Not yet enough noticed in the career of a “classic” writer like Willa Cather, whose reputation rests—with justice—on her discovery for American letters of regions like Nebraska, is the increasing and finally dominant pull that Europe exerted upon her. It can be traced from the very beginning of her long career; it impregnates the whole body of her work. When for her, about 1922, in a period of internal strain “the world broke in two,” there is no doubt upon which half she took her stand. One of the most interesting results of this development, moreover, came in the very last years of her life, a project never completed: to place the setting of a story straight across the world, quite far into the past—leaving America entirely—in the setting of medieval Avignon.
Very little comment has been made in print about the significance of this radical departure. In her old age had Willa Cather played out her interest in the field where she had conquered her fame? Was she moving, very late, even farther into one to which even in the beginning she had given her loyalty? Many problems are involved, and the situation is complex.
The chief mention of the little that has been published is on page 190 of her friend Edith Lewis’s Willa Cather Living, a most sensitive book, which happily makes good some of our lacks because of the adamant fate that Willa Cather reserved for those of her letters and papers she did not herself destroy. Miss Lewis has chronicled the chief facts with care:
She had wanted for years to write an Avignon story. On her many journeys to the south of France, it was Avignon that left the deepest impression with her. The Papal Palace at Avignon—seen first when she was a girl—stirred her as no building in the world had ever done. In 1935 we were there together. One day, as we wandered through the great chambers of white, almost translucent stone, alone except for a guide, this young fellow suddenly stopped still in one of the rooms and began to sing, with a beautiful voice. It echoed down the corridors and under the arched ceilings like a great bell sounding—but sounding from some remote past; its vibrations seemed laden, weighted down with the passions of another age—cruelties, spleendours, lost and unimaginable to us in our time.
I have sometimes thought that Willa Cather wished to make her story like this song.
She had brought with her [on a journey in June 1941, six years before her death] to San Francisco Okey’s little history of Avignon; and she often spent her mornings on the open roof garden of the Fairmont, walking to and fro, and reading in this book. It was probably then that she planned the general outline of the Avignon story.
The manuscript, by Willa Cather’s direction, was destroyed after her death; and it is a heavy loss. It had been in her mind to succeed Sapphira and the Slave Girl, of 1940 (her last published work, except for the stories gathered together under the heading of The Old Beauty, which were issued posthumously in 1948); and although these last years became a period of illness and non-productivity, the story’s place at the terminus of the great swing of her development is critical. Did we not know of it by hearsay, the subject matter might never have been anticipated.
The dial needle, though, starts moving in this general direction from the earliest time. There had always been a great curiosity and interest about Europe, every part of it, even when Willa Cather had been merely an unusually active child, growing up freely on the Divide. Passage after passage in the Nebraska novels, taken autobiographically, makes this clear. Her first journey to the Old World, nevertheless, had come only in her twenty-ninth year, when she went abroad from Pittsburgh with her friend Isabelle McClung, in the summer of 1902.
In his Willa Cather, a Critical Biography, E. K. Brown has summarized its Provençal days most sympathetically (pages 103–4):
In September they journeyed to the south, into the warm land of Alphonse Daudet, where the mistral blew “more terrible than any wind that ever came up from Kansas.” Willa Cather drank in the warmth and color of the land and rejoiced in its people. The impressions of Provence garnered now were ineffaceable to the last. She rejoiced in the landscape, the history, the architecture, the food, the wine; she stayed at the hotel in the ancient Papal city of Avignon, which Henry James had affectionately praised in his travel writings. Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung were the only English-speaking people in the town; there seemed to be no other tourists and Willa Cather enjoyed saturating herself with the life and aspect of the place. Here on the bank of the Rhone the young woman from the Divide had found something that touched her more deeply than the metropolitan density of London or the luminous quality of Paris; a life rooted in the centuries—what she later had in mind when she spoke of the things that lie deep behind French history and French art. That art extended to the sense of well-being that comes from sun and light and artfully cooked food; it is reflected in Bishop Latour’s remark when he tastes the soup cooked by Father Vaillant: “… a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”
Later he tells us (page 269): “The story she was writing in the last years of her life was to express what Avignon, the Avignon of the popes, had meant to her over a period of forty years.” Its roots therefore grew deep; and rich living was to nourish them.
A decade later—but Willa Cather developed late, and slowly—presumably after the publication in 1912 of her first full-length, Jamesian tale, Alexander’s Bridge, and while O Pioneers!, her first novel of the soil, was still in manuscript, she even assured her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, as we are told in the latter’s Willa Cather, a Memoir (page 97), that “Some time … there would be a story with sharp clear definite lines like the country in which I then was [the South of France].” So we have an expressed intention, even at the beginning of a long and fertile career, which first would take her to very different regions. To use the classic expression of Sarah Orne Jewett, some story about Avignon had begun to tease her a full generation before she took it up in sober earnest.
To understand the powerful symbol for her work which Avignon became, with its overtone of religion and, above all, its particular expression of what to Willa Cather was true beauty, one must slowly follow the thread of her whole career. Patiently wound up, this will lead us through the labyrinth.
At the very beginning there is a major vacillation, which it took her a long while to work through. This came in the difficult Pittsburgh years (1896–1906), which Edith Lewis has judged, and no doubt rightly, to have been for a number of reasons among the hardest in her life. Too little considered had been her first book of short stories—in their original version—The Troll Garden, of 1905, which came exactly at the end of this period, and was its summation. A symmetrical pattern of alternation is so clear that, of the seven stories composing it, the first three odd-numbered are distinctly Jamesian, both in setting and delineation of character, while the three even ones were drawn with considerable courage and skill from her own bare world of the West. The seventh and concluding one, “Paul’s Case,” forms a separate and hybrid Pittsburgh epilogue. One could not ask for a better graphic representation of her differing experiments in the attempt to find her proper field.
The contents of the Jamesian first, third, and fifth stories of this book—“Flavia and Her Artists,” “The Garden Lodge,” and “The Marriage of Phaedra”—show that while she still was teaching high school in Pittsburgh, writing from Judge McClung’s house where she was a guest, she must have imagined it almost obligatory for herself to attempt tales of worldly people of high fashion whom she could not possibly have known at this time, people of established place and assured means, preoccupied almost wholly in a dissection of their own emotions. These were the chic puppets of the hour; but were everywhere taken quite seriously.
In the first story, she writes of a large house party in Tarrytown, high life in an eleborate setting, maids and valets, a conservatory, a smoking-room with Turkish hangings and “curious weapons on the wall.” The action of the second tale unrolls in “a place on the Sound,” with “a glorious garden.” It belongs to a man who when he married the heroine “had been for ten years a power in Wall Street.” There a new summer house seems planned chiefly for another house party. In “The Marriage of Phaedra,” set in London, we find people of title who come and go, casual mentions of Paris and Nice. Willa Cather seems determined to qualify as a sophisticate, although she has as yet come no farther from Red Cloud than Pittsburgh. Still, this was the fashion of the time; and as she devised them, these settings seemed proper even for popular consumption. “Society” in America was still enthroned by popular consent, nourished by general interest. We are in the period before it gave way to the romances of film stars; and its sins were told in every Sunday supplement.
Parenthetically, what is even more of a pure pastiche of Henry James exists. This is a story titled “Eleanor’s House,” published in McClure’s for 1907 (Vol. XXIX), soon after Willa Cather had joined that magazine in New York. Here her protagonists have such complete leisure and are depicted as so removed from the hard facts of life in “their own place on the Oise” that, although one man is actually mentioned as “at work in the library,” it is almost impossible to imagine what occupies him there. Such expatriate wraiths may want to “finish the summer in Switzerland” or even as a final touch be “very keen about going to America”—this from Willa Cather!—yet their behavior is altogether shadowy. Every description of the feel of a place, a stream, or a rampart brings her back to us; almost nothing else in this short story does.
In sharpest planned alternation with the tales, in The Troll Garden, of a life that even in the future never was to become her own, is the stark, tragic trilogy of the stories with a Western background. “A Wagner Matinée,” “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” and “A Death in the Desert” all three represent already the Willa Cather of the Nebraska Divide and the Southwest whom we familiarly know, looking the grim fates boldly in the eye, competently grasping with both hands the tragedies of human destiny. “Paul’s Case,” the last in the book, in which she is so sensitively aware of dim hungers, takes her hero from a Pittsburgh variant of this drab world into that other, into the muffled luxury of the hotels, the perfume of hothouse flowers, the music, of snow-covered, wintry New York. Yet Paul must pay for this so brief pleasure by taking his own life. The alternation of a pair of powerfully beaten and contrasting rhythms with a final coda is perfect.
Quite curiously, at her next stage of development the whole search for a proper field has to be gone through once again—this time in full scale. There is exactly the same contrast, both in setting and subject matter, between the worldly Alexander’s Bridge, of 1912, and the rustic O Pioneers!, of the following year. How Willa Cather judged that these together also made a single unit, and how she had labored in giving them birth, she makes clear in a pregnant little essay of self-revelation contributed as late as 1931 to Colophon Part 6. It was titled “My First Novels (There Were Two).”
Setting, however, as well as scale and depth, has now expanded. Alexander’s Bridge gives us clear and capable pictures of the Back Bay in Boston, which, through her friendship with Mrs. James T. Fields, of unsurpassable literary memories, she now knew at first hand. Indeed, in it we almost enter Mrs. Fields’s house, at the beginning of the book. There are also London scenes, no longer divined through others’ eyes, but become much less mysterious to her through her work and travel there for McClure’s. O Pioneers!, which is really a story of a Scandinavian farmer’s daughter’s love for Willa Cather’s own wild land, definitely wins the upper hand, of course. Thus her career is finally launched, to rise to glorious heights. Willa Cather was now forty years old; at last free to fulfill her destiny and consume herself in her work, as once she had dreamed.
This is not the place to explore in detail the development of her internal feeling for the Nebraskan or the Virginian scene, the two that by inheritance she could fairly call her own. Here also there was much fluctuation: young fear and repulsion only very gradually transformed by a prolonged metamorphosis into their opposites. Against the materialism of the aftercomers alone, the second generation, that lesser breed after the pioneers, was she to remain adamant in lifelong hostility. Here were enemies she moved to slay whenever she rediscovered them. So we can at this place, without losing the clue, pass beyond The Song of the Lark, of 1915, and My Ántonia, published three years later.
There followed Youth and the Bright Medusa, in 1920, a book of collected short stories, in which she turned for new material to four pieces (three already published in magazines) about artists and their struggles—thus often speaking for herself—while at the same time reissuing the three earlier Western stories, somewhat revised, and also adding “Paul’s Case,” from The Troll Garden. This last book had long been out of print, and was now fifteen years behind her. “The Diamond Mine,” “A Gold Slipper,” and “Scandal” all concern the stage and have American settings; “Coming, Aphrodite,” new—and thus used to begin the book—represents her first days in Greenwich Village. We have in all of them the American scene of their decade, with steamships and motor cars to match; and there are only as many fleeting references to Europe as needed.
The contemporary world is now hers in this neat packet, with all the variants that she felt had permanent interest for her. Jamesian or Whartonian subjects, it is to be noted, in which she had earlier tried to qualify, are now sternly omitted; and one field she never entered: the chronicling of society for itself. Indeed, the only part of the Metropolitan Opera House she will apparently never touch, in spite of her long preoccupation with singers and their lives, is its Diamond Horseshoe.
From this satisfactory time, recapitulation achieved, a further—and for our present purposes most interesting—development begins. She embarks on a war story, One of Ours, which will take both us and herself from the later Nebraska, where the best seems already departed, over to France. On this novel of transition she worked for no less than four years. As for her hero, so for herself it was “The Voyage of the Anchises” (the title of one of its books), which bore her away from a familiar land to another where the adventure of life was to begin afresh, more glorious and with other vicissitudes. One of Ours was also published in what we shall see became a critical year of her life, 1922.
The story of the novel progresses from the shallowness of a mechanized Nebraska, deeply ugly and frustrating to a sensitive and inarticulate boy, pathetic in his stubborn loyalty to ideals that he cannot even define, across the seas to France, where he finds the fullness of his life in wonder, only a little before the war ends it. Here Willa Cather shows rare skill. The evocation of the church of Saint Ouen, in Rouen, for example, the crimson and purple colors of its rose window, its grave and deep-toned bell—we are simply taken there; we see and hear as through the just-awakened senses of diffident—oh, so diffident—youth. And the nearest approach to a true love affair in the book, Claude’s meeting with Mademoiselle de Courcy—who represents so well the fineness of a tradition that even in Europe was to pass—how effectively this comes after the horror and trap of a completely loveless marriage, to a frigid and unseeing neighbor, back in Nebraska! There is a sureness amounting to divination as to what mattered, in the mature European point of view, and what did not. I do not believe that this sensitive juxtaposition of the American West with France, so fleeting and fragile, so quietly evocative of the highest loyalties of each, has yet been noticed for what it is.
The novel ends far away from where it began: with a grave in France for Claude, who “died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be.” Here Willa Cather is also surely speaking for herself.
A few sentences later, at the book’s close, she is impelled to the heights. “Perhaps it was as well to see that vision, and then to see no more.” Suddenly the mood becomes absolutely black: “One by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership, leave prematurely the world they have come back to. Airmen whose deeds were tales of wonder, officers whose names made the blood of youth beat faster, survivors of incredible dangers—one by one they quietly die by their own hand. Some do it in obscure lodging houses, some in their office, where they seem to be carrying on their business like other men. Some slip over a vessel’s side and disappear into the sea.” … “And they found,” she concludes, “they had hoped and believed too much.” The end of the war only clamped tighter upon American life the shackles of materialism which were for her a profanation and a torment. Her world had been so very near to a splendid liberation; and now it could lapse, slip back, into this!
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 title of this book is meant to be “arresting” only in the literal sense, like the signs put up for motorists: “ROAD UNDER REPAIR” etc. It means that the book will have little interest for people under forty years of age. The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years.…”
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:
| The Professor’s House | (1925) |
| My Mortal Enemy | (1926) |
| Death Comes for the Archbishop | (1927) |
| Shadows on the Rock | (1931) |
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.
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.
First of all, there is the problem of the years in which it occurred. Inside the back cover she has noted “Benedict XII” by name and also written out the years of his reign: “1334 to 1342.” She has also placed opposite this two references to the text, one to page 93, where one of his biographers describes him—he had been born Jacques Fournier, in the County of Foix, and first became a Cistercian monk—as “hard, obstinate, avaricious; he loved the good overmuch and hated the bad; he was remiss in granting favours, and negligent in providing for the services of the Church; more addicted to unseemly jests than to honest conversation; he was a mighty toper and ‘Bibamus papaliter—let us drink like a pope’—became a proverb in his day.”
On page 88, which she has further noted and even circled, we find this description: “Pope Benedict … was a big man and molto corpulento. He was a most holy man who never would give dispensation for marriage between kinsfolk, and was careful and diligent in searching the moral characters of all candidates for benefices, and many he examined himself. Non bolea ideote—he would have no illiterates—he went about seeking good and efficient clerics, and honoured them much because he found so few.” How clear it is that a man of this stamp would have drawn her interest!
Benedict XII, though, is not the only pope mentioned inside the back cover. Willa Cather there has also written down the year “1305”—merely the four ciphers; but she gives a reference for this date to page 44 of the text, where she has marked a sentence reading: “On June 5, 1305, after eleven months of obscure intrigue and patent discord, Raymond of Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected to the papal chair, and assumed the title of Clement V.” We now know that she definitely placed her story within the first half of the fourteenth century and in the reign of Benedict XII, but perhaps at one stage it was to have at least a start in this earlier time.
“Law” and “Prisons” are words that she has also noted in this place, both of them referring to the same page, 242. Here a corner is turned down, and on this and the pages following there are marks showing concentrated attention. On page 243 she notices and marks, among a list of punishments inflicted in 1328 and 1329—only a few years previous to the accession of Benedict XII—not one but two mentions of the tearing out of tongues, the first with red-hot pincers, the second for the crime of “swearing against the Virgin Mary.”
On the page following, 244, there are not less than two lines and two checks marked opposite part of the text giving the detail of crimes publicly denounced: “Promulgated by a papal government, they naturally begin with penalties against the denial of God, or of the Virgin Mary, or blaspheming against these or God’s saints, or profane swearing at play or in taverns or the public streets.…” Willa Cather has documented herself securely on the “hard punishments” of the time.
Next we come to the setting; and for this there is a whole series of markings, too detailed to be transcribed—but showing how she had made herself familiar with the whole complex fabric of the papal palace and the various stages of its building. She notices on page 20, with a double line, “the great stone conduit which drained the kitchen into the Sorgue.…” On page 223 she has put a check opposite a mention recording payment “for carving four apes of stone in human form to be placed … over the portal of the palace,” which we learn served as gargoyles. The creative process is feeling its way. Indeed, the whole of Okey’s Chapter XV, part of which was titled “Life in a Mediaeval City,” has been carefully worked over: it is much marked. One can see clearly how from a few suggestive sentences she brooded deep into her story.
The famous bridge across the Rhône apparently fascinated her. She first notices, with a checking on page 25, the community of Friars Hospitallers, founded “to establish ferriers, build bridges, and give hospitality to travellers along the rivers of Provence.” She checks heavily on this same page a sentence reading: “Now, since the Pont St. Benezet was the only stone bridge between Lyons and the sea, until the building of the Pont St. Esprit in 1309, the importance it conferred on Avignon may easily be conceived.”
The whole medieval town had become familiar. On page 305 she has especially marked the following description:
… a scene of incomparable beauty awaits us at the end of the shady walk that rises from the platform to the modern Promenade du Rocher des Doms. This, once the barren, wind-swept acropolis of Avignon which was crowned in papal times with the windmills and the forts,… and which in floodtime served as a cemetery, has been transformed into a delightful garden.… The view from the Belvedere over the Rhone and four departments of France is remarkable both for range and beauty. At our feet sweeps the broad majestic Rhone, hastening seaward per aver pace co’ seguaci sui, and embracing in its course the great island of la Bartl elasse with the remaining arches of the bridge, and the chapel of St. Nicholas; opposite are the hills and mountains of Languedoc, their nearer slopes, above poor dilapidated Villeneuve, fallen from her ancient splendour.… far in the background stands the square tower of Chateauneuf des Papes.
So this was the setting, familiar to her over many years, in which Willa Cather planned the encounter of her two boys: here there were space and breadth, distances of her own kind.
How she would have set about to make the region vivid, with all the charm of its trees and flowers—details in which she always took so much interest—is also certain. Earlier in the book, on page 5, a double line scores these sentences:
At Valence the dark cypress and her spire—that sentinel of the south—comes into view; the mulberry, the olive, the almond, the chestnut, the oleander, the myrtle, the ilex and the stone-pine, tell of sunnier skies. Even the common flowers of the north are transfigured under the magic of the bright, translucent sky.…
There is a very urgent marking on page 229—two lines with a check between—of the whole of the following paragraph:
Among the amenities of the old palace were the spacious and lovely gardens on the east, with their clipped hedges, avenues of trees, flowerbeds and covered and frescoed walls, all kept fresh and green by channels of water. John XXII maintained a menagerie of lions and other wild and strange beasts; stately peacocks swept proudly along the green swards, for the inventory of 1369 specifies seventeen peacocks, some old and some young, whereof six are white.
In one monastery garden, page 348, a “tall hedge of laurel ‘high as a pine tree’ ” is further noted. The pencil mark is proof of her admiration.
That events could be made gorgeous in a setting such as this is in no doubt; and there was apparently also no little meditation on medieval feasting and carousal. Much marked and checked is a long passage, pages 237–8, abbreviated below:
… The most striking example of lavish splendour is afforded by the State banquet given to Clement V by the Cardinals Arnaud de Palegrue and Pierre Taillefer in May 1308: Clement, as he descended from his litter, was received by his hosts and twenty chaplains, who conducted him to a chamber hung with richest tapestries from floor to ceiling; he trod on velvet carpet of triple pile; his state bed was draped with fine crimson velvet, lined with white ermine; the sheets of silk were embroidered with silver and gold. The table was served by four papal knights and twelve squires [this last word circled by Willa Cather in the text—could it have been a possible role for André?], who each received silver girdles and purses filled with gold from the hosts: fifty cardinals’ squires assisted them in serving the banquet, which consisted of nine courses of three plates each—twenty-seven dishes in all. The meats were built up in fantastic forms: castles, gigantic stags, boars, horses, etc.… Then followed a concert of sweetest music, and dessert was furnished by two trees—one of silver, bearing rare fruits of all kinds, and the other loaded with sugared fruit of many colours. Various wines were then served, whereupon the master cooks, with thirty assistants, executed dances before the guests.…
A triumphal entry in 1340, a solemn embassy from Alphonso the Brave, King of Portugal, and his ally Alphonso of Castile, is also given special notice. This date is repeated in Miss Cather’s hand on the margin of the passage, checked and scored, on page 89; and now we know that it was, effectively, the one determined upon for her story. “As the glittering pageant approached Avignon,” we read in Okey, “red-robed cardinals went forth to meet it; a solemn pontifical mass was celebrated by Benedict himself, who preached a fine sermon.…”
Thus the material accumulated and took shape in her mind, to furnish a rich backdrop for the simple tale Willa Cather obviously wished—perhaps even in very strong contrast—to place against this splendor. On page 236 there are marked sentences mentioning ermine and beaver, payments to Tuscany for silk, for brocade to Venice: “The richness of the papal utensils beggars description: jewelled cups, flagons of gold, knife handles of jasper and ivory, forks of mother-of-pearl and gold.…” There was plenty to choose from. She marks a passage on page 221 mentioning “chests and cupboards for the silver vessels and scarlet of our lord the pope.” A bell, also on this page, seems to have been of special interest, the “pontifical bell, which from its silvery tone was known as the cloche d’argent.” One recalls those in One of Ours and in Death Comes for the Archbishop. By her nature Willa Cather is conditioned to notice once more—here in medieval France—the objects that always had evoked most meaning.
She was not drawn, however, merely by descriptions of richness. On page 71 she has checked and underlined a mention of the no less than 65,000 letters relating to the reign of John XXII on the Vatican registers. The same underlining is found a little earlier, page 66, to notice the Pope’s marshall, “one Walsingham, an Englishman.” Thrice marked is this passage on page 239: “… amid all this luxury, strange defects of comfort appear to the modern sense. Windows, as we have seen [and Willa Cather has also put a mark opposite the previous mention earlier in the book, on page 218], were generally covered with waxed cloth or linen; carpets were rare, and rushes were strewn on the floors of most of the rooms.”
A last item, which nonetheless heads the seven tabulated inside the back cover, must not go unmentioned. It is cryptic, reading only “Toulouse 170.” If we turn to this page, which is also turned down at the corner, we find that it refers to the later reign of Pope Urban V (1362–70). The single sentence mentioning Toulouse states that this pope “loved learning, founded colleges and bursaries for poor students; he cared for the amenity of the services of the papal chapel, and sent a music master and seven boys to study music and singing at Toulouse.”
Might it just possibly be that this was one way in which Willa Cather could have made the unfinished story develop, later sending her younger boy away to another city—even helped by the mute—thus to fulfill himself in song? We have far too little evidence to present this as more than a mere possibility; but the fact that the name of this other city, across France, heads the list of her seven mentions may be significant.
A strong caution is needed at this point. Miss Lewis has written to the author mentioning “how little of the historical material [above] Miss Cather actually introduced in the story … few of her stories have been so completely démeublé. There was almost no description; two or three paragraphs about the Palace itself—as she felt it rather than as it appeared; half a dozen words about Benedict XII, as he rode down to meet Alfonso.… The only room she described at all was the roasting kitchen in the Palace. No costumes, no functions. And yet, she managed to give the feeling of the place and time—I suppose because she herself felt it all so strongly.”
So the technique of making the reader sense very much more than he is actually told—chiefly because it has been passed through the alembic of a powerful imagination, and there has been reduced to quintessence—this technique, one surmises, here was used by Willa Cather in the completest control of her great powers. To have taken everything possible in; but then calmly to cut most of it out: this is a procedure she had pressed to extremest use, as she herself has told us, even with the actual pounds of manuscript that she discarded from Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Here her subject was incomparably richer; and her scale was planned—as Miss Lewis recalls—to be merely that of a long nouvelle.
We have come a long distance indeed from the Willa Cather of her earlier years, from imitative experiment in the long ago—as in “Eleanor’s House”—and from the first attempts to find herself; to find, above all, in Dostoevsky’s phrase, who she was; and then to learn the secrets of her own art, her own creation.
At first one may see in this Avignon story many differences from the bulk of that earlier work. Certainly we are far from the windswept stretches of the Nebraska Divide, from nineteenth-century pioneers, the struggling farmers, the immigrant “hired girls.” No one here is caught in the ugliness and problems of the present; we are under other skies and in quite another place. Yet if one dwells with the subject for even a little while, one becomes aware that in this Avignon story there must have been far less difference from Willa Cather’s earlier work than might at first appear. The setting exists for an almost familiar group of circumstances. Far from entering a past where the ills of life have been mitigated and struggle washed away, pressures have only become more literal, the pains and penalties of living more direct. Religion, in this papal setting, seems also neither more nor less present than it has been for some time.
The title alone, Hard Punishments, affects a wonderful affiliation with past work. All of Willa Cather’s characters know suffering, know handicap, know the hardness of life. It was the only fundamental circumstance, apparently, that interested her and seemed real to her; and this may be one of the reasons why she never—without exception—in her mature work, dealt with those born rich and privileged, who in so many ways therefore had nothing to struggle for; or at least whose private goals, in a totally different living habit, were to her unknown territory.
If one goes back in retrospect, even Alexander, the bridge-builder of the first novel, is observed and selected by her because of the fatal punishment that was to overtake him. In that early time her philosophy was already direct enough: “Some get a bad hurt early and lose their courage; and some never get a fair wind,” says his old teacher, of the failures of life. It is all there thus at the beginning, even to the classical concision of her summary.
Ántonia’s lot was hard. So was that of Thea; so was Lucy Gayheart’s. Myra Henshawe’s fate was adamant. In their destinies Claude and the Professor finally move into the region of death, where Tom Outland has gone before them. The ancient people of the Southwest, ages before, had only known the lesson perhaps better. In The Song of the Lark, the brewer’s son discusses this with Thea: “… You mean the idea of standing up under things, don’t you, meeting catastrophe? No fussiness.” Willa Cather indeed knows what she herself means. In the Avignon story she in no way changed her course; indeed, she only reaffirmed it by giving to pain and suffering a simpler physical expression. Life without them would be impossible. “Old Mrs. Harris” states this definitively: “Everything that’s alive has got to suffer.” The law is as true in one time as in another.
So it seems as if, rather than shift from the only material she felt important, rather than move into the diminished lives of a younger—and, to her, petty—generation at home, Willa Cather remained true to her principles simply by abandoning America, the later America that she so castigated, as a setting. It was to bypass the morass of shallowness, to avoid a sense of decline, a pervading feeling of insignificance and triviality, that she moved her scene away; now we know with how little essential shift of interest. To capitalize on old success, to be static, or continue a familiar pattern, these were for her the fundamental impossibilities.
There is one change, however, that should be noted. Miss Lewis has thought that the action of the Avignon story might only have been meant to last for less than a year; and that its length was to be somewhat like that of My Mortal Enemy. In this setting of an expanded nouvelle, Willa Cather apparently wanted to deal with youth once more. We seem to have come through a tunnel, with the longer novels dealing with the end of life, with old age, its gloom and its decline. These, in retrospect, seem behind. It may be that here also, to quote a sentence in “Before Breakfast,” the short story written after 1942 and published after her death in The Old Beauty, she feels that “Plucky youth is more bracing than enduring age.” Certainly it is youth that Willa Cather is again considering; and almost certainly, in the end, youth triumphant. We thus come to our close on a fine, clear note, securely—though with transcendent compassion; even if the actual termination, as in Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” was destined never to be written.
This incomplete story, then, does show a progression beyond the last point reached in Willa Cather’s published work, beyond not only Sapphira and the Slave Girl, but also the two stories in the volume of The Old Beauty that stress the penalties of old age. As in the central story of that book, she has gone back to “The Best Years” once more. Enormous and mature power now long had been hers; there was indeed more to say, even in this setting, unthinkable at the beginning of her career. Life was being divined, strong situations created, even across the centuries. Essentially, however, the material has not changed. The problems were still those that had absorbed even her earliest characters; and these new ones set about to solve theirs in ways with which she now has made us familiar. Far from proving a refuge from the ills of the present, her new field reveals penalties only more intense than in the past, with greater challenge—but with response still adequate. From their own “hard punishments” her shadowy lads would undoubtedly have wrested the inner strength, one feels, that would have made them matches for their destiny. At the end, therefore, even in this unfinished story set in medieval Avignon, Willa Cather simply remains herself.