Willa Cather's "Paul's Case"

 If anyone were to make a case for Willa Cather as the great American writer, it would involve her story “Paul’s Case.”

Warning: This note will be loaded with spoilers. If you plan to read the story, reader, pass by.

It’s the story of a young man who hates his life on Cordelia Street in Pittsburgh and is only alive when he’s at the theater or concert hall. The first part of the story, told from the point of view of his teachers, is about how he was expelled from school. 

In the second part, Paul decides that a short life well lived is better than a long, unbearable one. He leaves work with the company’s deposit, pockets the cash, takes a train to New York and lives at the Waldorf until the jig is up. He jumps in front of a train — but only after he’s lived the best life he can imagine.

For writers raised on the dictate “show, don’t tell,” Cather is liberating.

The best way to get at Cather’s ability to tell a story is to give samples as she considers elements of Paul’s “case.” (It sounds clinical, doesn’t it?)

• Physical description: “Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy.”

• Character: “It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and forgetting.”

• Psychological description: “Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the inescapable odors of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by those starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.”

• Life: “His golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each day as perfect as he could.”

• Values: “ … he knew now that money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted.”

• Self: “He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for about half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way …”

• Death: “Then, because the picture taking mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.”

In telling a story, rather than showing it, Cather didn’t abandon detail. She included the details in the telling. After the suspension hearing, Paul left school whistling “The Soldier’s Chorus” from Charles Gounod’s Faust, a ditty about how men should die.