Authors: Willa Cather
The place of
Sapphira and the Slave Girl,
begun in 1937 and published only in 1941, four years later and in her own sixty-seventh, is curious. It is a cold, slow-paced book, the chief character a willful and repellent invalid. One receives the impression that the material was never turned to in affection—at least, with the old spontaneous and warm affection that Willa Cather could give to the destiny of Ántonia, who had been such a match for her fate—but rather in an attempt, a decision, to cultivate one more area that she knew well but never had used. The action occurs near Winchester, Virginia, and the uneventful year is 1856.
This novel, as E. K. Brown comments (page 317), is not about “heroic moments in American life—the moment when the French made a civilization in the Canadian wilderness, the moment when the Southwest was at it apex, the moment when the wild land of Nebraska took the first impress of the pioneer. Now it was enough to evoke quite ordinary moments from the past; and these too had vanished, taking with them the burden of beauty for which there was nothing to compensate.”
It almost seems as if Willa Cather had come to a dead end; and indeed this may have been so, for in illness and fatigue she published
nothing else during the seven years remaining before her death in April 1947, in her seventy-fourth year.
At this point the story about Avignon consequently takes on added interest. For Willa Cather apparently attempted her most difficult task, the summoning of reality from a remotely distant time and place, which in any event she never could have known personally—as in some measure she did know something about all that had gone before—when life had most worn and tired her. So the circumstances surrounding the work were somber and not very favorable. Personally, she was facing the adamant combination of old age, illness, and the slow approach of death—that ultimate engagement in which triumph was impossible. Perhaps also she reached the field of the tale in a historical setting just too late: energies never sufficed, we must remember, over seven years, to bring it to completion. And this may have been one of the reasons—which we must respect—why at the end she ordered its destruction.
Even if she surmised that her powers were failing, she may still have wanted the companionship and solace of a piece of work in the making, as it always had been for her in the richer years of her own life. To work, also, was to pray. This may explain what was going on in her mind when we see her as Edith Lewis describes her, pacing the “open roof garden of the Fairmont, walking to and fro, and reading.…” Okey’s little guide-book become a breviary.
It is easy to see why a French palace like that at Avignon rather than the one at Versailles should have seized on Willa Cather’s imagination. Her firmly expressed distastes would normally find the latter artificial and flimsy, just where the noble pile beside the Rhône was the reverse. The surprise and splendor of the conception, the wonderful spareness of the lofty architecture, these broad halls set high above rich farming-land, this capital of popes in exile, across the mountains and beside a broad, rushing Provençal river: all would have spoken clarion words.
Constant similarities between the rural life of Provence and regions she had known all her life in the West must also have been in mind. Farming is farming: to plow and to sow, to harvest and to garner,
require the same labor, take their toll with the same fatigue no matter by whom performed, where—or when. Yet there were also the particular vigor and sap of this people. From her own twenty-ninth year, now long in the past, she had been consciously drawn to their special character, which apparently never ceased to delight her.
Once the definite conception had taken shape, she did, for a while, proceed. As Edith Lewis tells us (pages 195–6):
She worked fitfully at the Avignon story in the next two years [i.e., 1944 and 1945]; but her right hand was so troublesome [with a long disability that set in], became instantly so painful when she tried to write, that she was unable to make much headway. It was a story of large design, and needed concentrated vigour and power. Her knowledge of this often led her to put it aside entirely and try to forget about it until better times should come.
Alas, they did not; and now even this incomplete manuscript is destroyed.
Why, we must ask, did she at the last thus turn so completely away from America? The fact that the world had broken apart for her personally in 1922 has become clear enough. That in
One of Ours
she turned savagely against the American present is attested by the dark flow at the end of the book. She also reverts to this same theme in the story about “The Old Beauty,” which, although written earlier, was only published posthumously, in 1948. Here she sets her story wholly in Aix-les-Bains—how unthinkable this would have been earlier in her career!—which her middle-aged American finds, to his satisfaction, “unchanged” in a world already transformed; and this story is also set in the fateful year of 1922.
She is no longer at any pains to conceal her disillusion and aversion to most of the life about her. For a writer as classic both in feeling and style as Willa Cather, this judgment was natural enough. Indeed, in her private life she took no trouble to conform to newer interests about her, in literature, or art, or music. To preserve her entity, in a time of too facile communication, she became almost a recluse, certainly not “keeping up” with contemporary movements. Her defense
was dogged and complete. She does, in the essay titled “A Chance Meeting,” in
Not Under Forty,
qualify Marcel Proust as “the greatest French writer of his time”; but otherwise one hears of no later enthusiasms whatsoever. She will not go beyond Thomas Mann and Katherine Mansfield. Indeed, in the last months of her life she turned away from everything of the present, back even to Shakespeare and to Chaucer. Here was her grandeur and her consolation.
A soliloquy in the critical
One of Ours
should at this point be recalled. Of her hero, Claude, she says (page 406):
He had begun to believe that the Americans were a people of shallow emotions. That was the way [his friend] Gerhardt had put it once; and if it was true, there was no cure for it. Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
Thus France could give one meaning to life which it was impossible to find in America.
It could not have been easy, nevertheless, for her to turn to Europe, to expatriate herself—even if only spiritually—as had Henry James and Edith Wharton (although for very different reasons) before her. Even for them, as we know, the task was of immense magnitude and yielded dubious results; and they were wealthy patricians who without great effort could remove themselves from any place to any other. Willa Cather, embedded as she had been in Nebraska, and with a much harder destiny in many ways than those of such comparative darlings of fortune, took much longer; but in the end and by gradual steps she did very nearly the same thing. Like many people of plain origins, her first great need had been to be reassured, to still the youthful panic of seeming to possess only an inferior brand of everything that her more fortunate brothers and sisters took as naturally theirs. This was a prime need; but she had conquered it in her own way, which was the way of genius.
Furthermore, Edith Wharton and Henry James lived much the same cosmopolitan life wherever they happened to be, following—
even when they were railing at—contemporary fashion. Willa Cather reached first for the stars over the pure air of Nebraska, and then, when their light became obscured, would accept nothing less beautiful in their place simply because it was American. Her position was grander; the evolution of vastly more moment. Her stubborn loyalty to excellence, and the tenderness of her love, refused to alter because they had come upon alteration. Thus the Avignon story, incomplete and vanished as it is, remains the last great testimony of what she believed in, and of what she had lived for.
We should have to conclude on this lofty but rather barren note were it not for a piece of singular good fortune, a circumstance that is the origin of this essay. Miss Lewis does remember quite a little of the manuscript that no longer exists; and she has been kind enough to give the following account of it, thus adding a precious last chapter to the history of Willa Cather’s writing:
The title of Willa Cather’s unfinished and unpublished Avignon story was
Hard Punishments.
The setting was Avignon of the 14th century (1340), at the time of the papal residence of Benedict XII.
The central characters were two youths—whom she tentatively called Pierre and Andŕe; and the story was of their friendship.
It opened with a scene on the height above the Papal Palace, overlooking the Rhône. This place is now a park; but in the 14th century it was a sort of ash-heap, where refuse from the Palace was thrown over the cliff. Pierre, a peasant boy from a farm beyond the river, has climbed up there in order to sit and look across toward his former home. He is a criminal, according to the law of the time. A simple, childlike, rather stupid boy—he had traded off his father’s cart and donkey, and a load of pottery he was carrying to market, for a wonderful monkey belonging to a sailor who was passing through the town. His father had denounced him for theft to the authorities, and as punishment he was strung up for several hours by his thumbs. His hands are now useless, and he is an outcast—homeless, in constant pain, and unable to work. A woman in the town who keeps a brothel has taken him in and given him a corner in which to sleep. He sits on the height above the Palace, crying from homesickness and misery.
It is the day on which Benedict XII, on his great stallion, surrounded by a magnificent train, has gone down to meet Alfonso of Castile and his embassy, who have ridden from Spain to seek an indulgence from the Pope. The Palace is half empty, for many of its occupants, and most of the townspeople of Avignon, have flocked to see the splendid meeting.
While the peasant boy sits crying on his ash-heap, he hears a noise of breaking branches in the hedge that divides this spot from the Papal gardens; and there emerges the other youth in the story—André.
This boy is handsome, spirited, intelligent, well-born—his uncle holds an important post among the servitors in the Palace. But he cannot speak. His tongue has been torn out as a punishment for blasphemy.
Willa Cather was greatly interested in the subject of blasphemy, as it was regarded in the 14th century. It was not only a sin, but a crime, and was punished by the civil law. According to the records, it was a rather frequent transgression, in spite of the terrible punishment for it. Why was it held in such special reprobation? And why, in spite of the risk, did people so often succumb to the temptation to blaspheme?
Some time before the meeting of the two boys, there had been a great banquet in the Papal Palace. André had certain special duties to perform; but when they were over, he slipped away and joined a group of wild companions in the town, with whom he had lately become involved—in a sense a revolutionary group, who met in a low dive to air subversive theories against the Church and State. Excited by the daring of their reckless talk, André tries to out-do the others. The dive was that night spied on by the police, and André and his companions were reported and punished. Tearing out the tongue with red-hot pincers was the usual punishment for blasphemy.
A scene is given in which an old blind priest, who had been André’s friend and confessor since the boy’s childhood, comes to him after his ordeal, where he lies tossing on his cot in his cubicle in the Palace, talks to the frantic boy, comforts him, fortifies him, and absolves him. This was perhaps the central scene in the story.
My own understanding of it (I never discussed it with Miss Cather) was that she meant the deep root of the boy’s despair to be, not the disgrace, nor even the mutilation, but his sense of a sort of personal dishonor—of having irretrievably betrayed something sacred in himself,
thereby making the future impossible. The priest’s compassionate reassurance enables him to take up his life again. And when he does so, it is on a new plane. His disability becomes for him a challenge—to his courage and resourcefulness, to his pride. After his encounter with Pierre, the poor peasant boy becomes a part of this challenge. He sets out to succor, perhaps to rescue, one even more unfortunate than himself.
The latter part of the story was told only in notes, and was not completed.
It is with hesitation that I have given even this brief account—for it is like the story of an opera without the music. How much would a short summary of
My Ántonia
or
Old Mrs. Harris
mean to one who could never by any possibility read them? Whatever elements of beauty and power the unfinished Avignon story may have possessed—they are lost to us now. But to the student of Willa Cather’s work these notes may be of interest in indicating the tenor of her thoughts and the direction her genius took in the last years.
With the help of this precious information we at least now possess an outline of the unfinished story. There is a further treasure that Miss Lewis with great kindness has also made available to the author, Willa Cather’s own much-marked copy of “Okey’s little history”:
The Story of Avignon,
by Thomas Okey [Mediaeval Towns Series], London, J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1926.
Here we come wonderfully close to the creative process; for not only is this book much marked with single and even double lines in the margins, and further with checks and crosses; but on the last flyleaf and the inside of the back cover, in Willa Cather’s own hand we have half a dozen—seven, to be exact—notations of what became of special importance for her in planning this tale. A study of these brings illumination. We come very close to the times in which she placed her story, to its setting, and no little detail of its circumstances.