An Early Populist: Willa Cather – JP
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Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is a total surprise.
While I’ve read her major classics, Death Comes to the Archbishop and My Ántonia, this was my first chance to delve into one of her “minor” books.
Cather’s creative range amazes. In this novel the point-of-view is entirely male; indeed none but one of the “minor” female characters is shown in a truly positive light. While known for her compelling tales of the pioneering spirit, in this tale she settles on the intrigues of a small university town on the shores of Lake Michigan (as seen through the eyes of a history professor named Godfrey St. Peter), in contrast to the wilds of New Mexico (the site of Death Comes to the Archbishop) and the bureaucratic morass of Washington, DC, somewhat mirroring her life experience: a homesteader in Nebraska, a graduate of the state university, and then living in New York.
The novel is divided into three books: The Family, Tom Outland’s Story (his star pupil recounting his adventures in New Mexico) and The Professor. The first and last books are told entirely from St. Peter’s perspective, mostly from the family’s long-time home in Michigan.
What strikes me in Cather’s writing is a nascent populism, a strong anti-elitist streak, as well as a refined observation of social mores – that mirrors Jane Austen’s insights into romantic alliances, in this case between St. Peter and his ambitious wife Lillian. Her descriptions of place are indeed shimmering, imbuing locations, things, landscapes with their own character, as Virginia Wolf did in novels such as To the Lighthouse.
The Professor’s House, as befits the title, is about the early mid-life crisis of a successful scholar and professor who can’t seem to remove himself from the family’s old, rundown home and move into a new, more spacious one constructed with prize money. The room he can’t leave is specifically the top-floor study where he composed his 8-volume opus on the Spanish history of the desert southwest.
We at first find the professor near the height of his abilities, enthralling students and navigating the intrigues, dislikes, and rivalries between his wife, their two married daughters, and their sons-in-law. But as the novel progresses St. Peter withdraws more and more, coming to isolate himself in the garret-study, welcoming the family’s summer exploring Europe so he can be alone, reaching a point of apathy that he leaves it to chance whether the study’s old, temperamental stove would asphyxiate him – which it very nearly does at novel’s end.
The study of the angst of a male middle class American, the long slippery slope into psychological self-doubt and even spiritual despair, equals that the more contemporary John Updike – without the sex.
The three places that impact both male protagonists (St. Peter and Outland) are a natural and archeological marvel in New Mexico named the Blue Mesa (which changes both their lives), the old, ratty study shared with the family’s seasonal seamstress, and Lake Michigan (the last two exclusively the Professor’s).
Each represents freedom of sorts – but knowing that freedom unbound leads to debauchery, the old study, at first depicted as a refuge, an escape into isolation, becomes a false freedom, described mid-novel by the Professor as a “shadowy crypt,” which indeed it nearly becomes. But a crypt for what?
It is a man-made refuge, of course, so is not lasting, while Lake Michigan and the Blue Mesa are natural wonders and more enduring – despite the commercial raping of the mesa’s archeological site discovered by Outland.
The book contains a strong anti-materialist undertone. Not only is the mesa rifled through for gain, but St. Peter’s family is destroyed by the wealth bequeathed to his eldest daughter, generated by a lucrative patent to one of Outland’s discoveries. (Outland was engaged to the daughter, and willed over a nearly worthless patent to her prior to leaving for the Europe convulsed by World War I, where he dies.) St. Peter ponders if Outland, seeing the results of his patent, would quote Mark Antony’s “My fortunes have corrupted honest men.”
Book 3, The Professor, begins with, “All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance.” [p. 233] How could he be so sure, so unintentional?
To underline his somber mood, on the same page it is pointed out,
the Professor often thought of that curiously bitter burst from the barytone in Brahma’s Requiem, attending the words, “He heapeth up riches and cannot tell who will scatter them!”
Will St. Peter’s riches soon be scattered as well? His descent into lethargy and apathy, that nearly asphyxiates him, would counsel so. In the book’s last page, it is pondered,
Yet when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often.[p.258]
Was it chance that saved him? Ostensibly, yes, as Augusta the seamstress, sent on a special mission by Lillian still sailing back to the New World, happens upon him unconscious and drags him out of the room into a hallway with a breeze.
Augusta, when we first meet her at the book’s very beginning, is described unflatteringly:
For three weeks in the fall, and again three in the spring, he shared his cuddy with Augusta, the sewing-woman, niece of his landlord, a reliable, methodical spinster, a German Catholic and very devout. [p .8]
St. Peter, despite having grown up with a Catholic father, is very much a lapsed one. When his main rival at school tells him he is on his way to service, he replies, “All right, all right, Langtry, as you will. Quelle folie!”
Midway through Book 1, Augusta points out,
“You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else said the things you do to your students, I’d be scandalized. But I always tell people you don’t mean half you say.” [p.83]
When asked to clarify, she continues, “when you say slighting things about the Church.”
He is less funny when she finds him near death. In a frequently used narrative ploy, by bookending the tale with encounters with Augusta, one is led to ask, What has changed in the protagonist, what developments occurred?
Indeed, while subtle, it is fair to say the St. Peter is transformed in a mysterious way by book’s end. When, after waiting patiently to wake up from his stupor and ascertaining that he is well, Augusta asks if St. Peter would like her to stay up with him that night – in the very study that was his escape from all humanity – he responds positively:
“It would be a comfort. I seem to feel rather lonely – for the first time in months.” [p.255]
He furthermore reflects on how or why he could be so welcoming to Augusta’s attentions at this point:
She wasn’t at all afraid to say things that were heavily, drearily true, and though he used to wince under them, he hurried off with the feeling that they were good for him, that he didn’t have to hear such sayings half often enough. [p.256]
While doubting still that he could every truly enjoy the company of his querulous and bothersome family, he realizes suddenly,
“There was still Augusta, however; a world full of Augustas, with whom one was outwards bound.” [p.257]
What a transformation! By the end of the tale St. Peter is resigned that “he could face with fortitude the Berengaria [the ship his family was sailing home on] and the future.”
Earlier in the novel, St. Peter reassures his worried wife “that I’ll get my second wind.” Little did he or she know that it would be spiritual one.
I shared this reading of the book’s tea leaves at my local book club and was met with resistence – despite our diverse group including (my guess) a former Catholic and a secular Jew. The entire group is secular and still amazes me at times; they really don’t wish to see God’s hand in anything.
Cather, if not a closet Catholic, seems to respect the Church. She ridicules the thought of randomness being the cause of all things, going so far as to have the Professor delcare early on, “In Nature there is no selection.” Natural selection, one could say, is the theory of randomness and chance that intentionally crowds out any God from the equation.
Her name choices also hint at the transformation. Godfrey, obviously, is pronounced God-free. The St. Peter of our story is, obviously, not the Rock on which the Catholics purportedly build their church – but perhaps, just perhaps, he joins Augusta in her selfless faith.
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925), Vintage Classics 1990 Edition, New York
[To watch a recording of the book club meeting, click below. It looks like you’ll need the passcode db8xN7w= to access]
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/_ltqgkYyVIKpjTCORTmO4RedytZFKEEzKV0NU0Mr8PAgGzsGPv1faqxd8-HrCII-.BNWUijDgrWSuuHFM
Ben Batchelder is the author of four extended travel yarns and has been a Contributor to The JP since its inception. Contact him at his author site benbatchelder.com