The Professor's House

I just read Willa Cather’s, The Professor’s House (1925), and from the little commentary I’ve looked at I think my reading differs from that of most.

            In the college town of Hamilton, on the banks of Lake Michigan, 52-year-old Professor Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter, author of Spanish Adventurers in North America, has just built a new house with the cash prize he got for the book. But he doesn’t like the new house and prefers to work in the cramped attic room of the old one, where his window has a view of the distant lake and the ceiling slants down to meet the floor.

            His son-in-law, Louie Marsellus, has just built a sumptuous house on the lake, calling the place “Outland” after Tom Outland, whose gas discovery, willed to his then fiancée Rosamond St. Peter, Louie has successfully promoted and appropriated, along with Rosamond herself, after Tom was killed in the war. They are as unlike Tom as possible, and glory in their material world.

            Tom Outland was St. Peter’s best student, a boy from the West who brought his own history with him. While herding cattle in New Mexico with a friend, Rodney Blake, Tom discovered that the blue mesa near their camp’s cabin held undiscovered cliff dwellings of ancient Indians who last crossed the difficult ford into the canyon below or walked the tiny precarious trail from the mesa top more than three hundred years ago. From the cliff’s huge arched caverns full of dwellings, a spectacular vista spread out of “box canyon below, and beyond into the wide valley.” The dwellings sat in natural excavations in the rock, and at the back of them the ceiling slanted down to meet the floor.

            I don’t want to suggest an equivalence between the professor’s house and the cliff dwellings, but the whole Western scene represents an unrealized dream for the professor, whose only trip to the West was with Tom, who unerringly traced the route described in Fray Garces’ old diary when teacher and student traveled there two years after Tom’s graduation. St. Peter’s Lake Michigan, as he describes it to French friends, is like a sea, but innocent, sheltering. The landscape of Tom’s Indians is beautiful, but its inhabitants are plundered then and now.

            Tom’s dream of preserving the cliff dwellings and their contents disappears when Rodney Blake sells all the artifacts to a German who takes them abroad. But the remains of the young woman Tom and Rodney found and named “Mother Eve” don’t want to leave her old cliff house for a new place. As Rodney explains, “She went to the bottom of Black Canyon and carried Hook’s best mule along with her. They had to make her box extra wide, and she crowded Jenny out an inch or so too far from the canyon wall.”

            The professor’s dream of somehow preserving the past and his own autonomy with it disappears when he is almost killed in his old room because a storm blows out his stove flame and also blows shut his one window while he sleeps. When he recovers he realizes he must join his family in earnest, since he long since has made his choices.