Story of the Week: Willa Cather

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Sunday, December 1, 2024

The Joy of Nelly Deane

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Explore the World of Willa Cather in Her Nebraska Hometown” (Jeff MacGregor, Smithsonian Magazine)

“At Last, Literary Pioneer Willa Cather Is Having a Moment” (Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Bookkeeper’s Wife,” Willa Cather
• “An Autumn Holiday,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “A Problem,” Henry James
• “A Visit to Avoyelles,” Kate Chopin

Buy the book

“I’m engaged, Peggy.” Illustration by Paul Julien Meylan (1882–1962) to accompany “The Joy of Nelly Deane” in the October 1911 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Half-tone plate engraved for the magazine by Charles Wesley Chadwick (1861–1940). Image courtesy of the Willa Cather Archive.

“I expect I shall have to go to London again in the spring, but I am hoping to get home next summer, and to run out for a little visit with you,” Willa Cather wrote from New York to her Aunt Franc in Bladen, Nebraska, at the beginning of 1910. “The one this summer was such a satisfactory visit. It was the first time I’ve really seen you for years. . . . There is no place in the world where I can be so happy or rest so well.” As it happened, Cather wouldn’t make it to London that year, and she didn’t return to Nebraska until the summer of 1912. In the meantime, she published a story, “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” that perhaps not coincidentally features a narrator returning from Europe to visit the western prairie town of Riverbend, “the only place that had ever really been home to me.”

Cather had spent the previous fifteen years writing stories for national magazines, but she had doubts about her own talent and had become dissatisfied with her fiction. “I wanted to write after the best style of Henry James—the foremost mind that ever applied itself to literature in America,” she told an interviewer in 1921. “I was dazzled. I was trying to work in a sophisticated medium and write about highly developed people whom I knew only superficially. . . . I had been trying to sing a song that did not lie in my voice.”

After Cather began working at McClure’s in 1906, she found herself overwhelmed with editorial responsibilities, and during her early years at the magazine she wrote and published a handful of soon-forgotten stories. “She still was playing the sedulous ape to Henry James in matters of style and technique, character, subject matter, and theme,” confirms Cather biographer James Woodress. Then, in March 1908, she met Annie Fields and her companion, Sarah Orne Jewett, the renowned author of the story cycles Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs. She visited the couple several times over the next few months, and Cather and Jewett corresponded during the following year. Three of Cather’s letters to Jewett have survived and the manuscripts are located among Jewett’s papers at Harvard. None of Jewett’s original letters to Cather are extant, however; we have only the edited (and probably abridged) texts of three of them because Fields published a selection of Jewett’s letters in 1911, two years after her death at the age of 59.

“The first three stories Cather wrote after meeting Jewett show the immediate impact of Jewett’s influence,” writes Sharon O’Brien, the editor of Library of America’s Willa Cather volumes. “Evidently, Cather’s receptivity to her mentor’s literary example grew along with their developing friendship.” Cather published the first story, “On the Gull’s Road,” in the pages of McClure’s soon after her stay in Boston. The narrator, an ambassador, recalls twenty years earlier when, returning from a diplomatic post in Genoa to New York, he fell in love with a fellow passenger, a dying woman in a loveless marriage to the ship’s engineer. Anticipating that Jewett wouldn’t care for the story, Cather appears not to have sent it to her; “I am afraid you won’t like it, dear Lady. The scent of the tube-rose seems to cling to it still,” Cather wrote in late October 1908, referring to the story’s romantic flourishes.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, one couldn’t hide a story in the pages of a magazine as popular as McClure’s, and Jewett soon came across “On the Gull’s Road” when she received her copy of the December issue. “With what deep happiness and recognition I have read the ‘McClure’ story,—night before last I found it with surprise and delight,” she wrote to Cather soon after the story appeared. “You have drawn your two figures of the wife and her husband with unerring touches and wonderful tenderness for her.” Yet Jewett gently if pointedly criticized Cather’s choice of narrator: “The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man’s character,—it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade. I think it is safer to write about him as you did about the others, and not try to be he! And you could almost have done it as yourself—a woman could love her in that same protecting way—a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other.” In a subsequent letter, Jewett expanded upon her remarks, and she urged Cather to leave the magazine and “find a quiet place” to focus on her writing; “your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience.”

Jewett had told Cather that virtually all the background for her own stories derived from her childhood memories of South Berwick, Maine, so Cather had assumed she was more likely to enjoy her next story. Along with the letter that made light of “Gulls’ Road,” Cather enclosed a draft of “The Enchanted Bluff,” a sketch about six Nebraskan boys on a camping trip. After one of the boys relates the legend of the lost tribe of the Enchanted Mesa, they all imagine visiting the storied butte in New Mexico as soon as they are free to do so as adults. “I somehow think [it] might interest you a little—because it is different from the things you knew when you were a child,” Cather wrote to Jewett. “I make bold to send this scorned tale (Mr. McClure says it is all introduction) and I pray you cast your eye upon it in some empty half hour. It is about a place a weary long way from South Berwick.” Although her employer, S. S. McClure, rejected it for the magazine, the editor of Harper’s accepted it only weeks later and it appeared in the April 1909 issue.

We do not know if Jewett read the story or otherwise responded before she suffered a debilitating stroke in March; she died in June. During this period, Cather finished a third story, which was accepted by Century magazine that summer, and it would seem she had written it with her mentor very much in mind. “The Joy of Nelly Deane” notably features a first-person female narrator—something of a rarity in Cather’s oeuvre. In several ways, O’Brien points out, the story “shows the impact of Jewett’s legacy: not only does Cather dispense with her Jamesian voice in returning to Nebraska subject matter, but she also envisions creative power as female; the story’s heroine Nelly is a gifted singer. Jewett’s harmonious uniting of ‘woman’ and ‘writer’ in her life and work had helped Cather to integrate these seemingly opposed identities, and this reconciliation gave her new confidence and direction as a writer.”

Two years later, in May 1911, Cather visited Fields in Boston and spent a week surrounded by Jewett’s books and possessions. The following month she stayed with Jewett’s sister, Mary, at the family residence in Maine, where she sat at her mentor’s old desk and wrote letters to friends. Cather had not written a single work of fiction since Jewett’s death, but she had just quit her full-time job at McClure’s and would soon begin work on her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. "I often recall what Sarah Orne Jewett said to me many years ago,” Cather later told a reporter in Nebraska. "Miss Jewett said a knowledge of the world was needed in order to understand the parish. When in big cities or other lands, I have sometimes found types and conditions which particularly interested me, and then after returning to Nebraska, discovered the same types right at home, only I had not recognized their special value until seen thru another environment.”

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In late August 1910, after The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine had accepted the story for publication, Cather wrote to the editor, Robert Underwood Johnson: “Would you be kind enough to change the title of the story which I recently shortened for you? The story never really had a name, and I think it was called ‘Nellie Deane,’ or ‘The Story of Nellie Dean’ provisionally. I think ‘The Flower in the Grass’ would be a good title for it. That is really the idea of the story; a beautiful girl hidden away in the prairie country where nobody ever saw her.” It is not known if there was a subsequent exchange about the story’s title; it appeared more than a year later, in the October 1911 issue, as “The Joy of Nelly Deane.”

Notes: The town’s performance of “Queen Esther” is of the early eighteenth-century oratorio by George Frederick Handel, Esther. “There is a Green Hill Far Away” is a hymn written in 1848 by Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Frances Alexander and sung to tunes by various composers. First published in 1874, “The Ninety and Nine” is a hymn by American gospel singer Ira Sankey, adapted from the poem “The Lost Sheep” (1868) by Scottish lyricist Elizabeth Clephane, based on the parable told in Matthew 18:10–14. Commonly known as “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” “Are You Washed in the Blood?” was published in 1878 by Presbyterian minister Elisha Hoffman. The translated quote about the merchants of Caesar is from Book I of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. Cather’s narrator, Margaret, compares the relationship between Nelly Deane and Scott Spinny to Jean de La Fontaine’s fable “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” in which the grasshopper spends the summer singing while the toiling ant piles up supplies for winter. Isinglass is a thin, transparent sheet of mica, or muscovite, commonly used for the side panels of wood stoves in the 1800s.

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Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of "Queen Esther," and we had for the moment got rid of our three patient dressers, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Sunday, December 3, 2023

The Sentimentality of William Tavener

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Explore the World of Willa Cather in Her Nebraska Hometown” (Jeff MacGregor, Smithsonian Magazine)

“Never-Ending Nostalgia: Who and What Inspired Willa Cather” (Benjamin Taylor, LitHub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Peter,” Willa Cather
• “The Circus at Denby,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “Bill of Fare on the Plains,” Annie D. Tallent

Buy the book

“The Big Show of the World: Sells Brothers / Enormous United Shows.” The type at the top right corner reads: “Correct interior view of the great five continent menagerie prominently displaying the three dominant features: the pair of hippopotami, the school of Arctic seals and sea lions, and the flock of African ostriches which cannot be duplicated by any other travelling exhibition.” Poster printed by Strobridge Lith. Co., Cincinnati, 1895. (Library of Congress)
Founded in Ohio in the 1870s, Sells Brothers quickly became one of the nation’s largest circuses; by the mid-1880s, the company travelled to most major railroad stops throughout a region that included Nebraska and Kansas.

In 1899, Wisconsin-born Hamlin Garland, who had spent most of his early years living with his family on homesteads in South Dakota and Iowa, published Boy Life on the Prairie, a collection of semi-autobiographical sketches about rural life. In one chapter, he described the importance each summer of the traveling circus:

No one but a country boy can rightly measure the majesty and allurement of a circus. To go from the lonely prairie or the dusty corn-field and come face to face with the “amazing aggregation of world-wide wonders” was like enduring the visions of the Apocalypse. From the moment the advance man flung a handful of gorgeous bills over the corn-field fence, to the golden morning of the glorious day, the boys speculated and argued and dreamed of the glorious “pageant of knights and ladies, glittering chariots, stately elephants, and savage tigers,” which wound its way down the long yellow posters, a glittering river of Elysian splendors, emptying itself into the tent, which housed the “World’s Congress of Wonders.”

“The boy whose father refused to take him wept with no loss of dignity in the eyes of his fellows,” Garland recalled. “He could even swear in his disappointment and be excused for it.”

The year after the book appeared, Willa Cather published “The Sentimentality of William Tavener” in The Library, a new Pittsburgh literary magazine that employed her as a staff writer and editor. Her short story opens with the distress exhibited by the sons of a farmer who has denied them permission to take a day off from their farm chores to go to the circus.

The timing may well be a coincidence; circuses featured frequently in stories and novels of the era. Indeed, there is no way to confirm that Cather was inspired to write her story by Garland’s chapter on circuses or, for that matter, that she had even yet read it—although she clearly kept up with his work. Five years earlier, in 1895, she mockingly panned a “love story” by the editor of the Lincoln Courier and joked that she felt obliged to read it because any local tale might prove to be “the forerunner of many valuable additions to Mr. Hamlin Garland’s western school of literature.”

Cather was referring to Garland’s series of influential essays, which were collected the previous year in book form as Crumbling Idols. Garland advocated for a ”new school” of literary realism “true to the scenes and the people we love” in “the interior of America,” but he antagonized many in the literary world by inveighing against the dominance of tradition-bound publishers, editors, and critics in New York and Boston: “By what right do you of the conservative East assume to be final judges of American literature?” Although Garland continued to write about farm life and the American West, in 1902 he surrendered to the realities of the marketplace and, in order to work more closely with his editors and publishers, began spending much of each year in New York City, where he stayed until 1930. Cather, too, moved to New York in 1906 and lived there for the rest of her life. (Garland and Cather apparently did not meet each other until 1919 or 1920.)

Several scholars and critics have noted how some of Cather’s early stories resemble Garland’s tales and sketches; biographer James Woodress refers to her apprentice work about prairie life, including “The Sentimentality of William Tavener,” as written in “her Hamlin Garland manner.” Yet Mildred R. Bennett, author of The World of Willa Cather, contends that the Tavener story stands out: “its economical, low-keyed narrative style distinctly suggests the author’s later manner.” Marilyn Arnold, in her book about Cather’s short fiction, agrees: “Cather’s growing sense of how much to say and how much to leave unsaid, her increasing skill at delineating a character with one stroke, her almost uncanny ability to define a relationship with a single apt observation, and her marvelous feeling for low-keyed humor are evident.”

Some scholars have also asserted that the story is autobiographical and have pointed to Woodress’s reference to its “rather skillful use of what must have been a family story.” Although the story certainly has autobiographical elements, Woodress didn’t provide any evidence to support his supposition. Like the Taveners, Cather’s parents migrated from the Shenandoah Valley, and perhaps they both went to a circus before they were married. Yet, just as certainly, the story does not depict Cather’s immediate family. Her father, Charles Cather, didn’t last long as a Plains farmer; he sold out after a mere eighteen months in Nebraska and moved his family to Red Cloud in 1884. Futhermore, only two of Willa’s four brothers had been born, and they turned four and seven years old that year—hardly old enough to be the farmhands described in the story. While there were plenty of farms in the region that were homes to children working long days without end, deprived of festivities, the Cathers could not count themselves among them. In August 1888, after Willa had been living in Red Cloud for four years, she wrote to a friend: “We children have a great many picnics, parties & circus’ this summer.”

Notes: “The Sentimentality of William Tavener” is the only work by Willa Cather that is set in both Virginia, where she was born, and Nebraska, where she lived after she was nine years old. The Taveners’ farm, however. is in McPherson County, which is 200 miles northwest of the Cather home in Red Cloud. Like the Cathers, William and Hester Tavener migrated from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Back Creek runs ten miles to the west of the city of Winchester, and Romney is 30 miles further, West Virginia. Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, takes place in this same region in Virginia.

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It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of living in the West, and Hester undoubtedly was that. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Sunday, January 22, 2023

The Bookkeeper’s Wife

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Video: “Yours, Willa Cather” (Nebraska Public Media)

“10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Willa Cather” (Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, Publishers Weekly)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Gold Slipper,” Willa Cather
• “An Unfinished Story,” O. Henry
• “Miss McEnders,” Kate Chopin
• “Is Woman’s Suffrage a Failure?,” Ida M. Tarbell

Buy the book

Hand-colored photograph, c. 1905–1910, from one of a series of postcards issued by Metropolitan Life to advertise its services. The caption reads “Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.’s Home Office Bldg. N.Y. City. Glimpse of the Filing Section. The largest outfit of steel filing cases in the world.” (Image from eBay)

In October 1917 Willa Cather made tentative arrangements with Century magazine to publish a thematically linked series of short stories, and she sent a letter about the matter to Ferris Greenslet, her editor at Houghton Mifflin.

The Century people begin the series “Office Wives” in January. They want the book rights also. I don’t imagine you will mind, as there is not much money in a book of short stories, and this series would not be ready for book publication until next fall. I told [Century editor Douglas Zabriskie Doty] I thought they could have the book all right, but I did not absolutely promise. At least, I don't think I did.

The stories would be ostensibly informed by Cather’s firsthand experiences in the business world. She had worked as an editor, columnist, and occasional business manager at Home Monthly in Pittsburgh; as the telegraph desk reporter and headline writer for the Pittsburg Leader, a daily newspaper; and, most significantly, as a staff member from 1906 to 1912 at McClure’s magazine, where she became the managing editor.

By the time she began working at McClure’s, Cather had published some three dozen stories (most of which would never be collected or reprinted in her lifetime), a book of poetry (she later destroyed all the copies she could get her hands on), and The Troll Garden, a collection of seven short stories that had impressed, among others, Sarah Orne Jewett. She had not yet finished a novel and, in December 1908, Jewett warned Cather, in a letter often quoted by biographers, that her writing career was “being hindered by such incessant, important, responsible work as you have in your hands now.” Cather’s background—her “Nebraska life, a child’s Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the ‘Bohemia’ of newspaper and magazine-office life”—were “uncommon equipment” for a writer, and Jewett urged Cather to leave her job and turn those experiences into the stuff of literature.

Cather had been hired after Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and several other prominent staff members had walked out on publisher Samuel McClure, and she responded to Jewett:

What Mr. McClure wants is to make me into as good an imitation of Miss Tarbell as he can. He wants me to write articles on popular science, so called, (and other things) for half of each week, and attend to the office work in the other half. That combination would be quite possible—and, I fear, perfectly deadening. He wants, above all things, good, clear-cut journalism. The which I do not despise, but I get nothing to breathe out of it and no satisfaction.

Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing stories, that I am a good executive and I had better let it go at that. I sometimes, indeed I very often think that he is right.

Although the job kept her from writing fiction—Cather managed to finish only half a dozen stories while she was at McClure’s—another three years went by before she took Jewett’s advice, left the magazine, and became a full-time author, publishing her first four novels between 1912 and 1918. Nevertheless, her experiences as an editor doubtlessly improved both her writing and her confidence, not to mention her connections in the publishing world. “It is not nothing for a woman from the provinces in the West to exert power in the literary circles of the East,” writes Ellen Gruber Garvey in an essay about Cather’s magazine work. “Cather figured out what she liked and wanted to develop in her own writing by considering what she didn’t like in other people’s writing; she learned eventually to avoid the stock characters and visible plotting of much magazine fiction (and her own early fiction), while still absorbing what did occasionally appeal to her.”

Later in the decade, when she was between novels, Cather revisited Jewett’s suggestion to transform the “Bohemia” of the business world into fiction. In 1916, Century published “The Bookkeeper’s Wife,” her first story about the dynamic between women and men in the workplace. She then submitted two stories, “Ardessa” and “Little Annie,” for the proposed “Office Wives” series. Doty paid $350 for “Ardessa” but declined the other tale, telling Cather’s agent that it was too depressing to publish during the war. (It was accepted a year later by H. L. Mencken and published as “Her Boss” in The Smart Set.) The rough draft for a fourth story, “Explosives,” was submitted to Century but never appeared; the manuscript is lost and all we have is its rather suggestive title. Cather then gave up on the series; Woodress speculates that she was simply too busy finishing her next novel, My Ántonia, to give “Office Wives” the attention it deserved, but her enthusiasm for the collection may well have been tempered by the tepid reception of the last two stories.

The very title for the series, “Office Wives,” seems to have been a subtle act of provocation; of the five working women featured in Cather’s three stories—stenographers, typists, clerical workers—only Stella Bixby, “the bookkeeper's wife,” is married. (It would be another decade before Faith Baldwin’s best-selling novel The Office Wife and its mildly scandalous pre-Code movie adaptation popularized the term.) Cather explores the ways in which working women and their male supervisors mirror, in a distorted fashion, the domestic arrangements between wives and husbands. Ardessa, for example, is “like a sultan’s bride” in her exalted position as secretary to a magazine editor; when she is demoted and transferred to a new department, she becomes a “bartered bride.” The stories depict how the freedom and independence available to women in the workplace are still limited by their dependence on and subservience to men. “Through these female characters, Cather avoids the formulaic fantasy of popular stories of New Women and instead presents a realistic portrait of many an urban working woman’s experience,” writes Amber Harris Leichner in an article for Cather Studies. “Ultimately, Cather’s office stories are pessimistic about clerical work as a means for urban women to accomplish something more individually meaningful than an economic independence that may prove temporary.”

Notes: A Floradora pompadour is the hairstyle of the six “Floradora Girls” featured in the popular musical comedy Floradora (1899) by Leslie Stuart and Owen Hall. First performed in England, it opened in New York on November 10, 1900, ran for more than 500 performances, and was frequently revived.

For more on Cather’s relationship with S. S. McClure and her employment at his magazine, see the introduction to “The Enchanted Bluff,” a previous Story of the Week selection.

* * *

Nobody but the janitor was stirring about the offices of the Remsen Paper Company, and still Percy Bixby sat at his desk, crouched on his high stool and staring out at the tops of the tall buildings flushed with the winter sunset, at the hundreds of windows, so many rectangles of white electric light, flashing against the broad waves of violet that ebbed across the sky. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Paul’s Case

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Interesting Links
Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh: An Interactive Walking Tour (Penn State)

Educator Resources for “Paul’s Case” (Willa Cather Center)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Gold Slipper,” Willa Cather
• “Benediction,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Some Like Them Cold,” Ring Lardner

Buy the book

“After a while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself.” Above: Rio San Trovaso, Venice, 1903, oil on canvas by Spanish landscape painter Martin Rico y Ortega. Image via Meadows Museum, Dallas.

The Martin Rico painting that the protagonist of “Paul’s Case” would have seen at the Carnegie was San Trovaso, an earlier (and vertical) rendering of the above scene from a slightly different angle. Purchased by the museum in 1897 and now in a private collection, the earlier painting was described by Cather in a 1900 review of Carnegie’s gallery: “Among these graver performances, one comes upon a bit of Venice done by gay Master Rico, San Trovaso, on a sunny morning. A very blue sky, a silvery canal, white and red houses, bridges and gay gondolas, and in the foreground the dear Lombard poplar, the gayest and saddest of trees, rustling green and silver in the sunlight.”

During her lifetime, Willa Cather’s most famous short story was almost certainly “Paul’s Case,” and for many years it was the only work of fiction she allowed to be anthologized. In 1944 she wrote to John S. Phillipson, a young fan who years later became the founding editor of The Thomas Wolfe Review:

You ask me about “Paul’s Case,” I once had in my latin class a nervous, jerky boy who was always trying to make himself “interesting,” and to prove that he had special recognition and special favours from members of a stock company then playing in the town theater. You will recognize one part of Paul. The other part of Paul is simply the feeling I myself had about New York City and the old Waldorf Astoria (not the horrid structure which now stands on Park Avenue), when I first left college and was teaching latin in the Pittsburgh High School. I used to come to New York occasionally then, and that is the way the City seemed to me.

“In many ways Paul is a male version of Willa Cather,” writes Sharon O’Brien in Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. “In addition to the adolescent rebellion, she grants him her love for music and theater; her distaste for the mundane and the conventional; and her repudiation of the expected gender role.”

Cather had been working as an editor and arts critic in Pittsburgh for six years (and teaching Latin for fifteen months) when the scandal that inspired the story’s plot dominated the headlines of the city’s newspapers. In November 1902 the nineteen-year-old son of a prominent minister, who worked as a clerk for the Denny Estate, robbed the office safe of nearly two thousand dollars, fled to Chicago with his younger cousin, and checked into one of the most expensive hotels. The teenagers lived ostentatiously during the next two weeks, spending much of the money on clothes, jewelry, sightseeing, fine dining, and nightlife before they were arrested in Milwaukee and returned to Pittsburgh. Their fathers reimbursed the Denny Estate for the theft, and the charges were dropped. According to the Pittsburgh Leader, the minister’s son just wanted “to know how it would feel to have enough money to have just as good a time as any boy would care about having.”

Yet “Paul’s Case” is far more complex and subtle than a mere retelling of adolescent crime through the lens of autobiography. It is about a “very American dream, the romance of money,” as Cather scholar Loretta Wasserman puts it; in Cather’s words, Paul learns “that money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted.” The lack of autonomy that wealth could provide condemns Paul to a boring, sterile future. “Paul’s Case,” like all of Cather’s stories set in Pittsburgh, is “about the opposition between aesthetic aspirations and individualism, and the crushing, unimaginative orthodoxy of the bourgeois business world,” writes biographer Hermione Lee.

The story also deals with the ever-present struggle between morality and aesthetics. “All Pittsburgh is divided into two parts, Presbyteria and Bohemia, and the former is much the larger and more influential kingdom of the two,” Cather wrote in 1897 in a series of articles sent back home for publication in the Nebraska State Journal. The kingdom of Presbyteria “objects to enjoyment of all kinds, particularly aesthetic enjoyment”—but, as Cather made clear the previous year, she didn’t think all that much of Bohemia, either. “Bohemia is pre-eminently the kingdom of failure,” she wrote in a review of Henri Murger’s The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, the book that helped popularize the word. “For a young man it may be a temporary abiding place whose skies are not altogether hopeless. . . . But an old man who is still hanging about the outskirts of Bohemia is a symbol of the most pitiful failure on earth.” And of all the “old men” loitering around Bohemia, the one to whom she most objected seems to have been Oscar Wilde.

In reviews and essays published in the mid-1890s, when Cather was barely twenty, she lambasted the carnation-wearing Irish “buffoon.” In one article, she praised Robert Hichens’s parody Green Carnations, “It turns and twists those absurd mannerisms and phrases of Wilde’s until they appear as ridiculous as they really are. . . . The affectation poisons his style, his vigor, and his whole personality. He loses not only his art but his manhood.” After Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecency” in 1895, she condemned him afresh: “I am not speaking of his crimes against society, which all men know. I am speaking of his crimes against literature.” In yet another column, she wrote, “We will have no more such plays as Lady Windermere's Fan, no more such stories as The Picture of Dorian Gray. We can do without them. They were full of insanity.” Yet, forty years later, when she wrote a new preface for The Song of the Lark, she acknowledged her novel’s echoes of the very book she had dismissed when she was a young author: “The life of nearly every artist who succeeds in the true sense (succeeds in delivering himself completely to his art) is more or less like Wilde's story, The Portrait [sic] of Dorian Gray.”

When Cather began to write “Paul’s Case” during the winter of 1902–03, Wilde had been dead for two years, and her sympathetic portrayal of the title character hints that her urban life in Pittsburgh, her friends in music and theater, and her own conflicted sexuality may have already softened her attitudes toward both Wilde and Bohemia. In the story, Cather introduces Paul as a “suave” student whose very mannerisms were considered “peculiarly offensive in a boy,” noting that “there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole”—evoking Wilde’s ubiquitous green carnation. Because of these passages and many others, the question of whether Paul may have been, in Cather’s imagination, a closeted gay teenager has permeated discussions of the story for the past four decades. Her decision to remain vague on the subject would have been in keeping not only with the mores of her time (not to mention the demands of any respectable publisher) but also with her steady belief that “literalness” is less effective in literature, as she explained in her 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé”:

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

Notes: Jean-François Raffaëlli was a French realist painter and sculptor; at the time of the story, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh owned at least two of his Paris street scenes, including Boulevard des Italians, Paris. Cather mentions three operas: Faust (1859) by Charles Gounod; Martha (1847) by Friedrich von Flotow; and Rigoletto (1851) by Giuseppe Verdi. The Blue Danube is a waltz composed in 1867 by Johann Strauss II.

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It was Paul’s afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh High School to account for his various misdemeanours. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Saturday, June 8, 2019

“A Death in the Desert”

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Interesting Links
Ethelbert Nevin Historical Marker (ExplorePaHistory.com)

“A Great Novelist Finds Her Voice in Pittsburgh” (Rick Sebak, Pittsburgh Magazine)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Garden Lodge,” Willa Cather
• “The Fulness of Life,” Edith Wharton
• “Fly Away, Breath,” Wendell Berry

Buy the book

“Union Pacific Tracks, Depot and Park, Cheyenne, Wyoming,” c. 1908–10, hand-colored photographic postcard printed by Curt Teich & Co. and sold by Barkalow Bros., a cigar and news shop in Cheyenne. Cather’s story opens and closes in 1893 in the train station, which was built in 1886–87. Image courtesy of The Henry Ford.

During her second year in Pittsburgh, in 1897, twenty-three-year-old Willa Cather took a job working at the telegraph desk of The Pittsburg Leader, one of the city’s several newspapers. She also wrote theater reviews and within a month she began a “Books and Magazines” column. “I have met some very interesting people this year,” she boasted in a letter sent to a friend back in Nebraska. She name-dropped the novelists Anthony Hope (of Prisoner of Zenda fame) and F. Marion Crawford (“a terrible snob”), the actor William H. Crane, and the Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, among others.

One new acquaintance, though, was “prince and king of them all.” Only thirty-five years old, Ethelbert Nevin was one of the most famous American composers of his time, as well as a member of the family that owned and managed the Leader. He was known for such songs as “Narcissus” and “The Rosary”; the sheet music for the latter sold over two and a half million copies. Shortly before he died he composed the music for “Mighty Lak’ a Rose,” which was a favorite among Tin Pan Alley singers. Although not well known today, his songs were performed and recorded by such vocalists as Geraldine Farrar, Paul Robeson, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and Nina Simone, and his image appeared on a 1940 U.S. postage stamp in the “Famous Americans” series.

Cather was starstruck. “He went shopping with me this afternoon and carried my bundles and got me a bunch of violets as big as a young moon,” she told her friend. “He is about the most loveable man I have ever met,” she said in a later letter before admitting, “you'll think I am a matinee girl sure enough.” Two days after Nevin was hauling her sundries Cather attended his homecoming concert and sent back to the Lincoln Courier in Nebraska an article that combined a review of the concert with a profile and interview of the artist. By the end of year Cather had become a good friend of both Nevin and his wife.

Cather described Nevin even more intimately in a profile for the November 1900 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal:

The man is both retiring and uncertain, and it would take a globe-trotter to keep track of his whereabouts. When he is not in Paris, or Venice, or Berlin, or New York, he is usually to be found at "Vineacre," the family mansion, at Edgeworth, Pennsylvania, a little village on the banks of the Ohio. . . .

Temperamentally Mr. Nevin is much the same blending of the blithe and the triste that gives his music its peculiar quality, now exultantly gay, now sunk in melancholy, as whimsical and capricious as April weather. . . . He is not in any sense a recluse, and though crowds annoy him and social functions exhaust him he is peculiarly dependent upon the society of his friends, and can work best in the company of his wife and children.

She noted in passing that “he is often ill,” mostly from overwork and lack of sleep (she left unmentioned his occasional bouts of heavy drinking). Nevertheless, his friends and family were shocked when he died in New Haven after a brief, unspecified illness barely four months after Cather’s article appeared

Cather was devastated. “I know that I shall never feel that youthful and genuine enthusiasm for any one or for anyone’s work again,” she wrote in a letter to his widow, “and I feel as though my own youth had died with the man who, even when I did not know him, meant so very much to it.” Some of the phrases and metaphors Cather used in the letter would appear in at least two poems inspired by Nevin’s death, and his life and career would also provide the inspiration for the character of Adriance Hilgarde in the 1903 story “‘A Death in the Desert.’”

Cather may have written the story too soon; she later criticized it for being too obviously the work of a young writer and particularly for its flabbiness and sentimentality. When “‘A Death in the Desert’” first appeared in Scribner’s, it was 10,000 words long; two years later she cut a thousand words before including it in her collection The Troll Garden. She cut it even further, to 7,100 words, for the final version in her 1920 collection Youth and the Bright Medusa. “I cannot imagine an exercise which would be of more use to a young writer,” wrote the novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher in a review, than to “compare it line by line with the original version.” Cather showed the touch of a master who could “smooth away crudeness without rooting out the life.” For our Story of the Week selection, then, we present that third, pared-down version of Cather’s story.

Notes: The story’s title is from a Robert Browning poem concerning the death of John the Apostle in the desert near Ephesus. The Exposition at Chicago refers to the World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, held in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage. Camille is the doomed, consumptive heroine of La Dame aux Camélias, written as both a novel and a play by Alexandre Dumas fil. A statue of the Greek goddess Diana stood atop the tower of Madison Square Garden from 1892 to 1925. Das Rheingold is one of the four operas that make up Richard Wagners Ring cycle. The “thing Keats called Hell” refers to a statement in his preface to Endymion that there “is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.” The line “and in the book we read no more that night,” from Dante’s Inferno, is Francesca da Rimini’s description of the beginning of her adulterous affair. The three-line excerpt at the bottom of page 527 is Brutus’s farewell to Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, spoken shortly before his suicide and Cassius’s death. “Her Gott . . . lieber Freund” translates as “Lord God . . . dear friend.”

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Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle was looking at him intently. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Friday, July 20, 2018

Roll Call on the Prairies

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It

Interesting Links

“Discovering Grosvenor Phillips Cather” (Keith Muchowski, The Strawfoot)

“The Food Administration of Herbert Hoover and American Voluntarism in the First World War” (John Allen, Germina Veris)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Writing a War Story,” Edith Wharton
• “Heroes,” Ellen N. La Motte

Buy the book

World War I and America: Told By the Americans Who Lived It
127 selections by nearly ninety soldiers, airmen, nurses, diplomats, statesmen, political activists, journalists, and others • 987 pages

Left: World War I poster for the U.S. School Garden Army, an initiative by the Bureau of Education (with support from Food Administrator Herbert Hoover) encouraging children to garden. Right: Red Cross poster urging household production of supplies for soldiers. Both posters are chromolithographs published by American Lithographic Co., c. 1917–19. Images from Library of Congress.

At the end of June in 1918 Willa Cather was in a Manhattan hair salon when she noticed a New York Times item listing citations for bravery awarded to soldiers fighting at the Battle of Cantigny on May 28. The first citation in the list read:

Lieutenant G. P. Cather (since killed in action.) — With splendid courage and coolness he mounted the parapet of a trench and directed a destructive flanking fire from two automatic rifle teams exposed to seven German machine guns.

She had already learned of her cousin’s death when his name appeared in the “Killed in Action” section of the Times three weeks earlier. But the news of his citation for heroism caused her to reconsider Grosvenor Phillips Cather, whom she had always regarded as a bit of a ne’er-do-well. She sent the clipping to his mother with a note. “A dozen people have telephoned me today to ask if that splendid man who headed the list of splendid men in all the papers were any kin of mine,” she wrote. “He has covered us all with a credit we do not deserve—none of us except you and Uncle George.”

G. P. (as he was known to friends) had not always been so splendid—not to Willa Cather, anyway. They both had wanted to escape farm life, but Grosvenor regarded with contempt Willa’s career as a writer. He dropped out of college; his marriage was a shambles; he was financially unsuccessful and generally aimless. “We were very much alike—and very different,” Cather later wrote to the novelist and activist Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “He never could escape from the misery of being himself except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous. There were years when we avoided each other.”

In August 1914, when war was declared in Europe, Cather was in Nebraska, staying with Grosvenor’s parents on their farm outside Red Cloud. During her visit she met up with her cousin on the road to the town, where they discussed the impending war: “I believe he always wanted to be a soldier. I can see him sitting on his wagon as plainly as if it were yesterday, in the middle of a peaceful country, with thousands of miles of land and sea between him and those far-away armies we were talking about.” That day, the cousins seemed to achieve a détente of sorts. As she recalled a decade later, “we talked for the first time in years; and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind.”

The year he encountered Willa on the country road, G. P. enlisted in the Nebraska National Guard. He served under General John Pershing in the Mexican Border War, became a member of the Allied Expeditionary Force in 1917, and fought in France in the regiment commanded by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He was the first officer from Nebraska killed in the war and after Willa Cather read the Distinguished Service Cross citation in the Times, he was constantly on her mind. “It wasn’t affection, but realization so acute that I could not get away from it,” she wrote Fisher. “Some of me was buried with him in France, and some of him was left alive in me.”

When she went home to Red Cloud the summer after G. P.’s death, Cather read the letters he had sent from the front to his mother, and over the next three years she was preoccupied writing a novel featuring a war hero inspired by her cousin. That novel, One of Ours, was published in 1922 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. While she was at work on the novel, Cather also wrote “Roll Call on the Prairies” for The Red Cross Magazine, recalling her visit to Red Cloud in the summer of 1918 and offering her light-hearted yet respectful impressions of the patriotic war activities of Nebraskans, many of whom had sons and brothers fighting—and dying—in Europe.

Notes: The first sale of Liberty Bonds (referred to Cather as the first Liberty Loan) began on April 28, 1917, with an offering of $2 billion of bonds with a 3.5 percent rate of return. Bonds were sold in denominations ranging from $50 to $10,000, and the sale of “War Thrift Stamps” made it possible to purchase $50 bonds on the installment plan. There were more than four million subscribers to the loan. Herbert Hoover served as U.S. Food Administrator, 1917–19, and issued the directives regarding food distribution and conservation playfully mocked by Cather in her article. The Women’s Committee of the Council for National Defense was created in April 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson with the suffragist leader Anna Howard Shaw as its chair to help coordinate the domestic war effort.

* * *

No one remembers now that the “fighting spirit” of the West was ever questioned; but at the time the United States entered the war, people along the Atlantic seaboard felt concern as to how the Middle West and the prairie states would respond. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Friday, November 3, 2017

The Namesake

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“A Walk in Willa Cather’s Prairie” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker)

“Willa Cather's Civil War: A Very Long Engagement” (Ann Romines, Willa Cather Archive)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Willa Cather
• “Peter”
• “The Enchanted Bluff”
• “The Sentimentality of William Tavener”
• “When I Knew Stephen Crane”

Buy the book

“Despite the dullness of the light, we instantly recognized the boy of Hartwell's ‘Color Sergeant,’” 1907, painting by American artist Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874–1960) as an illustration for Willa Cather’s “The Namesake” in McClure’s Magazine. Image courtesy of the Willa Cather Archive.

For most of her life Willa Sibert Cather claimed she was named for William Seibert Boak, her mother’s revered brother who died at Manassas fighting for the Confederacy. She even wrote a poem dedicated to him, “The Namesake: To W.S.B., of the Thirty-Third Virginia,” and included it in her first book, the 1903 poetry collection April Twilights, which she paid to have published.

. . . He was twenty to a day
When he got his jacket gray—
He was barely twenty-one
When they found him by his gun. . . .

Proud it is I am to know
In my veins there still must flow,
There to burn and bite alway,
That proud blood you threw away;
And I'll be winner at the game
Enough for two who bore the name.

Cather’s story of the origin of her name, however, appears to be part fantasy, part misremembered family history. She was born Wilella Cather—not in honor of her uncle but in memory of an aunt who had died of diphtheria. For much of her childhood she was called Willie but around the time her family moved from Virginia to Nebraska she began telling friends she had been named Willa Love Cather after both her dead uncle and the Dr. Love who attended her birth. During her college years she altered the spelling of her middle name to Lova, and not until 1897—when she was twenty-four years old—did she change it to Sibert. Muddying the waters even further is that there was no male relative in the family’s past with the initials “W.S.B.” As Cather scholar Ann Romines reveals, the long-dead uncle's name “was actually James William Boak, as his military records and tombstone confirm. (Another Confederate uncle was Jacob Seibert Boak, but he survived the war.)”

In 1907 Cather transformed the dead soldier-uncle of her poem into an inspiration for a story. She had been living in Pittsburgh for the previous ten years and had spent the summer of 1902 in France. And so the story version of “The Namesake” features an American expatriate living in Paris who experiences an artistic epiphany when he returns home to Pennsylvania. Furthermore, Cather changes the allegiance of the “namesake” uncle: identified as a Confederate soldier in the poem (“he got his jacket gray”), he is now a staunch Unionist.

Several critics have also noticed a transitional melding of literary influences in “The Namesake,” from the labored ornateness of Cather’s early fiction to the earthy realism of her more famous works. The framing story, set in a Paris studio, sedulously evokes the style and themes of Henry James’s fiction; “even the protagonist’s name, Lyon Hartwell, smacks of the Master,” remarks Steven Trout in an article on Cather’s war fiction. Yet the story-within-the-story set in the New World—and particularly the battle scene—will remind readers both of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and of Cather’s more mature work. “Our brief glimpse of patriotic gore,” writes Trout about this section, “belongs in the same category as the tramp’s bizarre suicide in My Ántonia, Ivy Peter’s psychotic and sadistic blinding of the woodpecker in A Lost Lady, and the parenthetical tale in Shadows on the Rock of the little girl devoured by carp at Fontainebleau. The scene of the solder’s demise is shocking because, like these other examples, it seems to come out of nowhere.”

Cather eventually regretted her decision to publish her book of poetry, much of it outmoded in style and subject. In 1908 she paid to destroy the remaining copies and in 1923, when she reissued April Twilights, she removed over a dozen selections—including the poem dedicated to W.S.B.—and heavily revised the rest. Similarly, she never reprinted the story version of “The Namesake” after its appearance in the March 1907 issue of McClure’s. And, finally, in 1920 she jettisoned her middle name altogether and was known simply as Willa Cather—although her stationery retained the middle initial. Thus, for the last three decades of her life, the memory of her beloved Confederate uncle all but disappeared from both her writing and her name.

Notes: On page 53 are mentions of the queens of France, referring to the statues of queens and illustrious women that line the terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Quarter, shorthand for the Latin Quarter, the university section of Paris on the left bank of the Seine. Perroquets (page 54) are parrots. The Destinies (page 62), also known as the Fates, are three goddesses in later Greek mythology who watch over human lives. Gare Saint-Lazare (page 63) is one of the six large railway terminals in Paris.

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Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwell's studio on the Boulevard St. Michel. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Friday, May 26, 2017

Decoration Day

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)
From Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links
History of Memorial Day (Library of Congress)

Sarah Orne Jewett, “unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives” (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A White Heron,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “The Armies of the Wilderness,” Herman Melville
• “The Nameless Dead,” Kate Cumming

Buy the book

Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels & Stories
Deephaven | A Country Doctor | The Country of the Pointed Firs | 28 stories | 937 pages

Illustration used in back cover advertising for White Smith & Co. sheet music. The drawing first appeared as a black and white etching in the mid-1870s and was hand-tinted later in the century for use when the company began publishing color covers. A list of the company’s recent publications would appear underneath the commemorative artwork.

Three years after the Civil War ended, in 1868, General John A. Logan—the head of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans—established that May 30 should be set aside as Decoration Day, so-called from the tradition of decorating graves with flowers. More than five thousand participants gathered for the first Decoration Day in Arlington National Cemetery and lavished flowers and flags on some twenty thousand graves, and similar events took place in cemeteries all over the country. The commemoration spread more widely in subsequent years and by the 1880s the day was known in some places as Memorial Day, which over the course of the next century became the more common designation. It was only in 1968 that the federal government passed the law that, beginning in 1971, officially shifted the date to the last Monday in May.

On the morning of Decoration Day, in either 1889 or 1890, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote from her home in South Berwick, Maine, to her friend and companion Annie Fields in Boston about the events planned for that day:

There is going to be an unwonted parade in honor of the day and I am glad; for usually everybody trots off to Dover or Portsmouth and nothing is done here except to put the pathetic little flags about the burying-grounds. It seems to me that I have just begun to understand how grown people felt about the war in the time of it,—at any rate it brought tears to my eyes yesterday when John said that over two hundred men went from this little town to the war. You can see how many young sons of old farmers, and how many men out of their little shops, and people who had nobody to leave in their places, went to make up that number.

This “unwonted parade” almost surely inspired Jewett a couple of years later to write “Decoration Day,” in which a small group of aging Civil War veterans convinces the residents of their small Maine rural village to host a long-overdue procession honoring the local residents killed in the war.

After Jewett included the story in her collection A Native of Winby, the reviewer for The Writer singled it out as “one of the best stories that she has ever told,” and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier similarly wrote, just before his death, that the tale “was one of her very best.” In 1895 Jewett boasted to a reporter that the story had “kept its hold surprisingly and is making part of the exercises of the day this year.” And according to a handwritten note in a friend’s edition of A Native of Winby, Jewett later told a neighbor in Boston that “if she were remembered by any of her stories, she should be glad if it might be this one.”

In the last century, however, the opinions of critics have been decidedly mixed. When Willa Cather was assembling a 1925 edition of Jewett’s best writings, she belittled it as a “conventional magazine story” and recalled a conversation with Jewett two decades earlier. “When I told her that ‘Decoration Day’ to me seemed more like other people’s stories, she said with a sigh that it was one of the ones that had grown old-fashioned.” Cather convinced the editor at Houghton Mifflin not to include it in the volume.

Some of Jewett’s biographers have likewise dismissed the story as “sentimental.” But during his life the late Jewett scholar Richard Cary argued that the story is one of her finest—and by far the strongest of the many holiday-themed tales she published in magazines. The story “defines the pathos of short-lived gratitude,” Carey wrote, and Jewett “prevents pity from turning maudlin through an unexpected deliverance or a bracing touch of comedy.”

Note: On page 778, Jewett mentions the Wilderness, referring to the Overland Campaign, a series of battles in Virginia during May and June 1864, including the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5–7) in the Spotsylvania area measuring about twelve by six miles known locally as the Wilderness for its dense woods and undergrowth.

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A week before the thirtieth of May, three friends—John Stover and Henry Merrill and Asa Brown—happened to meet on Saturday evening at Barton's store at the Plains. They were ready to enjoy this idle hour after a busy week. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Friday, February 3, 2017

Fedora

Kate Chopin (1850–1904)
From Kate Chopin: Complete Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

Excerpts of interviews from the 1999 PBS program Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening

“Kate Chopin Corrupts the Young Person” (Emily Toth, Talking Writing)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Kate Chopin
• “Désirée's Baby”
• “A Respectable Woman”

Buy the book

Kate Chopin: Complete Novels & Stories
At Fault | Bayou Folk | A Night in Acadie | The Awakening | uncollected stories
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $25.00

The Coming Train, 1880, oil on canvas by American artist Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919).

When Kate Chopin was “rediscovered” in the early 1970s, readers were led to believe that her masterpiece, The Awakening, had been “banned” soon after publication and that its censorship was a primary reason both she and it had fallen into oblivion. Yet later scholars—particularly her biographer Emily Toth—have not found any proof that was the case. As Toth summarized her findings in 2009, “We’d been suckered into reading a banned book that hadn’t been banned after all, at least in St. Louis. . . . But any adult who’d wanted to read The Awakening in 1899 could easily have done so, just as we did from 1970 onward.”

The legend of The Awakening as a banned book was given life by a series of conflicting memories and misreadings of sources. One example is instructive: Early scholars suggested that, soon after publication, The Awakening had been banned in St. Louis, Chopin’s hometown. There were four copies in the St. Louis Mercantile Library in 1899, and all four copies were marked as “condemned” in the records. But the term “condemned” does not mean that the book was “banned” but that it was removed because of wear-and-tear; “more than 75 percent of the books acquired by the library in 1899–1900 are now marked ‘condemned,’” reveals Toth. Similarly, the St. Louis Public Library purchased three copies and, when one was lost in 1906 (two years after Chopin’s death), it was immediately replaced with a new copy—hardly an act for a book that was banned. The Awakening was in fact reprinted that same year, and only later went out of print for six decades. Of the rest of Chopin’s writings, just a handful of stories (particularly “Désirée's Baby”) were kept in print by appearances in anthologies.

Still, The Awakening unquestionably met with controversy on its publication, and it was greeted with numerous shocked and disapproving notices: “morbid,” “sex fiction,” “poison,” were some of the terms scattered in the more hostile reviews. A young reviewer named Willa Cather huffed, “I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme.”

Similarly, some of Chopin’s pieces of short fiction were considered too hot for publication in national magazines, and “Fedora” might have been one of them. When she finished the story in the 1896, she was at the peak of her fame: her writing regularly appeared in many major national magazines. We’ll never know for sure the reason this particular work was rejected by editors, but (says Toth) “Chopin gave ‘Fedora’ a twist—and one that made it hard to publish.” We’ll leave it to readers to discover that “twist” for themselves.

In 1897 “Fedora,” along with another story Chopin had been unable to sell, did appear in The Criterion, a local weekly that also published six of her essays on literature that same year. Unlike the essays, the stories appeared under the pseudonym “La Tour” (French for the tower). It’s unknown why Chopin chose “La Tour” as a pen name. One of Chopin’s childhood favorites was the novel Paul and Virginia, published in 1788 by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Could the alias have been inspired by the lead character, Virginia de la Tour? Or, although the pronunciation is not quite the same, might “La Tour” be Chopin’s clever pun for l’auteur (the author)?

Regardless, the pseudonym was probably not meant to mask her identity, which seems to have been an open secret in St. Louis. Indeed, she apparently planned to include “Fedora” under her own name in her next story collection—which, alas, remained unpublished at the time of her death.

* * *

For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the entire text of Chopin’s short story below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs, and this selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Fedora had determined upon driving over to the station herself for Miss Malthers.

Though one or two of them looked disappointed—notably her brother—no one opposed her. She said the brute was restive, and shouldn’t be trusted to the handling of the young people.

To be sure Fedora was old enough, from the standpoint of her sister Camilla and the rest of them. Yet no one would ever have thought of it but for her own persistent affectation and idiotic assumption of superior years and wisdom. She was thirty.

Fedora had too early in life formed an ideal and treasured it. By this ideal she had measured such male beings as had hitherto challenged her attention, and needless to say she had found them wanting. The young people—her brothers’ and sisters’ guests, who were constantly coming and going that summer—occupied her to a great extent, but failed to interest her. She concerned herself with their comforts—in the absence of her mother—looked after their health and well-being; contrived for their amusements, in which she never joined. And, as Fedora was tall and slim, and carried her head loftily, and wore eye-glasses and a severe expression, some of them—the silliest—felt as if she were a hundred years old. Young Malthers thought she was about forty.

One day when he stopped before her out in the gravel walk to ask her some question pertaining to the afternoon’s sport, Fedora, who was tall, had to look up into his face to answer him. She had known him eight years, since he was a lad fifteen, and to her he had never been other than the lad of fifteen.

But that afternoon, looking up into his face, the sudden realization came home to her that he was a man—in voice, in attitude, in bearing, in every sense—a man.

In an absorbing glance, and with unaccountable intention, she gathered in every detail of his countenance as though it were a strange, new thing to her, presenting itself to her vision for the first time. The eyes were blue, earnest, and at the moment a little troubled over some trivial affair that he was relating to her. The face was brown from the sun, smooth, with no suggestion of ruddiness, except in the lips, that were strong, firm and clean. She kept thinking of his face, and every trick of it after he passed on.

From that moment he began to exist for her. She looked at him when he was near by, she listened for his voice, and took notice and account of what he said. She sought him out; she selected him when occasion permitted. She wanted him by her, though his nearness troubled her. There was uneasiness, restlessness, expectation when he was not there within sight or sound. There was redoubled uneasiness when he was by—there was inward revolt, astonishment, rapture, self-contumely; a swift, fierce encounter betwixt thought and feeling.

Fedora could hardly explain to her own satisfaction why she wanted to go herself to the station for young Malthers’ sister. She felt a desire to see the girl, to be near her; as unaccountable, when she tried to analyze it, as the impulse which drove her, and to which she often yielded, to touch his hat, hanging with others upon the hall pegs, when she passed it by. Once a coat which he had discarded hung there too. She handled it under pretense of putting it in order. There was no one near, and, obeying a sudden impulse, she buried her face for an instant in the rough folds of the coat.

Fedora reached the station a little before train time. It was in a pretty nook, green and fragrant, set down at the foot of a wooded hill. Off in a clearing there was a field of yellow grain, upon which the sinking sunlight fell in slanting, broken beams. Far down the track there were some men at work, and the even ring of their hammers was the only sound that broke upon the stillness. Fedora loved it all—sky and woods and sunlight; sounds and smells. But her bearing—elegant, composed, reserved—betrayed nothing emotional as she tramped the narrow platform, whip in hand, and occasionally offered a condescending word to the mail man or the sleepy agent.

Malthers’ sister was the only soul to disembark from the train. Fedora had never seen her before; but if there had been a hundred, she would have known the girl. She was a small thing; but aside from that, there was the coloring; there were the blue, earnest eyes; there, above all, was the firm, full curve of the lips; the same setting of the white, even teeth. There was the subtle play of feature, the elusive trick of expression, which she had thought peculiar and individual in the one, presenting themselves as family traits.

The suggestive resemblance of the girl to her brother was vivid, poignant even to Fedora, realizing, as she did with a pang, that familiarity and custom would soon blur the image.

Miss Malthers was a quiet, reserved creature, with little to say. She had been to college with Camilla, and spoke somewhat of their friendship and former intimacy. She sat lower in the cart than Fedora, who drove, handling whip and rein with accomplished skill.

“You know, dear child,” said Fedora, in her usual elderly fashion, “I want you to feel completely at home with us.” They were driving through a long, quiet, leafy road, into which the twilight was just beginning to creep. “Come to me freely and without reserve—with all your wants; with any complaints. I feel that I shall be quite fond of you.”

She had gathered the reins into one hand, and with the other free arm she encircled Miss Malthers’ shoulders.

When the girl looked up into her face, with murmured thanks, Fedora bent down and pressed a long, penetrating kiss upon her mouth.

Malthers’ sister appeared astonished, and not too well pleased. Fedora, with seemingly unruffled composure, gathered the reins, and for the rest of the way stared steadily ahead of her between the horses’ ears.