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COPYRIGHT 2005 Marquette University Press
Nothing really matters but living ... Accomplishments are the
ornaments of life, they come second. Sometimes people disappoint us, and sometimes we disappoint ourselves; but the thing is, to go right on living. (Lucy Gayheart) Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. (Psalm 51:6)
We can now say with confidence that Willa Cather numbers among the enduring writers of the recent century. Her name evokes the courage of immigrant farmers struggling with the raw American plains, and her reputation rests secure on her frontier masterpieces, which with miraculous economy and stylistic excellence capture a defining moment in the American experience. All of this is true, but not the deepest truth. For Cather's soul one must look elsewhere. Within her accounts of breaking fresh ground in a strange land stirs a search for the source and meaning of life. That pursuit gathers momentum through an inner negotiation, before and beneath the crops, that accounts for the harvest accomplished in the soil. Here in the quiet realm behind the brow lies the agency generating Cather's celebrated dramas. This power goes far and deep, for the passage that Cather's foreigners make is not simply a crossing from an old world to a new but an advance from an old state of things to a new one. Visible as crops and hidden as freedom, this newness is the founding condition that undergirds the diverse experiences of belief in Cather's writing.
Mindful of the subject's intricacy and aware that any assessment of an artist's inner life is necessarily provisory, imperfect, and beset with partisan engagement, in this essay I present Willa Cather as a writer of faith. The argument is selective, somewhat discursive, and, in the final section, personal. The exploration begins by observing two convergent habits of mind, aesthetic and religious, that Cather uses to grasp the ultimate ground of our being. To gauge their relation to each other as modes of belief, this discussion pairs The Professor's House (1925), Cather's challenge to the tenets of organized religion, with Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her celebration of creedal truth. After suggesting in Death Comes for the Archbishop certain qualities of the American desert that epitomize for Cather the inner trials of belief, the essay takes up Lucy Gayheart (1935) to study the nature of faith. Lucy Gayheart, Cather's penultimate novel, neither questions nor foregrounds the precepts of religion and thereby allows us to see what holds true when skeptical probing and established explanations do not avail.
Lucy Gayheart is the culminant interest of this essay. My approach to this book is eclectic. Because faith is inevitably a response to how the divine plan works in time, I include a reminder of the dismal historical condition of 1935 when Lucy Gayheart appeared. And because Cather invariably speaks from and to her own situation when telling a story, I also give passing attention to the personal gloom out of which Lucy Gayheart emerges. Darkness exerts a fruitful pressure on Lucy Gayheart. By telling a somber story of youthful death, Cather navigates public and private shadows to find hope. The essay, however, does not seek to offer either a new historical or biographical account of Lucy Gayheart. The trust that Cather comes to avow reaches the reader mainly through music--mainly, but not ultimately. In relation to faith, music in this novel has an added dimension, and I want to revisit Cather's reliance on music to show its service to belief. That aim entails going beyond sound to resonance. This supplementary vibration of the operas and songs Cather held dear leads to my eventual, true topic: silence and endurance. With stillness and survival uppermost in mind, the argument turns to Harry Gordon, that isolated and lonely figure of failure and authority upon whose sturdy shoulders Cather lays the burden of maintaining certainty in spite of fundamental uncertainties that characterize our period in religion as well as in all other realms of life. In tracing the movement of Harry Gordon's introspection, I consciously move away from the cool detachment expected of literary commentary to participate in Cather's presentation of faith that sustains one in present grief and allows one to face whatever is to come.
IF we step back to take a canonical view of Cather's fiction, we can see that in story after story, novel after novel, whatever the protagonist's gender or class, nationality or individual gift, whatever the particular aspiration, whether the struggle occurs in the grassy culverts of Shenandoah Valley or on parched stretches of New Mexico, whether the character is a person of action or of contemplation, whether the outcome of that endowment lifts or sinks the heart, two modes of creativity operate. Invariably, an aesthetic and a religious power shape the inner workings of the protagonist's spirit, with the balance between these forces varying according to the character's temperament.
The aesthetic takes the form of an ability to appreciate the idea of things as well as the material things themselves. Unlike their relatives and neighbors who look for immediate tangible results of their labor, Alexandra Bergson and Antonia Shimerda, Cather's fabled heroines, intuit an unseen, far-ranging new beginning that taps the perpetuity of life in long tracts of empty plains. When wheat finally rises and corn rustles, the waves of yellow and green signal a physical survival that calls up a heightened consciousness. In this mindful state, all of nature comes to life and helps to define the heroine's individual identity. Each woman gains a union and a communion with the world. Insofar as the experience embraces the transcendental in the phenomenal, the perception, I submit, is mystical. This unitive contact with the imperishable energy at the heart of the prairie goes to the inmost center of the protagonists' work and hope. Even in times of calamity, the aesthetically gifted homesteaders can discern the fire of life in the heat of loss and death. They apprehend an underlying principle of vital order in nature and place their trust in it. No religious language is needed to propose that such a way of looking at the physical world attends a belief in the hidden source of life.
The way in which Cather's protagonists perceive the world is like a spiritual seed that germinates. With Alexandra and Antonia, whose intuitions prompt forceful action, the burgeoning outgrowth conspicuously changes the terrain. Sometimes, however, the seed pushes downward to produce an imperceptible growth, a darker understanding that reconfigures one's mood. Professor Godfrey St. Peter, the hero of The Professor's House, is a case in point. Though born of a Methodist mother and a "gentle weaned-away Catholic father" (30), St. Peter is an atheist (a-theos--without-God or God-free). At fifty-two, his solidly constructed world of family and scholarly research has collapsed. He is left with and in solitude. For St. Peter, aloneness is the radical truth beneath all truths of personal success, community, and social history. This truth expands to the greater truth: the God of his imagination and of his Christian past have died for him. In that loss, St. Peter comes to a vital belief. The death of the God of his projections makes room for the God who stands infinitely transcendent, above and below human reach. In the shaking of the foundations of St. Peter's universe, Cather gives us a powerful devastation, for the God who has died is the God of the human Ego deified. That God must die, St. Peter realizes. In his bleak withdrawal from human and ego-centric affairs, the professor calls the death of this God "the truth of the matter ... Truth under all truths" (265). A chasm opens, a longing emanates. His desire "under all desires" (265) is trying to believe. With unsparing candor, he realizes that he cannot place his trust in created things. It seems that is the case. No wonder, then, that "all these recognitions give him a sad pleasure" (266). St. Peter has found truth in not finding.
The correlative to aesthetic intuition is seeing by faith. Religious perception is really aesthetic response in another key, not necessarily higher so much as redirected toward a revealed absolute. Religion in Cather's writing is another, but not the sole, way of responding to the true source of life. For that reason Cather can have St. Peter profess to his students that "[a]rt and religion ... are the same thing, in the end" (69). For Archbishop Jean Marie Latour, art and religion are identical not only in the end but at the very beginning of reflection and life. Creation, through this prelate's eyes, is the work of an artist. All matter enjoys the indwelling of that divine initiative. In its genesis and evolution, the entire world is sacramental. Latour's aesthetics, then, is his theology. Seeing and believing are reciprocal as faith and sensitivity refine and deepen each other at every turn along the missionary's long, divagating journey in an America that is alive with providential manifestations. Signs of God's presence abound. A two-parted juniper tree with intersecting branches manifests the cross. Interminable pathless deserts are for Latour the direct way to draw closer to God. In the vast barrenness of the Southwest, a subterranean stream produces a miraculous stream to sustain him on his pilgrimage to God. Exilic solitude he accepts as the condition to be a man for others and the world. Like his kind down the ages, Cather's priest is part of God's direct revelation in the concreteness of human conduct.
Through Cather's sustained attention to the interior growth of Jean Marie Latour, Death Comes for the Archbishop shows us how basic spirituality is to her writing and how deep it takes her story. So extensive is her chronicling of the renewal of Christianity in the American Southwest that the events go further back than nineteenth-century religious and social history to dramatize the fourth-century story of the great ancient desert. In fact, the chaotic territory where the two French priests are sent is highly charged with the spiritual hostilities and possibilities animating the legendary desert adventure in late antiquity. The alien crags and sandy expanses of the ancient desert elders abut the "canyons and arroyos" of New Mexico and Arizona (Archbishop 3). Along the endless "succession of pathless deserts, yawning canyons" (40-41) of the new world one finds all the trials of thirst, hunger, and surrender that were played out in the primitive wastes of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Surrounded by perilous rocks and gloomy steppes marking the Mediterranean basin, men and women struggled to reach God through a self-sacrificing discipline that would help them wage war against demonic powers. That war rages amid the caves at Pecos and along Latour's extensive trek across the Painted Desert and Hopi villages to Navajo country. Mexicans, Indians, Americans, and French, all are embattled by evil. Many, such as Scales, Friar Balthazar, Father Lucero and Father Martinez succumb to the malevolent forces. Others, namely Magdalena, Sada, Father Latour and Father Vaillant struggle against evil; and in fighting the good fight, they find the peace that comes to allies of virtue.
If one pauses to consider the relation between the American desert and that of the fourth century where strange solitaries worked out their arduous religious search, one can only be struck by how subtly Willa Cather incorporates the themes of that remote world into the spiritual reformation of the Southwest. The evils that lurked in the ancient desert reappear with startling frequency and unsurprising familiarity. Cather may not have been familiar with patristic texts, but by sheer power of insight and feeling she succeeds in giving new guises to worn iniquities: pride, greed, ecclesiastical abuse of power, lust, wrath, gluttony, and...
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