A Chance Meeting, page 13
Willa Cather was having difficulty finding her voice. She was writing short stories and poems, but she found the atmosphere of McClure’s distracting and did not feel that any of her current work came up to the level of what she had been writing before she moved to New York. It would have been easy to become a journalist—her pieces on Mary Baker Eddy were so successful that they were later collected into a book, though Cather was not especially proud of it and always insisted that it be attributed to Georgine Milmine. “Working on McClure’s was like working in a high wind, sometimes of cyclone magnitude” was how Cather’s companion, Edith Lewis, remembered it in her memoir. Lewis worked there also, and she described the office in a state of constant turmoil, with McClure himself rushing around, giving off ideas like “showers of sparks,” and endless people passing through. Lewis was pleased when one day William Dean Howells dropped by and asked Lewis what she was doing. She answered, and he said “in his beautiful voice: ‘I was a proof-reader, too.’” With all the visitors and activity, Cather would come home at night keyed up and spent. The occupants of 148 Charles Street and their steady dedication to the pursuit of literature made a deep impression on her.
Sarah Orne Jewett.
They must, in turn, have liked her very much, this fervent young writer, so clearly gifted and with such a strong sense of the past. A few months before she died, Jewett wrote Cather a long letter about her collection of stories, The Troll Garden. First of all, Jewett said, “If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.” Jewett appreciated the material available to Cather, but “I want you to be surer of your backgrounds,—you have your Nebraska life,—a child’s Virginia . . . but you don’t see them yet quite enough from the outside.” And she felt Cather was writing for the wrong audience and should leave behind
your vivid, exciting companionship in the office. . . . You must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society. . . . In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality—you can write about life, but never write life itself. . . . To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world.
“I do not know,” Jewett concluded, “when a letter has grown so long and written itself so easily, but I have been full of thought about you. You will let me hear again from you before long?”
Many years later, Edith Lewis quoted from this letter in her memoir, Willa Cather Living. Lewis said that Cather could not at first act upon Jewett’s advice, as she had to earn her living at McClure’s, and in fact there were things in the letter that Cather wouldn’t understand for a long while, but Lewis was sure that for Cather Jewett’s missive “became a permanent inhabitant of her thoughts.”
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Of all the stories that Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett could tell—the stories of Dickens, and those of Turgenev’s great love, the opera singer Pauline Viardot, and of the Brownings’ little boy riding his pony on the Pincian Hill in Rome—the ones Willa Cather liked best to hear were those about Henry James. How Henry James, Sr., came into James Fields’s office after his son had sent back from Europe a few slight stories, largely unappreciated, and how, blooming with confidence, the elder James had said, “Believe me, the boy will make his mark in letters, Fields.” One day, Cather was sitting at breakfast with Annie Adams Fields when, “apropos of the melons,” the older woman described how Henry James, Sr., would come into breakfast and eat, though Cather couldn’t recall “whether it was that he liked [melons] very much or couldn’t abide them.” And then there was the story of how, one afternoon at Manchester-by-the-Sea, James Fields had brought a pile of submissions with him, and he and Annie Adams Fields went down to their favorite spot by the river and deciphered Henry James’s “execrable” handwriting to read his new story, “Compagnons de Voyage,” out loud. Cather loved Annie Adams Fields for her response, recorded in Fields’s diary that evening: “I do not know why success in work should affect one so powerfully, but I could have wept as I finished reading, not from the sweet, low pathos of the tale, but from the knowledge of the writer’s success. It is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.” Willa Cather was happy following Fields’s recommendations to read the poetry of John Donne or the prefaces of John Dryden, and she liked watching Fields tell her stories. She had such vitality, and her reverence for writers made Cather feel prized and rather proud. In those days, Annie Adams Fields was beautiful still, Cather remembered. “‘A woman’s mouth,’ I used to think as I watched her talking to someone who pleased her; ‘not an old woman’s!’”
Years later, Cather wrote that sometimes she thought of all the writers whose work Fields had loved in her own particular way, and it reminded her of the way Marcel Proust had “somewhere said that when he came to die he would take all his great men with him: since his Beethoven and his Wagner could never be at all the same to anyone else.”
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In the summer of 1911, two years after Jewett died, Willa Cather was visiting Fields at Manchester-by-the-Sea. It was very hot, and they were waiting for Henry James, who had come back to America the previous year for the death of his brother William. Henry James still had his feeling for America, even though the American literary world had largely ignored the recently issued New York Edition of his works. Before this slight, in 1904 and 1905, James had taken the impressions for his account The American Scene, spattered with complaints about the ignorance of immigrants and the tastelessness of the well-to-do but still drawn with a sense of newness and possibility. James had not changed his mind about the thinness of the material America offered its artists. At the time, Willa Cather loved no American novels as she loved the work of Henry James, and she accepted his estimation.
In The American Scene, James had had a particularly hard time making sense of the south; he was bothered by the emptiness he found there and still more disturbed by the implication that without slavery there was no southern culture. With a nod to his brother’s former student he had written, “How can everything so have gone that the only ‘Southern’ book of any distinction published for many a year is The Souls of Black Folk, by that most accomplished of members of the Negro race, Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois? Had the only focus of life then been Slavery?” When Henry James was in America again in 1910, W. E. B. Du Bois was helping to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in which project he was assisted by an early signature of support from William Dean Howells.
Fields, following all these developments, had somehow managed, according to James, to keep “her whole connection insistently modern,” while yet preserving at 148 Charles Street the memories of another age. Of his visits there, James had written:
Here, behind the effaced anonymous door, was the little ark of the modern deluge, here still the long drawing-room that looks over the water and toward the sunset, with a seat for every visiting shade, from far-away Thackeray down, and relics and tokens so thick on its walls as to make it positively, in all the town, the votive temple to memory.
Willa Cather and Annie Adams Fields were waiting for Henry James to come, and Willa Cather was very excited. She was waiting not only for Henry James but for her other idols; she was waiting for Flaubert and Turgenev; she was waiting for an entire era of literary life to which she was fiercely attached. At last, instead, came a note, fulminating against the “Great American summer” and apologizing that its author simply could not leave Nahant. If, in her second mourning, Fields was sorry not to have the company of an old friend, she did not say so. “I was very much disappointed,” wrote Cather, “but Mrs. Fields said wisely, ‘My dear, it is just as well. Mr. James is always greatly put about by the heat, and at Nahant there is the chance of a breeze.’”
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Cather never met Henry James, but the year after she missed him, in 1912, she published her first novel, of a thoroughly Jamesian bent, about Americans in Europe, called Alexander’s Bridge. She came to feel that this direction was utterly a mistake for her. She went to the southwest and reacquainted herself with the cultures of New Mexico, an important influence, though some of her friends thought Cather’s Native American characters had a tendency to be flat and stereotypical. After her journey, taking her title from that of a poem by Whitman, Cather published O Pioneers! Then, steadily, every few years, came the great novels: Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Shadows on the Rock, Lucy Gayheart—novels of American landscape, every one of them.
In 1936, Cather wrote of the period when she had known and been influenced by Jewett. “At that time,” Cather said,
Henry James was the commanding figure in American letters, and his was surely the keenest mind any American ever devoted to the art of fiction. But it was devoted almost exclusively to the study of other and older societies than ours. He was interested in his countrymen chiefly as they appeared in relation to the European scene. As an American writer he seems to claim, and richly to deserve, a sort of personal exemption.
Eleven years before Cather came to this understanding with James, when Sarah Orne Jewett, so famous in her lifetime, was beginning to be less well known, Cather had edited Jewett’s stories for publication. At the end of her preface, when Cather named the three American novels that she thought would never die, she chose The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs. These were the novels through which Cather had seen her project, and she left James aside in his own category, incomparable and alone.
It is possible that the meeting with Henry James that didn’t happen, together with Sarah Orne Jewett’s letter that did, saved Willa Cather a decade of disappointment and artistic wandering. For had she met James, with his intricate and demanding conversational style, she might have had his voice in her mind every time she sat down to write, and she might have written many more novels like Alexander’s Bridge. Instead, Cather bore out every one of Jewett’s insights and took up every one of her suggestions. She grew into a writer of un-shakable discipline and conviction; she wrote of Nebraska and of her Virginia childhood; she became, as the years went on, increasingly solitary; she was known for her wide outlook upon the world; and, as she wrote more and more of history, worked with just those subjects in which Jewett would most have delighted. Cather was the greatest writer of the next generation who knew Jewett well, and the one whose sensibility most closely resembled Jewett’s own. In Death Comes for the Archbishop and in Shadows on the Rock, Cather achieved what James had warned Jewett was so nearly impossible; she managed to find her way back to the old consciousness, to write of people centuries dead as if they had just come into the room.
Perhaps Willa Cather allowed herself the pleasure of picturing Sarah Orne Jewett reading Death Comes for the Archbishop, eagerly cutting the pages in her wide, soft armchair in the library at 148 Charles Street. Afterward, Jewett would have written her a letter of praise and fulfillment—you have done magnificently, I can’t tell you how moved I was, this is just what I meant, better, even, than I could have imagined.
14. EDWARD STEICHEN AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ AND GERTRUDE STEIN
EDWARD Steichen and his wife, Clara, moved back to Paris in 1906. He had decided to pursue painting, which he thought might be more interesting, although less lucrative, than the portrait-photography business. In the four years he’d been living in New York he had been lonely for the Parisian avant-garde. He and Clara rented an apartment on the boulevard Montparnasse, and he went back to visiting Rodin, and he painted. Almost immediately, the Steichens went around to two of the well-known salons for contemporary art: in the house of Michael and Sarah Stein and at Gertrude and Leo Stein’s at 27, rue de Fleurus. Michael, the brother of Gertrude and Leo, had followed his younger siblings to Paris, where he continued to manage their inheritances so astutely that they were all able to live comfortably and buy paintings their whole lives. Michael and particularly his wife, Sarah, had thrown themselves into collecting Matisse. Edward Steichen was very taken with Matisse and in 1908 arranged with Alfred Stieglitz that there would be a show of Matisse’s watercolors and drawings at 291—the gallery had then been up and running for three years. The first Matisse show in New York caused a fury that delighted Stieglitz. Critics who had dismissed the Rodin nudes that he had introduced the previous year now felt positively sentimental about the Rodins compared to what they saw as Matisse’s blazing, shocking nudes.
Gertrude and Leo Stein also knew Matisse and collected his work, but they had other things, too: Renoirs, Cézannes, and Picassos. Edward and Clara Steichen went to the Saturday nights of Gertrude and Leo Stein for the talk and for the pictures. Sometimes they met the Matisses there or Picasso and the woman with whom he then lived, Fernande Olivier; Steichen was always especially glad to see his great friend Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor. There were other Americans who came on Saturdays—Alice B. Toklas, who was not yet living at 27, rue de Fleurus, and the painters John Marin and Max Weber and Alfred Maurer. People would walk back behind the house to the atelier where the pictures hung, and they would look and talk, and then they would go into the house and drink and talk.
In later years, Gertrude Stein was the first citizen at these gatherings, but up until the Great War, while Leo was still living at the rue de Fleurus, he talked. Leo Stein could speak for several hours without interruption; he said it was in his nature to explain. He was an analytical thinker, and when people wrote about him they often mentioned his characteristic phrase: “define what you mean by. . . .” Picasso sketched him as a Jewish patriarch, with a long beard and glasses. Leo Stein was a natural collector—during the war, when he was living in New Mexico, he assembled an impressive collection of pre-Columbian art, something only a few people realized was valuable at the time. Then, in his usual way of doing things and undoing them, he sold it. Leo Stein had begun acquiring pictures when he arrived in Paris in 1903, and he was the first Stein to appreciate Matisse and Picasso. But the pictures at the rue de Fleurus were largely chosen by both Gertrude and Leo. Though each had his or her own visual preferences, they often bought together, and they bought with unequaled taste and timing. Those years, from 1904 to 1912 or so, were the great period in their collecting. When, in 1914, after nearly forty years of living together, they, as Leo put it, “disaggregated,” neither ever collected so well again.
Things were happening when the Steichens were coming on Saturday nights. By 1908, Alice Toklas was there more and more often. That winter, all four of the Steins were reading a series of pieces in McClure’s Magazine on Mary Baker Eddy, and Sarah Stein gave up her own painting and devoted herself to becoming a practitioner of Christian Science. New Picassos and Braques were arriving. In a few years, cubism would be fairly launched and Marcel Duchamp would be coming by and “urgently” debating one of his chief preoccupations—the fourth dimension—with a very interested Gertrude Stein.
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In 1909, Alfred Stieglitz’s father, Edward, died. When his children were young, Edward Stieglitz had moved his family to Germany partly so that they would grow up immersed in European culture, but he had never quite approved of his son’s proclivity for modern art. The death of his father was a painful loss, but it also seems to have liberated Stieglitz’s taste, and it provided him with an inheritance, which enabled him to continue paying for the gallery and supporting his friends. In 1909, Alfred Stieglitz and his wife, Emmy, arrived in Paris for a visit. Steichen took him to meet Rodin, and to Marin’s studio, and to 27, rue de Fleurus to see the pictures at the Steins’.
They sat, in the atelier, with the pictures, and Leo Stein held forth. Steichen was cheerful and easy in conversation, and Stieglitz was himself a tremendous and forceful talker, and Gertrude Stein became a great soliloquizer, but Leo Stein compelled a hearing. “I quickly realized,” Stieglitz later wrote, “that I had never heard more beautiful English nor anything clearer.” Stieglitz didn’t catch Gertrude Stein’s name when they were introduced, and later he couldn’t recall if she’d said anything at this meeting. She sat in a corner, as was her custom, on her high leather chair with her feet on a pile of sandbags. She wore her usual brown corduroy, and Stieglitz remembered her as a “dark and bulksome” presence.
Stieglitz was already an admirer of Matisse, but he was unprepared for Leo Stein’s assertion that the really great thing about Matisse was his sculpture, which Stein felt was greater than Rodin’s; nor was Stieglitz ready for Stein’s conclusion that Rodin and Whistler were second- if not third-rate artists and that the great artist of the coming century was Picasso. Stein talked for a glowing hour and a half, and as they left Stieglitz asked Stein if he would write some of that down so that Stieglitz could publish it in Camera Work. Stein replied that he couldn’t think of it, that the ideas were all much too unformed, and he never did. Instead, three years later, in 1912, Stieglitz published some of the very first works by Gertrude Stein to appear in print and the first in America. Gertrude Stein was radiantly pleased by the publication of her studies, “Matisse” and “Picasso,” which, Stieglitz later explained to a friend, he had accepted “as soon as he had looked them over, principally because he did not understand them.” Entering, in her own way, into the commerce of artists’ portraits of artists, she said of Matisse, among other things, “This one was one, some were quite certain, one greatly expressing something being struggling.” And of Picasso: “This one was one who was working.”
