A Chance Meeting, page 16
Cather wondered whether the book would really be understood. Later she would write to Carl Van Vechten that his liking the book gave her great satisfaction; she had worried that city readers wouldn’t know what to make of it. Still, she had a certain pride in standing her own ground, and perhaps this was the feeling that came to be uppermost in her mind as she made her way uptown. She came to the public library—the new building had been open for fifteen years—and walked along what had been the Croton Reservoir until she arrived at the Beaux Arts Studios at 80 West Fortieth Street, where Edward Steichen had been taking photographs since 1923.
The studio was on the second floor. Perhaps the receptionist showed her where the ladies’ room was and then offered her a seat. Steichen was often a few minutes behind schedule, but he was there almost immediately, his assistant, James McKeon, known as Mac, in tow. Steichen always arrived with flourish. Later, in a different studio in the 1940s, he had an oversize elevator installed: people waiting in the reception room would be surprised when an enormous door opened and Steichen, in a Ford roadster, drove out of the elevator, came to a stop next to the receptionist’s desk, and parked.
Steichen and Mac said hello to Cather, and Steichen bounded into the studio and they began setting up lights. A minute or two later, they asked her to come in and sit down. Perhaps she said she would rather stand, and Steichen looked thoughtful and said, Yes, that seemed like a good idea. Mac changed the angle of the lights. Cather crossed her arms while she was waiting, and Steichen saw her face and body settle into lines that looked characteristic. In the photographs that Steichen took of Cather, which became the best-known photographs of her, she looked happier than she did in any other images: the whole warm goodwill she had, her authority, her fine and resolute judgment, and her absolute assurance—all these were present in her face.
In 1952, five years after Willa Cather died, Katherine Anne Porter set out on her desk a few of Cather’s books and a print of the Steichen photograph and wrote a splendid, if largely inaccurate, memorial essay about its subject. Porter admired James Joyce above all modern writers and considered herself a fervent member of the avant-garde, but she had inherited her sense of the short story, which was her greatest medium, quite directly from Cather. Of Cather’s stories she said gracefully: “They live still with morning freshness in my memory, their clearness, warmth of feeling, calmness of intelligence, an ample human view of things; in short the sense of an artist at work in whom one could have complete confidence.” Mostly, though, Porter chose to write of how she and Cather had grown up and how different their tastes had been, as if Cather had been a relation of hers, perhaps an aunt, whom she went to visit now and again.
Willa Cather by Edward Steichen, 1927.
Porter described Cather’s childhood: her educated and literate and well-mannered parents and grandparents, the family’s “unchallenged assumption that classic culture was their birthright,” and the storekeeper in town with whom Cather studied. In picturing Cather’s childhood, Porter wrote:
my mind goes with tenderness to the lonely slow-moving girl who happened to be an artist coming back from reading Latin and Greek with the old storekeeper, helping with the housework, then sitting by the fireplace to talk down an assertive brood of brothers and sisters, practicing her art on them, refusing to be lost among them—the longest-winged one who would fly free at last.
Cather was neither lonely nor slow moving but “refusing to be lost among them” was close to what she expressed herself.
Porter had been born into not-very-genteel poverty in Texas. She had only one year of proper schooling, no books at home, and a shiftless father, but she never admitted to any of this and instead fabricated a childhood of fading southern aristocracy for herself and her characters that persuaded most of the world and many of her close friends. She wanted a childhood like Willa Cather’s, and when she wrote of Cather she indulged in an outright lie: “I was brought up on solid reading, too, well aged.” Katherine Anne Porter saw no reason not to throw her weight behind the legend of herself. When she was just turning twenty-nine and living in Denver, she appeared in a play and gave herself an excellent review in the local paper the next day.
The way Porter told it, both young women stepped easily into more cosmopolitan worlds, though their aesthetics were different. Cather, Porter said, listened to Wagner, while Porter’s own taste ran to Bartók and Stravinsky. Porter was immersed in Joyce, but Cather was reading Flaubert—Porter neglected to mention Cather’s passion for Proust, or the pleasant friendships Cather had with people as different as D. H. Lawrence and Robert Frost. “The Nude,” wrote Porter in a fond and patronizing tone, “had Descended the Staircase with an epoch-shaking tread, but [Cather] remained faithful to Puvis de Chavannes.” Porter noted that Puvis de Chavannes had placed figures in landscapes in a way that “inspired the form and tone of Death Comes for the Archbishop” but not that the work of the French painter had been helpful to Picasso as well as to Cather. Still, it wasn’t Porter alone who represented Cather as a touch anachronistic. The old-fashioned Cather was Cather’s own invention, clearest in her collection of essays Not Under Forty, published in 1936. Cather so titled her book because she felt no one born in the twentieth century would care to read it. “The world,” Cather wrote in her prefatory note, “broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” She offered no explanation for her choice of dividing line, but much had happened in the prior years—Annie Adams Fields passed away in 1915 and Henry James in 1916, the war ended in 1918, Europe scrambled bloodily for Africa, William Dean Howells died in 1920, and Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for her war novel, One of Ours, in 1922. After that, “the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years.”
Cather, though she lived in New York, carried the standards of Boston and France, as Fields and Howells, Jewett and James had done before her. Not Under Forty included the beautiful essay “A Chance Meeting,” in which Cather described encountering Flaubert’s niece at a hotel in Provence. When she found out who the lady was, Cather wrote, “I took one of her lovely hands and kissed it, in homage to a great period.” Perhaps Katherine Anne Porter envied the gallantry of Cather’s connection to this earlier world. Cather was always able to reach back with a sureness Porter felt she lacked. Porter would have been forty-six when she read Not Under Forty—perhaps she scribbled a few grumbling notes in the margins of her copy, irritated at the implication that she had cheated herself of knowing those whom Cather called “the backward,” while at the same time being, Cather seemed to be saying, too old for the avant-garde.
There was a quality of pride in Porter’s admission, surprising in a memorial essay, that she was ignorant of much of Cather’s middle and later work. She had read O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and the short stories in Youth and the Bright Medusa and Obscure Destinies. “Just these,” she said, as if it had happened by chance, “and no others, I do not know why.” Strange that Porter did not find her way to Lucy Gayheart or My Mortal Enemy, or Shadows on the Rock. Odder still that she never read The Professor’s House, for which Cather built a structure in three parts not unlike that used by Porter in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the book that many said was both Porter’s best and her most startlingly new. For Pale Horse, Pale Rider Porter assembled three long stories based on her own growing up—the last time she dealt with her actual history instead of her fabricated upbringing. Porter seems to have pulled away from reading Cather between 1922, when the world broke in half, and 1927, when Cather finished Death Comes for the Archbishop and had her photograph taken by Edward Steichen.
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Katherine Anne Porter said the Steichen was the only picture she’d seen of Cather, and she considered it at some length in her essay. “No genius,” she wrote, “ever looked less like one . . . unless it was her idol, Flaubert.” Porter wrote: “Miss Cather looks awfully like somebody’s big sister, or maiden aunt, both of which she was.” According to Porter, the photograph showed: “a plain smiling woman, her arms crossed easily over a girl scout sort of white blouse, with a ragged part in her hair. She seemed, as the French say, ‘well seated’ and not very outgoing. Even the earnestly amiable, finely shaped eyes, the left one faintly askew, were in some mysterious way not expressive.” This opinion did not coincide with that of Edith Lewis, who was that same year, 1952, writing her remembrance, Willa Cather Living, in which she said she had felt from the first instant of knowing Cather that her dark blue eyes were “a direct communication of her spirit.” And she continued, “I know no way of describing them, except to say that they were the eyes of genius.”
It was not out of character for Porter to have overlooked the genius in another woman’s eyes. She was herself beautiful and vain (she spent days going through the prints of her own author photographs by the portraitist George Platt Lynes) and very competitive with other women for the attention of men.
Porter often felt that if she was not the center of attention she was being ignored, and at first the literary world was difficult for her. Of Joyce, Porter was able to say only that she had seen him once across a room. And of meeting T. S. Eliot, at a party where she felt out of place, what she reported back in a letter to a friend was little of Eliot and no conversation with anyone else. Porter said she had been too shy to go up to Marianne Moore and had contented herself with eavesdropping on what Moore said in her “beautiful velvet voice.” Moore, as she stood “holding her glass of fruit juice,” rather disapproved of the drunken company. “That man,” Moore said, “is simply speckled all over like a trout with impropriety,” a pronouncement that didn’t make Porter feel any less shy.
Katherine Anne Porter, circa 1930.
In later years, Porter became a central figure in that desired world—she came to know Marianne Moore quite well, gave important encouragement to Eudora Welty and to Flannery O’Connor, and went regularly to the White House, where, one evening, James Baldwin, in a burst of drunken enthusiasm, told her he loved her. It was from the vantage of being so accepted that Porter could write with assurance of how Cather was disappearing into her legend, and how that was perfectly appropriate, and how she, for one, could understand Cather’s accomplishment in doing her own work in her own way. But beneath this bravado Porter may have had a feeling of rejection. When Porter sat writing her essay, glancing at the photograph by Steichen among the papers on her desk, she might have felt that Willa Cather had turned away from her and she might have been a little hurt.
Porter’s truest impulse was in her first sentences, where she tried, painful though this was, to acknowledge that she had made a mistake. Between them, she and Willa Cather had sundered a link that ought not to have been broken.
I never knew her at all, nor anyone who did know her; do not to this day. When I was a young writer in New York I knew she was there, and sometimes wished that by some charming chance I might meet up with her; but I never did, and it did not occur to me to seek her out. . . . There are three or four great ones, gone now, that I feel, too late, I should not have missed. Willa Cather was one of them.
Feeling that there was no substitute for having her own impression of those great ones, Porter wrote simply, “It would have been nice to have seen them, just to remember how they looked.”
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In the spring of 1922, when she was, as she said, “a young writer in New York,” when it ought to have happened, Katherine Anne Porter did not meet Willa Cather. Porter was not a very young writer for very long in New York; she was in and out of that city quite sporadically, and she wasn’t regularly writing fiction until she was nearly forty and not living in New York at all.
In 1922, Porter turned thirty-two. She had been married at sixteen, and had long since run away from her first husband (later there would be three more). Like her character in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, she had come very close to death in the postwar influenza epidemic that killed more Americans than had died in battle in the Great War. She had been in New York and, always greatly interested in dance, she had written the story for a ballet danced by Anna Pavlova to great acclaim. And she had been in Mexico, writing journalism about oppression and revolution and the new Obregón administration. And through all of this, she had been reading Willa Cather. She was trying hard to write stories, and she had come back to New York, and she was staying in a small room in Greenwich Village, on Washington Place, about six blocks south of Cather and Edith Lewis, who lived at 5 Bank Street.
For seventeen days that spring, Porter remembered, she breakfasted in the morning on coffee and a roll, made that last as long as she could, went out at lunch for a hamburger and a banana, and wrote in a white heat. At the end, she had finished her first real story, “María Concepción,” which, among other things, protested against the subordinate position of the Native population in Mexico and established as a heroine a young married woman who killed her husband’s mistress. The story was published in Century Magazine and more or less launched her as a fiction writer. Then, in a pattern she was to repeat—Marianne Moore found Porter’s procrastinations astonishing—Porter gratefully absconded for politics and sex rather than write in solitude, which she hated. Almost immediately, she was back in Mexico, reporting and having an affair that was not quite as torrid as she might have liked.
Perhaps Porter wondered what would have happened if she had stayed in New York just a little longer. What if, on a rainy day, she had been walking along Bank Street, struggling with her umbrella, and had seen two women getting out of a cab, one cheerily saying good-bye to the driver, and what if she passed just as they were about to dash for their front door. If she had gathered her courage and said, “Excuse me, Miss Cather,” wouldn’t the square, generous, resolute woman have stopped, looked her in the eyes, crossed her arms, and stood still and spoken to her, despite the rain falling on them both? Porter wouldn’t have wanted a friendship, but it would have been nice to have seen her, just to remember how she looked.
18. ALFRED STIEGLITZ AND HART CRANE
THERE were 116 photographs in the gallery, mostly portraits, and some pictures of clouds and of trees and barns near Lake George. It was the cloudscapes that most excited the two visitors that day in April. Stieglitz, standing in the back room, could hear one of the men talking, his voice at a high pitch of enthusiasm. He was talking quite well. This was the second show of his own work that Stieglitz had hung after a decade devoted to exhibiting others, and he was curious about people’s reactions. He listened to the young man a little longer and then went out into the gallery. Someone he knew, the critic and editor Gorham Munson, had brought someone he didn’t, Hart Crane; it was the poet who had been talking.
In April of 1923, Hart Crane was twenty-three years old. He had recently come back to New York, where he had lived once before, after spending several frustrating years in Ohio working for his wealthy father, who owned chocolate and candy factories that supplied, among others, Marshall Field’s department store and the dining cars of the Northern-Pacific railroad. His father was the inventor of the candy Life Savers. Clarence Crane felt that his son should learn the business from the bottom up and had him behind drugstore counters and in factory warehouses for much of the time. Hart Crane had eventually found other employment writing advertising copy, and it was on the strength of that skill, and with the tiny savings from that work, that he had managed to get back to New York, where he was living in the Munsons’ apartment, at 4 Grove Street, in Greenwich Village. He had been in New York for three weeks—money was tight, but he was optimistic. When Georgia O’Keeffe met Crane later she wrote in a letter that his face was “young and clear and fresh and very alive as if always in a hurry.”
Two days before he and Gorham Munson went to Stieglitz’s gallery, Crane had read, for the Munsons and some other literary people, his long poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” the fruit of four years of serious reading and three months of coming home every night to sit next to his Victrola and listen and drink and write: “baseball scores / The stenographic smiles and stock quotations / Smutty wings flash out equivocations.” It was his first reading in New York, and, although he knew that the taste of the crowd mostly did not quite stretch to his latest work, it was disappointing that—except for Munson and another of Crane’s new friends, the writer Waldo Frank—they hadn’t been that excited. So when he and Munson decided to go by the two rooms at the Anderson Gallery that Stieglitz was then using for his exhibitions and Crane saw work that seemed to him made in exactly the spirit of his own artistic project . . . well, as Frank later said, it was “like putting a firecracker to a match.”
Crane and Stieglitz talked for a good hour about the photographs. Many of the portraits were of artists—Georgia O’Keeffe was on the wall, some of the nude photos, but not the most daring ones; there was a portrait of the painter John Marin; and one of Marcel Duchamp, who had been back in New York for a year. But of all the images there that day, Crane loved best the cloudscapes and the one called Apples and Gable. Stieglitz had been taking a lot of apple photographs; he thought of the artist as an apple tree, as he used to say, “taking up sap from the ground and bearing apples,” and he considered the apple tree quintessentially American. Perhaps also thinking of the biblical connotations of the fruit, Stieglitz made a number of photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe with apples. When still living in Cleveland, Crane had written a poem called “Sunday Morning Apples” for William Sommer, an artist friend there. Looking at the photograph, perhaps Crane thought of his own line for Sommer, “I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,—” Crane had actually also written letters to Stieglitz proposing that Sommer be given a show at Stieglitz’s gallery, though he hadn’t had any success.
