Collected Stories (70 page)

Such feelings, I believe, help to explain a cryptic and critical sentence, as self-revelatory as any she ever wrote—Willa Cather was not given
to enlargement of her personal feelings—that we find, fourteen years later (1936), in the Prefatory Note to
Not Under Forty,
a book of essays published in that year.

Here it is with its preceding context:

The painful disillusion, after what she had hoped would come from the war, had taken the usual eternity (to borrow the phrase she got from Stephen Crane) “to filter through the blood.” Now, fourteen years later, she could submerge her personal disappointment within larger issues; she could take her stand, refusing to be budged from tested excellencies, refusing to yield to what she considered ignoble and inferior. She had been of her place and of her time, she would remain so; and if this meant lack of comprehension by the younger generation—in part, perhaps, matching hers also of them—well, they were warned, and could keep away. There is ferocity and bitterness here; but rather than march in the festal train of the Bitch Goddess of worldly success, she will pay any price, even that of alternating between public scorn and private silence. The world has caged her; but beware of her paws! There is to be no silliness about the matter.

Yet she was not permanently caged. A restless, splendid character such as hers would be bound, in the end, to escape—and did. From now on she begins ranging farther and farther afield. “Away, away in time and space” seems to be her mood. After another book published in 1923, a penultimate glance at the Nebraska of her youth, four great novels succeed one another within the space of a single decade. The book of that year is familiar to many:
A Lost Lady,
a story of decline and fall, of elegiac reminiscence and of tender regret
for vanished frailty. The “Lady” is also lost, one must observe, in the snows of yesteryear.

Then we come to the wayfarer’s high plateau, where it is already afternoon with lengthening shadows, and a constant preoccupation over the meaning of life—and also with death at the end much nearer. The titles themselves are highly evocative. Here is the succession:

Note the allegory and symbolism in their wording. The Professor’s true house, as his story makes abundantly clear, is his own grave; this is
his
long home. The enmity of Myra Henshawe for her husband, in the next novel, is maintained, indeed grows and battens, under miserably straitened and constricting circumstances that finally allow her only the manner of choosing her death. Then great Death itself—like a Holbein series, the grim procession continues—comes for the Archbishop in his cell near the desert; while in another austere region, rock-bound Quebec, we can watch shadows fall on further lives. There is no escape from pessimism, or at least from the firmest grasp on the realities of time and human destiny. As in the legend, in this last book, of the Canadian heiress who longed to become a recluse and then—ardors over —lapsed into terrible and prolonged aridity, every device that can be used presses the one inescapable conclusion: we are mortal, we must die.

The Professor’s House,
of 1925, as E. K. Brown has pointed out, is an allegory contrived with extraordinary skill, especially the mechanism of inserting a long
nouvelle
into the center of it, to give an effect of distant clarity and lyric beauty, of sunlit aerial color, seen beyond a dull, conventional foreground. Dead Tom Outland looms, sweet in the purity of young strength, towering beyond the pettiness of the life of a small academic community, where vulgar Louie Marsellus and his shallow wife revel in his succession. The Professor himself
passes in the course of the story from later middle age, success achieved but becoming meaningless, into the much colder and passive region of his last years; and Willa Cather has fashioned him of exactly the same age as herself.

Nowhere is she cleverer than in the symbolism of the various houses that are so important to this story. There is the Professor’s old house, where we see him first, the one he is so reluctant to leave, from the very beginning casting a lingering look behind—jerry-built and uncomfortable, but a place where there had been deep and joyful living. There is the new house that can never have true life infused into it; he has even lost his love for the woman who will be its mistress. We are given glimpses also of the elaborate monstrosity of the Marsellus ménage, tricked out with money inherited from the dead Tom Outland, and even named—a profanation—with his last name, used as a wretched pun. Tom’s own group of cliff dwellers’ houses, the houses that he has discovered, simple and intrinsically beautiful, thus makes the clearest contrast between spurious values and those high and ancient ones that can outlast calamity. Finally the Professor’s house-to-be, his grave, completes the grim symbolism.

Willa Cather can be very direct in such matters. After a close call from accidental death through sheer and symptomatic lethargy, she makes the Professor reflect that his sagging old couch is already his coffin, with poor sham upholstery: “Just the equivocal American way of dealing with serious facts,” she says. “Why pretend that it is possible to soften that last hard bed?” No palliative, no trickery or ornamentation will blind her to the essential hardness, to the punishments of life. She will have none of the cheap standards, the petty consolations, about her.

In terminating his own discussion of the book (on page 246), E. K. Brown makes a significant remark: “Not by any answers it proposes, but by the problems it elaborates, and by the atmosphere in which they are enveloped,
The Professor’s House
is a religious novel.” So we have come out onto the last great plateau of Willa Cather’s own journey. She is now much nearer to a finish with the local scene and its rather minuscule passions, which she has definitely appraised.

*  *

The development continues inevitably, inexorably. One of the hardest, most obstinate stories of her whole work is the relatively short, but strangely intense, novel published in 1926 (only one year later, and in her own fifty-third),
My Mortal Enemy.
It remains a mysterious work. E. K. Brown, who must long have pondered its cryptic subject matter, does suggest a clue. In the end, he says (page 250): “… it becomes plain to us that this worldly woman has passed out of worldliness into preoccupation with primary realities.” This is the place to which Willa Cather wanted to bring her heroine, after headstrong youth and an ill-considered elopement with a much weaker man, whose character could never match her own. Finally Myra goes straight to religion, which here is not treated by implication, as in
The Professor’s House,
or even as an anodyne, consoling the end to the unhappy life of a once worldly woman, of fierce will power,
détraquée.
Here it becomes a principal part of the story. The way now opens for the next two, perhaps the greatest pair of Willa Cather’s novels.

A light ever seems to radiate from broad sun-swept stretches in the Southwestern desert landscape of
Death Comes for the Archbishop
(1927). There is also a marvelous unity to the book, made up in large part of deceptively simple passages; here a local story retold, there a pious legend remembered. To this corresponds the harmonious and expanded character of Father Latour himself. In part he may be taken to represent Willa Cather’s own late summer hours—or at least her aspiration for them—in the country she had discovered far beyond her old West, in one of the great adventures of her intellectual life.

What is significant in the new direction of her journey—which through much reminiscence of Auvergne, the province from which both priests in the book had started, becomes also a pilgrimage in the direction of Avignon—is that she now is a declared seeker for a faith that will console her, nostalgic as she always has been, for the perishability of life. Indeed, that life of “The Best Years”—the title of a very touching later tale—had passed first, as Virgil had phrased it in words that she long held in memory. For her, also, “
Optima dies … prima fugit.
…” It is significant also that in the year 1922, when
the geological break in the continuity of her life had occurred, in that year she herself entered the Episcopal church, being confirmed at the same time as her parents. As is Episcopal to Baptist, it would seem, so is the great beauty of what once was and now is gone to the more prosaic world of the present. Yet her treatment of Catholics in this book, as well as later in
Shadows on the Rock,
became so sympathetic as she went along that many readers quite unconsciously must have thought her speaking for her own faith—which in a sense she was. She had indeed already moved her setting far away from her own youth and early novels.

Death Comes for the Archbishop
also constantly takes one backward and forward, on missions of religion, between the Old World and the New; it is as if Willa Cather were intent upon weaving a cable of many strands between them. She seems to delight in flashing before us the scenery of Rome or Clermont, intermittently, to contrast them with Santa Fé or Taos; demonstrating that the greatest discrepancies vanish, and only harmonies remain, for those who are dedicated to a great ideal and thus in part transcend their surroundings. Here, on such firm heights, the unhappy and restive self perishes, to give way at the last to harmony and tranquillity. Vicariously this was her coming to terms with her own destiny. It further explains her intention behind the disarming and lovable simplicity of the small events in the foreground of the novel, symbols that with the economy of a great artist she has used for great purposes.

Colder, later in personal time, and more remote also by more than a century—for the action is set in the time of Louis XIV—is the next story, the serious, not to say somber,
Shadows on the Rock,
of 1931. Willa Cather is now in her fifty-eighth year. Her heroine is a young, motherless girl whose somewhat frail life revolves almost wholly about her touching effort to achieve a woman’s warmth and service for the household of an aging father. The characters of Count Frontenac and Monseigneur Laval are drawn as those of already old men.

The bastion of the great rock on which Quebec has been founded, the climate, the cold winters, somehow all seem of an unvarying gray after the smiling warmth of the open Southwest. Here and there a
sheen as of unexpected late sunset wonderfully suffuses her mood; although Willa Cather herself seems to have moved still farther away, both in time and space. Religion also is very near the heart of this book. The characters are American in the sense that they come to live permanently in the New World—although even Cécile, her young heroine, is represented as born in Paris—but their pathos is in their continuing attempt, destined for never more than partial success, to transplant and keep alive, under hard and adverse conditions, the standards of the full civilization of France, their distant and revered
“mère des arts et des lettres.”
This must be accomplished in a world where even the flora and fauna are as on another planet, often menacing as in a nightmare.

Willa Cather makes much of Old World cooking, of cleaning and polishing, of the amenity of a sensitive and quiet bourgeois
“foyer.”
By the night fireside in the little house on the crooked street the old values still have force and power. The latent threat comes from the genius of the new land itself; and the ships that sail slowly across the stormy seas, and whose arrival becomes as vital to the reader as it is for the inhabitants of Quebec itself, these ships bear the very life-blood that must continually be transfused if what was admirable and remembered can continue under such difficulties.

Subtly Willa Cather’s sympathies seem to have changed; or is it such a change, after all, because from the earliest time her German musicians, her young men from Prague—or Bergen or Upsala—even arriving as poor immigrants, these had brought to the outlying farms about Red Cloud values that the young girl who was also Willa Cather sensed by every worthy measurement as far transcending what they found in possession about them. Excellence does not change, whatever the circumstances, the fluctuations in its appreciation.

As so often after a major advance Willa Cather now seems to need rest on her flinty journey. There comes about a time of retrospect; first with the three stories collected in the volume titled
Obscure Destinies
(1932), and in the sensitive portrayal of touching
Lucy Gay-heart
(1935), a last full-length evocation of the world of her morning years. Then, going back even earlier, she turns to the dim days of
her earliest childhood in Virginia, this last a theme scarcely touched before—indeed, except as a background it had not determined her life. As is to be expected, the development proceeds step by step with a decline in her own vitality.

She had early rebelled against her destiny, born on the fringe of things; she had defied, she had never surrendered. Now she seems to wish passionately to submit. The violins tune to some of the most beautiful melodies of all: in “Old Mrs. Harris,” a tale in
Obscure Destinies,
she can touch sublimity—can create it out of almost nothing. The same is just as true of another touching and so delicate short story, already mentioned, “The Best Years,” published posthumously in
The Old Beauty.
It is also about the earliest Western time, but now seen as far behind and long ago vanished. The journey may be wilder, the hour late, and there is no “going home” now except to death; yet courage and love have not failed her.