Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Willa Cather's feel for the Southwest

 One more note on Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House: Book II is perhaps the best description of the Southwest I’ve read. (My friend Alvin, who is from New Mexico, would say I should lose the “perhaps.”)

Books I and III are about Professor St. Peter and his family and their home in a college town near Lake Michigan. Book II is an account of St. Peter’s former student, Tom Outland, who grew up in New Mexico. It’s Tom’s story of finding the ruins of an ancient culture at Blue Mesa and his efforts to explore it with his partner, Rodney Blake.

Does that seem out of place to you? Some critics, taking a metaphor from the novel, described the second part as the dazzling turquoise between two bits of pedestrian silver in a piece of jewelry.

I don’t know what to make of the structure. I thought of the second movement in Samuel Barber’s famous string quartet, which Barber turned into Adagio for Strings. I wondered what this part of Cather’s book would read like as a stand-alone work.

Professor St. Peter had two girls who were enchanted by Tom’s stories of the Southwest. And here’s Cather:

 

St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there were no shadows.

 

Shade and shadows are vital to the life in the Southwest. The architecture of public buildings is about shade. The sites of chicken coops are chosen with consideration to shade.

That sentence is a beautiful way to suggest that Tom’s stories to the children lack depth and reality. The real story might not be suitable for children.

That one sentence says a lot — at least to me — about Cather’s writing.

• Source: Willa Cather, The Professor’s House, was originally published in 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf. There are many editions. The quotation is from Book I, Chapter 10.

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