BOOKS
The American Sublime
BY RONALD BRYDEN rrOWARDS the end of A Lost Lady,* Mrs. For- rester, thin, rouged, smelling faintly of brandy but enchanting as ever, dons her long garnet earrings and tries once more to give a dinner-party of the kind which, in her husband the Captain's lifetime, made their house outside Sweet Water, Nebraska, a favourite place for their wealthy railroad friends—the men with whom the Captain had built the Burlington—to break their journeys from Chicago to the Coast. She invites out half a dozen young men from the town—bank clerks, clothing salesmen, estate surveyors—in the hope of teaching them some of the case and cultivation, the grace of living, of the world beyond their flat horizon of plains. Nervous, with oiled hair and hand-painted ties, the boys chew silently, listening to her wit, awkwardly sipping the last of the Captain's wine. 'What is it,' she whispers desperately to Niel, the
• one back from Harvard, who has known and loved her from boyhood. 'what is it they do to a little glass to make it look so vulgar?' And Niel reflects that she is like a great actress without fit audience; her husband's peers, the men who won the prairies, are dead or old, and from the Mississippi to the Rockies shrewd young men like these are dividing their conquest. 'Only the stage- hands were left to listen to her. All those who had shared in fine undertakings and bright occasions were gone.'
The passage sums up most of the reasons why it's not surprising that the attempt to revive Willa Cather should come from this side of the Atlantic. Long before she died in 1947, she and America had more or less turned their backs on each other. She was born too late: last and palest of the paleface disciples of Edith Wharton and James, she must have been one of the first people to declare, in Not Under Forty, that nothing since 1914 had greatly interested her.. In a sense, she had never recognised America. In a period when the rising young redskin' giants—Fitz- gerald, Faulkner, Hemingway—were proclaiming America's coming of age as a new culture and world power, she saw it still as a colonial wilder- ness, a scattering of tiny pockets of civilisation imported from England, Spain, Scandinavia, Bohemia. She had grown up in a European world, and with its breaking on the fields of Flanders she felt that America's roots had been cut off. Mournfully, she watched what she took to be its withering, ignoring the new generation shouldering past.
They were young men, fond of fights, bourbon, hunting and sex. She was a spinster, old enough to be their aunt : a large, round-faced blue- stocking from Nebraska in a shirtwaist and a sailor collar, who had taught herself to like wine. opera and Flaubert. Born when women did not smoke or discuss their bodies, she carried a kind of prudery into her writing, not merely about sexuality and violence, but about physical detail of any kind. Her theory of the 'novel demeuble,' stripped of its Victorian upholstery, matter strictly subordinate to ideas, amounted almost to
a prudery of statement itself. Art, she argued, is the choice of what can go unsaid; a 'writer's only 'creation' is what he manages to evoke without words. American readers excited by discovery of their own culture, by the Sears Roebuck cata- logue-realism of Dos Passos and Lewis, found her novels dry, wispy, generalised and distant, averted from noises, factories and smells. Almost, you could say, averted from the present: in the ultimate clerical betrayal, from fact itself.
But the final and worst charge against her was gentility. She introduced the snake of class into the American Eden; she brought the word vul- garity to a country where it had no meaning. In James and Edith Wharton it was a European word, from which Americans were, on the whole, exempt by their innocence. Daisy Miller might be ignorant, shallow and loud-spoken, but the word vulgar was irrelevant to her as to the animal kingdom. Willa Cather brought the accusing epithet home, staring down Main Street at the young men's shoes, lifting dusty prairie roofs to sniff at kitchen arrangements, sofa-covers, em- broidered mottoes, the choice of music open on the piano, with a cool, fatalistic distaste: this is the result of your melting-pot, the flavour and marrow boiled out of America's bone.
True, Willa Cather never outgrew smugness about her Virginian ancestry: the narrators of A Lost Lady and My Antonia are boys brought west, like her, by Southern parents, the only lads in town who learn Latin and appreciate poetry. True, she never shook off a provincial solemnity, acquired as one of the University of Nebraska's first women graduates, about 'things of the mind' and having books on the shelves. She never wholly shed the admirations of her years of ladies' journalism, for people who drank tea and cut French novels, for actors, opera stars, great hostesses. But the case for her is not a denial of this. It is recognition that she elevated it all into a serious, lifelong argument that societies must at every level care for merit as the Athenians did, or perish. And that she argued from a vision of America which still holds lasting value and magnificence.
Willa Cather would not have understood people who objected to the idea of refinement. It seemed to her obvious that all life, all civilisation, is a process of refining: from energy to order, from passion to form, from experiment to habit. romantic waste to classical simplicity. She saw life and history as an alchemy compressing all human qualities into durable gold. Her first successful novel, The Song of the Lark, is the story of a Scandinavian girl from Colorado who grows up to be a great Wagnerian soprano. It could be lamentable, a fairy-tale rescue of a European princess from the American dunghcap. Instead it is the story of how the girl's whole experience—the farm-childhood at home, the railroad songs, the furtive visits to the Mexican shanties across the tracks—are concentrated and transmuted into her art, into comprehension of the great Wagnerian myths. The raw material of
her prairie childhood has been coined-into wealth for the whole world.
The explorers and conquistadors stumbled in America on to the greatest treasure the world had known. Willa Cather came to believe that their successors, the gold-diggers and land- speculators, were squandering the wealth their forebears created, spending greedily what should have been refined and preserved. In A Lost Lady, Niel Herbert comes to recognise that what he valued in Mrs. Forrester was not her beauty, which other men could plunder and spoil, but a grace which came from a period she had outlived. She symbolises the achievements of the great pioneers: it was the Captain who had taken and formed her into a woman of dignity and graciousness, as he had civilised the wild red grass of the plains. He had made her into an icon of what he had conquered, an image in which his strength and the beauty he had tamed could be for ever available as richness and power: as civilisation.
An image of power and civilisation—that, Willa Cather believed, was what modern America needed, and needed to become. The Professor's liouse,f probably her finest novel, is about a historian at a Middle Western university who in middle age turns against his wife and daughters, who want to move him into a new house built on the wealth from an invention bequeathed the family by one of his students, killed in the war. The boy, Tom Outland, came from the South- West, where in a hollow mesa above the desert he had stumbled on an Indian cliff-city, the small, perfect monument of a vanished civilisation. His experience of this dead beauty had become a source of power to the boy, a power which, the Professor realises, Tom passed on to himself while he shared their home, enabling him to write his great history of the Spanish explorers. Now the old house itself seems an expression of those happy years, and to move, the Professor feels, is to cut himself off from the sustaining order of a life he has built and can never re-create. He cannot live without the power of such an order, the civilising power Toni found in his pueblo.
A civilisation, Willa Cather decided, transmits its power in its forms, its rituals, its legends. Her later novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, were attempts to turn the history of the early Catholic pioneers in America into imagery for an American legend. Her technique was the heroic simplification of the French painters she most admired. Millet and Puvis de Chavannes. and it is arguable that in them her mythopoeic tendency to reduce aft human complexity to legendary black and white verges upon mere immature sketchiness. Her late novels are most vulnerable to the charge levelled at all her work, that it is sexless, under-bodied, sublimated. Willa Cather would have seized at the last epithet. Surely, she would claim, assimilating Freud to the older nine- teenth-century idealism which bred them both, all worthwhile human achievement is sublima- tion : of experience into art, particular into uni- versal; sublimation of the commonplace into the sublime. The effort of her life was to create an American sublime, to elevate the landscape of America's huge plains and ranges, the achieve- ments of its history, into images of power and inspiration. In the present agonised American quest for identity and direction, perhaps her novels could refresh the national myth which, at European distance, still seems magnificent and truthful in them.
• By Willa Cather. Hamish Hamilton, 12s. 6d. ' fi Hamish Hamilton, I5s.
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