Douglas Bauer | March/April 2012

NOTES

The voice of the stream at the bottom of the gorge was hollow and threatening, much louder and deeper than it ever was by day-another voice altogether... The sullenness of the place seemed to say that the world could get on very well without people, red or white; that under the human world there was a geological world, conducting its silent immense operations which were indifferent to man.
-Willa Cather, from
The Song of the Lark1

Last fall, I taught an undergraduate class that included, besides The Song of the Lark, three other Cather novels: A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, and My Mortal Enemy. Many of my students were juniors and seniors concentrating in Literature. Some of them were also aspiring writers. But except for a few who had read O Pioneers! or My Antonia in high school, all were unfamiliar with Cather's fiction.

I'm happy to report that the class stayed strongly engaged with Cather's worlds from novel to novel. This was not only immensely satisfying; it was also, I confess, a bit of a relief. Offering one's own literary enthusiasms to a group of undergraduates, no matter how motivated, is always a risky, unpredictable business, and I love Cather's work for many reasons. Perhaps above all, I love the tough empathy she awards a population of protagonists whose very deep and very human flaws make them in some ways unlikable and in all ways unforgettable.

But if I gauged correctly, what impressed the students most were Cather's matchless descriptions of the physical world, the way she often treats the landscape and the light, particularly the light, as characters themselves, giving them the same qualities of mood and motive, the same temperaments of ambitious display and daunting indifference that she often gives her humancharacters.

This was big news to the students—that narrative in the service of the natural world could, and should, be more than merely lovely, working not only aesthetically but also in a more implemental way to signal the meaning of a moment.

We examined, for example, this passage in A Lost Lady, where young Niel Herbert, who adores the beautiful and nimbly guileful Mrs. Forrester, wakes one day before dawn and decides to visit the Forresters's marsh. It's a magnificent natural swath, leading up to the house, that's been left to grow and evolve free of man's interference.

All over the marsh, snow-on-the-mountain, globed with dew, made cool sheets of silver... There was an almost religious purity about the fresh morning air... Niel wondered why he did not often come over like this, to see the day before men and their activities had spoiled it, while the morning was unsullied, like a gift handed down from the heroic ages.2

The students saw that the narrative language here accomplishes several things. It satisfies its first obligation by giving us a vivid picture of the marsh in dawn-light. It also emphasizes Niel's romantic innocence, but it does so with a skillful obliqueness—telling the reader how Niel regarded the waking morning, not how the narrative intelligence regarded Niel. Too, the canny grandiosity of the tone-the air's religious purity, the day as a gift heroically bestowed-lets the reader know that no morning, however glorious, could live up to Niel's exalted perceptions of it. And sure enough, a paragraph later, he discovers that man's activities have already sullied this one as he bends to lay some flowers beneath Mrs. Forrester's shuttered bedroom window and hears from within her "soft," "teasing" laughter, and then a man's, not her husband's, sounding "fat and lazy,-(ending) in something like a yawn."3

Only now that the class has ended have I begun to recognize a curious contradiction between my students' appreciation for Cather's splendid, multi-purpose landscapes and the habits these same students bring to their moment-to-moment lives. For the first thing they're likely to do each day upon opening their doors and stepping forward into life is to power up their electronic toys, popping in their ear buds as they begin to scroll their palm-sized screens, moving along inside a chrysalis of talk and texts and tunes, and in so doing making themselves effectively incapable of noticing, of receiving, the physical world-the very world they found so compelling reading Cather.

Certainly this insulating gadgetry is everywhere around—and on—us. (I recently saw a mail order catalogue from an outdoor apparel and camping equipment company featuring an all-weather coat with pockets specifically measured for your iPod and your smart phone and your pager, and God knows what else.) So I don't mean to paint with too narrow a brush. It's simply that I had the experience of teaching a group of avid readers and, in some cases, hopeful writers who loved the work of someone I regard as a 20th-century master. And most of all they loved the power and aesthetic versatility of her descriptions of physical worlds. But as I said, these young men and women were, and are, also typical citizens of the cultural moment. They are eager users of the high-tech tools whose inevitable effect is to grab their attention—socially, emotionally, psychologically—and take it to a place that keeps them from noticing the world they're moving through.

I obviously don't imagine that everyone under the age of twenty-five whom I see texting and talking and ignoring the physical world around him is writing the next generation of narrative. The more speculative point is that those who are or hope to bewriting it are participants in a world where it's commonplace for couples to walk down the street absorbed in separate cell phone conversations and to sit across from one another at restaurant tables in privately engaged silences, each assuming that dead-give-away, round shouldered posture, as if suffering a kind of early dowager's hump, thumb-tapping away on their Blackberries.

(Which, by the way, speaking of that couple in the restaurant leaning in to get and send their texts, raises still another question. What's to become of dialogue in literature if we no longer eavesdrop? Is there a more invaluable tool in the writer's kit? Or one that better fits the notion of man paying useful attention to the world around him?)

Mine was exclusively a literature class, so I didn't see any creative work from the maybe nine or ten who were writing fiction, and had been even before they got to college. But in my experience, of those nine or ten, there might be three or four whose very early work would show potential. And of those, it's possible to imagine one or two of them finding their way to writing lives of some kind. Which is to say that my sample might indeed be anecdotal, but it's also one to reckon with.

So I'm wondering what these writers will do when they're working on a story or a novel or a piece of narrative nonfiction and they reach that moment in a scene that has historically asked readers to see and hear and smell the setting, to feel themselves in the characters' world and to sensually experience it along with them?

In her book, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, Joan Acocella writes that "Nature was the inspirer of Cather's irony."4 (Young Niel Herbert breathing that morning marsh air of "religious purity" as he walks to Mrs. Forrester's shuttered window, on the other side of which she lies with her illicit lover.) With Acocella's point in mind, I have to wonder if whatever inspires irony in the narratives that are coming will have much, if anything, to do with human behavior occurring in a contradictory or indifferent natural world.

I see no clues in the contemporary writers my students read for pleasure: Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and David Foster Wallace, to name a few. These writers consistently move their characters through the physical world, and, more to the point, have them take meaningful, often highly ironic note of it.

The student writing I do read continues to include the physical world. It's there, present in the narrative mix, though frequently that's pretty much all it is—barely and inertly there; as if deemed a still obligatory feature to be present and accounted for. On the other hand, what I see increasingly in student work are narratives in which characters come to moments of reorientation—pausing as they prepare to leave one scene for the next; finishing a conversation and watching the other person walk away; emerging from a building after the meeting has ended and stopping momentarily to gather themselves before heading for the subway—and they immediately check e-mail or text or send an instant message. Moments when characters used to take a moment to figuratively smell the air—stop to take in the view or scan the room or glance up and down the sidewalk.

***

For Cather, the way to get perspective on one's world is to be physically and attentively in it. One could say that when her characters find themselves so attuned, what results is a vivid simpatico of the spiritual and sensual. A dying Myra Henshaw, in My Mortal Enemy, having returned to the Catholicism of her girlhood, makes a pilgrim's final journey to a cliff overlooking the Pacific, a sacristy of air and stillness. The Song of the Lark's Thea Kronberg, alone in Arizona canyon country, "could become a mere receptacle of heat, or become a color... she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas."5 Father Latour—the archbishop for whom death comes—and his loyal vicar, Father Vaillant, ride horseback through the New Mexico wilderness under low "purplish clouds,"6 absorbing the color of the climate so fully that "the faces of the two priests were purple"7 as well. Existential chameleons.

Further, Cather's characters are often at their most compelling when they empty their minds and leave them that way for a time, which makes it possible for them simply to receive the world—the natural world, yes, but also, finally, the daily, quotidian world. That is to say, when their minds are not only active collectors but also empty receptacles and they're doing what our culture has become increasingly incapable of doing: nothing.

Not only are Cather's people frequently doing nothing, they're doing it for weeks, for whole seasons. In The Professor's House, Godfrey St. Peter stays at home when his extended family leaves for a summer in France, telling them and himself that he needs to think and write without interruption. Instead, he subsides into an intellectual indolence he only gradually recognizes and doesn't try to resist.

But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth. He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility. He was cultivating a novel mental dissipation...8

Having brought St. Peter to this unprecedented place in his life, it's now that Cather refines the essential exploration of the novel, which Joan Acocella describes as "finding long before your life is over that everything you cared about in life is over."9 St. Peter's life has been his work, and his work his life, so Cather knew that his journey to a moment of recognition would necessarily be long and circuitous and that it would take time; a slow summer's worth of solitary time.

It perfectly fits her understanding of man and his physical world and the resulting resonance of the two in proximity that she took him every day to that sand-spit by the lake, emptying his mind and giving his senses to those pines that rimmed the shore and those after-dinner stars.

***

I've seen a television commercial a few times that shows a young man walking quickly through a kind of Maurice Sendakian fairy tale landscape—things growing in busy tangles and pulsing primally—of which he is completely unaware because he's yakking away on his cell phone. Until, head down, he comes abruptly to a stop an inch before colliding with some enormous Where the Wild Things Are creature standing in his path. He looks up into the creature's eyes, then around at the magically real lushness he finds himself in and wonders aloud, "Where am I, anyway?" He says this without a hint of fear or concern or actual curiosity, but in a tone that suggests, if anything, an annoyance that this fertile dreamscape and its monster has interrupted his conversation. Then he turns on his heels and starts back, as quickly as before, in the direction from which he came, while returning to his cell phone monologue in mid-thought.

This is our world now, one in which it's a good thing when cell phone reception is so gloriously clear that it allows us to ignore a landscape of lavish hazards.

In the Cather class, no matter how lively the conversation, the moment it was done, nearly all the students, as they left the room, reached for their smart phones like smokers for their packs. So it's easy to imagine the young fellow in the commercial as a motivated young writer and member of our group, hurrying away from the discussion just ended to get back to work on his short story. The abiding question, then, is what he might do when he reaches his room and sits down at his desk and in the scene he's writing his protagonist goes outdoors.

Will this writer's characters, I wonder, eventually simply stop going outdoors altogether? Or will he describe them, each and all, moving along city sidewalks and hiking the Adirondacks with their buds in their ears and their iPhones in their hands, while his narrative ignores the crowded sidewalk noise, the mountainous vistas, and devotes its attention to witless cell phone conversations ("Hi. I'm here in the Adirondacks. Where are you?") and 140 characters of Twitter inanity.

And so, again—how will settings be rendered; how will the natural world be narrated? Will it be employed in any way, as Cather so fully puts it to work?

A first instinctive answer might be that narratives will come more and more to occupy our interior worlds; that their attentions will be increasingly inner-directed. Maybe so, but texting and talking and listening to some private play list is no way to get there. On the contrary, all these activities simply fill our interior worlds to the brim with stuff, with noise, making it a certainty that there's no room in our consciousness for rumination.

Indeed, the very idea of rumination, contemplation, causes quaint, so last-century phrases such as "alone with our thoughts" and "keep an open mind" to percolate up and leaves me, I know, the geezer in his front porch rocking chair, shaking his cane at the passing parade and decrying the world gone to hell in a hand basket. In this mood, I imagine David Copperfield walking from London to his Aunt Betsey in Dover with his ear buds secured, listening to the medley of fife ditties he's downloaded, not noticing, and therefore unable to tell us about, the terrifying trampers and tinkers and the "Goroo!"-shouting shop keeper he passes along the way. Or I imagine Alice dropping through the rabbit hole because she has her head down texting and doesn'tsee it. OMG, I'm falling!

***

Interestingly, it might seem that Cather herself, in some of what she wrote, asserts that an ignorance of the natural world is nothing to get so worked up about. In her fiercely argued credo, "The Novel Demeuble," she writes that every "writer who is an artist knows that his 'power of observation' and his 'power of description' form but a low part of his equipment."10 And in The Song of the Lark, she says of Thea Kronberg, who's ruthlessly focused in her determination to fulfill the promise of her magnificent soprano voice, "The faculty of observation was never highly developed in (her). A great deal escaped her eye as she passed through the world."11 As a music student, living in Chicago, "(Thea) felt no interest in the general briskness and zest of the crowds. The crash and scramble of that big, rich, appetent Western city she did not take in at all..."12

But if Thea was not aware of the brutish clamor of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, her creator surely was. Leaving a concert late in the afternoon, Thea's senses are assaulted:

The streets were full of cold, hurrying, angry people, running for street-cars and barking at each other. The sun was setting in a clear, windy sky, that flamed with red as if there were a great fire somewhere on the edge of the city. For almost the first time, Thea was conscious of the city itself, of the congestion of life all about her, of the brutality and power of those streams that flowed in the streets, threatening to drive one under. People jostled her, ran into her, poked her aside with their elbows, uttering angry exclamations.13

Here we see Cather's narrative scheme in full. She needed Thea to be initially oblivious to the clangor and chaos of Chicago in order to give her a sufficiently powerful awakening jolt. And if a great deal of the world did escape Thea's eye as she passed through it, Cather goes on to say that "...the things which were for her, she saw; she experienced them physically and remembered them as if they had once been a part of herself... There were memories of light on the sand hills, of masses of prickly-pear blossoms she had found in the desert in early childhood... These recollections were a part of her mind and personality."14

In other words, Thea was not so much inattentive as she moved through the physical world, but was unconsciously selecting it; instinctively choosing what she needed from it for the sake of her art.

So, it might be true that the gifts of observation and description form, in some cases, "but a low part of (the writer's) equipment."15 Nevertheless, as Cather goes on to say in "The Novel Demeuble," "He must have both, to be sure."16

***

Cather knew from experience that the landscape's power to clarify and inspire could result just as much from refusing as embracing it. She once explained in an interview that she had to leave Nebraska because its vast skies and its table-flat terrain and its insistent winds were altogether too frightening. Just try, she said in effect to her interviewer, walking out into the middle of a Nebraska field and standing under a windmill and feeling the force of all that emptiness, and tell me you're not frightened.

In response to that fear, she left the place that caused it and lived in ever-larger cities, Lincoln, then Pittsburgh, before settling in New York. But leaving Nebraska allowed her to be usefully frightened of it. Away from it, she could be fully attuned to it. Afraid to live in it actually, she could inhabit it fully in her imagination, and she couldn't have done so, been so brilliantly afraid of it, if she hadn't seen it, sensed it, engaged it entirely.

So my wondering about narrative's future is keen. Yes, the physical world might indeed, as Cather wrote in the passage that began these thoughts, be able to get on very well without people, might be able to conduct its operations quite indifferent to man. But obviously the reverse does not apply, which only begs the question of how writers will get on. How will they conduct their operations as they grow more and more indifferent to their physical worlds? None of these questions would be as interesting to me if a buoyingly curious bunch of students hadn't loved Cather's landscapes so much. But they did.

AWP

Douglas Bauer's books include The Very Air, a novel, and The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft.He is a member of the faculty at Bennington College.

1. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (New York: The Library of America, 1990) p. 560.
2. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: The Library of America, 1990) p. 46.
3. Ibid., p. 47.
4. Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) p. 89.
5. Cather, The Song of the Lark (New York: The Library of America, 1990) p. 548.
6. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: The Library of America, 1990) p. 315.
7. Ibid.
8. Willa Cather, The Professor's House (New York: The Library of America, 1990) pp. 258-9.
9. Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) p. 62.
10. Willa Cather, "The Novel Demeuble" (New York: The Library of America, 1990) p. 834.
11. Cather, The Song of the Lark (New York: The Library of America, 1990) p. 549.
12. Ibid., p. 463.
13. Ibid., p. 469.
14. Ibid., p. 549.
15. Cather, "The Novel Demeuble (New York: The Library of America, 1990) p. 834.
16. Ibid.