Willa Cather's Collected Stories

            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.