I became
interested enough to dig into the Cather archive at UNL and read some stories
not in this book, which collects all the stories that she herself collected for
book publication during her lifetime—five story collections. One story not in
this book that I’d recommend is “The Profile,” which reveals Cather’s fondness
for Henry James and also has a little tinge of the horror tale about it.
The only
story in the book that I was already familiar with was “The Sculptor’s
Funeral,” which was briefly on the syllabus of the Humanities course that used
to be required at Murray State—a course that David Earnest, Richard Steiger,
Terry Foreman and I planned, along with a few others. This story is worth the
read if only for the speech of the sculptor’s boyhood friend, the drunken
lawyer Jim Laird, to his fellow Sand City residents, excoriating their
meanness, venality, and complacent philistine membership in what Mencken called
the “Booboisie.”
At least
half these stories are about philistinism vs. art or vs. estheticism. They set
particular places that represent the provincial—imaginary like Sand City or
real like Pittsburgh or Cheyenne—against those places where art might be
expected to flourish—New York City, Boston, London, Paris. The true artist like
Harvey Merrick the sculptor escapes the provinciality of Sand City; Paul, not
an artist but a would-be esthete, escapes Pittsburgh to die in New York;
Georgiana Carpenter, a musician, is exiled from Boston to the frontier in
Nebraska, and her music goes silent for thirty years until “A Wagner Matinée.”
Katharine Gaylord, a singer, goes to the desert of Cheyenne to die. But in one
of Cather’s stories, “Flavia and Her Artists,” the philistines come off looking
better than the artists. Death is the revelator in quite a few of these
stories. A protégé learns about his mentor’s other life after the mentor’s
death, or an impending death provokes confessions, or there’s a dramatic death
within the story. Paul, by the way (I don’t think we get his last name) is in a
story called “Paul’s Case” that for a while, at least, was the only story
Cather would allow to be anthologized. I do not recommend it, but de gustibus
non est disputandum.
More detailed notes on the stories in the book:
“Flavia and Her Artists” is a
story that is Jamesian in some ways. Flavia Hamilton keeps a salon of artists,
writers, and intellectuals she herself is unable to appreciate. She invites a
cousin, Imogen, who as a young girl had a crush on Arthur Hamilton, Flavia’s
husband. Also present is another cousin of Flavia’s, the cynical Jemima
Broadwood. When one of Flavia’s artists, a writer named Roux, publishes a
scathing satire of Flavia a day or so after leaving the salon, the reactions of
Imogen, Jemima, and Arthur are nicely differentiated. Imogen wants to shield
both Hamiltons, but Arthur takes the paper from her, reads it, and burns it,
pronouncing Roux a scoundrel at dinner that evening, without alluding to the
satire. He apparently has no illusions about his wife. But Jemima says to
Imogen it was a pity he didn’t use the article to confront his wife with her
illusions about herself and her artists, not perceiving that in fact he loves
her with her illusions.
“The Garden Lodge,” where the
famous young tenor was accompanied by the lady of the house, is the place where
she finally mourns what would have been a wild romance, but then returns to her
familiar, repressed self.
McMaster, a fellow painter who
had never met Hugh Treffinger, visits his studio three years after his death,
becomes fascinated by his last, unfinished picture called The Marriage of Phaedra, and hangs around with the idea of writing
Treffinger’s biography. When he was dying, he clearly let it be known that he
did not wish the picture disposed of, but his widow pretends to have no
knowledge of this and is very eager to sell it quickly, perhaps to help with
finances when she marries the impecunious Captain Gresham. Does the painting
remind her too much of herself?
Paul, in “Paul’s Case,” despises
school, and, when he is suspended from school and his father cuts him off from
his outlets as usher at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall (where he imagines following
the lead singer into her hotel) and from his friend the actor, Paul steals a
thousand dollars from the business his father has apprenticed him to, goes to
New York, buys new clothes, checks into the Waldorf-Astoria, and spends a week
luxuriating, with nights on the town with a new friend. When he learns his
father has returned the money and is on his way to New York to find him, Paul
throws himself in front of a train. Paul’s aestheticism and isolation at least
hints at homosexuality.
In “A Wagner Matinée,” the
narrator, known only as Clark, learns that his aunt Georgiana is coming to
Boston. She taught him music and much else when he lived with her and her
husband and she was a prairie wife in Nebraska, exiled from a life of music in
Boston. She had eloped with a penniless youth and moved with him to the
frontier. Clark arranges for her to stay in his boarding house and plans an
afternoon of Wagner, little thinking that the music would break “a silence of
thirty years,” or how familiar she was with much of it. At the end of the
performance she says to him, “I don’t want to go, Clark,” and he realizes her
Nebraska exile from all this seems to her to lie just outside the concert hall.
In “The Sculptor’s Funeral,”
Harvey Merrick’s protégé accompanies his body back to Sand City, Nebraska for
burial and learns just what a stifling moral and esthetic wasteland the
sculptor had escaped.
“A Death in the Desert” deals
with the last days of Katharine Gaylord, a singer who was in love with Adriance
Hilgarde, a talented, charismatic, and already married composer. Everett
Hilgarde, Adriance’s younger brother, who is frequently mistaken for Adriance,
comes upon Katharine quite by chance when he visits Cheyenne. He had a crush on
her when he was a young man, and has never gotten over it. He stays with
Katharine until her death.
“The Enchanted Bluff” is that place where the
old gang always dreamed of going but never did; now one of their sons says he
wants to.
“Tom Outland’s Story,” which
became Book II of The Professor’s House,
is included in the last collection here, as well as an article about an
unfinished story.
Notes about stories not in the collection:
“The Burglar’s Christmas” is a
melodramatic early story in which a young man is unaware he is playing the
prodigal son when he inadvertently chooses his own family’s house to burgle.
In “The Namesake,” the sculptor
Hartwell narrates, Conrad’s Marlow-like, the story of his return to America to
encounter the remnants of his namesake uncle, who was killed in the Civil War.
“Nanette: An Aside” tells how
the diva Traddutori lets her dresser-companion Nanette, who sings in the
chorus, go for the sake of romance, though she more than envies the object of
the girl’s affection.
“On the Divide” is the story of
Canute Canuteson and his rough method of wooing and marrying his neighbor’s
daughter.
“The Profile” also reminded me
of James in the way the painter Dunlop (who paints his wife in profile so that
her disfiguring scar is not visible) theorizes how his wife must have been
protected by her parents from any mention of her scar, and how he hopes to find
his way into the intimate place where her own awareness of it is tucked away so
that someday they might perhaps speak of it.
