Copyright ~) 1974 by the W|II. Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educatlonal Foundation Winter Newsletter--1974 Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Eduoational Foundation VOLUME XVIII, Number 4 RED CLOUD, NEBRASKA

it as a necessary part of life. In each story, a young Newsletter--Literary Issue Winter 1974 woman or girl is supported either psychologically or Edited by Bernice Slote financially by a benevolent older male who is not related to her in a romantic way. In each story, death Twice a year literary issues of the Newsletter o~: the central figures for whom the stories are named will present new Willa Cather material: reprints of some of Cather’s early, hard-to-find, and still un- is inevitable, but not violent. collected journalistic writings; early reviews, inter- The dominant theme of "Neighbour Rosicky," "Old views, and notes about Cather’s work; bibliographi- Mrs. Harris," and "Two Friends" is the mystique of cal information; and--from Cather readers---original brief notes, observations, explications, or short cri- figures which are pillars of strength and succor for tical articles. (Submit manuscripts to CATHER persons in their sphere of influence. The author pro- NEWSLETTER, 201 Andrews Hall, University of vides a close study of the dependence of the weak Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68508). and trusting upon the strong, and, when the strong ... In This Issue... figure is inexorably and permanently removed from ~Notes on O~ure Destinies by Claire Mattern, the scene by death, leaves the reader to speculate upon Patricia Yongue, Mona Pers, Jacquelynn S. what will become of the dependent figures as they Lewis, JoAnna Lathrop are left to rely more upon themselves or someone else, ~-From English reviews with only memories to sustain them. The narrator is a reporting observer in "Neighbour Rosicky" and "Old Mrs. Harris," but the sensitive treat- Obscure Destinies, Willa Cather’s collection of ment, particularly of the central figures, shows a more three stories about the people of Western farms and than casual interest. The narrator "feels" the warmth, small towns, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in the strength, and unselfishness of Anton Rosicky and Mrs. summer of 1932. Early reviews were in the New Harris, and, along wilh the reader, watches with horror York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune on July as their physical ills overtake them. Finally, in "Two 31. The first story, "Neighbour Rosicky," had been Friends," the narrator emerges as "1," the persona completed as early as 1928 and had appeared in the who is entranced with and psychologically dependent Woman’s Home Companion for April and May 1930. upon the life comprised by the two friends together. The other two stories were written in 1931. "Two The death of the two individuals, Dillon and Trueman, Friends" was also published in the Woman’s Home is, indeed, anticlimactic compared to the shattering Companion in July 1932, and "Old Mrs. Harris" in the trauma of the death of the friendship, upon which Ladies’ Home Journal, September-November 1932. It not only the narrator but Dillon and Trueman also had was there called "Three Women." Most reviewers become dependent. The separate entity that was thought the stories were poignant, true to life, and the friendship died of "natural causes," just as Anton beautifully written, though without the intensity of Rosicky and Old Mrs. Harris didma quiet disagree- earlier Nebraska novels like My Antonia and A Lo~ ment and non-violent estrangement, from which many Lady. Others stressed the subtlety of the style and friendships perish, as common an ailment as heart the importance given to the lives of ordinary people. attack or stroke. For new readers, the stories of Obscure Destinies con- The narrator becomes reconciled to the death of tinue to be revealing. The following are five notes Neighbour Rosicky, and, in Whitmanesque fashion, written especially for this issue. can see the grass in the graveyard as representing completion, beauty, and the cyclical elements in life and death. The narrator draws consolation after the THE THEMES THAT BIND death of Old Mrs. Harris in speculation that those who The collection of stories by Willa Cather called drained the vitality from Mrs. Harris and heedlessly Obscure Destinies is comprised of three tales which are exploited her would be treated the same way some related to each other in significant ways, just as they day, in some Karma-like fashion, and grow to appreci- are also related to the life of the author and the great- ate what they had done. The death of the triumvirate er body of her work. bond between Dillon, Trueman, and the narrator in In each story, like the author and her family, "Two Friends" remains a scar, however, and leaves the principal characters have migrated from East to West. narrator unconsoled in the "old uneasiness; the feeling The prairie landscape and the way its occupants relate of something . . . delightful that was senselessly to it are integral parts of the stories. In each story, wasted." Perhaps whatever we have treasured most Chicago serves as a cultural touchstone; and in each must always seem to us "senselessly wasted" after it one, the narrator notes that principal characters not is gone. only are quite literate but express an enthusiasm for Claire Mattern Grand Opera and are conversant in this area, regarding University of Nebraska Until the crisis in their relationship, the two friends have little reality for the reader, because the narrator does not conceive of them as real people at all. For her, they embody the beautiful idea of a perfect friend- ship. When her idealized picture of them is shattered, and their human frailties are disclosed, she is dismayed. Her disillusionment is that of a child, who has dis- covered, for the first time, the ordinary human being behind the mask of his favorite stage hero. Mona Pars, University of Uppsala, Sweden "NEIGHBOUR ROSICKY" "Neighbour Rosicky," the first of the Obscure Destinies stories, is at the positive end of a narrative road that in terms of feeling is one of descent. Willa Cather’s biographers recommend that "Neighbour Ros- icky" be read as a brilliant postscript to M,y .~,ntonla (1918), for elegiac affirmation of ~,ntonias creative, spirit-giving life is continued in the account of Anton "Dillon’s bank and general store stood at the corner of Main Street and a cross-street .... " This is the Red Rosicky’s productive life. The story also suggests Cloud scene described in "Two Friends." Willa Cather’s effort to communicate as much as pos- sible of an essentially "incommunicable past," as that "TWO FRIENDS" past became more distant in the face of a particularly difficult present for author and country alike. Be- "Two Friends," commonly dismissed as of slight tween the time of ,~nto.nia and that of Anton Rosicky, importance in Willa Cather’s works, has a strange a deterioration of the national spirit had set in, due. peal for me. I attribute it to the special atmosphere mainly to political-economic stress, and there was much created by the girl narrator’s attitude to the two need, amid the. gloom of Willa Cather’s own life at friends, who hold a strong attraction for her. Those the time, to capture a moment of happiness. two men are her heroes, and she is content to worship "Neighbour Rosicky" is, in this respect, a fitting them from a distance. She hardly knows them, but epilogue to Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), draws pleasure from lust watching them. As a non- the only one of Willa Cather’s novels to illustrate a life participant onlooker, she observes them act their parts, lived and ended in accordance with aesthetic design. like performers in a play. Latour’s death, in his rectory that is framed by his Actually, there is much in the description of the blooming orchards, so different from the bare little situation that recalls a theater setting; the girl forms cruciform tree he encountered on his first trip into New an audience o~ one, the two friends are the actors. Mexico, is the "splendid finish" to a splendid life. The reader is invited, as it were, to share the card- So, too, Rosicky’s death, but in a much more humble board box with the young narrator, and sit there with way. To Dr. Ed Burleigh, the physician who tries to her, for hours at a stretch, watching the gestures and take care of Rosicky’s defective heart, Rosicky’s life Jistening to the conversation of the two men, who are "seemed complete and beautiful." The gentle, un- placed, as on a Jighted stage, in chairs in front of her. pretentious Czech does more, even in death, to cure While it is dark in the shade of the wall, where the the spiritual afflictions of his family and good friend, girl is sitting, the moon illuminates the two men as than science can do for his faulty heart. Both Latour well as the vacant lot behind them, which is described and Rosicky, like Antonia, are artists of the personal as a surrealistic stage background: "These aba.ndoned order. Both prelates, one of the church and the other buildings, an eyesore by day, melted together into of the family, set their arid lands in o.rder. Both curious pile in the moonlight, became an immaterial build gleaming monuments of love and faith that will structure of velvet-white and glossy blackness, with exist long after their deaths. Willa Cather needed here and there a faint smear of blue door, or a tilted to re-affirm this kind of greatness before she set out patch of sage-green that had once been a shutter." to illustrate the waywardness of life in general. Ugly by daylight, this place becomes mysteriously As such, "Neighbour Rosicky" stands apart from transfigured by the moonbeams, iust as rickety stage the other Obscure Destinies stories, which do not property is beautified by art~ully applied spotlights. dwell at all on the idea of "splendid finish." Rosicky When the cold weather comes, the two friends completes a life of creativity that means something move inside the store, and the girl follows in their to those around him, but old Mrs. Harris, as valiant wake. Seated on a counter, she continues to watch them and as loving and as selfless as Rosicky, slips out of closely. The fact that she cannot hear a word of what the lives of her family, leaving no one but the distant they are saying does not diminish her interest. The narrator to see the beauty of her life and the harsh- scene of the two men "playing checkers in the office ness of her road, the loneliness of her road. In an behind the wire screening; both seated on high ac- almost existential way, Willa Cather emphasizes, "Le countants’ stools, with the checker-board on the cash- but n’est rien; le chemin, c’est tout." And, in "Two let’s desk before them" is rendered like a pantomime. Friends," she writes even more dismally of the degen- The girl’s minute account of the gestures and manner- eration of something initially splendid, of something isms characteristic of the two men, and the importance "delightful that was senselessly wasted, of a truth she attaches to their every movement, underlines the that was accidently distorted---one of the truths we pantomimic quality of her experience. want to keep." There is scar tissue left in the narra- tor’s heart because of this waste; there is sadness in her heart because of heartlessness in the world of old THE EXPRESSION OF LONELINESS Mrs. Harris; but there is gratefulness in her heart be- I continue to be intrigued by a special Willa cause of the greatness of Neighbour Rosicky’s story, a Cather brand of aloneness exhibited repeatedly in greatness that was a part of the past. her fictional characters. One by one they face up to Patricia Yongue, University of Houston each unique existence in like lonely stature, described with like simplicity. The pioneer place and time of Cather’s stories ON THE TITLE was, at its best, a lonely experience. Truthful treat- Few artists have served so prolonged and care- merit of the progress West and the people who were ful an apprenticeship as Willa Cather did and, cor- a part of that phenomenon must naturally depict a respondingly, few have displayed the craftsmanship raw determination and courage, at the core of which of her mature works. Obscure Destinies effectively was loneliness. But there is too.re than simple de- displays Cather’s mastery. In this work not only is scription of a singular determination; there is a tech- each of the trio of short stories artful in itself, but the nique peculiar to Willa Cather and more complex whole collection is unified in conception and titling. than lonely prairies, cold cities, courageous settlers, and Cather read Gray’s "Elegy Written in a Country the right words to embody them all. This device is Churchyard" insighffully. Gray, in this poem, warns a coupling of opposition---or comparison--semantic that neither Ambition nor Grandeur dare mock the adversaries united, as it were, within a sentence, a "useful toil .... homely joys, and destiny obscure" paragraph, or a perception. By creating a picture con- of those members of the community now buried in trary to what the reader might conceive, Willa Cather the churchyard. The poet concludes with a promise thus achieves a significant effect which builds as her that artists who memorialize the seemingly unimport- stories progress. ant dead will be themselves remembered and so sug- "Neighbour Rosicky" in Obscure Destinies will gests that art immortalizes both its subject and its serve as my single, brief example. In Doctor’s Bur- creator. leigh’s office we are introduced, after little conversa- Willa Cather presents us with the "obscure" lives tion, to Mr. Rosicky as one who "did not look like a of Anton Rosicky, Mrs. Harris, R. E. Dillon, and J. H. sick man." He is, then, further described as" gay Trueman. The first three die in the course of their rather than grave." After leaving the Burleigh office stories and Trueman disappears with finality from the Rosicky proceeds to the store where he is attended narrator’s life. Just as the buried dead are for Gray by a lively, young, pretty, town girl who further sets the "forefathers" of the town, so each of these char- apart the worn, old, dying country man who shortly acters is identified by Calher in a familial or social passes a "snug and homelike" graveyard on the road role. Rosicky is "Neighbour Rosicky"; to suggest the to home and a kitchen described by Rosicky himself community’s affection and familiarity, h~rs. Harris is as "no place fur a man." The "united differences" "Old Ntrs. Harris" and, to her family, "Grandma"; contin~ue, some subtle and others sharp, but all piling Dillon and Trueman are "Two Friends," related to in the mind of the reader the foreign essence of exist- each other and to the townspeople. We cannot be ence which serves to inflict an overwhelming alone- permitted indifference to these lives; their destiny, is ness on, first, "Neighbour Rosicky," then "Old Mrs. ours; the human family is ultimately one. Cather Harris," and, finally, "Two Friends." names each person to particularize individual import- There is a peculiar and significant genius in Willa ance, yet renames him to stress his immersion into the Cather’s expression of loneliness which ties beyond a commonality of the world. To suggest each story’s choice of simple words. Perhaps this subtlety of under- universality, Cather ends each with a direct statement lying and interwoven opposition is important to that of the importance of what has occurred. Dr. Burleigh remarkable result. reflects, "Rosicky’s life seemed to him complete and beautiful." An unidentified voice summarizes that Jacquelynn S. Lewis, University of Nebraska "thus Mrs. Harris slipped out of the Templetons’ story," but promises that the daughter and granddaughter ENGLISH REVIEWS will in time come closer to Mrs. Harris through emotion and understanding. The retrospective observer of In England, reviews of Obscure Destinies first ap- "Two Friends" reviews the broken friendship and peared in late 1932. The following excerpts give concludes that it produced "the feeling of something a hint of their tone. broken that could so easily have been mended; of From a review by Frank Kendon in John O’ London’s something delightful that was senselessly wasted, of Weekly, December 3, 1932: a truth that was accidentally distorted---one of the truths we want to keep." effects ’b~,shrewd She ventures native knowledge upon no tricks, of character but gets based her Cather has let her narrators lead us to see beyond upon instinctive and loving observation of persons, the limitation of each individual life into mutual simi- and by sound solid prose---prose that does not try to larity and human continuity. Cather has remembered be anything more than the clear medium in which these people in her lines and through her art has em- the story appears. I am inclined to compare her with phasized the "destiny," the important function of in- Hardy, chiefly because her eye is always on the people dividual life. She has converted the adiective "ob- and not on the book .... Novelists of the conservative scure" into an ironic comment on life., these lives only class, like Hardy .... are greater, it seems to me, in seem ordinary, yet they endure in Cather’s art and so the very fact that they make Literature take a quiet cor- insure their fame and hers. ner. They spare no labour to efface the marks of JoAnna Lathrop, University of Nebraska their labour, their conscience makes them write well, their good taste and modesty make them write quietly gives us opportunity to look for such qualities and to so that their readers may have nothing between them find them fo.r ourselves by describing with exactness, and the character .... without minuteness, these simple domestic lives. She The obscure destinies which Miss Gather cele- is not afraid of simplicity, she makes the flavour of brates in these three stories are an old farmer, an old provincialness pleasant, she makes obscure men mas- grandmother, and two sound business men of the old ters of their destinies; but with al her kindness she school. All three tales are set in the Western States is never false to reality, never noisier or sadder or of America, and taken a|together give a picture of sweeter than life. that quiet, vigorous, well-founded farming life, like and yet unlike the land life of England¯ Unselfishness, From the Manchester Guardian, December 16, 1932, sturdy independence, humaneness, love of house and signed "T.M.": land and family, content rather than happiness, are ... The delicacy and tenderness of the story the virtues--the Wordsworthian virtues I almost wrote entitled "Neighbour Rosicky" are perfect .... The --which Miss Gather finds in these people; and she picture is like music in its complete harmony. And when the old man dies the end is like music fading. From a review by Helen Moran in the London Mer- cury, January 1933: William Thomas Auld, M.D. Ella Gather Lewis Dr, C. Bertrand Schultz Mildred R. Bennett John March Marian Schultz ¯.. Miss Gather creates people, not types¯ These W. K. Bennett, M.D. Miriam Moumford Margaret Gather Shannon Richard Borton William Mountford Bernice Slote are homely, quiet people, who seem so real that when Vi Borton Harry Obitz Helen Gather Southwick Don E. Connors Helen Obitz Marcella Van Meter old Rosicky dies one feels a pang of regret because Virginia Faulkner Frank O’Rourke Durward B. Vamer now it is too late ever to know him, forgetting for the Josephine Frlsbie Jennie P~il~er Laird G. Wolfe Ted Kennedy David E. Scherman Lucia Woods moment that he is a character in a book. Helen Leng reid James H, Zumberge

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