On Nov. 3, I tried to list 12 short stories that I’d include if I were editing an anthology. I’m already dissatisfied.
The glaring omissions are Willa Cather’s “Neighbor Rosicky” and Guy Davenport’s “John Charles Tapner.” I don’t know which two from the original list would have to go to make room for these two, but I couldn’t do without them.
I’ve written about “John Charles Tapner.” (See “A peculiar kind of short story,” Sept. 22, 2021.)
I can’t explain the absence of “Neighbor Rosicky.” Michael Leddy, commenting on the challenge to choose a personal anthology of 12 stories, said he’d include the three stories collected in Cather’s Obscure Destinies. “Neighbor Rosicky” is one of those. Last year, I wrote this sentence: “I think ‘Neighbor Rosicky’ was Cather’s masterpiece.” But I didn’t say why.
Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read “Neighbor Rosicky” and think you might, stop here.
“Neighbor Rosicky” does something that’s hard to do: It captures what a good person is like. It’s easier to write about great men and women than it is to capture ordinary people who somehow embody goodness.
Rosicky was a Czech farmer who died of a bad heart at 65. He was the kind of fellow who would tell the storekeeper to round up his bill and throw in some candy and fabric for the women back on the farm.
He thought of others and showed them hospitality. He tried to ease their burdens. He knew what was bad in this world — our stressful workplaces aren’t nearly as toxic as the factories of the Gilded Age — and he tried to steer younger people away from that pain.
His “American” (non-Czech) daughter-in-law, Polly, slowly realized that Old Rosicky had shown her love. She was shocked when she realized that no one — not even her mother — had loved her like Old Rosicky.
It was as if Rosicky had a special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an eye for color. It was quiet, unobtrusive; It was merely there.”
That passage has the heft of scripture to me.
There are many small pleasures in this story. Rosicky had a bad heart and wouldn’t follow his doctor’s advice to take it easy. I love the doctor’s lament that a Bohemian can’t be separated from his coffee or his pipe. And I love the space that Cather created called “Father’s Corner,” a spot near a plant-filled window, where Rosicky had his chair, surrounded by Bohemian newspapers and books, tobacco, pipes and tools.
Wow — I didn’t know that you already knew the Cather story. I read Obscure Destinies, The Professor’s House, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl in grad school. Nothing had prepared citified me for Cather. But boy, did she stick.
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