Willa Cather, The Troll Garden

A surprising number of us have our own, apparently mostly secret, relationship with Willa Cather. Her authenticity, her moral clarity, her sharp wit that doesn’t feel mean, her understanding of a longing that’s close to the bone, her profoundly human characters and the way  she sees them. Several of the writers I’m working with this summer got into a beautiful discussion about her online, and there was some gleeful surprise about how many of us loved her and how passionately. The Prairie Trilogy (O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia) are huge favorites with writers and readers, and so is Death of the Archbishop. I also have a special fondness for her first book of fiction (she’d published a volume of poetry earlier), The Troll Garden, a collection with some of her most famous stories, including a few I encountered when I was much too young to understand loss or disappointment, like “Paul’s Case” and “A Wagner Matinee.”  

The wicked, marvelous “Flavia and her Artists,” the first story in the collection, is about a patroness of the arts: her ambitions, her pretensions, and her complicated marriage, seen through the eyes of Imogen, a fairly young and innocent observer. Flavia had been her mother’s friend, but has taken her up, ravenously, in part because “Imogen had shown rather marked capacity in certain esoteric lines of scholarship, and had decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at the Ecole des Chartres, [which] had fairly placed her in that category of ‘interesting people’ whom Flavia considered her natural affinities, and lawful prey.”  

Imogen, on the other hand, has adored Flavia’s husband Arthur Hamilton since childhood. He “had been the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy tales.” She wonders about her decision to go even as she’s on the way to Flavia’s grand house party and artists’ retreat, “the asylum for talent, the sanitorium of the arts.” At the house, she watches a great unraveling under the malicious and entertaining guidance of Flavia’s second cousin, Miss Broadwood, who reminds Imogen of a nice boy “who has just had his cold bath, and come down all aglow for a run before breakfast.”

 She also watches, closely, her mother’s old friend, the wife of her childhood magician: “She was in the habit of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found it impossible to take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence and insistence with which Flavia demanded it.” Without giving away the delusions, betrayals, and sacrifices that make this such a Willa Cather story, I want to look at a moment that gets at the heart of the mystery of the apparently ill- suited love between Flavia and Arthur, as seen through Imogen’s attentive, jealous, puzzled gaze:

By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural pronoun, third person, always referred to the artists. As Hamilton’s manner did not spur one to cordial intercourse, and as his attention seemed directed to Miss Broadwood, in so far as it could be said to be directed to anyone, she sat down facing the conservatory and watched him, unable to decide in how far he was identical with the man who at first met Flavia Malcolm in her mother’s house, twelve years ago. Did he at all remember having known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish affection for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed caves of her consciousness, and had she really expected to find it possible to be fond of him again? Suddenly she saw a light in the man’s sleepy eyes, an unmistakable expression of interest and pleasure that fairly startled her. She turned quickly in the direction of his glance, and saw Flavia, just entering, dressed for dinner and lit by the effulgence of her most radiant manner. Most people considered Flavia handsome, and there was no gainsaying that she carried her five-and-thirty years splendidly. Her figure had never grown matronly, and her face was of the sort that does not show wear. Its blond tints were as fresh and enduring as enamel – and quite as hard. Its usual expression was one of tense, often strained, animation, which compressed her lips nervously. A perfect scream of animation, Miss Broadwood had called it, created and maintained by sheer, indomitable force of will. Flavia’s appearance on any scene whatever made a ripple, caused a certain agitation and recognition, and, among impressionable people, a certain uneasiness. For all her sparkling assurance of manner, Flavia was certainly always ill at ease and, even more certainly anxious. She seemed not convinced of the established order of material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling that walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly to the winds in irretrievable entanglement. At least this was the impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly false. 

Hamilton’s keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had recalled the image in all her inventory of speculations about them. She looked at him with compassionate surprise. As a child she had never permitted herself to believe that Hamilton cared at all for the woman who had taken him away from her; and since she had begun to think about them again, it had never occurred to her that anyone could become attached to Flavia in that deeply personal and exclusive sense. It seemed quite as irrational as trying to possess oneself of Broadway at noon.

Imogen’s judgments seem accurate in terms of how we experience Flavia through her dialogue and actions, but they are also tinged with the remains of the young philologist’s childhood fascination with Arthur Hamilton. Flavia and Arthur met in her family’s household; Imogen has an aggrieved feeling that he had been hers before he was Flavia’s. She seems to hate Flavia for the ways she underestimates Arthur, as well as for her ambition, her lack of understanding, her hard self-assurance and will. But then there’s this one sentence in her consideration of Flavia: “She seemed not convinced of the established order of material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling that walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly to the winds in irretrievable entanglement.”  

It’s a very close third person point of view, though not exactly a direct reporting of her thoughts (she wouldn’t have thought, “Did he at all remember having known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish affection for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed caves of her consciousness, and had she really expected to find it possible to be fond of him again?”) Still, these assessments and ideas seem to be Imogen’s. She’s not compassionate  about Flavia, but saves her kindness for Arthur, who she experiences as Flavia’s victim, still inexplicably enchanted by her. Her observation is, though, full of understanding. And then immediately retreats into a harsh judgment: “At least this was the impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly false.” 

Imogen judges Flavia, we judge Flavia (and maybe judge Imogen for judging her? Though if we were there, we probably would do the same and if we were in this grand house full of artists, we might well sit up late at night gossiping about her). Cather has set this up, in terms of what we can objectively see about Flavia, to suggest that she shares this judgment. And given her own deep authenticity and humanity, and her relative youth at the time of writing this, it makes sense. But she does allow Imogen that very precise insight into her enemy’s vulnerability, that almost tender sense of what it means to feel that everything can fall to pieces. It feels frantic, that sentence, not relying on a single metaphor, but a whole pile of them, suggesting the demolitions of time, the instability of the earth, and the fragility of a life.  

The emotions and observations here are not the whole story of “Flavia and her Artists”—something happens with the artists and the marriage and Imogen. But the account proceeds all the way through by means of these moments of collision that don’t allow any comfort. Except, maybe, the comfort of feeling sure of the accuracy of these (invented) observations. We are not being lied to. It’s not the most urgent story, in our urgent circumstances, but, despite the occasional jolting idea or phrase that reminds us Cather was a woman of her own time, it’s a story that feels like it could be happening right now. Cather allows us to keep distinguishing between delusion, denial, truthful perception, coldness of heart, and then real kindness and, in the end, sacrifice.  

During our class discussion, I found a piece about Cather on Literary Hub that I thought added to our conversation and dropped it into our forums. Looking for it again later, because I have no idea where it is on our boards (we have something over a hundred posts a week in our conversations), I searched for “Lit Hub” and “Willa Cather.” And the internet unlocked to pour a torrent of great stuff into my lap, essays about her domestic life and great secret (no, not her partnership with Edith Lewis, which wasn’t at all secret), how she inspired one extraordinary writer to get over her stage fright, her time in France, her attachment to the prairies, the sexist views of her war writing, her chronicling of theater, how she was a literary ancestor to so many people, including those from very different backgrounds…and that didn’t begin to touch all the podcasts and academic articles. Even reading only some of these, I was still impressed by how each of us have our own Willa Cather, our own relationship with her, our own ways of claiming her and sharing her with each other at the same time. 

My News

Right now I have the first pass proofs for Marriage to the Sea on my desk. I’ve been able to change a couple of small but crucial things, and have the extraordinary close attention of brilliant writer and editor Rowan Sharp, who also did the wonderful copy edit. Often a publisher has different people do the copy editing and the proofing, but there’s something especially great about being in conversation with someone where you understand each other’s sensibilities and have a collaborative working relationship. Proofreading is not in the least a mechanical activity—there are hundreds of small decisions that affect the overall book, and we’re even still looking at a few sentences, at lapses in continuity, and so on.  

I’m working through a PDF with comments now, so much better than in the old days. As I wrote Rowan today, when I first started doing page proofs, the publisher would send a printout of the book, I would print out my own copy, lay the two versions out side by side, and then sit there for however many days (as I recall often there were only about four days to do this) turning over the top page on each pile and scanning them both. (A friend used to work at a textbook company where one person would read the text aloud while another person read the proofs!) I usually didn’t even know the name of the copy editor, let alone have the option of writing them with questions, and we were discouraged, heavily, from making even the smallest changes. Having this work to do is a small good thing in the middle of massive, shattering disruptions.

Before the proofs arrived, Ron and I had a great time at the SF Art Book Fair, hosted by the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, “an annual multi-day exhibition and celebration of printed material from independent publishers, artists, designers, collectors, and enthusiasts from around the world.” Totally packed with hundreds of people mad about art and books. Great conversations, and we came home with a wonderful haul, including the bound collections of a project that I might write more to you about next time. In a way, it’s the complete opposite of Willa Cather, but in another, it’s all about the conversations between generations of artists, writers, and readers, over time, how we influence each other and how we absorb and play with the work and ideas of writers who’ve come before us.