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The Two Worlds of Willa Cather and Elinor Wylie

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The Two Worlds of Willa Cather and Elinor Wylie NOT FOR REPRINT EVELYN HELMICK HIVELY THE TWO WORLDS OF WILLA CATHER AND ELINOR WYLIE The world broke in two for the artists of the early twentieth century. A burst of creative activity in music, art, and literature prompted Ezra Pound to declare 1922 Year One of a new era. The sentiment was echoed by those who found the innovative and iconoclastic attitudes of the modernists the way to confront the problems of a time of upheaval in science, politics, and religion. Many of the writers of the 1920s chose to follow Pound’s commandment to “make it new.” Other voices, however, rejected the cult of the new and clung to tradition. Willa Cather chose tradition. She also wrote that the communicates more information than is found on the world broke in two in 1922 “or thereabouts.”1 The rage page of her story. Borrowing from Christopher Morley, for newness, she said in 1921, was one of the things she wrote, “The importance of any fable can be gauged she deplored.2 Reaching into the time and place of her by the area of silence it covers.”3 To disguise her facts, she childhood, she retrieved the familiar subjects and the said, she often used allegory and fantasy. literary expression for her fiction. Her belief that a writer “Two Friends,” a representative story by Cather, written finds the material for her work before the age of fifteen in 1931 but tacitly alluding to events that occurred (sometimes she said twenty) is the reason that she was decades earlier, first appeared in the Woman’s Home often identified as a regional or elegiac writer. Like many Companion, an Ohio magazine that catered to farmers of the woman writers of the early twentieth century, she and homemakers. Its readers were likely to identify with was also frequently labeled a traditionalist. the young narrator who recalls two exceptional men in a Elinor Wylie fully embraced all that was modern. Her small Western town who spend their evenings together division came not between past and future but between and often travel together to the city. Dillon is a banker urban and rural. With a father who was solicitor general and store owner, articulate and commanding, especially as under Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and he demands that everyone respect the language. Trueman a husband who was co-founder of the Saturday Review is a cattleman from the East, reticent and worldlier. of Literature, she moved in a world very different from As the two friends talk, the young narrator sees the Cather’s. Her work is clever, fast-paced, and filled with surrounding countryside transformed: “Nothing in the contemporary allusions designed for sophisticated readers. world, not snow mountains or blue seas, is so beautiful Without apology, she described most of her fiction as in moonlight as the soft, dry summer roads in a farming improbable and strange. But in one way it often resembles country, where the white dust falls back from the slow Cather’s fiction: it conveys something, she said, that wagon-wheel.” The spell is broken when Dillon attends 22 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM NOT FOR REPRINT Willa Cather Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number LC-US762-116087] Elinor Wylie Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. Photo by Nickolas Muray. WINTER 2018 23 A TALE OF TWO WRITERSNOT FOR REPRINT I T AKE NE M W a political convention in Chicago explicitly expressed; Bryan’s speeches, and returns with enthusiasm for from the 1896 “Cross of Gold” William Jennings Bryan — a great championing the farmer and worker orator, he tells Trueman, who replies, to his 1925 Scopes trial attack on the “Great windbag!” Their argument teaching of evolution. Cather does focuses on language, but it’s clear not take a side in the quarrel between that Trueman objects to Bryan’s the friends, and even in her own T R N populist message as well; the rift admiration for Bryan she praised A D E R is complete, and for the narrator a mostly the skills of oratory that she I T O D I O N / M sense of equilibrium in the world has had heard when he, as Nebraska vanished. congressman, visited her hometown “Two Friends” was the best short of Red Cloud. Surely, she said, “that story she had ever done, Cather was eloquence that reached the old wrote to her publisher, comparing stamp that was accounted divine, it to a Courbet painting — “a sort eloquence that reached through of romantic realism.” Readers of the the callus of ignorance and toil and Woman’s Home Companion could find found and awoke the stunted souls familiar scenes and characters in the of men.”5 Bryan’s fundamentalist traditional story form. But Cather themes of ethnocentrism and often made skillful use of modernist isolationism, as well as the anti- techniques, and, like Wylie, she evolutionism that defines him, demonstrates that what is not on the resonated with the populace of page, “the emotional aura of the fact the South and Midwest and lend a or the thing or the deed,” determines powerful, disquieting tone to the the quality of the work.4 story as political differences violate In “Two Friends,” the specific the beauty and equilibrium of a relevant facts are not stated, but friendship, the memories of a young readers would recognize what was not person, and the order of a town. 24 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM NOT FOR REPRINT The themes and style of (Wylie's) fiction were written for the contemporary reader who often demands the clever and the new. Wylie wrote “The Life Story of Greensmith’s narcissistic account. often demands the clever and the Lydia Greensmith” in 1926, an The readers of the New Republic new. Cather’s fiction still reaches a ironic amusement for the readers of would know that Greensmith was much wider audience and can be the New Republic, a liberal monthly recounting the life of Wylie herself, appreciated on several levels, from published in New York to comment who was the Jackie Kennedy of the a middle school student to the most on political and cultural affairs. time, newspapers reporting her every discerning reader. Much of her work Considered by Carl Van Vechten, move. The story is witty, satiric, deserves the designation of a tale — a friend and eminent critic, to be beautifully crafted and, like much that narrative used to communicate her best story, “Greensmith” opens of the writing in the twenties, about to members of a culture the values in the small spaces of the Musée the individual and of the moment. that define their place in the world. Carnavalet, the Paris museum But, like “Two Friends,” the story The characters and symbols of a tale devoted to the history of French begins and ends with language. As are often best understood by the interior decoration. This story, too, the narrator leaves, culture itself and used to establish has a young narrator, a woman she hears Greensmith ordering its identity. When Cather’s world who wonders whether there is another drink “in her French of broke and she chose the past, she time for dress fittings at the Poiret Fairfield in Connecticut.” revealed further that her stories “slid salon before the races begin at Today that story and the other back into yesterday’s seven thousand Longchamps. She meets Lydia “fugitive prose” in Wylie’s collected years,” summoning for those she Greensmith, who is “charming works are mostly forgotten, and called the “backward” the mythic and absurd” and says she has been only some of her exquisite poetry tales of their culture. visiting the museum and other is anthologized. The themes and famous public places during the day style of her fiction were written For works cited: go to www.phikappaphi.org/ and sleeping at night in the great for the contemporary reader who forum/winter2018 hotels of Paris and New York. This fantasy was intended for a small following who both appreciated EVELYN HELMICK HIVELY has been professor of English and director of American Studies at the University of Miami the artistic playfulness of the story and vice president of academic programs at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Her books include and recognized the references in Sacred Fire: Willa Cather’s Novel Cycle and A Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie. WINTER 2018 25.
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