Willa Cather's last completed short story, “The Best Years,” is a work that has usually been either downgraded or ignored by her critics. With the exception of some appreciative general comments by George N. Kates,¹ the consensus has been that the story is not up to Miss Cather's full capability in the genre. An extreme statement of this view describes the story as “only the somewhat querulous writing of old age.”² I should like to suggest, however, that “The Best Years” does convey much of the power characteristic of Willa Cather's best novels and short stories.

Works such as My Ántonia, “Neighbour Rosicky,” A Lost Lady, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock succeed largely through her ability to describe the subtle strengths and weaknesses of the relationships between characters who are richly and convincingly depicted. It is in just this way that “The Best Years” is particularly effective. In addition, Miss Cather here returns to a theme that had occupied her again and again throughout her career: the loss of youth. As in all of her best works, she also creates in “The Best Years” a vivid impression of place, which is immediately relevant to—even partly determinant of—the emotions and tensions of the characters. The story, therefore, in both matter and method stands as a fitting conclusion to Willa Cather's literary career.

Just as the more widely admired “Neighbour Rosicky” revolves around and is dependent on our full understanding of its central character, so does “The Best Years” gain its strength from its main figure, Lesley Ferguesson. The centrality of this vital girl to the lives of those around her is emphasized by the structure of the story. Sections I through V show her warm affection for her family and for Miss Knightly, the county school superintendent, while demonstrating the great value that Lesley's presence has for them. Section VI tells briefly but poignantly of her death from exposure in a snow storm. The seventh section then offers a final glimpse of the Ferguesson household twenty years later. Miss Cather emphasizes the need for each individual to preserve the youthful ability to find challenge in the present and to hope and work for a better future for oneself and those he loves. In the final section it becomes clear how thoroughly Lesley embodies this theme when we see the effect her absence has on her mother. Mrs. Ferguesson sorrowfully comments in Section VII that “our best years are when we're working hardest and going right ahead when we can hardly see our way out.”³ By the time Mrs. Ferguesson makes this comment, we fully understand that, for her and the rest of her family, “the best years” were the years they shared with Lesley and which, like her, are now gone.

We see Lesley ultimately, therefore, as representative of youth itself. Miss Cather, very near the end of her own life and career, reaffirms here a fundamental implication of her best early novels: the outlook of youth is life-giving and life-preserving, and to lose it is to make life pathetically empty. When the combination of challenge, hard work, and love no longer exists, the essence of life disappears. Lesley is made of some of the same stuff—more fragile but no less vital—as Ántonia Shimerda and Alexandra Bergson, while Mrs. Ferguesson is sadly reminiscent of Mrs. Forrester of A Lost Lady in her ultimate willingness to submit to oppressive circumstances. She is, in effect, victimized by regret, a fate that Miss Cather's more admirable characters never permit to occur, though the threat is usually present. In the final section of “The Best Years,” we see Mrs. Ferguesson looking backwards; she has lost the vitality and purposefulness she had always shown when Lesley was with her in “the best years.”

Throughout the first six sections of the story, Miss Cather concentrates on establishing the importance that Lesley's love has to each of the other characters. In her they find joy and encouragement in their struggle for security and comfort in the “new country.”⁴ Sections I, II, and part of III establish the warm affection that Miss Knightly feels for the girl. The older woman's willingness to go out of her way to enable Lesley to be with her family for a week end is the most significant detail we are given in the author's definition of this relationship.

It had been at no trifling sacrifice that Miss Knightly was able to call for Lesley at six thirty. Customarily she started on her long drives at nine o'clock. This morning she had to give an extra half-dollar to the man who came to curry and harness her mare. She herself got no proper breakfast, but a cold sandwich and a cup of coffee at the station lunch counter—the only eating-place open at six o'clock. Most serious of all, she must push Molly a little on the road, to land her passenger at the Wild Rose schoolhouse at nine o'clock.

(pp. 115-116)

As the narrator further observes, “Such small inconveniences do not sum up to an imposing total, but we assume them only for persons we really care for.” (p. 116)

The relationship between Lesley and her family is detailed in sections III, IV, and V. Lesley says a great deal about her attachment to her brothers when, after Miss Knightly asks, “‘You still get a little homesick, don't you, Lesley?’” she understates her feeling by saying, “‘I do miss the boys’” (p. 91). Her brothers, we find, miss her equally as much and feel quite possessive about her affection. After Lesley has said of the students in the country school at which she teaches, “‘I just love some of them,’” four-year-old Bryan jealously insists, “‘No, no! … you don't love anybody but us!’” (p. 95), and he is rewarded with “the tight hug he wanted.” Her brother Hector's delicate love for Lesley is revealed in the brief Section V, which describes his making telegram deliveries on Christmas Eve. He is wearing the overcoat Lesley had bought for him, and he gratefully reflects on the gift: “He was thinking how kind Lesley was, and how hard she had worked for that money, and how much she had to put up with in the rough farmhouse where she boarded, out in the country. … When he grew up, and made lots of money (a brakeman—maybe an engineer), he would certainly be good to his sister.” (p. 117)

It is sections III and IV, however, that undoubtedly do most to establish Lesley as the fulcrum on which the family's happiness balances during these “best years.” In this central part of the story, Miss Cather uses setting—the Ferguessons' little home in the depot settlement—as her chief tool in delineating the love between Lesley and the rest of her family. In seeing specific parts of the house as Lesley sees them, we understand that they are, for her, representative of these strong emotional bonds. For instance, we read that “‘upstairs’ was a story in itself, a secret romance” (p. 106). Here the children had slept and had their delightful “dream adventures” together. “There was certainly room enough up there for widely scattered quarters, but the three beds stood in a row, as in a hospital ward. The children liked to be close enough together to share experiences” (p. 108). As in most Cather works, emotional ties are strongly felt, though seldom directly expressed or described by either characters or narrator. The Ferguesson children have “never told their love” (p. 109), but because Miss Cather has given significant details, such as the mere disposition of their beds, we understand their deep affection for each other nonetheless.

Other portions of the home function in a similar way. “The turnpike” going up to the attic, the back porch, the parlor with its “real Brussels carpet” that Lesley had bought, the dining room with the dangling light bulb whose glare goes unnoticed—all of these parts of the house carry deep emotional associations for Lesley. It is this identification of the house with the family's mutual love that enables Lesley, when she sits down on the floor of the back porch with her feet on the ground, to sink “into idleness and safety and perfect love” (p. 112). In this same scene we learn that, from Lesley's point of view, “the feeling of being at home was complete, absolute: it made her sleepy. And that feeling was not so much the sense of being protected by her father and mother as of being with, and being one with, her brothers” (pp. 112-113). We are always aware that the house is somehow a necessary part of this feeling. Mrs. Ferguesson's children “… were bound to her, and to that house, by the deepest, the most solemn loyalty. They never spoke of that covenant to each other, never even formulated it in their own minds—never. It was a consciousness they shared, and it gave them a family complexion.” (pp. 104-105)

After Miss Cather presents Lesley and her close relationship with her family, she reveals the girl's sudden death in Section VI. At her best, Miss Cather knows when to avoid the sentimental, and it is a sure artistic judgment that has caused her to introduce Mr. Redmans, a blunt, matter-of-fact railroad conductor, to announce to Miss Knightly and the reader the news of Lesley's death. Knowing the indefinable importance of Lesley's presence in the family, we appreciate the classic simplicity and truth of Redmans' observation that “that family are terrible broke up.” (p. 125)

The story might end with Section VI and still be a well-told and moving story, though its chief effect would be pathetic. We comprehend the essential meaning of the story, however, only by seeing the first six sections in the reflected light of Section VII. “The Best Years” closes as do nearly all of Miss Cather's major works, with an epilogue set many years after the action of the rest of the story. Here Miss Knightly—now Mrs. Thorndike—returns to MacAlpin after some fifteen years' absence and visits Mrs. Ferguesson. The motif of this section of the story is change. The town has expanded, “ottos” have largely replaced horses and buggies, and, most significantly, Mr. and Mrs. Ferguesson occupy a different house. In place of the little house in the depot settlement, they now live in a large house with a polished oak hall and stairway and four unused upstairs bedrooms. Their sons have moved away and have become successful and independent, while Mrs. Ferguesson herself, once a vital woman with “a great deal of influence” in MacAlpin, has “grown softer” and is presently made “helpless” by a sprained ankle—injured, significantly, on her own new, slippery staircase. She is overjoyed to see Miss Knightly, who she knows has not forgotten Lesley. As she says, “‘There's nothing in all my life so precious to me to remember and think about as my Lesley.’” (p. 134)

In spite of these memories, the old life, presented in the first six sections of the story, is now dead for Mrs. Ferguesson. For a moment Miss Knightly's reappearance, bringing memories of that life, is a way for Mrs. Ferguesson to clutch at her years “in the old house down by the depot,” with her children “up in the loft.” But, as she tragically realizes, her upstairs is now big and empty, her children are gone—Lesley, who meant the most, is irretrievably gone—and “the best years” are decidedly past. Those years cannot be reclaimed any more than can Lesley's life, and Miss Knightly's appearance only heightens the tragedy of this realization for Mrs. Ferguesson, who has given herself over to the full-time occupation of looking backward. Miss Cather's works typically affirm the value of the past and the enrichment that its experiences and our memory of them can bring to the present; but in her presentation of Mrs. Ferguesson, the author warns against total devotion to the past. In Miss Knightly's return to MacAlpin, the past is not recalled; its pastness is affirmed. The story thus insists upon the need to reconcile oneself to the passing of youth and the presence of change. Certainly this is the author's view of what must happen if Mrs. Ferguesson—or anyone—is to survive the loss of youth.

Miss Cather's thematic accomplishment in this story has been chiefly to affirm the value of youth while insisting upon a positive reconciliation to its loss. In doing this, she establishes Lesley as an embodiment of the mood of “the best years,” identifies this character and her great warmth and family love with a physical object—the old house—and then presents a picture of the consequences for Mrs. Ferguesson of the loss of Lesley and of the house with which she was identified. The final section raises the significance of the story onto a broader scale of tragedy than it could have without this section. Here we see the loss of Lesley as more than the loss of a beloved daughter, sister, and friend; it becomes essentially the loss of youth, with all of its joys, satisfactions, and struggles. Thus, while Miss Cather successfully creates and employs Lesley as a character in the first six sections of the story, in the final section she gives Lesley a symbolic significance that becomes the key to the essential thematic import of the entire story.

Certainly “The Best Years” is a moving and powerful story. What is more, it seems an appropriate story to close Willa Cather's career since it expresses so successfully the author's view of the value of present challenge and the challenge of maintaining past values—both concerns that are central to her whole literary canon—while at the same time achieving an artistic level that earns for the story a position with the best of Miss Cather's fiction. It is in her ability to understand and to depict such essences of life as the mutual love of Lesley and her family, while still avoiding the maudlin, that her ability had previously surpassed that of most other writers of fiction. In her final complete creative effort, Willa Cather reveals no suggestion of atrophied ability, but rather the very strengths that had contributed to her prior successes.

Notes

1. “Willa Cather's Unfinished Avignon Story” in Five Stories by Willa Cather (New York, 1956), pp. 177-214. See especially pp. 194-195 and p. 213. Edith Lewis and Elizabeth S. Sergeant also indicate appreciation of the power of the story in very brief comments in their two biographical works. See, respectively, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record (New York, 1953), p. 196, and Willa Cather: A Memoir (Philadelphia and New York, 1953), p. 279.

2. Dorothy Van Ghent, Willa Cather (Minneapolis, 1964), p. 42.

3. “The Best Years,” The Old Beauty and Others (New York, 1948), p. 136. Hereafter, all quotations from the story will be from this edition.

4. In showing the Ferguessons' struggle to establish a comfortable existence in a “new country,” “The Best Years” of course echoes another of the themes that had been at the heart of Miss Cather's writings ever since the publication of O Pioneers! in 1913.