerned and would even sacrifice his relationship with her to save her from pain. Roux is not similarly handicapped. Though somewhat perplexed at first, Roux comes to some uncomplimentary conclusions about Flavia which he publishes in a newspaper interview in order to punish her and women like her for using him as a showpiece. He had wondered why she gathered artists about her, for he had perceived “at a glance” what the narrator already knew, “namely, that all Flavia's artists have done or ever will do means exactly as much to her as a symphony means to an oyster; that there is no bridge by which the significance of any work of art could be conveyed to her” (pp. 164-65). Flavia is both troll and forest child, both temptress and wide-eyed innocent. Ambitious, demanding, oblivious to her own blindness, she lives parasitically off the borrowed light of those whom she persuades to accept her sumptuous hospitality.

The narrator, who grants that Flavia is a “remarkable woman,” nevertheless characterizes her in rather harsh terms at times. Flavia's inclinations toward people tend to smack of “violence” and “vehemence and insistence.” Her “enamel” face “a perfect scream of animation” (Jemima Broadwood's term), Flavia lives in constant anxiety for fear that “the fabric of her life” might “fly to the winds in irretrievable entanglement” (pp. 156-57). Flavia, who thinks she is in complete harmony with the artists of the world, strikes Imogen as one who projects a note which is “manifestly false.” And apparently, Flavia's weakness is not simply a matter of ignorance. These people whom she regards as “her natural affinities” she also regards as “lawful prey” (p. 149), a term which carries ugly suggestions. Unable to construe opinions of her own, Flavia adopts the positions of others and argues them with fervor. The “most worn word in her vocabulary” is “best” (p. 150); the creed she repeats daily is that one must seek “the best” and give “the best.”

In her house Flavia's great ambition has been realized, to provide an “asylum for talent,” a “sanitorium of the arts,” terms which unmistakably suggest a harbor for the diseased or unhealthy. Still, for Flavia the house is “the mirror of her exultation; it was a temple to the gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch” (p. 152). The sneer is obvious in the voice of the narrator in this description of Flavia and her dream for her artists: “A woman who made less a point of sympathizing with their delicate organisms, might have sought to plunge these phosphorescent pieces into the tepid bath of domestic life; but Flavia's discernment was deeper. This must be a refuge where the shrinking soul, the sensitive brain, should be unconstrained …” (p. 152).

This story is not simply a dramatization of the conflict between the artist and society. Flavia, who believes herself to be the very soul of art appreciation, but who is in fact shallow and foolish, is in many ways a more likeable character than the “artists” who know what she is, but pretend to admire her in order to enjoy the material advantages Arthur's money provides. Thus, though they scale the wall and enter her troll garden, they perhaps are the greater beguilers. Even M. Roux, who is certainly more worthy of the title of artist than the hack novelist Frank Wellington, cruelly betrays Flavia after eating at her table. Jemima's obvious scorn for all the celebrities who devour Flavia's goblin fruit carries significant weight in the reader's mind, for she has an uncanny ability to tell things straight. The “artists,” in fact, have beguiled Flavia into believing that they have magical powers and extraordinary sensibilities which she would do well to nurture and even worship. Then too, Hamilton's regard for his wife speaks in her favor as well as his.

It seems clear that Cather's main concern is not with art per se, but with the attitudes and behavior of human beings, some of whom happen to be artists. Art can and often does suggest a standard of truth for human thought and action, but in this story it is Arthur Hamilton, manufacturer, not the artists, who becomes the measuring stick. It is Hamilton, who resists the false attractions of materialism and exploitive art alike, against whom Cather judges both artists and plebeians. It is he who acts instinctively and selflessly out of love and human caring. And it is he who is therefore destined to be misunderstood and to dwell as a stranger in his own home. In this story Cather demonstrates the principle she had come to believe and avow with increasing fervor: the exploitive instinct is destructive to both art and humanity, and it isolates human beings from their most salutary sources of sympathy.

“The Sculptor's Funeral,” the next story in the collection, presents a shining still-life portrait of the nonexploitive artist, the true artist who may appear to have been selfish because of his single-mindedness, but who in fact has offered a kind of total sacrifice of self on the altar of art and humanity. It was surely not by accident that Cather chose to juxtapose Flavia and her perfidious artists against the sculptor, damning them by the integrity of his example. And in some ways, the hostile environment of the small Kansas town to which Harvey Merrick's body returns for burial is no more pernicious than the hothouse corruption of Flavia's “asylum” for “delicate organisms” and “shrinking souls.”

“The Sculptor's Funeral” is a landmark in Willa Cather's career. Not only is it her first truly great story, but it is the first story in which she herself is totally involved. Cather is writing from the heart about things that are so terribly true for her that the whole force of her personality and her belief resonates through the lines. Perhaps for the first time the vitality of her mind and art speaks more convincingly than the content of her words or the grace of her style. Cather seemed to recognize the story's quality, for she selected it to appear in a later collection of short stories as well as in her collected works; and she allowed it to appear in anthologies, a rare concession for her.

“The Sculptor's Funeral” is Cather's most important fictional statement to date on what were for her the enduring values of human life. The coffin of the sculptor is in some sense a monument to those values, like the tombs of ancient monarchs. In life, however, the sculptor was regarded as an embarrassment to his father. The townspeople pitied Harvey Merrick's father for trying to run a farm with a son who aspired to an education and advanced training in art rather than property and money. Even as a youngster Harvey could not be trusted to tend cows responsibly because he might be distracted by a sunset. The sculptor's body is shipped home where the “successful” men of Sand City come to sit through the night with it, cackling over Harvey's prodigalities and failures, completely unaware of the meaning of the palm on his coffin.¹⁶ The sculptor, dead before reaching middle age, is a world-renowned artist who had somehow miraculously sprung up in their midst.

Jim Laird, who went off to college with Harvey and returned to be the shyster lawyer his townsmen wanted him to be, in a fit of anger and self-hatred bursts in on the watchers and delivers what is probably the most powerful speech Cather ever wrote. In that speech she clearly draws the battle lines for what was to be a lifelong effort to fortify the things of the spirit against material incursions. Jim Laird, who is really the central character of the story, knows that he succumbed to the trolls' enticements while Harvey resisted, and he throws his self-disgust back at his fellow townsmen in a verbal cyclone: “There was only one boy ever raised in this borderland between ruffianism and civilization, who didn't come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind to; but he knew Harvey wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his bank and all his cattle-farms put together; and a lack of appreciation, that way, goes hard with Phelps” (pp. 183-84). He attacks what he calls the “sick, sidetracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks” such as “the here-present financiers of Sand City” mercilessly and praises Harvey Merrick, who “wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together” (p. 185).

In some sense Jim Laird is both the protagonist and the antagonist of the story. The central conflict is not between the sculptor and the townspeople, for Harvey Merrick has already won the old battle and is safely out of the fray. The central conflict is between Jim's better nature and the self that prospers by serving scoundrels. The return of Harvey's body has stirred to the surface a side of Jim's nature that he has repressed for many years, a side that values all that Harvey stands for. It is as if Harvey's body had to come home to deliver its silent message to Jim Laird. More specifically, the return of his friend's body for burial is the symbolic return of Jim's own conscience which is then promptly buried with the sculptor. So the “sculptor's funeral” is indeed the most important event in the story. It precipitates the awakening of conscience that some years ago might have saved Jim Laird; but it also brings him face-to-face with what he has become, and the shame of it is too painful to bear. Too drunk to attend the funeral, Jim awards the victory over his soul to the antagonist within him whom he despises.

Jim, as the central character, is subtly played against the other characters in the story. The rather nondescript Steavens who accompanies his master's body home could never speak so passionately for personal integrity as Jim Laird, nor could he fall so miserably into the service of the enemy. Jim's townsmen, unlike Jim, are too dense to see the evil in their natures. But Harvey's mother is particularly important because she is like an exposed nerve someone has stepped on, Jim's nerve. Cather's description of her is superb, terrible and superb, complete in just a few lines. The woman's face is brutally handsome, “but it was scarred and furrowed by violence, and so coloured and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there.” Steavens perceives that “she filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water.” Even he “felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool” (p. 176). Jim has some of that same raw power, but with him it is usually tempered by expediency. Besides Jim, only the feeble old father and the family's mistreated housegirl seem to have sensed the sculptor's quality.

During the wake Cather allows each of the watchers to reveal himself through his smug comments. What better way to show an artist's fineness than to bring him mute into the company of all that is sordid and crass? And what better way to show what Jim Laird has sold out to? In reporting that Jim does not attend his friend's funeral services, the conclusion reconfirms that the story's central concern is Jim Laird's self-division and the successful repression of his better nature: “The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved must have gone underground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble out there by cutting government timber” (p. 185).

The next story in the collection, “The Garden Lodge,” works in still a different way with the troll garden theme. The distinctions between trolls and forest children are deliberately blurred in “Flavia and Her Artists,” with troll-like characters appearing everywhere. But the distinctions are lucid in “The Sculptor's Funeral” where the self-satisfied trolls flourish with little outside interference. “The Garden Lodge,” however, exposes no evil trolls; its only trolls, in fact, live in the garden of art. Cather admits, through allusion and direct statement too, that art itself can be a form of sorcery, a garden of incorporeal delights that may tempt the innocent to sorrow and even destruction, or hold out promises that forever elude. “The Garden Lodge,” a ready confession that art is both agony and ecstasy, is an important story for Cather. She makes it plain that art scarcely guarantees the devotee glamour or material ease or a lifetime of emotional high tides, though at various moments it can bring all of those. Art can spell poverty and pain and social censure as well as wonder. To have risen to the top and received worldwide acclaim as the sculptor had done is one thing; to have sacrificed everything to one's artistic desire and reaped only hardship, “petty jealousies,” and a “cowardly fear of the little grocer on the corner” (p. 189), as Caroline Noble's father had done, is quite another.

Determined first of all to survive, Caroline has consciously rejected the sentimental and molded herself into what her friends perceive as a “cool-headed” and “disgustingly practical” woman who is “always mistress of herself in any situation” (p. 187). What her friends do not know, of course, is what she had endured as a youngster:

She had grown up in Brooklyn, in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no especial need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labour that brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labour that brought him only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the orchestra everything under heaven except melody.

(P. 188)

This, she learned, was what art meant: a mother “who idolized her husband as the music lord of the future,” a brother who “had inherited all his father's vindictive sensitiveness without his capacity for slavish application” (p. 188), and a house that “had served its time at the shrine of idealism,” brought “low enough” by “vague, distressing, unsatisfied yearnings” (p. 189). She remembers that in that house where a “mystic worship of things distant, intangible and unattainable” prevailed, the family nevertheless always had “to come down to the cold facts of the case; to boiled mutton and to the necessity of turning the dining-room carpet” (p. 189).

After the deaths of her brother and mother, Caroline had assumed control of the household, and by giving lessons and eventually playing recital accompaniments, she managed to pay the bills and take life in hand. She met and married a widower, a successful businessman, and for the first time she “paused to take a breath”; finally, with him, she felt “entirely safe” (p. 190). But the world of art eventually intrudes upon her hard-won peace. Secure and decidedly unsentimental, she scarcely expects to be thrown off balance by the visit of opera star Raymond d'Esquerré who elects to rest, study, and practice for a month at the Nobles' home, singing many hours in the garden lodge with Caroline accompanying him. Until her husband suggests after d'Esquerré's departure that they tear down the garden lodge and build a summer house there, she had not known what deep lodes of her essential being had been tapped by the singer's presence and his art. Her initial reaction favors preserving the lodge because d'Esquerré had sung there. That night, unable to sleep, Caroline goes to the lodge, vulnerable to a flood of throttled feelings and memories. While a storm holds itself in poised abeyance, she plays from the last music that the artist had practiced there. Finally, she breaks down sobbing; and the storm, as if on cue, crashes around her. After so many years of studied control, Caroline begins “fighting again the battles of other days,” helplessly entertaining long-buried ghosts from her past. By the next morning, however, she has successfully collected and ordered her feelings again. When her husband asks her if she has come to a decision about the lodge, she calmly votes to raze it. She has not fallen in love with the man for whom she played accompaniments as Lucy Gayheart does, but she is momentarily caught in his spell. Older than Lucy, and far less impulsive, she is less vulnerable, but she is also less vital and appealing.

The focal point of the story is Caroline's experience in the garden lodge on the night of the storm. There she is visited by a vestige of her young self, and also by the realization that the things she had come to believe in as realities were perhaps only shadows after all. And “the shadows of things, always so scorned and flouted,” were in fact “the realities.” Even more painfully, she realizes that “her father, poor Heinrich [her brother], even her mother, who had been able to sustain her poor romance and keep her little illusions amid the tasks of a scullion, were nearer happiness than she.” This realization is reinforced by an allusion, the second in the story, to Klingsor's garden: “Her [Caroline's] sure foundation was but made ground, after all, and the people in Klingsor's garden were more fortunate, however barren the sands from which they conjured their paradise” (pp. 195-96).¹⁷

So, the contest is not between the sordid money-grubbing world and the heaven of pure art, but rather it is between the practical and the imaginative impulses which can quicken inside anyone. But given a choice, who would not finally prefer the excesses of the imagination? The story develops an interesting paradox on this point. D'Esquerré, who creates an enchanted world for his largely female audiences, seeks relief “near a quiet nature, a cool head, a strong hand” (p. 190), while Caroline, who has committed herself to matter-of-factness, has her moment of truth in the realms of feeling and imagination. D'Esquerré is only too aware that with his art he escorts women aching for his magic into the garden of the trolls, or in this case, of the sorcerer Klingsor. The sorrow, of course, is that the garden of the imagination is enchanting chiefly to those outside it. Only occasionally is d'Esquerré stirred to “believe again.” For the most part he lives with a “tacit admission of disappointment under all this glamour of success—the helplessness of the enchanter to at all enchant himself” (p. 194). True artists do not fool themselves, do not partake of their own goblin fruit, except in rare moments when their audiences give it back to them with “fervent and despairing appeal” (p. 194).

C. THE WAGES OF ART

The next story in The Troll Garden, “A Death in the Desert,” is generally regarded as an important story even though it is not so strong stylistically nor so credible as “The Garden Lodge.” In “A Death in the Desert” Cather warns again that the garden of art can be a sorcerer's garden which, though it seems to promise perennial youth and the rarest of sweet fruits, may, in fact, deliver a bitter harvest of isolation and death.

By accident of his passing through Cheyenne, Everett Hilgarde becomes a watcher with Katharine Gaylord and her brother Charlie during the last weeks of her life. Although Everett had loved her for many years, she had loved only Everett's look-alike brother, Adriance Hilgarde, her teacher and fellow performer who is now safely abroad. Her continuing futile passion for the talented and self-serving Adriance only adds to Everett's distress as he watches her die. Katharine's anguish is overstated almost to the point of melodrama, and we become aware that this story is less the account of a woman's pitiful dying than it is the tragedy of a man's being subsumed in the identity of a famous brother whom he has the misfortune to resemble. Katharine Gaylord's approaching death provides a set of circumstances under which Everett's bitter lifelong eclipse can be revealed.¹⁸ Everett, not Katharine, is the story's main character, just as the main character in the Robert Browning poem of the same title is not the dying man, but the one who ministers to the dying man.¹⁹ Katharine's “death in the desert” has momentary significance, chiefly as it affects and elucidates Everett's life. Everett's death is continual.

“A Death in the Desert” begins and ends with Everett's being mistaken for his older, yet more youthful, brother, of whom he is a somewhat crudely molded copy. All his life, people have noticed or loved Everett chiefly because of his resemblance to Adriance; all his life they have preferred Adriance to him. Everett's chief value has been his ability to call up the apparition of his brother for the artist's worshipful admirers. The opening scene of the story introduces Everett's everlasting predicament. The setting is a westbound train in Colorado where a traveling man mistakes Everett for Adriance and plies him with questions about his famous brother, “the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk to Everett about” (p. 200). Never free from his own face nor his brother's fame, Everett no sooner steps from the train in Cheyenne than a “woman in a phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins.” Embarrassed, Everett “lifted his hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most impossible places, especially by women” (p. 201).

This particular woman, of course, is Katharine Gaylord. Answering her pleading summons, Everett is greeted with an all too familiar exclamation: “How wonderfully like Adriance you are” (p. 206)! Always on the periphery of Adriance's life and career, Everett resentfully recalls that as a young man he was habitually enlisted for backstage emergencies, but no one paid him any attention, “unless it was to notice the resemblance” he bore to Adriance (p. 207). He recalls bitterly that even his mother, in her loneliness for Adriance, “used sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light … and kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance” (pp. 207-8).

As Everett's days with Katharine in Wyoming stretch into weeks, he realizes that even here, with the woman he loves present and Adriance an ocean away, he remains, as always, a stand-in, or, as the narrator says, “a stop-gap.” In everything, he has found “himself employed in his brother's business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining current of Adriance Hilgarde's.” He sorrowfully realizes that his vigil with Katharine is only another “commission from his brother,” and that “his power to minister to her comfort … lay solely in his link with his brother's life” (p. 210).

Cather reminds us again of the consequences of consuming the enticing fruits of art. Art takes its toll on the character of the artist who may, like Adriance, be so absorbed in himself that he is unconscious of another's love or suffering. It also takes its toll on a person like Katharine who gives all for it, but is quickly forgotten when she can no longer meet its demands. Finally, it takes its toll on a person like Everett who is swallowed up by it because of simple proximity and accident of birth and countenance. Katharine is a victim once, but Everett is a victim again and again, for there are many Katharines in the overspill of a life like Adriance's. Everett's eternal agony is to be nothing to anyone except a look-alike for the wonderful Adriance. Even the woman he loves, in her last living moments, touches his hair, looks into his face, and whispers, “Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear” (p. 217). As Everett at last boards the train to leave Wyoming, the story comes full circle, for a huge German woman rushes up to him ecstatically, thinking he is Adriance. He must say again, “I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother” (p. 217).

Cather carefully creates a cyclical effect in this story, suggesting that what we have seen is just one episode in a series that endlessly repeats itself in Everett's life. Although it does not make Katharine's pain any easier to bear, her story will be repeated in the lives of others, each one suffering only his (or, more usually, her) individual fate. Everett's story, however, will be repeated again and again in his own life. Since he is something of a second self for Adriance, he becomes a conscience for his brother, accepting responsibility for the rejected, easing the pain Adriance has managed to sidestep. It is unjust, surely, but perhaps such injustice is inevitable if the truly gifted artist is to rise. The Blooms insist that, being “several cuts above ordinary people, the artist must be willing to be preoccupied with himself,”²⁰ and Cather would be the last to argue against the hard and sometimes damaging choices the artist must make. Understanding the necessity for the artist's selfishness, Katharine absolves Adriance from blame, insisting, “It wasn't in the slightest degree his fault. … I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom greedily enough” (p. 215). But Everett has swept up too many broken pieces of human lives to accept that analysis wholeheartedly. At the end, he boards the train, fully expecting his next “commission” from Adriance to present itself before long, fully expecting to be erased himself, again and still again.

Cather seems to be saying that the immolation of Everett is a high price to pay for the privilege of Adriance. Even in The Song of the Lark the artistic gains Thea Kronborg makes by willfully denying some of her tender impulses are offset to some degree by the losses that she suffers as a human being, and that others suffer through her neglect. And though she has to separate from her family in order to become an artist, she has also to rediscover those old ties in order to find peace and self-renewal. Cather had learned, as Brown puts it, that “there was disillusionment in the garden and danger in the marketplace.”²¹

“The Marriage of Phaedra,” the fifth story in The Troll Garden, is probably the least memorable in the collection.²² The point of view is essentially that of an American in London, but the story is not really his, and he is no Jamesian American abroad. In fact, the story has no convincing central figure; perhaps that is why it seems somewhat anemic and out of focus. “The Marriage of Phaedra” does, however, treat rather straightforwardly the conflict between society and art. If it contains a forest child, that child is the late Hugh Treffinger, a painter known for his extravagant personality and his equally extravagant artistic methods. He had ventured into the troll garden of high society to pursue and win the attractive, if brittle, Lady Ellen. Unable to resist the tempestuous charm of his courtship, she married him, only to watch him lapse into his old habits and social preferences. Experimental and courageous in his art, he attracted a school of devotees, but Lady Ellen had absolutely no feeling for his work. His best painting, The Marriage of Phaedra, was never finished, and on his deathbed, Treffinger made it understood that the painting was never to be sold. James, Treffinger's personal valet and loyal servant, steals the painting when he learns that Lady Ellen, on the brink of a second marriage, plans to sell it to an unscrupulous art dealer from Australia. James carries the painting to the American artist, MacMaster, who convinces James that the painting would be recovered regardless of their efforts to hide it. MacMaster makes a feeble effort to save it by appealing to the Lady Ellen, but she rebuffs him, and the painting is sold. The sale of the precious painting by one who has no interest in it other than its monetary value foreshadows Roddy Blake's selling to a foreign art dealer the Indian relics he and Tom Outland had found (The Professor's House). In both cases, the art pieces are taken away from the one who values them most.

The most interesting and puzzling aspect of the story is its title, the same title attributed to the painting which James believes precipitated the strokes that killed Treffinger. The Theseus-Phaedra-Hippolytus allusion is a puzzle because it has no clear application to the story. Cather's work testifies to her conviction that art and marriage make a difficult mix, and perhaps this notion is hinted at in Treffinger's painting where Phaedra turns from her husband for a stealthy glance at Hippolytus, the object of her helpless passion. If one's desire is bent in a particular direction, one is helpless to change it. For the artist, art can be the only consuming passion, marriage and mate notwithstanding.

D. TWO OF THE LOST

Two of Cather's finest stories, “A Wagner Matinee” and “Paul's Case,” complete the Troll Garden collection. Both deal with sensitive characters whose environments shackle their artistic spirits. Although it portrays the East-West conflict that is prominent in Cather's work, especially in books like The Song of the Lark and Lucy Gayheart where the artist is particularly sensitive to the strictures of western family life and mentality, “A Wagner Matinee” is not so much about the contrasting worlds of Boston and Nebraska as it is about Aunt Georgiana and what those worlds have in turn made of her. As a young woman she had taught music in the Boston Conservatory, but she turned her back on that world when she fell inexplicably in love with a shiftless young New Englander and went west with him to stake out a homestead in the rugged prairie lands of Nebraska. After thirty years of unrelieved toil, she returns to Boston to settle the matter of a small legacy from a deceased relative. She is met there by a nephew who as a youngster had lived with her family and worked for her husband on the Nebraska farm. He has planned a surprise for her, a Wagner concert, the first real music she has heard in half a lifetime. She is moved immeasurably as the artist in her nature, so long asleep, trembles to consciousness. When the concert is over she cannot bear to leave, because “just outside the door of the concert hall” is the world she must take up again, “the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crooked-backed ash seedlings where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door” (p. 242).

This story may be, as some have suggested, chiefly an indictment of “the toll exacted by the land,”²³ but more than that it is a revelation of human love and appreciation. A nephew discovers a new depth of feeling for an aunt who, in spite of the narrow circumstances of her own life, taught him an appreciation for the fine and the beautiful, gave to him gifts she could not give to herself, opened doors for him that were forever closed to her. Out of this young man's memory a wonderful, almost heroic, portrait takes shape; this portrait is the woman, and this woman is the story. Georgiana arrives in Boston, black with soot and sick with travel, a “misshapen figure” in a “black stuff dress.” Her nephew Clark, so terribly aware of her oddness, nevertheless regards her with unmistakable “awe and respect” (p. 236). Every detail, even down to her bent shoulders, “sunken chest,” “ill-fitting false teeth,” and “skin as yellow as a Mongolian's” (p. 236), is mellowed by his loving regard for her. Seen through another pair of eyes she would have been a country caricature, but seen through his eyes, she becomes a symbol of the pioneer spirit.²⁴

Through Clark's memory Cather reconstructs incidents that define Georgiana's character. His earliest recollections must have come to him secondhand, perhaps as an old family story. He remembers hearing that as “an angular, spectacled woman of thirty,” she conceived an “extravagant passion” for “a handsome country boy of twenty-one” and eloped with him, “eluding the reproaches of her family” by going to the Nebraska frontier where, through incredible hardships, she and Howard Carpenter managed to establish themselves. Georgiana becomes for Clark something like what Ántonia was to become for Jim Burden, heroic and wonderful, if not mythic. In spite of coarse outward circumstances, she retained a fineness of spirit with which she unconsciously and continually blessed his life. He reflects gratefully, “I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her” (p. 236). He remembers the countless times that she stood at her ironing board at midnight, after the day's chores were over and the six young children were in bed, drilling him on Latin verbs, or listening to him read Shakespeare. He recalls further, “She taught me my scales and exercises, too—on the little parlour organ, which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farmhands” (p. 237). It was she who gave Clark “her old text-book on mythology,” the first book he ever owned. It was she who listened to him practice, counting out the time with him. Once as he struggled with an old piece of her music he had found, she came up behind him, put her hands over his eyes, and drew his head to her shoulder. With trembling voice she warned, “Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh! dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that” (p. 237).

Now, years later, he wonders if the concert will mean anything to her, wishing “for her own sake … her taste for such things quite dead, and the long struggle mercifully ended at last” (p. 237). Her chief concern as they travel the city she had once known so well is for “a certain weakling calf” at home, and “a freshly-opened kit of mackerel in the cellar” which could spoil in her absence. But when the music begins, she meets it in a rush of combined anguish and joy. By turns she clutches at Clark's coat sleeve, or moves her “bent and knotted” fingers across an imaginary keyboard on her old dress, or weeps silently. Clark knows then that the feeling “never really died,” that “the soul that can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only; like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again” (p. 240).

However much this story discloses the irreclaimable loss suffered by a woman who exchanged her artistic loves and drives for the cruelties of frontier life, however painful the experience in the concert hall is for all of us who sit with Clark beside Aunt Georgiana, we are not back “on the Divide” with Canute Canuteson. Even in our grief we are in an atmosphere of human caring and appreciation; we are in the presence of genuine feelings unshamedly expressed. Cather evokes these feelings through the momentary collision between the world of music and culture which Georgiana had rejected so long ago and the stark, barren world she chose out of love. Her two worlds pause in equipoise as the concert ends and the musicians exit, “leaving the stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield” (p. 241). And, as Clark observes, just outside that door in Boston is Nebraska waiting to claim its stepchild.

After thirty years, Aunt Georgiana has tasted again of the goblin fruit, the luscious nectar that never satisfies, but only increases the appetite. Again the lure is the world of art, quite different from the evil materialism of the fabled troll garden, but a lure nevertheless. Appropriately, Cather leaves the story at the door of the concert hall, with the return to Nebraska as inevitable as the winter prairie wind. The cold, harsh world of the Divide may yet again scar over the wound newly opened, and Georgiana may slip gratefully into the somnambulant routine of her life in Nebraska; but for the moment she is caught hopelessly between the two worlds that have shaped her life. Clark's mournful observation at the beginning of the Pilgrim's chorus (Tannhauser overture) seems to define the mood of the story in terms of opposition, change, and loss: “With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and trim as a wooden fortress …” (p. 239).

“Paul's Case,” the final story in The Troll Garden, is drawn from Cather's experiences as a high school English teacher and lower-middle-class neighborhood dweller in Pittsburgh. It was the only story for some time that Cather allowed to be anthologized. Published seven years before Cather's first novel would appear, it remains one of her most widely read and acclaimed works.

Eccentric, maybe even half-crazy, Paul abhors the dull respectability of his neighborhood on Cordelia Street and his high school. He finds his only pleasure as an usher at Carnegie Hall and as a hanger-on with the stock theater company where he can bask in the artificial glow emanating from stage lights which never play on him, from hotel lobbies he is forbidden to enter, from music and paintings he does not understand, and from the lives of performers he completely misinterprets. By comparison, school and home are drab, unbearable; he cannot be bothered with them. After a minor inquisition in which his teachers “fell upon him without mercy” (p. 244), Paul still shows no inclination to study or to be agreeable. It is decided finally that he must quit school and go to work, and that he must forego Carnegie Hall and the stock company.

Thus imprisoned in Cordelia Street with all legitimate avenues of escape effectually closed, Paul commits a desperate act. Entrusted to deliver his company's weekend bank deposit, Paul makes his decision and takes flight. Structurally, the story is as bold as Paul. Part 1 ends with the adult collusion that separates Paul from the only things he loves; part 2 begins in abrupt juxtaposition with Paul on a train bound for New York. Once in New York he lives for several marvelous days the life he had always believed he was suited to live, the life of a wealthy boy in a luxurious room at the Waldorf, wearing fine clothes, eating elegant food, and surrounding himself with flowers.²⁵ But those self-indulgent days make it impossible for him to return to Cordelia Street. When Paul learns from the Pittsburgh newspapers that his father has repaid the stolen money and is en route to New York to retrieve him, he takes a ferry to Newark and a cab out of town. Then he dismisses the cab and struggles through deep snow along the bank beside the Pennsylvania tracks. When the train comes he leaps into its path. In the instant before he dies, however, he suffers a heartbreaking realization: he had been too impatient in grabbing his one moment of splendor; he should have gone to exotic lands across the seas.

A fitting climax to the Troll Garden collection, “Paul's Case” is the most overt treatment of the troll garden/goblin market theme in the book. Paul is obviously the hungry forest child who is utterly helpless before the luscious appeal of the garden, represented for him in the trappings of wealth and in his adolescent perception of the artist's world. For Paul there is no reasoned choice, no weighing of alternatives and consequences, no will to resist; for him there is only ugliness and the garden, and he must have the garden. But Paul is also Cather's ultimate alien. He belongs nowhere, and can never belong. Expanding the theme she had introduced in her early stories on the Divide, Cather portrays in Paul a being who is alienated by more than environment and lack of human contact and understanding. Peter, Canute, Serge, and Lou could all have been saved by altered environmental circumstances and human caring, but not Paul. He thinks an environmental change is all he needs, but he is wrong. And he will admit no need for the love of mere mortals.

Paul knows that he is unsuited for Cordelia Street; what he does not know is that he is unsuited for the worlds of art and wealth as well. Paul is an alien because he has a warped perception of everything; he is unable to see anything in his world as it really is. His mind reconstructs the world in his image of it, and then he tries to inhabit the world he conceives. Since in truth one segment of Paul's world is better than he imagines it to be, and the other is worse than he imagines, he is always out of step no matter where he is. Cordelia Street is repulsive to him, utterly ugly with its “grimy zinc tub[s]” and “cracked mirror[s]” (p. 251) and its insufferable monotony. Cather indicates, however, that Paul's view is not necessarily correct. Cordelia Street is a respectable neighborhood where semi-successful white collar workers and their wives rear great broods of children and attend ice cream socials at church. The fact that Paul's father can readily make good Paul's theft suggests that he is far from destitute.

Paul wants to believe that Cordelia Street and his high school represent the very antithesis of the world for which he was made, the world of wealth and glamour. What he fails to perceive is that the ideals of Cordelia Street are identical with his own. He only thinks his values are out of place there; in actuality they are not. Cordelia Street, like Paul, worships glamour and money and the things money can buy. Its gods are the wealthy business magnates for whom the men on Cordelia Street work. Up and down the street people like Paul's father sit on their front steps and exchange “legends of the iron kings,” tales of their bosses who cruise the Mediterranean but still keep office hours on their yachts, “knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy.” The street fairly buzzes with “stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo,” stories absorbed greedily by the underlings of the “various chiefs and overlords” (pp. 249, 250) whom Paul would like to emulate. Cordelia Street constructs a golden vision of the world Paul longs to enter.

The only thing within Paul's reach that approximates that fairy world is the world of art—music, drama, painting. It seems to offer what he seeks.²⁶ But he is just as wrong in his perception of that world as he is in his perception of Cordelia Street. He mistakes its stagey glitter for its essence. Like Flavia, he knows nothing of true art. Since mere finery is what he craves, “symphonies, as such,” do not mean “anything in particular to Paul”; but he loves them for their show just as he loves paintings and the theater. For him art is the soloist's “elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all … that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine” (p. 246). He longs to enter what he perceives to be a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease” (p. 247). But not being an artist himself he has no real place in that spangled world.

Cather makes it clear that not only is Paul not an artist, but his perception of the artist's life and the artist's glittering world is miles from the truth. The artists in this story have no delusions—and no wealth. Scarcely the “veritable queen of Romance” that Paul believes her to be, the German soloist is, in fact, “by no means in her first youth, and the mother of many children” (p. 246). Paul's notions about the stock company players is equally distorted, and they, “especially the women,” are “vastly amused” when they learn of the romantic stories Paul has told about them. “They were hardworking women, most of them supporting indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid inventions.” It is a further irony that Paul's idols “agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul's was a bad case” (p. 253). His alienation from the world of art is complete.

Paul's last desperate effort to find place, to be where “his surroundings explained him” (p. 257), is also destined to failure, again because he mistakes artificial sheen for reality—and because he can make no distinction between the radiance of art and the shimmer of the Waldorf. The latter is just another version of the opera house to him. Art equals shine; shine equals wealth. To him it is all one desire. In New York, with a thousand dollars at his disposal, he believes he is home at last, for “on every side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.” Here, he thinks, is the center of life; “… the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes.” He glides easily about the Waldorf, at last with “his own people,” feeling “as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him alone” (p. 256).

But Paul has merely purchased the sensation of home, played his only ace for a few days of belonging. With stolen money he buys an artificial environment in which to enclose himself—linens, suits, gorgeous people, a fine room, and the hotel itself. Even Central Park is not real, but is “a wonderful stage winterpiece” (p. 256). The Waldorf encasing Paul is the final symbol of his alienation because its artificial splendor isolates him from encroaching reality. Cather represents the Waldorf and its displaced occupant in repeated references to the alien hothouse flowers that bloom “under glass cases” on the streets of New York, all the “more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow” (p. 256). Like Paul, the flowers can survive for a time if they are protected by artificial light and heat. But even then, their days are limited, and if they are ever removed from their heated cases, they wither and die.

In the story's final scenes, Cather continues to equate Paul symbolically with flowers out of place in a harsh environment. Walking along the tracks, having made the decision never to return to Cordelia Street, Paul notices that “the carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, … their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run” (p. 260). As if prompted by this symbolic description of his own brief moment of splendor and its inevitable end, Paul buries a blossom in the snow, acknowledging his death in a cold world that holds no lasting home for him.

Paul misconceives the garden of art as a glittering world of wealth and ease, and he fails to perceive that the chief difference between Cordelia Street and the Waldorf is the difference between wanting and having—a difference not of kind but of degree. Understanding these worlds so little, he has no home in either of them. Only in his death, when he “drop[s] back into the immense design of things” (p. 261), does the alien child appear to find place.

Thus, the pursuit of art and the pursuit of wealth exact their tolls. One by one the stories in The Troll Garden show the consequences of such pursuits, whether misguided or true, whether understood by the seekers or not. And then, in the climactic story, “Paul's Case,” the two are seen as one goal, a final impossible and intolerable irony in which Paul equates God and mammon.

Notes

1. Faulkner, Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, p. 264. Unless otherwise noted, all page references to stories through 1912 are from this volume (page references are in parentheses in the text).

2. Isabelle was the daughter of a distinguished Pittsburgh judge, Samuel A. McClung.

3. Bennett, World of Willa Cather, p. 38, indicates that Cather's youngest brother was called “Jack-a-boy” as a youngster, and that in the story Cather “described her admiration” for him. “She told friends that she would give anything just to look into his eyes for ten minutes.” The sentimentality of the story may be partly attributable to Cather's feelings for Jack. Her continuing fondness for him is apparent in a letter to Frances Cather (Aunt Franc), dated 17 November 1914 (presumably), Nebraska State Historical Society archives. Jack had been staying with her in New York, attending school, and she speaks proudly and affectionately of her little brother who is becoming so manly.

4. “The Sculptor's Funeral,” “A Death in the Desert,” “A Wagner Matinee,” and “Paul's Case” also appear in Youth and the Bright Medusa.

5. These composition dates are suggested in Faulkner, Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, p. 148.

6. Charles Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton: A Series of Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge (London and New York: MacMillan & Co., 1891), pp. 1-5. Bernice Slote discovered this source. In an appendix to Kingdom of Art, pp. 442-44, she reprints the entire “Forest Children” story.

7. In a tribute to the deceased Rossetti in a Journal column, 13 January 1895, Cather describes “Goblin Market” as Christina Rossetti's “one perfect poem,” and she quotes from it and discusses it at some length.

8. Slote, Kingdom of Art, pp. 442-43.

9. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, pp. 113-15.

10. Slote, Kingdom of Art, p. 95. See also Bradford (“Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Stories,” p. 545) who says, “A reading of the uncollected stories dealing with artists reveals that Miss Cather's attitude toward the artist was more complex than might be supposed from reading only the accepted stories.”

11. Slote, Kingdom of Art, pp. 95-96.

12. She also published her only volume of poetry during this period, April Twilights in 1903.

13. Bloom and Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy, p. 117.

14. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, p. 118.

15. Bloom and Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy, p. 149.

16. Slote (“Willa Cather as a Regional Writer,” p. 11) suggests that even though the inhabitants of Sand City are crude and materially corrupt, “‘The Sculptor's Funeral’ cannot be taken altogether as a judgment of the small town in the west; it is based on more general observations.” She notes that the situation in the story is actually based on an incident that occurred in Pittsburgh, the return of the body of artist Charles Stanley Reinhart for burial. Bennett (“Willa Cather in Pittsburgh”) was the first to make the connection between the short story and an early newspaper column in which Cather describes the Reinhart homecoming.

17. See Wagner's Parsifal. When Parsifal breaks the sorcerer's spell, Klingsor's garden, like that of the trolls, collapses in ruins.

18. The Blooms (Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy, pp. 148-49) interpret the story to be Katharine's. They speak of the “sacrificial motif” in the story, of the artist who destroys herself in creating beauty for a world that is largely disinterested. They even describe Katharine's disease-wracked body as “the personification of the artist's self-immolation.” Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, also believes that if the story contains tragedy, Katharine's life is that tragedy, while Everett's life is only pathos. Several Cather letters make it clear that she had serious doubts, both early and late, about the quality of “A Death in the Desert.” Still, she elected to include it in Youth and the Bright Medusa.

19. Bradford (“Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Stories,” p. 544) makes the interesting comment about both poem and story “that attending an artist is as destructive of one's personal life as attending a saint.”

20. Bloom and Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy, p. 146.

21. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, p. 123.

22. The idea for this story comes from a visit Cather made to the studio of artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones on her first trip to England in 1902. That visit is described in an account she sent back to the Journal. It has since been collected in Kates, Willa Cather in Europe. As Kates says, “… it is with no great surprise that we find the entrance lodge, the ‘bare tank’ of the studio itself, and, above all, this active-minded talkative guardian—even with his own name [James]—eventually reappearing in further work” (p. 66). There was also an unfinished picture in the Burne-Jones studio, not on the Phaedra subject, which caught Cather's attention and became the central concern of her story.

23. See Bloom and Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy, p. 8, for example.

24. See Bennett, World of Willa Cather, note, p. 254, and Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, pp. 116-17, for references to the ire Cather's portrait of Georgiana raised in Nebraska when “A Wagner Matinee” first appeared in 1904. Cather, distressed over the reaction of local people to her picture of life on the Divide, softened the portrait of the old woman for the Troll Garden collection and cut the offending paragraph describing Georgiana altogether for the Youth and the Bright Medusa collection (1920).

25. At least two sources suggest that Cather used two different models for her portraits of Paul in Pittsburgh and Paul in New York. In a 15 March 1943 letter to John Phillipson (Willa Cather archives in Red Cloud), Cather says that the Pittsburgh Paul was a boy she had taught in her Latin class, and the New York Paul was herself. The boy was high-strung and erratic like Paul, and tried to make people believe that he was a favorite of a theater stock company. So far as she knew, he never ran away or jumped under a train. She indicates that the New York Paul reflects her own feelings about New York and the Waldorf-Astoria when as a young woman in Pittsburgh she made occasional visits there. Cather also says that sometimes a character develops from a writer's grafting another person onto herself. Seibel, in his recollections (“Miss Willa Cather from Nebraska,” p. 205), reports that he read “Paul's Case” and insisted to Willa Cather “that the Paul of the first pages would not act like the Paul of the closing pages.” He says, “Paul was not drawn from one boy in her high school classes, but from two boys—hence the dualism I sensed and she later admitted.”

26. Slote (Kingdom of Art, pp. 96-97) speaks of Paul's “genuine if excessive feeling for art” and later describes him as “a Forest Child who desires things rare and strange, but to excess and with no one to help him.”