The Warmth of Willa Cather

I am coming to the end of Willa Cather's "Five Stories," a collection of her short fiction that spans the course of her literary career. The first story in the collection, "The Enchanted Bluff," is written in first person. It uses retrospection powerfully and brazenly; it concerns a river and a group of boys who grow up in a small town, how they are all taken with a story of a blue mesa and a city ensconced in it, hovering above clouds, where an ancient people once lived. They will go on to be dulled by adult lives; they never live up to their promises to travel to the mesa, though the fellow most taken with it still says he will. The story is about the pull of mystery, the magic of this imagined city of an extinct people, how the very existence of it enlarged these boy's dreams and too how time and circumstances dulled them, and kept them from seeking the mesa. It ends like this:

"Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular meals and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over, and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he had balanced his cash and shut up his store. We took the long way around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we revived the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there, but he thinks now he will wait until his boy Bert is old enough to go with him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff."

That end takes on such a size as a result of the retrospection; and though there is a sadness in how clear it is they will never go, there is a sort of hope, too, in how the story has been passed on, how now it has taken the imagination of Tip's son.

The second 'story' I had already read: it is the discrete, odd chapter "Tom Outland's story," which forms the center of the novel "The Professor's House," a book I read when I was an undergraduate at Stanford and did not understand at all-- I said things about the grace of the prose, and certainly, I noticed how the chapter seemed to stand alone, as if Cather had wanted to construct an entire narrative around one perfect and discrete and self-contained story, as if the entire story of the Professor was pulled toward the mystery of Tom Outland's story. And Tom Outland's story is that of a young man and his friend Roddy who happen on the Blue Mesa and go into the city and explore it, how to Tom Outland the Mesa is perfect, sacred, and how his friend Roddy, believing he is doing right, sells the artifacts they unearthed when Tom is unable to get anyone in Washington to fund their exploration. Like the first narrator, Tom is looking back both on his time at the Mesa, and at what has been lost: the Mesa, his youth and innocence, and by his own choice, his friendship with Roddy, for in his anger at Roddy's having sold the artifacts without consulting him, he tells Roddy to leave and is never able to find him again even though Roddy meant the money for Tom, to support his education. The story ends hauntingly:

"Now that I was back on the railroad, I thought I couldn't fail to find him. I went out to Winslow and to Williams, and I questioned the railroad men. We advertised for him in every possible way, and had all the Santa Fe operatives and the police and the Catholic missionaries on the watch for him, and offered a thousand dollars reward for whoever found it. But it all came to nothing. Father Duchene and our friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I'm not very sanguine about good fortune for myself. I'll be called to account when I least expect it.

In the Spring, just a year after I quarrelled with Roddy, I landed here and walked into your garden, and the rest you know."

I think about that line-- "Anyone who requites faith and friendship...will have to pay for it," for I once lost a best friend, neither of us able to forgive, though the first error in turning my back on her was mine. And I recently lost a friendship that meant a great deal to me, or at least, I fear it has been lost, and I think of those lines as well. Close friendships between men and women can be difficult to sustain. But I do not feel I am exempt from the price; we may get only so many people who care for us deeply and can understand us fully.

What most interests me about these two stories, the only two in the collection written in first person, is how the stories echo back on one another, the Blue Mesa as figure, and the Blue Mesa as lost paradise, a pure but only temporary mecca. The stories overlap, reflect and refract, just as Tom Outland's story itself ends by returning to the Professor's story in a way that changes and enlarges that narrative-- the Professor, as I remember it, becomes obsessed with what Tom Outland has told him, the Blue Mesa and the life Tom Outland had and the loss of Roddy's friendship haunting his own days but also enlivening his dreams. In all of Cather's first-person, the power and size of her first-person narration is accomplished not by lyric-- and she hs considerable lyric talent-- but by retrospection of the sort Fitzgerald uses in Gatsby, moving through time to show us not just what has become, but the full measure of what we have been shown. In a less generous writer's hands, retrospection can ruin and overburden; it is a dangerous tool. Cather uses it with precision and heart.