A Story by Willa Cather

 

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

At last I find occasion for a “trigger warning”.  Though I aim at “general interest” in this blog, I must indulge myself from time in a rather “academic” post.  Such a time has come, so if this is not your sort of thing I suggest you follow Chaucer’s advice and simply turn to another page.  What is “literature”?  The question is more difficult than it might appear.  Among the dictionary definitions is “printed material,” any printed material.  The best literature on septic tanks recommends plastic baffles.   More commonly the word implies a positive aesthetic judgment.  Literature means writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent universal interest.  For me, a work of literature is traditional—meaning that it is aware of earlier written works with which it engages in a spirit of respect or competitive contestation without recognition of which a reader must necessarily have but a limited view of the work.  Thus practically all of Roman literature imitated earlier Greek “models”.  Dante in his Commedia is “imitating” Virgil, who at the literal level is the pilgrim’s guide for most of the poem.  And Dante obviously “influences” the many writers of Renaissance epic.

This past week I have read for the first time a number of the early stories of Willa Cather.  By any just reckoning Cather is one of our greatest twentieth-century writers.  I was particularly impressed by her story “‘A Death in the Desert,’” published in 1903.  To this story I shall in a moment return, but I must first note that I find a decisive shift in her writing after the first World War, especially in the great novels My Ántonia (1918) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).  These are novels still clearly linked to a classical tradition, and by the time of her death in 1947 she had fallen somewhat into eclipse.  It is one of the ironies of the perversity of current academic fashion that her critical reputation was reanimated by an unwarranted attention to her lesbianism.  The obviously more important wellsprings of her art, which I have rarely seen mentioned, were classicism (she was a Latin teacher) and Christianity (she was a fully engaged practitioner and active member of the Episcopal Church in its frontier outpost of Red Cloud, Nebraska.)  But when it comes to English departments, one must these days be content with what scraps are on offer.

Perhaps the most important character in “’A Death in the Desert’” is a famous and deeply self-absorbed American composer named Adriance Hilgarde, who makes no direct appearance in it.  Adriance, who has had a great success in Europe and is on the verge of a crowning triumph in Paris, has a much more ordinary brother, Everett, who so annoyingly resembles Adriance in physical appearance that Everett is constantly being mistaken for him.  There is a third major character, Katharine Gaylord, an aging singer, a very old associate of the Hilgarde brothers.  Katharine is dying of tuberculosis in a ranch house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where (following the standard medical advice of that age) she has retreated in the vain hope of regaining her health.  As the story begins, Everett, one of those nice guys who always finishes last, travels from the East by train to the wilds of the West to comfort the doomed woman.  Her dying is protracted, and the two share many intimate conversations.  She recounts her hopeless and unrequited love for the Olympian composer.  “It was not the first time that [Everett’s] duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his brother’s imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten.”  Everett in turn, rendered incautious by the pathos of the moment, confesses his own long-standing passion for Katharine—a revelation that startles, indeed shocks her.  Then she does die, and Everett, as he is departing Cheyenne is mistaken for his brother by a visiting German singer with whom he crosses paths in the train station.  Now that is about as Henry James as you can get without being Henry James.  Indeed, a valid criticism of the early Cather is its excessive “Jamesianism”.  But James is not the only great writer with whom Cather engages.

She puts the title of the story in quotation marks because it is an actual quotation.  It is the title of a (once) well-known poem by Robert Browning.  Browning is among our hardest and most philosophical poets.  That is probably why he is so little read today.  Few of his dramatic monologues are simple, and this one is no exception.  But his death in the desert is that of Saint John the Evangelist, the last living literary eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus Christ.  What will become of Christian faith when the last personal witness of the Christ-life is gone?  Among the complex issues the poem raises are questions of truth, the authority of written texts, and grounds for belief.  I believe that for Browning, one of the prominent issues he had in mind was the nature of Scriptural authority, a subject that had among intellectuals been pretty well revolutionized—to the dismay of many conventional Christian believers--by the so-called “Higher Criticism” of the nineteenth century.  Cather’s story is not a theological treatise, but it explores the relationship of art (in this instance, music) and truth in a manner in which James and John strangely cooperate.  I suspect that no one ever reads a serious writer “completely,” but it is always worth the try.  And, certainly, there is as much danger of over-reading a subtle work than of under-reading it.

A major theme in Henry James is the spiritual freshness of the new American character in the context of the ambiguous sophistication of the old European societies.  So far has the world moved on since 1881 (publication of Portrait of a Lady), say, that the idea of the comparative spiritual wholesomeness of Americaness may seem mind-boggling.  But it is was major theme of our early national literature, elaborating the ancient subject of the moral superiority of simple, rural life to the dangerous sophistication of urban cosmopolitanism.  But the drab, dreary, and often sinister side of supposedly heroic pioneer life, and the small- town legacy of that life, likewise became an important American topic.  You see it famously in Sherwood Anderson, much admired by Cather.   Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize on the strength of it.  It is pretty much the essence of southern Gothic in parts of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.  It is not infrequent in Cather herself, and conspicuously in The Troll Garden, the early collection of short stories that included “’A Death in the Desert’”.

Willa Cather was not merely a great writer, but a conscious creator of literature as I defined it at the beginning of this short essay.  The title of “’A Death in the Desert’” is, I suspect, a lapidary ornament.  The masons who built the great medieval cathedrals sometimes placed beautiful stone ornamentation in parts of the building invisible to those who worshiped in it.  The idea, I think, was that God could and did see it.   It was a kind of redundant luxury, a work of pious artistic supererogation.  No reader needs to see the meaning of Browning to her sad story—presuming it really is there--but if you do see it, it is likely to increase the already opulent pleasure of the reading experience.