The Professor in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is Godfrey St. Peter. His family life is changing. His daughters are grown and married. The world is changing in ways he doesn’t really like, and he’s having trouble moving from the old house, where he’s written his books, to the new, better house.
St. Peter is an cultured, sophisticated man. While the family is away in Europe, something of his boyhood — something of his original sense of self — returns. Cather says this:
The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not the scholar. He was primitive.
And then this:
The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature into the original one, and that the complexion of a man’s life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together.
What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world. Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened to him …
Willa Cather works in mysterious ways. I admire this passage, but I’m not sure I understand it. I have no sense of whether it’s true.
But a running theme in this collection of notes is that one should try to come to grips with the forces of that shape us. I’ve been thinking about the forces that shaped me. One could say there’s something boyish in that. But I’m not sure that I could say that the Professor’s experience has happened to me.
• Sources and notes: Willa Cather, The Professor’s House, was originally published in 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf. There are many editions. These passages are at the end of Book III, Chapter 2. And thanks, Alvin, for sending me a copy.
I think that the thing to keep in mind with St. Peter here is the idea of contingency -- he believes he has rediscovered a self unmodified by circumstance or chance. Whether he’s right about that is another question. Is the self of his Kansas boyhood the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter?
ReplyDelete(I think The Professor’s House is one of the great American novels, and still not nearly as well known as it should be.)
Thanks for the note, Michael. It is an extraordinary novel. I would have loved to have been sitting in a classroom when you were teaching it.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think identity works the way St. Peter imagined. It might be nice, as mature people, to dump all our baggage and return to a more innocent form of ourselves, but the choices we’ve made are there in the lives we’ve lived. There’s just no undoing that.
I love being an old person and still being able to glimpse the young version of me. I’m tempted to say he’s almost a different person — an interesting “almost.”
No, it doesn’t work as he’d like it to. And the Kansas boy is himself a matter of contingency — the move in childhood. And he was Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter before that. He’s looking for a foundation that’s not to be found. Cather of course knows all this. : )
DeleteIf you were teaching a short course on Cather, what would your reading list look like? I came late to this novel. If the question interests you, I hope you will post a note here or at Orange Crate Art.
DeleteWithout italics, as I’m on the phone:
ReplyDeleteO Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Obscure Destinies, Lucy Gayheart, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
For a really short course:
The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Thanks, Michael. This will be fun.
ReplyDelete