By all indications, criticism and scholarship on Willa Cather are flourishing: studies of this author and her work have increased dramatically in the past twenty years, from approximately fifteen to more than fifty scholarly and critical essays annually, and from an occasional book to eight in 1986-88 alone. Papers on Cather appear regularly in general national programs; conferences and seminars devoted specifically to her attract hundreds of participants each year. Such interest results naturally in the belief that Cather students would be well served by a specialized publication, one that, by focusing attention upon the quality and diversity of Cather scholarship, would complement both the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and the more general journals.

Selected essays from one such seminar provided the occasion to announce Cather Studies. As work proceeded to publish a volume based on papers presented at the Third National Seminar on Willa Cather (Hastings and Red Cloud, Nebraska, 1987), we soon realized that we had a foundation for Cather Studies 1, to be sponsored by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and in cooperation with the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation.

Many people have contributed to the success of the seminar series and to the establishment of Cather Studies—especially Mildred R. Bennett, late president and chairman of the board, Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation; Frederick M. Link, chair of the Department of English, University of Nebraska–Lincoln; Jane Hood, director of the Nebraska Committee for the Humanities; Judith Levin, Department of English, University of Nebraska–Lincoln; and the many scholars who generously contributed time and expertise. I am grateful also to the Nebraska Committee for the Humanities for major funding.

More than twenty years ago, in his insightful essay "Cather's Mortal Comedy," D. H. Stewart analyzed Death Comes for the Archbishop as a truncated Divine Comedy structured around the seven virtues and their corresponding vices and crowned at the end by the "Beatific Vision" of Latour's last thoughts. Although his analysis is forced in places, Stewart succeeds in making a case for Dante as a possible Cather "influence" and indicates references to him in her writing. In Cather's essay "Escapism," Dante is among the great men she wishes to rescue from the "iconoclasts and tomb-breakers" of this century, who dispose of him "because he was a cryptogram and did not at all mean to say what the greatest lines in the Italian language make him say" (25-26). Stewart also calls attention to the passage in My Ántonia where Jim Burden's mentor Gaston Cleric reads "the discourse between Dante and his 'sweet teacher' Virgil . . . and the lines of the poet Statius, who spoke for Dante" in honoring the Aeneid as "mother to me and nurse to me in poetry" (261-62).

Other references to and borrowings from the Italian poet that Stewart does not mention establish Dante as a definite influence. For example, in the early story "A Death in the Desert" (1903), Katherine Gaylord describes her visit to Adriance Hilgarde in his Florentine palace where beneath a bust of Dante they clung together like Francesca and Paolo "on a spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything" until Adriance's wife returned home, "and in the book we read no more that night" (73). Later, for the story of Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata in her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! (1913), Cather drew on the same Dante pair to illustrate the tragic consequences of sexual passion as well as to evoke sympathy for the lovers. These examples suggest Cather's appreciation of the human drama, although not necessarily the moral dimension, in Dante. But by 1925, three years after her conversion to Episcopalianism and early in the period of her spiritual quest novels-The Professor's House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and Shadows on the Rock (1931)-Cather's appreciation seems to have deepened. In a lecture that year at Bowdoin College she emphasized love rather than hate as the art-generating passion and distinguished "Dante's Inferno and the whole Commedia [as] inverted evil, hatred of evil because of the love of good. The great characters in literature are born out of love," she said, "often out of some beautiful experience of the writer" (In Person 156).

Like the Commedia, Cather's novels of the postwar period reveal a personal need for a spiritually reflective and well-ordered universe. In The Professor's House, for example, Godfrey St. Peter yearns for the time when for "every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday [and] was a principal in the gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing" (68). In My Mortal Enemy, Myra Henshawe returns to the Catholic faith of her youth because it gives significance to her death. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Latour sees the Redemption reflected in a twisted tree, in the color of the mountains, and in the rock of Ácoma. Shadows on the Rock presents the world view of the Commedia through religious women and children. To the devout nuns "this all-important earth [was] created by God for a great purpose, the sun which He made to light it by day, the moon which He made to light it by night, and the stars, made to beautify the vault of heaven, like frescoes, and to be a clock and compass for man" (97). When Cécile and Jacques light candles before the castlelike altar of Notre Dame de la Victoire and watch the flames reveal its highlights, they imagine "that the Kingdom of Heaven looked exactly like this from the outside and was surrounded by such walls. . . . and it was comforting . . . to know just what Heaven looked like,—strong and unassailable, wherever it was set among the stars" (64-65).

A world tailored to Christian mythology and values is aesthetically appropriate for the pilgrimage that Dante dramatizes through the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso and Cather in Death Comes for the Archbishop and the second half of My Mortal Enemy. Inspired by the via crucis, the journey in each work represents a departure from worldliness, imitating Christ's submission to the Father, an interior journey symbolized in an exterior one containing purgatorial elements that prepare the pilgrim for God (Turner and Turner 1-17, 248-51). Shadows on the Rock emphasizes these components through a place resembling Dante's purgatorial setting rather than a journey, but when combined with the earlier novels, it completes a Catherian New World Divine Comedy. In considering the three novels I begin with My Mortal Enemy because it anticipates the more comprehensive journey from Hell to Paradise in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Shadows on the Rock will serve as a coda to the journey that is symbolized in Father Latour's travels through the vast southwestern landscape.

The Commedia begins with Dante's midlife confusion in the Dark Wood of Error, which Beatrice later defines as his turning from divine to human sciences, turning "his steps aside from the True Way, pursuing the false images of good" (Purgatorio 30.130-31). Having given up her God for worldly love in a marriage never blessed by the church or with children, Myra Henshawe has descended into darkness, "come on evil days" (Mortal Enemy 60). Her husband Oswald, like a soul in Hell, has the "tired face of one who has utterly lost hope" (61), and Myra' complaint about the plight of humanity—"Ah-ha, I have one more piece of evidence, one more, against the hideous injustice God permits in this world!" (65)—reminds me of Dante's similarly resentful Vanni Fucci, who makes obscene gestures toward God. The infernal extreme of Myra's condition is evident when the mother of the southern family tramping in the apartment overhead transforms into a tormenting serpent: "She has the wrinkled, white throat of an adder . . . and the hard eyes of one" (74).

The turning point in Myra's story is her initial visit to the headland above the Pacific, where she begins to desire forgiveness, "to see this place at dawn . . . a forgiving time" (73). Hers is the purgatorial struggle of detachment from worldly things (McCabe 46), the headland rising above the sea recalling Dante's mountain in the southern seas which sinners must climb before translation through the spheres of Paradise. With narrator Nellie Birdseye, Myra repeatedly returns to the headland and its solitary cedar, an echo of Dante's Tree of Life atop Purgatory, anticipating Father Latour's cruciform tree at the beginning of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Dante's journey to the summit begins on the steps of Penance and ends with purification, once he confesses straying from spiritual to worldly pursuits and Matilda washes him and makes him sip the waters of Lethe to dissolve his guilt. The three steps through the gate where the Angel Guardian, representing the priest confessor, uses the keys of discernment and absolution to forgive sinners symbolize confession, contrition, and gratitude for God's mercy. This same sequence is present in Cather's novel. The first step in Myra's journey is recognition of sin, and in her consternation she laments to Oswald the very happening of their lives together: "Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?" (95). Her haunting question is essentially a lament of dependence on the occasion of her sinfulness rather than any condemnation of Oswald.

In receiving the Eucharist, Myra—while perhaps not purged of her sins—is restored to grace. Consequently, she takes up her crucifix and makes her final journey to the headland, where she had equated dawn with the kind of purification Dante experiences on the summit of Purgatory. "When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water," Myra tells Nellie, "it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution. You know how the great sinners always came home to die in some religious house, and the abbot or the abbess went out and received them with a kiss?" (73). One must hope that Myra survives until dawn and concludes her journey in light, just as Dante ends his in light, light within the soul as well as striking the eyes. The result is peace (which flows from harmony with God) and understanding (which flows from peace): as I grew worthier to see, the more I looked, the more unchanging semblance appeared to change with every change in me. (Paradiso 33.112-14)

At the beginning of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Latour is lost in a maze of trails and conical hills. His story too involves a painful progress from worldliness to surrender to God's will. The pattern upon which the priest's pilgrimage is modeled is clarified in his contemplation of Christ's suffering at the cruciform tree: "The Passion of Jesus became for him the only reality; the need of his own body was but part of that conception" (20). Just as Dante is rescued by the Virgin's sending Virgil to guide him, Latour is led by the Virgin to Hidden Water-a symbol, like Beatrice, of Christian faith.

The way to God cannot be easy for these pilgrims. As Virgil points out to Dante, there is no easy way up the hill crowned with light: "I . . . will lead you forth through an eternal place. There you shall see the ancient spirits tried in endless pain, and hear their lamentations as each bemoans the second death of souls. Next you shall see upon a burning mountain souls in fire and yet content in fire" (Inferno 1.106-12). Latour, shut out of Santa Fe, must pursue a circuitous route to and from Durango-his own penitential journey-to be admitted to the city. "Salvation must grow out of understanding," notes John Ciardi. "Total understanding can follow only from total experience, and experience must be won by the laborious discipline of shaping one's absolute attention. The object is to achieve God, and Dante's God exists in no state of childlike innocence: He is total knowledge and only those who have truly experienced knowledge can begin to approach him" ("How to Read Dante" 343).

Dante's journey into darkness has its counterpart in Latour's visit to the "Stone Lips" cave, where earth's mysteries challenge the patriarchal order the priest represents. A similar challenge occurs at Ácoma, where he feels defeated and doubts the efficacy of Calvary among the remote Indians. Less mysterious but equally challenging are Latour's confrontations with the Seven Deadly Sins, which Dante presents on the cornices of Purgatory. While some of the sinners with whom Latour must deal possess a cluster of qualities that move them toward roundness of character, each is typified by a dominant fault: Lust is the boast of Padre Martínez, Gluttony is Fray Baltazar's, Avarice is Padre Lucero's, and Sloth is represented by his nephew Trinidad; Buck Scales is the type of Wrath; Manuel Chavez is Envy; and Dońa Isabella represents a venial form of Pride. Although Hell and Purgatory are fused in Archbishop, Cather presents her lost sinners first: Scales, Martinez, Lucero (recall Lucero's deathbed vision of Martínez in torment—"Eat your tail, Martínez, eat your tail!"; 171). We journey toward less serious failings and even feel affection for Isabella in her vanity, though the vanity she personifies has serious overtones in Latour's own spiritual development.

Latour's chief failings are selfishness and pride, and pride is the very sin Dante acknowledges in Purgatorio as his own chief failing. Evident in his tendency to control and order, which is challenged in the cave and at Ácoma, Latour's vanity centers on cathedral building. In fact, spiritual progress can be traced in his changing attitudes toward this project. At first it is a "very keen worldly ambition . . . that such a building might be a continuation of himself and his purpose, a physical body full of his aspirations after he had passed from the scene" (Archbishop 175). Much later, when Vaillant fails to be enthusiastic about "fine building, when everything about [them] is so poor—and [they themselves] are so poor," Latour insists that "the Cathedral is not for us . . . We build for the future" (244). His concern is that such plans might involve worldliness. Finally, the cathedral functions as his sanctuary. When he enters Santa Fe for the last time and sees it leaping operatically out of the mountains and black pines, it has taken the place of Vaillant in his life: "He felt safe under its shadow; like a boat come back to harbour, lying under its own sea-wall" (273). This building comes to represent the church for which he had surrendered his will in giving Vaillant the opportunity to go to Colorado.

To apply Christ's submission-to-the-Father journey to Latour's, we must understand the personal need he has for his friend Joseph's companionship and enthusiasm. Vaillant's "impassioned request" to serve the poor Americans in Arizona spoils Latour's "cherished plan" to keep him in Santa Fe and is "a bitter personal disappointment." The "sharp struggle" going on within Latour is climaxed as he breaks off a spray of flowering tamarisk "to punctuate and seal, as it were, his renunciation" (208-09). This begins his Gethsemane, anticipating the additional pain involved in offering Vaillant the opportunity to go to Colorado. During Vaillant's preparation for departure we realize that the dependence is mutual, that Vaillant too suffers in leaving his old friend behind.

Finally, Cather clothes her priests in beatitude by making their lives remarkably similar in spirit and imagery to two celebrated saints in Paradiso. In the Sphere of the Sun, Thomas Aquinas tells Dante of "two Princes" sent by Providence to serve the fallen away Bride of Christ, the church (11.28-108). One of these, Francis of Assisi, is praised as "like the seraphim" in his love; Aquinas extols his marriage to Lady Poverty, despite the wrath of his father, a prosperous wool merchant, who opposed his son's vocation. Aquinas enumerates Francis's missionary journeys to Greece and Egypt and his projected pilgrimage to Spain, and praises his ability to attract followers-Bernard, Egidius, and Sylvester, who bound themselves with the humble cord of the Franciscan order. Humble birth and voluntary poverty translated into regal dignity and spiritual riches in Francis's life, says Aquinas, who concludes with a reference to the saint's receiving the stigmata during his vision of Christ in 1224.

Although Cather based her portrait of Father Joseph Vaillant on William J. Howlett's biography of Colorado's Bishop Machebeuf, her emphasis on details paralleling Dante's Francis seems more than coincidental. Joseph's father is a prosperous baker, a stern and jealous man who opposes his son's missionary ambitions. Like Francis, Joseph voluntarily embraces poverty; in Colorado he sleeps on a straw mattress, eats on oilcloth-covered planks, and uses wornout shirts for towels. Although he begs and invests in property for the church, "for himself, Father Joseph was scarcely acquisitive to the point of decency. He owned nothing in the world but his mule Contento. . . . [He] was like the saints of the early Church, literally without personal possessions" (227). Like Francis, Joseph inspires many followers. When the dying Father Revardy travels to Denver to assist at Vaillant's funeral, Latour reflects on "the extraordinary personal devotion that Father Joseph had so often aroused and retained so long, in red men and yellow men and white" (289). When Dante's Aquinas concludes, Saint Bonaventure relates the story of Saint Dominic, a "cherubim" in his wisdom. Where Francis eschewed learning and praised the simple mind, Dominic founded an order of scholars to preach the pure faith. Married to Faith, as Francis was to Poverty, Dominic became a husbandman, laboring in the garden sown by Christ: he soon became a mighty doctor, and began to go his rounds of that great vineyard where the vine, if left untended, pales and cannot grow.

Dominic's particular charge was to smite the stumps and undergrowths of heresy. And where the thickets were least passable, there his assault bore down most heavily. And from him many rivulets sprang to birth by which the Catholic orchard is so watered that its little trees spring greener from the earth. (Paradiso 12.34-111)

The parallels to Latour and his mission are obvious. Latour directs the construction of a lake in the rectory garden to water the lotus bulbs he imported from Rome. He transports fruitbearing trees and associates the Mexican church with the apparently defunct tamarisks and desert cottonwoods capable of sudden and surprising flowering. Vaillant, in his endearing simplicity, must verbalize what is obvious to Latour: The lost Catholics in Arizona, he says, "are like seeds, full of germination but with no moisture. A mere contact is enough to make them a living part of the Church" (206). Vaillant looks for direction to Latour, the Cathedral builder, who guards the purity of the faith and contends with the clerical corruptions and heresy reflected in the ruined peach tree stumps in Fray Baltazar's garden at Ácoma. As befits a husbandman, Latour retires to a garden: "He grew such fruit as was hardly to be found even in the old orchards of California. . . . He urged the new priests to plant fruit trees wherever they went, and to encourage the Mexicans to add fruit to their starchy diet" (267). Not only these individual lives but their complementary qualities and activities parallel Dante's portraits. Francis and Dominic, says Bonaventure, are each a wheel of the great chariot in which the church rides; they are the two champions sent by Christ to teach and give example. "To extol one or the other," says Aquinas, "is to speak of both in that their works led to a single goal" (Paradiso 11.40-42).

Additional Dantean elements in Archbishop include Marian protection, Bernardine ministry, and emphasis on light. Both Latour and Vaillant are assisted by the Blessed Virgin throughout their struggles, as when Latour is directed to Hidden Water, discovers the slave Sada one December night, and after Vaillant departs (with a petition for Mary's guidance-"Auspice, Maria!") feels a solitude "of perpetual flowering. . . . filled by Her who was all the graces; Virgin-daughter, Virgin-mother, girl of the people and Queen of Heaven: le ręve supręme de la chair" (256). During his final years Latour is accompanied by his student Bernard, just as Saint Bernard accompanies Dante during the final stage of his journey to the Godhead. Like Dante, Latour is directed toward light, toward "the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!" (276). And he moves beyond time, which "ceased to count for him" (290).

Shadows on the Rock generally restricts the physical pilgrimage to the purgatorial place. Emphatically static, set firmly on the rock of Quebec, it nevertheless incorporates a variety of events in time and place into the account of a year in the lives of apothecary Euclide Auclair and his daughter Cécile. Quebec itself is a replica of Mount Purgatory crowned with the Earthly Paradise. The initial description of the town compares it to an artificial mountain "broken up into cliffs and ledges and hollows to accommodate groups of figures on their way to the manger" to pay deference to the Christ Child (5). Like the French Nativity scene Auclair recalls, Purgatory is a series of ledges and cliffs, and at its top, beyond the wall of fire and night's shadows, Dante experiences the radiance of the Heavenly Pageant.

Quebec too is haloed with light, as a catalogue of Cather's descriptions illustrates: "the red-gold autumn sunlight poured over the rock like a heavy southern wine" (33); when the "autumn fog was rolling in from the river . . . . a glow of orange [appeared] overhead where the sun was struggling behind the thick weather. It was like walking in a dream . . . in a world of twilight and miracles" (61-62); on St. Nicholas's Day "the sunlight on the glittering terraces of rock was almost too intense to be borne; one closed one's eyes and seemed to swim in throbbing red" (98); "that second afterglow, which often happens in Quebec, had come on more glorious than the first. All the western sky . . . was now throbbing with fiery vapours, like rapids of clouds; and between, the sky shone with a blue to ravish the heart,-that limpid, celestial, holy blue that is only seen when the light is golden" (103-4); "when the sun came up over the Ile d'Orleans, the rock of Kebec stood gleaming above the river like an altar with many candles, or like a holy city in an old legend, shriven, sinless, washed in gold" (169). Cather's use of light suggests reality beyond this earth, a world above the world, and her personification of the sun suggests the Deity: "the sun emerged . . . an angry ball, and all the snow-covered rock blazed in orange fire. The sun became a half-circle, then a mere red eyebrow, then dropped behind the forest, leaving the air clear blue" (70-71). "Throughout The Divine Comedy the sun . . . is a symbol for . . . Divine Illumination," observes Ciardi. "In Purgatorio, for example, souls may climb only in the light of the sun. . . . Only in the light of God may one ascend that road, and that is the light to which the soul must win" ("How to Read Dante" 340-41).

Shadows on the Rock emphasizes the theme of purgation or expiation, the concept that we must suffer for a time before we enjoy the Beatific Vision that escapes Dante's descriptive powers at the end of Paradiso, where "in a great flash of light" he discovers "just how our [human] image merges" in the triune rainbow representing God (33.137). Cather's novel reads like a compendium of pain (Stouck 149-61), indicating that human incompleteness is at once the circumstance of suffering and an indication of the need for the perfection that will come through it. Blinker's face is misshapen from an ulcerated jaw; Bishop Laval suffers varicose legs; Mother Juschereau is laid up with a sprained ankle; Madame Renaude has a harelip; hero Henri de Tonti has only one arm; Madame Pommier is severly lame; Antoine Frichette suffers a hernia after his brother-in-law fatally opens his leg from ankle to knee; during bad March weather "many people in the town were sick . . . and Cécile herself caught a cold and was feverish" (156); finally, Count Frontenac declines and dies. Such realities of this flawed world looking toward the next explain the novel's title: "The shades of the early martyrs and great missionaries drew close about [Cécile on All Souls' Day]. All the miracles . . . and the dreams . . . came out of the fog. . . . When one passed by the Jesuits', those solid walls seemed sentinelled by a glorious company of martyrs. . . . at the Ursulines', Marie de l'Incarnation overshadowed the living" (95).

The theme of suffering for sins is understood even by the children. When Jacques lets slip a nasty word, Cécile washes his mouth with soap: "Is it gone?" (53) he asks solemnly when she finishes. And after his loose-living mother spends a night with boatmen from Montreal, the little boy attempts reparation by making the Stations of the Cross. A major occasion is All Souls' Day, which the colonists spend praying to shorten the suffering time of their departed loved ones. Every year on the anniversary of his hanging, the Auclairs have a Mass said for unfortunate Bichet, who was executed for stealing two brass kettles from a Parisian coach house. Early in the novel Mother Juschereau tells of the appearance to Sister Catherine of the soul of the sinner Marie, who appealed for prayers and Masses to shorten her term in Purgatory. After the Masses were said, Marie returned, "a happy soul, more brilliant than the sun, which smiled and said: 'I thank you, my dear Catherine, I go now to paradise to sing the mercies of God for ever, and I shall not forget to pray for you'"(39).

Cather's story of Laval's successor involves several relevant Dantean touches. Bishop Saint-Vallier is thoughtless, fickle, theatrically extravagant, and high-handed; his "face recalled the portraits of eccentric Florentine nobles" (121), the largest group in Hell. In the Epilogue, however, Saint-Vallier returns from France to Quebec humbled and broken by years of captivity: "Even his enemies were softened at seeing how the man was changed. In place of his former assurance he seemed to wear a leaden mantle of humility; he climbed heavily up the hill to the Cathedral as if he were treading down the mistakes of the past" (272). These details cleverly combine Dante's punishment for damned hypocrites (who struggle under great cloaks, golden and fair on the outside but leaden and heavy within) and the punishment of the proud in Purgatory (who labor around the mountain doubled over beneath enormous slabs of rock that press down according to the degree of their sin). Saint Vallier himself recognizes the otherworldly aspects of the rock of Quebec, which somehow remains outside of time; in this place he will attempt to make amends for the excesses of his life. "You have done well to remain here where nothing changes," he tells Auclair (277).

Other factors suggest this novel as a New World Purgatorio. The seasonal coming of the ships to Quebec recalls the coming of Dante's Ship of Souls. To the Auclairs, the first ship appears as a gleam of white, dipping, rising, and growing "larger and larger, the canvas of sails set full, with the wind well behind them" (206). Dante sees the angel ship speeding toward him: "From each side of it came into view an unknown something-white; and from beneath it, bit by bit, another whiteness grew. We watched till the white objects at each side took shape as (the Angel Boatman's] wings" (2.22-26). As in Dante, Cather's figurative level extends to people as well as to place. The waif Jacques Gaux becomes the novel's Christ figure. Auclair watches him making the Stations of the Cross, and old Bishop Laval kisses his feet as a "reminder of his Infant Saviour" (Shadows 75). North American martyr Noël Chabanel becomes the type of self-denial for the missionary Father Hector; and recluse Jeanne Le Ber, vowing to be as a sanctuary lamp, represents the light of faith for the people in general. In fact, Cather's models of heroic virtue parallel Purgatory's system of Whips, which remind the suffering of the virtues they lacked through examples from the life of the Virgin, from Holy Scripture, and even from pagan lore. In Shadows the same virtues are celebrated: the nuns practice chastity; Bishop Laval confines himself to meager, unappetizing food; Mother Juschereau is ever diligent, her fingers constantly constructing artificial flowers for the churches as she oversees her nuns; Jeanne Le Ber gives away her fortune to the church; Noël Chabanel is a model of meekness, Sister Catherine of caritas, and little Jacques of humility.

These observations, I believe, are the tip of an iceberg. Dantean influences and similarities are a fruitful field because they tell us much about Cather's art and mind and help us understand some of her characters. In the area of artistry, Dante considered himself an innovator of the "sweet new style" of natural expression, the principles of which are comparable to Cather's ideas about unadorned style and lack of clutter in fiction (Ciardi, Notes to Canto 24). Also, Dante's principal structural technique, like Cather's, is the paralleling of episodes and characters, what critics call "back illumination" (Ciardi, "How to Read Dante" 349-50). Boatman Charon in Inferno, for example, stands in meaningful relationship to the Angel Boatman in Purgatorio much as the Hidden Water episode in Archbishop stands in meaningful relationship to Junipero Serra's miracle of the Holy Family. In characterization, Dante leaned heavily on historical and local figures and used them freely, as did Cather throughout her novels, most notably in My Ántonia, Archbishop, and Shadows. The keys to understanding Father Latour and Myra Henshawe are to be found, I think, in Dante and his Catholic world. Both characters reflect Cather's deep need for the kind of order that gives meaning to individual lives, and their spiritual quests are pilgrimages toward the integration of personal and communal visions. Cather's attraction to a Dantean system was not a matter of orthodoxy so much as a desire for an integrating spiritual context. When in Shadows on the Rock Count Frontenac is dying, we are told that in spiritual matters he had always accepted the authority of the church and that he believed that his spirit would go before God to be judged: "He believed this, because he had been taught it in childhood, and because he knew there was something in himself and in other men that this world did not explain" (247). It is this "something" that emerges in Cather's fiction and Dante's poem. It is what gives significance to their technical achievements and makes their accomplishments valuable.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is an anomaly in Willa Cather's fiction. Massive, serene, and luminous, it is scarcely a novel at all; it lacks the novel's defining feature, psychological development and change. Nor does the book have much conflict. Moments of danger in the present end as soon as they begin. Episodes of suspense or terror in the past come to the reader contained and made safe by means of a framed narration. The crises in Jean Latour's long struggle to create and control his diocese are briefly reported but take place primarily off-stage. Nevertheless, despite its lack of drama, Death Comes for the Archbishop repeats and transforms the central concerns of Cather's psychologically complex and conflict-ridden earlier fiction-concerns with possession and loss, with fall and redemption. The novel grows in particular from Cather's four other finest works, with which it forms a sequence: My Ántonia (1918), A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's House (1925), and My Mortal Enemy (1926) (omitting One of Ours, published in 1922). Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is both a culmination and a reversal of these earlier novels.

On December 27, 1922, Willa Cather and her parents were confirmed in the Episcopal Church by Dr. George Beecher, Bishop of Nebraska. This was partly a social gesture on Cather's part; Episcopalianism was newly established and very fashionable in Nebraska. But partly, too, it was a reflection both of Cather's increasing conservatism-her increasing desire to fill her life with tradition and ritual-and of her intensifying spiritual longing for a haven, a sanctuary, something to set against what she was coming to see as the tragedy of human experience: the cruelty, anguish, and bleakness of life and love in the world.

Cather's writing always betrayed a keen sense of loss. At the center of her fiction-particularly in the works I am concerned with here-is the story of the Garden and the Fall. The lives of most of the major characters enact a recurrent tragic pattern, a pattern of dispossession, exile, and longing. For Jim Burden, Niel Herbert, Marian Forrester, Godfrey St. Peter, Tom Outland, and Myra Henshawe, adulthood is a time of failure, disappointment, dejection, sexual guilt, or sexual sterility; their lives seem summarized either by Robert Frost's line "Nothing gold can stay" or by Emily Dickinson's "A loss of something ever felt I." Part of this pattern involves the characters' search for the moment or act that constitutes their origins: either a timeless moment of wholeness, an Edenic moment shortly preceding exile, or a moment which, viewed retrospectively, plunges the character into time and guilt and itself marks the beginning of the Fall. Then, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather echoes and reverses every single one of these moments of origins. To recognize this is to see how fervently Cather wants to affirm the possibility of redemption. "Man was lost and saved in a garden," the Bishop thinks near the end of his life, quoting his "fellow Auvergnat, Pascal" (267).

Jim Burden's life powerfully enacts the story of dispossession. He comes to Nebraska at age ten and on his first morning there has an experience of bliss and plenitude as he sits with his back against a pumpkin in his grandmother's garden. "Nothing happened," he remarks. "I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more" (Ántonia 18). But the rest of the novel records his inexorable movement away from that moment. He leaves the garden at the outer edge of the settled prairie for Black Hawk, Black Hawk for Lincoln, Lincoln for New York. He passes from childhood to the repressions and confusions of adolescence, to the sterility of adulthood; as the novel's Introduction tells us, he ends up unhappily married, childless, a lawyer for one of the great railroad companies that so avidly develop—that is to say, obliterate—the open prairies. During the course of the novel, he has what seem at first to be two additional Edenic moments, but one—with the hired girls down by the river, just before he leaves Black Hawk for Lincoln—is marred by thoughts and talk of death, loss, and sexual confusion; and the other-with Ántonia and her children in the orchard-is marred by the knowledge that the garden he stands in, rich with apples in its triple enclosure, is not his home but hers. Homeless, he travels restlessly from West to East and East to West, and makes a home at last only in art that immortalizes "the precious, the incommunicable past" (372), recording the story of the woman who has never been "my Ántonia."

A Lost Lady, Cather's great study of carnal guilt and carnal beauty, begins with a literal fall. Ivy Peters, the novel's psychopath, has blinded a female woodpecker. Trying to catch it to put it out of its misery, twelve-year-old Niel Herbert falls from a tree, breaks his arm, and is rescued by the enchanting Marian Forrester, a mother/Muse figure with whom he soon falls more or less in love. The rest of the novel, seen through Niel's eyes, chronicles Mrs. Forrester's fall through a series of men: from her husband Captain Forrester, a man of godlike calm, a man like a tree or a mountain; to her first lover, the virile, wolflike Frank Ellinger; to her second lover, the loathsome, reptilian Ivy Peters. It chronicles as well her husband's fall from nearly mythical vision and power as one of the early pioneer founders of the Burlington railroad, to physical incapacity, near poverty, and death; and the fall of the morning world, the rose-filled marshes and open prairies, along with the rise of men like Ivy Peters. Then, in a movement that is echoed and reversed at the end of Death Comes for the Archbishop, the narrative moves back in its final pages to search out the moment of origins in an even earlier literal fall. Marian Forrester invites a group of town boys to dinner in an effort to teach them social graces and after dinner tells them of the time long ago when she first met Captain Forrester. Hers is a story of woundedness, of pain and need that issue in human love. A beautiful young woman, already marked by sexual scandal, she fell in that long-ago time from a cliff in California and landed in a tree with both legs broken. Captain Forrester found her, carried her to safety, cherished her, wed her, took her home to his gardens in Sweet Water. And there she began her long, slow fall again.

Desolation pervades The Professor's House, a novel that describes not only the loss of paradise but also, and more terribly, the loss of desire itself, of what Cather calls the ability to conjugate the verb "to love" (264). Godfrey St. Peter, a middle-aged professor at a midwestern university who is feeling the bleakness attendant upon completing his life's work-a vast history of the Spanish explorers-and whose own family relations are increasingly fraught with jealousy, fatigue, and tension, turns in a season of spiritual destitution to thoughts of the most gifted student he ever had, a young man named Tom Outland. Long before, Tom had appeared out of a mysterious past in the Southwest, had entered the professor's garden one day bearing priceless Indian artifacts and a pocketful of turquoises, clear and blue as the desert skies. He had become the Professor's student, had become engaged to the Professor's beautiful daughter Rosamond, had invented a gas that promised to revolutionize aviation, and—in a semisuicidal gesture, before he could marry the daughter or develop the invention—had gone off to die in the First World War. Now, years later, the Professor reads Tom's diary, and in the inset "Tom Outland's Story" we learn that Tom's despair was the result of his discovery of Blue Mesa. For just a moment, this abandoned and untouched Indian settlement slept above him in the crystalline air, in the "calmness of eternity" (201); once he told his secret, however, he set in motion the chain of events that brought about the depredation of the city and his own fall into sorrow. Musing upon Tom Outland's life, Godfrey St. Peter concludes that for him, too, the truth is that "he was solitary and must always be so" (265). There is the moment on the mountain, and the endless fall. Tom dies young; the Professor survives his own near-suicide to gaze without hope or delight at a darkening future.

Though these three novels describe a Fall or a series of Falls, there is also in each one an alternate vision: a powerfully presented natural mode of being, or—rare in Cather's fiction—a note of felix culpa. Jim Burden, of course, shares his novel with Ántonia. Fecund, spontaneous, nurturing, not so much sexual as maternal, she is Cather's greatest exemplar of natural being. Jim's is the story of a Garden and a Fall, but Ántonia's is the story of an abiding Garden. Known only through Jim's narrative, she yet surpasses and eludes it, for her mysteries are not Edenic but Eleusinian. In A Lost Lady, Cather presents not an alternate mode of being but rather a final reversal of feeling. Niel, who has judged Marian Forrester harshly and withdrawn his allegiance from her when he discovers her affair with Ivy Peters, comes in this most emotionally mature of Cather's novels to realize at last that the beauty Marian Forrester represents is inseparable from carnality, from the body. Cather comes close to forgiving, even affirming, sexuality in this novel. Having lost her, Niel learns to value Marian Forrester: "When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he could be gay" (71). And finally, even in The Professor's House there occurs a note of felix culpa in the person of Louie Marsellus, the worldly and rather showy Jew who marries Rosamond St. Peter, gains access to Tom Outland's invention, and develops it into a fortune. He begins as the novel's antihero but comes to suggest a heroism counter to Tom's and possible in the postlapsarian world, based as it is not on purity and solitude but on emotional generosity and sexual love-what Louie himself calls the "fantastic unreasonableness" of passion (170). His love, not Tom's, makes Rosamond, the "rose of the world," bear fruit; by the end of the novel she is pregnant, but-so deep is the book's despondency, its stoical acceptance of life without delight-the knowledge of new life affects St. Peter not at all.

My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, and The Professor's House, then, offer counterthemes, however muted, to the theme of dispossession; My Mortal Enemy does not. This novel bears, I think, the most direct relation to Death Comes for the Archbishop: I believe that through her identification with Myra Henshawe, Cather burns herself out. This underrated novel, with its exquisite presentation of sexual passion, is the cry of a soul in torment. It is also Cather's most courageous-or most desperate-attempt to affirm life as intensity, as freedom, defiance, and drama. Greatly in love, the young heiress Myra Driscoll defies her uncle, elopes with Oswald Henshawe, and is disowned; one moment of origins in My Mortal Enemy is that legendary moment when, as narrator Nellie Birdseye comments, "Love went out of the gates and gave the dare to Fate" (17).

Another moment of origins, easily overlooked the first time through, occurs during the funeral of Myra's uncle, John Driscoll. The description of the funeral is important, for in this passage we see an expression of the desire to cheat death of its victory, a desire which within a year issued in Death Comes for the Archbishop. "I myself could remember his funeral," Nellie Birdseye says, "though I was not more than six years old when it happened." Driscoll's financial support of the church is amply repaid, on his death, by the opulence of the occasion: the high altar blazes with candles; the choir is filled with masses of flowers; and Mass is celebrated by the bishop and "a flock of priests in gorgeous vestments." Then, in a splendid gesture of enclosure, "when the pall-bearers arrived, Driscoll did not come to the church; the church went to him. The bishop and clergy went down the nave and met that great black coffin at the door, preceded by the cross and boys swinging cloudy censers, followed by the choir chanting to the organ. They surrounded, they received, they seemed to assimilate into the body of the church the body of old John Driscoll. They bore it up to the high altar on a river of colour and incense and organ-tone; they claimed it and enclosed it." Indeed, as Nellie says, it seemed as if John Driscoll had "escaped the end of all flesh; it was as if he had been translated, with no dark conclusion to the pageant, no 'night of the grave' about which our Protestant preachers talked. From the freshness of roses and lilies, from the glory of the high altar, he had gone straight to the greater glory, through smoking censers and candles and stars" (Mortal Enemy 18-19).

Myra's life is marred by poverty and jealousy; giving all for love brings her bitter disappointment. In a final splendid gesture, she dies alone at dawn, a runaway once again, on a wild headland overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The pain that brings her to this point is nearly overwhelming. Nor, since its cause is ineffable, can it really be articulated. Myra herself says, "I should have stayed with my uncle. It was money I needed. We've thrown our lives away" (75)-but she would have been no happier had she sacrificed love to stay with old John Driscoll; her account of her own life seems insufficient. Nellie Birdseye comes closer when, remembering Myra listening to the "Casta diva" aria from Norma, she thinks of that "hidden richness in her," that "compelling, passionate, overmastering something for which I had no name" (48).

Myra dies alone with "my mortal enemy" (95). Such, Cather seems to say, are the wages of passion, for Myra's mortal enemy seems to be both her husband-who loves her devotedly-and her own desirous spirit and body. Myra has gone forth, away from home, church, and father; consumed by "two fatal maladies" (74), she is at liberty to suffer and to die. John Driscoll, in contrast, creates a haven for himself. Headstrong and ruthless like Myra, he nevertheless stakes his fortune on forms of safety and closure, and Cather comes perilously close, in the passages I have quoted, to suggesting that with sufficient belief and sufficient fortune donated to the church, John Driscoll can escape death. Myra is Cather's heroine-but the cost is too great, the discoveries too painful. Out of Myra Henshawe's defeat Cather creates Jean Marie Latour; out of the agony of My Mortal Enemy she creates the luminous calm of Death Comes for the Archbishop.

The heart of this book, then, is Cather's meditation on Last Things. What is the way to live, since one must die? What is the way to avoid Myra Henshawe's torment? In her essay "On Death Comes for the Archbishop," Cather comments that its title came from Holbein's Dance of Death. The reference is revealing, for in this series of woodcuts upon the medieval theme, the Bishop alone goes to his death with serenity, humbly following Death across a landscape which, in its simplifications, resembles the landscape of Cather's novel. There is his flock, frightened and scattered; he has been a faithful pastor. There are the church on the hill and the setting sun, which accrue rich symbolic value for Cather. And across this landscape, as much at one with his death as the setting sun, moves the dignified, patient Bishop.

Jean Marie Latour dies with similar poise. At the end of a long, rewarding life he dies peacefully "of having lived" (Archbishop 269), surrounded by friends, in the shadow of the artifact which will enclose him and immortalize him, his Cathedral. As he lies dying, his thoughts circle back to his life's moment of origins. As in A Lost Lady, the narrative of this moment has been delayed; but whereas there we learn of a Fall, here we learn of a Fulfillment. The moment comes to Cather from her primary source, William Joseph Howlett's life of the "pioneer priest" Joseph P. Machebeuf (who is represented in the novel by Father Vaillant). Howlett mentions the moment only in passing; but Cather, by placing it in the dying Archbishop's memory, by allowing her whole novel to build toward it, underscores its importance. Latour remembers the morning he and Joseph Vaillant ran away from their families and village to sign up as missionaries to the New World; as he remembers Vaillant's anguish, he drifts out of his dying body to enter that long-ago moment: "In reality the Bishop was not there at all; he was standing in a tip-tilted green field among his native mountains, and he was trying to give consolation to a young man who was being torn in two before his eyes by the desire to go and the necessity to stay. He was trying to forge a new Will in that devout and exhausted priest; and the time was short, for the diligence for Paris was already rumbling down the mountain gorge" (299).

As in My Mortal Enemy, Love goes out the gates and gives the dare to Fate. Here, however, the bid is for sacrifice, celibacy, discipline, redemption; in this moment the priests are born into their missionary endeavor and die to the fallen world. Leaving their homes, they journey to a terrifying landscape, a hell of "countless canyons and arroyos, fissures in the earth which are sometimes ten feet deep, sometimes a thousand" (7). But though their earthly journey seems to be an exile, faith enables them to dwell in the realm of origins. This is the significance, for instance, of the cruciform tree before which the Bishop worships at the beginning of the novel. Lost in the desert, nearly dead of thirst, concerned for his mission, Latour comes across this tree that sanctifies the landscape. He commends himself to Christ and then, as if by miracle, stumbles upon a tiny settlement called Agua Secreta, a garden by the side of living waters.

Thereafter, with few exceptions, the Bishop moves at ease upon the earth, creating the shapes of redemption out of this vast inimical wilderness: a diocese, a cathedral, a garden. He acts but does not change; his experience in time attests not to exile and loss but to centeredness and possession. Even his parting from Vaillant causes him only a few moments of loneliness; briefly he indulges in human reflections, "such reflections as any bachelor nearing fifty might have" (255). But as soon as he turns away to the solitude of his own room, he seems, in Cather's words, "to come back to reality, to the sense of a Presence awaiting him." His solitude becomes a "perpetual flowering," for his human needs are met by "Her who was all the graces; Virgin-daughter, Virgin-mother, girl of the people and Queen of Heaven: le ręve supręme de la chair" (256).

"The supreme dream of the flesh . . ." Death Comes for the Archbishop has been called regressive and escapist; some critics feel it marks Cather's abdication from human conflict and desire and her cultivation of fantasies of safety. Others praise its luminous prose, its deep response to history, its characters and landscape, and call it Cather's greatest work. My own response is mixed. It is a radiant book, less a novel than an act of prayer, an act of centering and composing the self, a ceaseless meditation. Its desire seems the same as the desire of traditional Ignatian meditation, as Louis Martz describes it in The Poetry of Meditation: to awaken and direct emotion for purposes of devotion (36ff.). Its structure also loosely resembles the structure of Ignatian meditation, in which the devotee passes from a composition of place to an analysis of the significance of the scene composed, and thence to colloquy, in which the aroused and perfected will expresses its devotion. The episode of the cruciform tree, for instance, constitutes Cather's-and Latour's-composition of place, the creation of a setting appropriate for meditation, a setting that enables the devotee to focus his thoughts upon one aspect of doctrinal truth about the nature of God, the nature of man, and their interrelationship. Nearly dead of thirst, Latour turns his attention from his own anguish to remind himself "of that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, 'J'ai soif!' . . . Empowered by long training, the young priest blotted himself out of his own consciousness and meditated upon the anguish of his Lord. The Passion of Jesus became for him the only reality; the need of his own body was but a part of that conception" (Archbishop 20).

Latour's meditation here reaches its own state of colloquy; it also composes the scene for the book's long meditation. The miraculous sign of the cruciform tree and the subsequent discovery of Agua Secreta set the seal upon Latour's further actions; the moment reveals the landscape as redeemed once and for all, and the book spells out the ramifications of this truth. Finally, near the end of his life, Latour enters a state again resembling Ignatian colloquy, a free outpouring of devotion-although in this case, the entity with which he communes seems to be his own inviolable and sacrosanct self rather than a God conceived of as Other and therefore longed for. Thus, colloquy here is not impassioned but serene: "He was soon to have done with calendared time," Cather writes. "He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible" (290).

Cather describes Death Comes for the Archbishop as "in the style of legend," inspired by the frescoes of the life of Saint Genevičve painted by Puvis de Chavannes. She describes it also in terms of hagiography: "In the Golden Legend the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance." One of the book's beauties is the way in which, lovingly and calmly, Cather depicts the world sub specie aeternitatis. Soup, bells, mules, the birth and death of civilizations-all have their place in the order.

However, particularly when one compares the Bishop with the Indians, whose presence becomes increasingly important in the book, it is difficult at times to tell whether Latour represents the bliss of self-surrender in devotion or the opposite bliss of fantasies of the omnipotent self. As he nears death, for instance, Cather writes, "More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself" (289-90). In a way this resembles the mystic's "cosmic consciousness," as Karl Shapiro describes it: like the mystic, the Bishop enters a "state of moral exaltation [and] enhanced intellectual power," experiencing "elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a conviction of immortality" (31-32). But the Bishop's state of mind differs importantly from the mystic's in that his bliss derives not from "a sense of identification with the universe" but rather from a sense of the absolute indestructibility of the self. Paradoxically, then, the Bishop seems to aggrandize precisely the state of consciousness opposed to cosmic consciousness: the "consciousness of oneself as distinct from all other objects and beings in the universe" (Shapiro 31).

It is, of course, difficult to distinguish the serenity of connection to the universe from the serenity of fantasies of omnipotence-and it is true that near the end of his life Latour feels deep accord with the Spanish martyrs whose way prepared his own, with the Navajos, with the clear blue desert air that "whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning" (276). Nevertheless, Latour's presence is very different from that of the Indians, who "pass through a country without disturbing anything . . . pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air" (233); the Zuńi runners he sees one day, for instance, vanish unforgettably, "their bodies disappearing and reappearing among the sand dunes, like the shadows that eagles cast in their strong, unhurried flight" (235). Theirs is the true cosmic consciousness, the knowledge of union with all that is. Latour's is the tower of the self; he dies (like old John Driscoll) with "no night of the grave," translated immediately into his artifact, his immortality, his Cathedral.

Closely allied with this focus on the ego and its preservation is Cather's rejection, through and for Latour, of a sense of darkness Sunlight irradiates the book-the clear high skies, the "blue and gold" of morning (276). As Susan Rosowski points out, Death Comes for the Archbishop is founded on a pattern of belief anything outside of which threatens the believer; at least twice Latour is shaken by his encounter with "materials that predate form and . . . a people who exist outside Calvary's sacrifice" (Voyage Perilous 173). At Ácoma, for instance, he preaches to Indians who seem to represent "types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice on Calvary could hardly reach back so far." When he blesses them and sends them on their way, he feels only "inadequacy and spiritual defeat" (Archbishop 100). But though Cather mentions this despair, the book cannot really accommodate a sense of shadows. Nor can it accommodate a sense of the body, the secret, sexual body; in Death Comes for the Archbishop-in marked contrast to some of the earlier novels-the body is the one thing Cather, through her Bishop, seems to want most to deny."

Once again as he moves about the land the Bishop loses his composure. Caught in a sudden snowstorm, he is led by his Indian guide Jacinto to a secret cave high in the side of a mountain, the entrance to which suggests "two great stone lips, slightly parted and thrust outward." Cold and dank, the cave is filled with "a fetid odour, not very strong but highly disagreeable" (127). It is a mighty place, an Indian place of worship. It gives onto a yet more secret cave, very small, and inhabited (it is rumored) by an enormous serpent. Beneath it rushes a "great underground river . . . a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock . . . a great flood moving with majesty and power" (130). The river hums and roars like the blood in the body, or like Being itself; the serpent sleeps; the cave abides-and the Bishop responds to this landscape with revulsion. "It flashed into his mind from time to time," Cather writes of this occasion, "and always with a shudder of repugnance quite unjustified by anything he had experienced there. . . . the cave, which had probably saved his life, he remembered with horror" (133).

Cather's Mariolatry and her treatment of female characters in Death Comes for the Archbishop suggest that she shares the horror. Like millions of Christian believers, she finds in Mary the image of female divinity. In the story of the broken old bondwoman Sada-a story she liked so well that she had it reprinted separately for Christmas-Cather writes movingly of Mary as mother and intercessor, and seems to allude to her own pain too when she comments that "only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer" (217). But Cather's aggrandizement of the humble, cringing Sada as the type of "pure goodness" (212) suggests that Mary, in this book, is the dream of a flesh that would eschew itself. The impression is strengthened by Cather's presentation of the story's other two female characters. The first is Magdalena, a Mexican girl who marries a "degenerate murderer" named Buck Scales (77); who nearly dies under the yoke of a marriage in which as soon as her babies are born, they are killed in ways too horrible for her to relate; but who regains youth, beauty, and wit once she escapes her husband and goes to live in the convent. The second is Dońa Isabella Olivares, the woman the Bishop calls upon to "make a little poesie in life for us here" (192). She is indeed charming and sexually alluring, but she comes to seem pathetic when, in an incident Cather presents as amusing, she would rather forfeit her dead husband's estate than tell the truth about her age. Terrified of time, age, and death, she attests to the perils of basing one's female identity upon one's sexuality. Far better, in terms of this novel, to emulate the Virgin Mary, woman without the darkness or the odor, woman without desire, need, or stain.

Just at the end of the book, Cather tells an inset story of the Navajos, the loss and restoration of their Canyon de Chelly. Her handling of this narrative reveals both the great beauty of her vision in Death Comes for the Archbishop and the dangers of that vision. As the Bishop lies dying, he thinks not only of his own moment of origins, that moment when he and Vaillant stood on the mountain road and accepted "l'invitation du voyage" (285), but also of the restoration of the Canyon de Chelly to the Navajos. For a time, American policy was to drive the Navajos from their own ancestral lands to the "Bosque Redondo, three hundred miles away on the Pecos River. Hundreds of them, men, women, and children, perished from hunger and cold on the way; their sheep and horses died from exhaustion crossing the mountains. None ever went willingly; they were driven by starvation and the bayonet; captured in isolated bands, and brutally deported" (293). Their lands too were laid waste; Kit Carson (elsewhere one of this book's heroes) followed "the last unconquered remnant" into the Canyon de Chelly, "spoiled their stores, destroyed their deep-sheltered corn-fields, cut down the terraced peach orchards so dear to them. When they saw all that was sacred to them laid waste, the Navajos lost heart. They did not surrender; they simply ceased to fight, and were taken" (293). But then, as if by miracle, the American government admitted its mistake, and after five years of exile the Navajos were allowed to return.

On first reading, it seems that Cather has introduced utterly extraneous material right at the end of her novel. But of course the story is not extraneous at all; in Cather's vision it offers that all-but-impossible thing, a return to the Garden. In 1875 the Bishop took his French architect on a pack trip into Arizona to show him something of the country before he returned to France, and he had the pleasure of seeing the Navajo horsemen riding free over their great plains again. The two Frenchmen went as far as the Canyon de Chelly to behold the strange cliff ruins; once more crops were growing down at the bottom of the world between the towering sandstone walls; sheep were grazing under the magnificent cottonwoods and drinking at the streams of sweet water; it was like an Indian Garden of Eden. (297)

The story is very beautiful, but as it functions in Death Comes for the Archbishop, the sense of closure is too complete. For one thing, as has been pointed out, "no authoritative work on the religion and mythology of the Navajos supports [Cather's] proposition that their gods dwelt in the canyon" (Bloom and Bloom 339). For another, even in Cather's telling of the story, the history of the Navajos is filled with irrevocable losses. Yet here she ignores these losses. In this second Eden man walks with his gods, and woman suckles a lamb: "Man was lost and saved in a garden" (267). Placing it as she does at the end of Death Comes for the Archbishop, stressing its analogy with Eden, Cather seems to offer the Navajo story, against her own bitter knowledge, as assurance to the heart's deepest longing that all which has been lost will be restored.

Perhaps because critics have long viewed Willa Cather as a poetic writer who excelled in creating scenes rather than in developing plots, they have given little attention to her endings. Yet Cather's endings are among the most revealing aspects of her fiction. When she quoted Michelet, "The end is nothing, the road is all," she announced a principle central to her narrative poetics: a keen sense of an ending (the phrase is Kermode's), and a correspondingly keen determination to subvert that sense. The result is a series of endings in which Cather made dramatic the contrast between two principles with which she worked. One was that of linearity, a story organized by a beginning, a middle, and an ending and emblematic of a traditional and often patriarchal social order; the other was that of simultaneity, with its assumption of symbolism and its positing of alternatives to tradition by creating a new and often female order.

It is a commonplace that Willa Cather wrote grim early stories, accounts of failed homesteaders, dying youth, and lost artists; what has not been noted is how consistently she wrote stories of the End. Working with materials unredeemed by art (until she wrote about it, Nebraska had not been the subject of serious literature) and within a male-dominated literary tradition (when she looked for great women writers, she found only the Georges, "and they were anything but women," she declared when she was young [Lincoln Courier]), she sought ways to make her own sense out of her world.

Willa Cather began with Apocalypse. "Lou, the Prophet" appeared in 1892, following "Peter" (another version of the End, a story about a suicide), her first published fiction. In "Lou, the Prophet" Cather gave to her Nebraska homesteader a biblical vision of history that explains human events by a divine plan. The catalyst was personal disaster, for Lou interpreted the loss of his corn crop as his greatest calamity; his response was a vision of the end of the world. While he slept, he dreamt that the Devil and his angels were holding back the rain, loosing the damned in Hell. But then "a strange light shone . . . and the clouds parted, and Christ and all his angels were descending" (Collected Short Fiction 536). When he awoke in pain over his dream, he took from the shelf his mother's Bible. It opened of itself at Revelation. . . . Page by page, he read those burning, blinding, blasting words, and they seemed to shrivel up his poor brain altogether. At last . . . he sank down upon his knees in prayer. . . . Nature did not comfort him any, he knew nothing about nature, he had never seen her; he had only stared into a black plow furrow all his life. Before, he had only seen in the wide, green lands and the open blue the possibilities of earning his bread; now, he only saw in them a great world ready for the judgment, a funeral pyre ready for the torch. (537)

"Lou, the Prophet" is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, by so directly incorporating the biblical vision of an End, Cather laid the groundwork for more subtle biblical echoes throughout her early stories and in her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. Second, by including gender in her character's response to that vision, Cather introduced the single most important factor that would shape her sense of an ending. Cather described Lou as if he were a child who, awakening from a nightmare, seeks the maternal presence that might comfort him, turning first to his mother's Bible, then to a female nature. Thus Cather's early character announces a long line of men who seek comfort in women's ways of knowing: Peter, who loves his violin as if it is a woman; Canute Canuteson, who melodramatically kidnaps Lena Yensen; Eric Hermannson, who sees the eastern visitor Margaret as a vision of ethereal beauty; most famously, Jim Burden, who by returning to Ántonia comes home to himself.

"Lou, the Prophet" introduces also an impulse that runs through Cather's early stories, her need to project beyond the ending of the conventional script of pioneer possibilities and from there to evaluate the way the script has been ordered. Narrative technique expresses that need. Point of view, for example, is characteristically past the End-after the crops have failed, the settlers have abandoned the boom town, or the artist has died. From such a perspective, bright beginnings of frontier settlement and romantic love are revealed as illusory and apparent salvations as damnations. Characters awaken to the dark unintelligibility of their lives: an old man in "Peter" realizes that without his violin he exists as a barbarian; Canute Canuteson in "On the Divide," that his homesteading is unrelievedly lonely; Aunt Georgiana in "A Wagner Matinee," that she has passed her life in a wasteland; Jim Laird in "The Sculptor's Funeral," that a brilliant sculptor returns to the same "bitter, dead little Western town" that he left. These stories about awakenings to the senselessness of experience characteristically close in despair: Peter commits suicide; Aunt Georgiana cries that she doesn't want to return home; Jim Laird admits that his own life has been a sham (Collected Short Fiction).

Cather's early explorations of the End culminated in her first novel. Alexander's Bridge is a story about the breakdown of Bartley Alexander, a renowned engineer torn between two selves, symbolized by two women. More important, it is an allegory of creative genius doomed by an American myth of progress. Using the strained and finally collapsed bridge as a metaphor for the disintegration of the psyche and the collapse of society, Cather projected modern notions of progress beyond the End, whence she could view them whole. Here too she drew upon traditional elements of the Apocalypse: her prophet, Lucius Wilson, introduces Alexander with unmistakable biblical imagery—"There he is. Away with perspective! No past, no future for Bartley; just the fiery moment. The only moment that ever was or will be in the world!"—and predicts that he will end in "a crash and clouds of dust" (8, 12). Warfare between good and evil ensues (internalized as a struggle between Alexander's two selves), and the collapse of Alexander's bridge is a scene of apocalyptic chaos—a river filled with drowning men and among them Alexander, trying to beat off the injured and crazed workmen who are gripping him an dragging him under.

For Alexander's story, Cather internalized Apocalypse, making it a psychological crisis of creativity by linking her sense of an ending to qualities inherent in Alexander's character rather than to an external fate. Prophecy is of psychic disintegration, and warfare between good and evil is an internal struggle between Alexander's two selves: the civilized, public, and adult sensibility represented by his wife Winifred; the passionate, private, and younger one represented by his lover, Hilda Burgoyne. The vision of the new heaven and earth with the new Jerusalem is one man's memory of innocent youth (when Alexander, glimpsing boys seated about a campfire, recalls his own boyhood) and of the comfort of a maternal embrace (when Alexander, fighting off the men who would pull him under, recalls his wife).

The engineer was also, as Elizabeth Ammons has argued, a cultural hero, and through him Cather passed judgment on an American culture that would divert creative energy into competition and mastery. She passed judgment too on the gender conventions associated with those notions. Alexander is masculine power writ large, described in a rhetoric inflated until it verges on the comic and, as a result, contains its own destruction. Descriptions become a parody of the heroic, a creator so subordinated to his product that he has become indistinguishable from it (Cather compares Alexander's head to a catapult, his shoulders to the support for the span of a bridge, and his energy to a pounding engine). As his bridge is "incurably disabled . . . already as good as condemned, because something was out of line in the lower chord" (124), so Alexander also has been incurably disabled by mindless service to public notions of success. Bartley Alexander has become "a mechanism useful to society," dominated by a driving competition to get on in the world (39).

The tragedy is that an alternative existed, carelessly left behind with Alexander's youth and by implication as carelessly forgotten by a modern society. Within him resides a vestigial memory of a personal self and a simpler time; the moment most authentically his occurs when he glimpses boys around a campfire, then recalls his own childhood and a more primitive way of relating to the world. As contrast to Alexander's increasingly frenetic movement between two continents, two women, and two selves, the scene symbolizes the harmony of cooperation and the repetition of ritualistic story-telling; it evokes the timelessness of myth and legend.

Cather ends, however, not with a New Jerusalem, but with the end of history. A final scene presents a coda in which time has stopped and, as if into a frieze, scenes are frozen. Alexander's wife, Winifred, lives on in their Boston home, dedicated to her sorrow; Wilson and Hilda sit together in London, agreeing that "nothing can happen to one after Bartley" (138). It was, indeed, for Cather the end of one strain of writing. Following Alexander's Bridge she ceased writing stories about the End, instead using apocalyptic allusions to dramatize alternatives to an End. In A Lost Lady, for example, Marian Forrester refuses to immolate herself on the funeral pyre of a pioneer past; and in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Rachel Blake rescues Nancy Till by driving her from desolation and through chaos.

So apparently different, Cather's first novels ("there were two," she said ["My First Novels"]) belong together: Alexander's Bridge tells of her apocalypse of a historical imagination; O Pioneers! of her genesis of a mythic one. From Alexander to Alexandra-the gender difference is significant, for Cather turned from ideas progress and mastery that she identified with male paradigms to those of stability and love, identified with female ones. In doing so, she discarded the premise upon which fiction was conventionally based, that of making sense of contingent reality. In O Pioneers! Cather gave only an obligatory nod to the circumstantial reality common to fiction (she does tell of two generations of immigrant settlement in Nebraska), for her real allegiance was to myth and tale. The country insisted on being the hero of her story, Cather said in a letter to Elizabeth Sergeant, and she did not interfere.

In writing of Alexandra's relation to the land, Cather wrote her own creation myth, placing its beginning not as an event in time but as a feeling: "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman" (65). She created for that country a human spouse, then wrote of its awakening in response to love, using for her subtext an Americanized version of Beauty and the Beast. O Pioneers! tells of the beautiful daughter who is pledged to the country, which is like a beast under a spell (118); of her awakened love for it and of her subsequent giving of her heart to it; of the magical transformation that follows, with which she reigns over a fruitful kingdom. By transferring the romantic action to the relationship between Alexandra and the land and by transforming the fairytale heroine, Beauty, into her heroine, Alexandra, Cather empowered qualities traditionally restricted to women-feeling and, particularly, the capacity for love. Moreover, she used secondary characters to question social and literary conventions for women. Alexandra's brothers provide an ideological backdrop of the sex-gender system characteristic of the second stage of settling the frontier: Oscar and Lou parody economic and legal restraints upon women, declaring that the property of a family belongs to its men, regardless of its title; and Emil parodies love conventions, considering Alexandra at forty too old to marry. Finally, the subplot further challenges romantic conventions, for Emil and Marie's love is from its outset doomed to tragedy.

The rejection of convention and empowerment of female alternatives is particularly evident in the ending of O Pioneers!, where Cather subverted a conventional plot and affirmed mythic continuities. The projected marriage between Alexandra and her childhood friend, Carl Linstrum, reminds the reader of conventions that are inadequate and false: that is, of marriage as the standard happy ending in fiction about women. Cather contradicts tradition with her depiction of the Alexandra-Carl relationship: whereas strong female heroes are ordinarily linked in love actions to older, temperate, and wise men, Cather links Alexandra to the younger, sensitive, and uncertain Carl. Whereas love action traditionally centers on a female hero's relation to the male she will marry, Cather focuses on Alexandra's relation to the land, moving Carl off to St. Louis and then to Alaska for a good part of the action and depicting him as decidedly reluctant to follow the quest script imposed upon men. In the end it simply does not ring true that the Alexandra who tamed the Divide is now leaning heavily upon Carl's shoulder while he kisses her "softly, on her lips and her eyes" (309); indeed, Cather omitted these lines from the Autograph Edition.

Yet the novel's ending only incidentally predicts a conventional union: as friends, Alexandra and Carl will marry, but in doing so they pledge their faith not to each other but to a far more important bond: Carl tells his future wife not that she belongs to him, as gender convention would dictate, but that she belongs "to the land . . . now more than ever" (307). In the ritualistic rhythm of a benediction, the omniscient narrator concludes with the blessing of timeless truths: "They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening sun. Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!" (309). Unlike her marriage to Carl—a middle-aged and presumably childless one—Alexandra's union with the country is one of passion and procreation, a greening of crops and a renewal of youth, for which Cather uses metaphors of the marriage bed and of generation.

Closure is circular: the prefatory poem's opening image of "sullen fires of sunset, fading" is completed at the novel's conclusion, when Alexandra stands gazing into the west as the "level rays of the sinking sun [shine] in her clear eyes." The opening's youth "flashing like a star out of the twilight" is completed by the ending's evening star, like a promise awaiting Alexandra's union with the land and extended by "the shining eyes of youth" resulting from that union (309). Here is no western hero who will demonstrate his virility by acting violently and his power by effecting change; instead, Alexandra offers the promise of continuity, love, and stability. In so ending O Pioneers! Cather demonstrates one of her most effective strategies of subversion. She includes familiar ingredients of the romance plot but frees them from culturally imposed restrictions. Alexandra succeeds by the traditionally female virtue of loving, but she does so in untraditional ways by turning her feelings to the land rather than to a man; similarly, the sexual asymmetry valued by the romance plot is present but, again untraditionally, as an obstacle to overcome, for the marriage between Alexandra and Carl is possible only when they join in like human need.

This gender distinction between history and myth is one that reappears throughout Cather's fiction. Willa Cather identified men with progress and change, linear time, and an end-determined imagination; she identified women with mythic continuities. She created no female character comparable in a historian's sensibility to Professor St. Peter; conversely, she created no male character comparable in mythic dimensions to her earth mother, Ántonia. Not surprisingly, then, she characteristically wrote of male characters yearning to retrieve the basic truths identified with women. Whereas American literature conventionally begins with a young man at the outset of a journey, Cather frequently begins with middle-aged men who have completed their worldly travels and achieved public success: at the opening of Alexander's Bridge, Alexander is a world-famous engineer; at that of My Ántonia, Jim Burden is a successful lawyer; at that of The Professor's House, Godfrey St. Peter has completed his acclaimed Spanish Adventurers in North America. Not only is "the moving . . . over and done" for each at the outset, but the moving has been prototypically American: the engineer of mighty bridges that spanned the continent, the lawyer for the railroads that tamed the West, the chronicler of adventurers who brought civilization. Each has followed the modern notion of progress to its promised end—which has failed to sustain. Each then seeks the timeless truths identified with female responses to experience: Alexander returns to the spontaneously loving Hilda, Jim Burden to Ántonia, Godfrey St. Peter to the "seasoned and sound" sewing woman, Augusta (Professor's House 281).

These characters represent a larger impulse that runs through Cather's writing, an impulse toward resolution in orders closely identified with women. Is there, after all, another major American writer whose novels so often end in a kitchen? Jim Burden returns to Ántonia's kitchen; Mahailey thinks of Claude as directly over the kitchen stove (One of Ours); Niel Herbert's final disillusionment occurs as he looks in at Marian Forrester, standing before her kitchen sink (A Lost Lady). In Shadows on the Rock, where the kitchen is the center throughout, the ending tells of preparations to go to dinner. With their repetitive and stable domestic rituals, such endings provide one alternative to modern notions of progress.

Among other ways in which Cather presented alternatives, sometimes a character gives up the attempt to tell a story, or to order experience by linear time. In A Lost Lady, for example, Niel Herbert—who throughout the novel tries "to get the truth out of" Marian Forrester: that is, to explain her by imposing his fictions upon her (100)—in the end abandons the attempt to tell her story, resting content that she had a hand in breaking him in to life. In yet other novels Cather subverts closure by concluding the plot line in ambiguity or riddle. In the final paragraphs of The Professor's House, Godfrey St. Peter has returned to consciousness in a symbolic rebirth but without an understanding of the past or expectation for the future. In My Mortal Enemy, Cather pushes the modern version of romantic love beyond the end to ask what happens after the young lovers renounce fortune and elope, presumably to live happily ever after. With the love plot fulfilled, she sets her characters on a quest whose plot folds back upon the conventional ending, for Myra Henshawe must learn its significance. The heroine of the love plot thus becomes the hero of the quest, testing myth against the reality of economics and her own feelings, then defiantly writing an alternative ending to her own story. After her death her last words echo as a warning and a riddle to her narrator, and by extension to the reader: "Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy!" (95, 105). The question echoes through the criticism, which has uniformly focused upon identifying the enemy, ignoring the fact that the question asks not who but why. With this question Cather challenges her reader to return to the plots by which Myra Henshawe's life was scripted, and to evaluate the love plot in the light of her subsequent quest for its meaning.

Not surprisingly, Cather used her most timebound narratives, The Song of the Lark and One of Ours, for her most developed quest plots; each details her character's search for alternatives to the End, particularly as mandated by socially imposed gender conventions. On one level The Song of the Lark is the story of young Thea's development into Kronborg, the renowned soprano; on a more important level, it tells of Thea's liberation from a modern sense of linear time and into an older, cyclic one. The story opens in Moonstone, Colorado, then moves to Chicago as Thea struggles to "advance" her career and to "make progress" first as a pianist and then as a singer. Only when she realizes that she has failed by such methods is she "released from the enslaving desire to get on in the world" (368-69). Freed for a different kind of experience, in Panther Canyon she moves into a womblike recess of the earth, where she discards linear time and affirms "the old time" (378), repetitive, ritualistic, and continuous. Whereas she had been "hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up," in Panther Canyon she reaches an understanding of "certain feelings . . . suggestions that were simple, insistent, and monotonous," as repetitive as the beating of Indian drums, about "a continuity of life," identified particularly with "intuitions about the women" who had lived there, voices out of the past (372, 376, 378).

From this point on, the conventional plot is secondary at best. Following her epiphany in the cliff dwellings, we are interested not in what happens to Thea in a worldly sense but in the new order she will imagine or create. By continuing to focus on Thea following her Panther Canyon experiences, however, Cather (like her later narrators Jim Burden and Niel Herbert) seemed to impose history upon her character. She came to regret her decision: "I should have disregarded conventional design and stopped where my first conception stopped, telling the latter part of the story by suggestion merely."

Instead, Cather provided further details, climaxing in Thea's performance as Sieglinde, in which she comes into her full powers (571). Thus ends the history of Thea, with her leaving the mortal world and entering "the kingdom of art" (Lincoln Journal), where she is as a divine creator. Following her transcending performance, Thea does not reappear as herself. Immediately afterward she is a veiled presence, bowing graciously but not lifting her eyes; in the Epilogue she is a memory held by her Aunt Tillie, the last Kronborg in Moonstone. More important, Thea's influence is felt through the stories told about her and the imagery associated with her—particularly that of the moon, which is strongly linked to Thea throughout and dominates the ending: as the moon every night causes the tides that make a lagoon habitable and wholesome, "so, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams" (581).

Endings in O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark are typical of Cather's fiction in that they include strong rhetorical markers identifying them as endings. Final sections are set off, sometimes labeled as epilogues; sentence structure is highly rhythmic; point of view draws back and the narrator becomes reflective, commenting on preceding action, predicting the future, and generalizing about meaning. More often than not, however, Cather turned around those traditional forms to suggest alternatives to the very conventions they represent. My Ántonia, for example, includes strong formal markers of closure, yet its final effect is to produce questions about the authenticity of the preceding fiction. Cather created as her narrator a young male romantic who would make Ántonia his heroine; then Cather gave Ántonia the strength to defy his romance plot for her: she bears a child out of wedlock, marries a man without position or money, and most defiantly, grows old. When he is middle-aged, Jim Burden returns to Ántonia, in doing so rediscovering the first road upon which he and she had ridden from Black Hawk, symbolic of his reentry into his own childhood. As the novel draws to a close, Jim has "the sense of coming home to [himself], and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is" (371-72). When he must leave, he does so reassured that he will return again to Ántonia, her children, and, by implication, his memory of his own childhood.

Gender is once more a dominant factor as Cather further challenges linear ways of ordering experience and affirms another order, one residing "at the very bottom of . . . memory" (322). As a prominent lawyer for a railway that helped tame the West, Jim Burden is another of Cather's male characters who have followed to the end conventions for success, only to deem them inadequate. In returning to Ántonia, Jim affirms a more primitive way of knowing, one that works by "immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true" (353). Eschewing a story line for a series of "pictures," Jim has written of Ántonia by the knowledge gained from returning to her. "Here's my story," he says in the introduction. "I suppose it hasn't any form" (n.p.).

The effect of the ending is to throw us back to the novel's beginnings, where Cather introduces herself (any other interpretation of the "I" here would be ingenuous, for the author provides identifying details clearly intended as autobiographical) and tells the history of the manuscript: on a train passing through the Midwest she had met her fictional character Jim Burden; together they recalled their childhood, then agreed that each would write an account of it. In the first version of the introduction, the character Jim gave to his creator his manuscript, saying, "Here's my story, now where's yours?" And she, admitting that her own "was never written," identifies the account that follows as Jim's. Thus, in My Ántonia Cather establishes a complete fictional world, its ending one of resolution and stability; then, by reminding us that it is fiction, questions the experience it offers.

Alexander's Bridge, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia challenge American notions of success; One of Ours challenges those governing happiness. Claude Wheeler's story is of a "search for something splendid" (178-79) in a modern world of rising materialism governed by gender convention. His narrative traces his performance of tasks culturally mandated for a man: to subdue the land, marry a pious woman, and fight for his country. The action climaxes in battle as Claude dies protecting a bit of French land in a war he only dimly understands.

In his attempt to make sense out of experience, Claude lives by a script that reflects modern American values, yet his heart's desire is to follow the old laws of romance. As in Alexander's Bridge, the real battle is an internal one, between warring aspects of Claude's nature. Again Cather writes of two selves, one private and the other public, one that seeks repose and the other that demands action. For this internal battle Cather depends upon metaphor and symbol as in poetry, particularly by identifying Claude with the sun and the moon. In the opening scene Claude appears against a rising sun, the first of many such scenes linking him to heroic imagery. But while others identify Claude with noble action, he believes himself one of the "children of the moon," whose imprisoned spirits languish in darkness (179).

Sun and moon imagery, suggesting the warring aspects of Claude (reality and ideal, male and female), come together in the final scene. For her conclusion Cather embedded scene within scene, placing each against a setting sun symbolic of the beckoning frontier, American men, and Claude Wheeler. Again, however, she subverted gender conventions, for in an ironic reversal of the usual American westering movement, she closed with a homecoming. The transport carrying troop survivors steams slowly up the narrows with the tide; and on "the banks of Lovely creek, where it began, Claude Wheeler's story still goes on," because for the "two old women who work together in the farmhouse, the thought of him is always there, beyond everything else, at the farthest edge of consciousness, like the evening sun on the horizon. . . . As they are working at the table or bending over the oven, something reminds them of him, and they think of him together, like one person: Mahailey will pat her back and say, 'Never you mind, Mudder; you'll see your boy up yonder.' Mrs. Wheeler always feels that God is near,—but Mahailey is not troubled by any knowledge of interstellar spaces, and for her He is nearer still,—directly overhead, not so very far above the kitchen stove" (389, 390-91).

This, the most sentimental of Cather's endings, depicts Claude's reentry into an intensely domestic world of warmth and feeling. It works by a delicately rendered deification, suggested by the capitalized pronoun "He" and its dual antecedent, God and Claude. Metaphor again provides resolution. Evening sun or morning star—it no longer matters, for with death a peace has come to the warring parts of Claude's nature. Claude has died for the idea of a life of action lived by an ideal, the energy of the sun guided by the pure truth of the moon.

The pattern is consistent through Cather's canon. Though her conclusions generally include some afterhistory of the central characters, they seem little more than asides. Readers often discount Alexandra Bergson's marriage to Carl Linstrum and overlook Thea Kronborg's marriage to Fred Ottenburg, so unimportant does Cather make the marriages that traditionally reward successful women. Instead, endings offer symbols and, through them, meaning of another order. Though there are painful contradictions in Thea's life (she is a great artist yet no longer has a personal life), we find comfort in the concluding symbolism of the moon; similarly, while the narrative takes Claude's life to irreconcilable alternatives (he can die in futile action or return to inevitable disillusionment), we find comfort in the imagery of an evening star.

A Lost Lady is Cather's most controlled example of these two independent but related principles of form, one historical and the other symbolic. The novel has a plot in time. The young Maria marries an older and successful man, moves with him to Sweet Water, Colorado, and there suffers the effects of time: he lose his fortune and dies; then she falls prey to grasping materialism. Again Cather identifies gender with ways of knowing: Niel Herbert, attempting to explain Marian Forrester through his experience of her, is identified with the historical, timebound narrative; Marian Forrester, who eludes such definition, is identified with symbolic meaning. The novel works by a dialectic, as Niel attempts to resolve ever widening discrepancies in his subject, until he breaks off his experience with her. The conclusion of the narrative proper emphasizes that that experience is over: "in the end" Niel leaves the Forrester place "for the last time," and the narrator confirms that "it was even so" (169, 170).

In a coda Cather reinforces the narrative break. Years later Niel learns that Mrs. Forrester remarried, moved to South America, and died. It is only when he realizes that she is beyond his knowledge or comprehension (the phrase Cather uses is "out of his ken") that he can abandon attempts to get at her secret and to resolve her differences; instead, he accepts that her meaning is unresolvable and settles for identifying his feeling about her: he is grateful that "she had a hand in breaking him in to life" (171). There is none of the universality of Jim Burden's conclusions about Ántonia, yet the effect is similar in that Cather again subverts her narrator's story, invalidating his way of ordering experience.

In The Professor's House and My Mortal Enemy, Cather subverted convention by beginning beyond the ending, then setting her characters on quests for alternatives to the scripts that had been imposed upon them. At the outset Godfrey St. Peter has achieved public success with his life's work, and Myra Driscoll Henshawe has married for love; each embarks upon a quest for alternatives beyond that ending. Having completed his multivolume history of the Spanish adventurers, Godfrey St. Peter seeks an alternative way of ordering experience: he disengages from clock time to do "very little" (262), reminiscing about the past and giving himself up to reverie.

The Professor's House is Cather's most radical search beyond the end, for she takes her character through death and past his own mortality, to reflect upon his life from beyond the grave. For St. Peter's death, Cather constructs a highly symbolic scene: alone at the top of a deserted house, he is out of humanized space; and at midnight, he is out of time. Lying upon his hard box-couch, St. Peter positions himself as if in a coffin; wrapping himself with a blanket from a prehistoric people, he prepares to receive the most ancient truths. When the wind blows out the flame in his gas heater, St. Peter falls unconscious, as close to death as a man can be and still return. The novel ends with his reflection as he rests with the sewing woman who has rescued him. Again, gender interpretation is intriguing. St. Peter withdraws into his study as if into a womb; the retreat enables him to cast off the public, competitive sensibility Cather identified with male experience and to return to the instinctual truths she identified with female sensibility. When with the midwife Augusta he is "reborn," he has discarded the old certainties and affirmed his own feeling.

Riddles become enigmas in My Mortal Enemy with the repetition of Myra Driscoll Henshawe's "strange complaint . . . 'Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy!'" (95, 105). Long before Adrienne Rich wrote about the cultural "book of myths" that defines women's stories (DuPlessis 131), Cather used a riddle to challenge these myths and to separate the love and quest plots traditionally joined for women. Appropriately for a successful quest plot, the story ends with boxes, which contain the secret or answer that Myra has reached. Her ashes are "sealed up in a little steel box," then scattered by Oswald somewhere on his voyage to Alaska; her amethysts are bequeathed to Nellie, but when Nellie takes "them out of their box and wear[s] them," she feels a chill over her heart (102, 104). The sense of mystery remains. It is as if Myra's complaint, breathed "into the stillness of the night," has joined the winds of nature, so that it questions beginnings from beyond the End: "Sometimes, when I have watched the bright beginning of a love story, when I have seen a common feeling exalted into beauty by imagination, generosity, and the flaming courage of youth, I have heard again that strange complaint breathed by a dying woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul: 'Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy"' (104-05). By refusing to make concords, Cather thwarts her readers' yearning for comfort. Remember Myra Henshawe as a young woman, her husband charges Nellie, not as she became; yet Nellie refuses his conventional story and tells instead a defiant tale of ways in which romantic love corrupts. Thus My Mortal Enemy evokes the profoundly troubling question: what if the ending reveals that it was all a mistake?

In Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, Cather followed the manner of legend to write of worlds without beginnings or endings. Their settings move these novels out of historical time: the desert of the American Southwest and the rock of Quebec are primordial forms to which a culture has been transported. Bishop Latour travels to a mesa on which there is the sense of "incompleteness, as if with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau." Here, before the beginning, materials are "still waiting to be made into a landscape" (Archbishop 95). Such settings support Cather's radical denial of the reality of things and her embrace of the old laws of legend. Her endings were simultaneous with her beginnings: in dying, Father Latour "was living over his life," and "how often and how fondly he recalled the beginning of it" (183). In both novels, too, Cather gives the stability and repetition of ritual a female dimension: Death Comes for the Archbishop is infused with Mariology, and Shadows on the Rock with domesticity.

Critics have long considered Cather an apolitical writer, and certainly she did not write to effect specific social change. She was intensely concerned with the ways in which ideologies are codified, however: a dominant culture attempts to mold the values of its time; a subordinate culture attempts to subvert that power and assert its own. In this broad sense Cather was political throughout her writing and especially in her last two novels, Lucy Gayheart and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In both, she considered the ways in which treatments of time can corrupt.

Previously, Cather had incorporated dominant ideologies into her traditional love plots, then subverted those plots by creating female characters who wrote their own scripts in defiance of the expectations imposed upon them: Alexandra turns aside her brothers' ideas of what is appropriate for her; Ántonia Shimerda and Lena Lingard are amused but otherwise unaffected by the romantic script Jim Burden would impose upon them; Marian Forrester rejects the funeral pyre upon which Niel Herbert would have her immolate herself. Cather removed heterosexual romance from the privileged position it had occupied in nineteenth-century fiction: she made it a secondary and tragic plot in the Marie-Emil action of O Pioneers! and explored its corrupting consequences in My Mortal Enemy. Most often, she simply concentrated upon more important matters: Alexandra's relationship to the land, Ántonia's with her children, and Thea's with music. When in her final two novels Cather did return heterosexual romance to the center of her narrative action, she used a Gothic mode to expose its potential to corrupt.

Gothicism is, as Ellen Moers and others have demonstrated, the cultural trope for cultural experiences of secondary status, most often the powerlessness of women in a world controlled by men. In Lucy Gayheart and Sapphira and the Slave Girl Cather came full circle, writing devastating critiques of the cultural myths central to women's economic, social, and political lives: in one book, a critique of salvation through courtship and coupling; in the other, of salvation through motherly love.

In both novels Cather wrote of continuity disrupted, of daughters without mothers, on the brink of adulthood and adrift in a world of silenced women: Lucy's mother is dead; Nancy's biological mother, Till, will not defend her against ruin, and her surrogate mother, Sapphira, is plotting her rape. Together, the novels are dark versions of romantic love conventions: Lucy Gayheart tells of a girl whose only access to an adult world as she grows up is through men: as accompanist to the artist Clement Sebastian (and even then, she may accompany him only in rehearsal, to be replaced by a man in performance), or as wife to the town banker, Harry Gordon. Sapphira and the Slave Girl tells of Sapphira's plot to "entice" her nephew with Nancy, a nightmarish perversion of motherly efforts to secure a man for her daughter.

As so often in her writing, Cather used the endings of these novels to remind her reader of culturally mandated conventions. Lucy Gayheart ends with Harry Gordon's memory of the young Lucy before she entered womanhood, the very ideal of feminine charm; Sapphira ends with Till's memory of Sapphira in her final days, a loving mistress of the household and the very model of maternal compassion. By their conventionality, these endings would erase the fictions that preceded them. That of Lucy Gayheart would obliterate the character we met, not a thirteen-year-old girl at all but a young woman vibrant with desire for adult experience; that of Sapphira would ignore the evil of which this apparently loving mother was capable. In each, the traditional elements of strong endings evoke an immediate sense of satisfaction. Yet each evokes also an aftereffect with the realization that dark questions remain unresolved.

Both novels also explore the end of time. In Lucy Gayheart Cather concludes with the funeral of Mr. Gayheart, the town watchmaker and the last of the Gayheart line; with him the old time will stop. In Sapphira, where old time has stopped, Cather pursues her plot beyond the end of a social order. Together, these books pose the most radical of questions, not about a certain time but about Time itself, and not about a social order but about Order. With the threat of oblivion hanging heavy in both, Cather asks what happens to people if order and time are revealed as fiction, a plot arbitrarily imposed upon experience?

I have long found the ending of Sapphira and the Slave Girl the most puzzling in Cather's oeuvre. It consists of three parts: first, there is the conclusion to the narrative of the slave girl, Nancy, effected when Rachel breaks the suspended world created by Sapphira and guides Nancy to the underground railroad and to freedom (and thus out of the narrative). Second, there is "Nancy's Return," which initially resembles a conventional epilogue, providing the afterhistory of major characters and tying up loose ends. Twenty-five years have passed, and Nancy returns "to a different world," a post-Civil War world (277). She and her mother, Aunt Till, are reunited, and we learn of her life in Canada—that she is an elegant middle-aged woman who carries pictures of her husband and three children. But here Cather introduces as narrator a five-year-old child, writing as "I" and telling of witnessing the reunion between the characters.

Fiction or fact? Cather blurs the distinction, blurs it further by concluding with "The End," then adds on the same page the third part: a note signed "Willa Cather" that reflects upon the story just told. She admits that she called several characters by actual Frederick County surnames, but disavows any intentional use of the name of any person she knew or saw in Virginia. Puzzling? Only if we insist upon separating fiction from reality, history from imagination. Thus things ordinarily kept apart merge: the past moves into the present; fiction blends with fact; the ending is not an ending. Thus too Willa Cather does in her own person what she had made her most famous narrators do years earlier, when in My Ántonia and A Lost Lady Jim Burden and Niel Herbert "ended" by making their stories personal, each reflecting upon the effect of that story upon him. In doing so herself, she reminds us of continuities, the writer directly addressing her reader and inviting that reader to take his or her place in the ritual of storytelling.

Willa Cather never could reconcile herself to the fact that she was a public figure of considerable interest. As the author of a dozen novels, some of which had won her both fame and fortune, she might have realized that her admiring public would want to know how she had managed to become one of the great writers of her day. But she resented it when she found she could not sit on a bench in Central Park without people recognizing her and wanting to talk to her. Her intense dislike of publicity and her passionate desire to remain a private person have combined to frustrate her would-be biographers.

Most newsworthy individuals rather enjoy having their egos massaged by reporters, interviewers, autograph seekers, and fans, and writers usually are no exception. The literary remains of countless authors end up in institutional libraries, and one thinks of the enormous collections of papers of Mark Twain at Berkeley, Thomas Wolfe at Harvard, Ernest Hemingway at the Kennedy Library in Boston, Theodore Dreiser at Pennsylvania, and so forth. Writers cannot avoid leaving a paper trail that anyone can follow. They write hundreds of letters to friends, strangers, enemies, and critics—all this in addition to their published works, which in themselves are often very revealing.

Therefore, it is impossible for a writer to prevent posterity from finding out whether he or she liked rare roast beef or preferred pinochle to bridge. It was futile for T. S. Eliot to write in his will that his heirs should not help anyone wanting to write his biography, and even though Henry James tried to cover his tracks, Leon Edel managed to turn up thousands of letters and write a five-volume biography. Cather did not try to prohibit the writing of her life through testamentary restrictions, but she saw to it that her literary remains were exceedingly meager. There are very few manuscripts extant; she did not save letters from her correspondents; and she and her friend Edith Lewis destroyed as many of her own letters as they could retrieve. Lewis also burned the manuscript of Cather's unfinished novel after her death, and to throw up another roadblock, Cather's will forbids the publication of any of her letters that manage to survive. The practice of destroying letters continued after Cather died, for Lewis bought letters that came on to the market and burned them. Happily for Cather's biographers, many of her friends and correspondents survived her and with a proper eye to the needs of posterity kept their letters, some 1,500 of which now repose in libraries from Maine to California.

Cather's attitude toward being the subject of a biography was formed early, before she became a world-class author. In 1921, when she was still giving interviews readily and accepting speaking engagements, she wrote an old friend who wanted to do biographical piece on her. She said she perfectly hated biography—particularly her own—and if her correspondent were not an school friend, she would turn him down cold. No biographical sketch, she believed, was ever thought interesting unless it exaggerated the subject on one side and made him a freak; it was only as a freak that he was interesting. The external "queernesses" of an individual, she added, are so seldom his or her reality; often they are utterly uncharacteristic of the person, a mask to hide the reality. This dislike of biography, however, really applied only to Cather herself. She was an avid reader of biography, and often her letters recommended to friends biographies she had particularly enjoyed.

Cather was no different from the rest of us in this respect. People are interested in people, and novelists in particular want to know about people. The genre has been popular at least Plutarch's Lives, and publishers love to publish biographies. The reasons are simple enough: if one knows a little about a public figure, he wants to know more. Did Benjamin Franklin really' father illegitimate children? Was Lincoln's wife really a shrew? Did Oscar Wilde really die of syphilis? Or people read biography as a way of learning about history. History that is all impersonal—the movement of large-scale events, the clash of economic forces—is dry as dust, but people make history, and that is interesting. As Emerson said, an institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Writers should realize that their lives are part of the continuum that makes up our cultural history and bow to the inevitability of having their biographies written.

Making the materials for a biography accessible seems to me the best way an author can assure the writing of an objective life. Of course, there always will be mean-spirited biographers who will twist and distort the facts, writing what Joyce Carol Oates recently called "pathography." Cather's zealous efforts to destroy letters has led some of her critics to believe that she had something to hide—her lesbianism, for instance—but there is nothing damaging in any of her extant letters. She destroyed letters simply because she did not want anything published that she had not prepared for print. I don't think it ever occurred to her that forty years after her death hundreds of her letters would be owned and catalogued by libraries and made available to interested scholars, who would be able to paraphrase, if not quote.

My interest in Cather began more than twenty years ago when I was asked to contribute a short critical biography to a new series designed to honor authors the editor thought had been neglected. Although Cather had been dead only twenty-one years, even then I did not have to start at ground zero. There already had been a biography, and a handful of scholars had been at work interviewing her friends and contemporaries, identifying and collecting her fugitive writings from her years as a journalist in Lincoln and Pittsburgh, identifying stories and articles written under half a dozen pseudonyms, and gathering letters. Mildred Bennett's indispensable study of Cather's Nebraska milieu, The World of Willa Cather, had been published; Bernice Slote's collection of Cather's first principles and critical statements had appeared as The Kingdom of Art; William Curtin's two volumes of Cather's journalism, The World and the Parish, was in typescript, and the University of Nebraska Press had brought out all of Cather's stories published up to 1912. There was still plenty left for me to dig out of the newspaper and magazine files, and in Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (1970) I added my bit to the growing documentation of her life. However, I still felt somewhat as Sir Isaac Newton did when he wrote his rival scientist Robert Hooke in 1675: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

The chance to be the first biographer of a great writer does not come to very many people. I envy E. K. Brown, who had this privilege for Cather, but one cannot write a definitive biography too close to his subject with relatives and close friends looking over his shoulder. Brown worked under such constraints as the authorized biographer. He got his commission, soon after Cather died, from Edith Lewis, who had been her friend and companion for nearly forty years and was the heir to much of her estate. Brown fell into the assignment after writing an essay on Cather for the Yale Review in 1946. She liked it so much that site wrote him about it, a very uncharacteristic act, and a brief correspondence ensued before she died the following year. Usually she gave short shrift to professors she did not know, regarding them as general nuisances. I remember one nasty letter she wrote a professor who had innocently written her asking questions about her writing practices. She told him he was the twenty-ninth professor who was writing a textbook and had asked the same questions. She wasn't going to answer any more queries. Besides, she did not think creative writing could be taught anyway.

After Brown was asked to write the official biography, Edith Lewis wrote a memoir to help him with biographical data. But she was the self-appointed guardian of Cather's fame, and anything that did not redound to her friend's glory she suppressed. Working with Lewis required Brown to accept her view of things. He also could not quote from any letters because of the prohibition written into Cather's will. So Brown threaded his way across the landscape with keep-off-the-grass signs besetting him at every turn. He died before quite completing the book, but his friend Leon Edel applied the finishing touches.

That Brown wrote as good a biography as he did is testimony to his skill as a writer and his talent for biographical research. His book has long been out of date regarding biographical facts, but as criticism it stands up very well. It was a distinguished book, as the reviewers recognized when Alfred Knopf published it in 1953. Brown was faulted only for the meagerness of the biographical detail and to some extent for having to rely too heavily on Edith Lewis, but, of course, he had no alternative. Knopf was quite wrong when he wrote on the dust cover that here was all the biographical information about Cather that anyone was ever likely to uncover.

At the time Brown wrote, there were only a few letters available, and he was only dimly aware of the vast amount of apprenticeship work and journalism that remained to be exhumed from the files of newspapers and magazines. From her junior year in college (1893) until she became a high school teacher in Pittsburgh (1900), Cather wrote incessantly for newspapers in Nebraska and Pennsylvania and for magazines everywhere. If it had been possible, she would have burned all her journalism and her early stories, just as she did her letters. She wanted her apprenticeship forgotten. When Edward Wagenknecht got interested in Cather's early fiction and wrote her about some of the stories he had located in old periodicals, she responded angrily. She told him very emphatically that he could republish none of this early work. She had taken the trouble to renew copyrights in order to prevent republication. She used the analogy of an apple-grower to make her point: if she had boxed for shipment to market all the good apples from her orchard and left the bad ones on the ground, it would be a very unfriendly act for someone to come along at night and pack up the bad apples with the sound ones.

As I have already suggested, Cather's efforts to frustrate her biographers came to naught. When I began working on Cather in 1967, about one thousand of her letters had found their way into libraries, and most of her fugitive writings had been recovered and republished. I still could not quote the letters, as her literary executors were adamant about following her will in that respect, but the information the letters contained was public property.

In the biography I published in 1987 I had the unusual opportunity of being able to write Cather's biography for the second time. I thought I had finished with her in 1970, but as her reputation continued to grow, I kept being invited to take part in Cather seminars, Cather symposia, Cather celebrations, and Cather editions, and my interest kept pace with the general interest. When my friend Bernice Slote, whom I had always expected to write the definitive biography, died in 1983, I decided to give it a try myself. By this time 50 percent more letters had gotten into institutional collections; a good many autobiographies and memoirs in which Cather appears had been published; and an astonishing number of her interviews, speeches, and public statements had surfaced. For a writer who had the reputation of being a very private person and relatively inaccessible, she had left a well-blazed trail. Actually it was only during the last fifteen years of her life that she really withdrew into a cocoon and was hard to reach. Thus it was time for someone to write a full-length biography. I did not manage to fill two volumes, as recent biographers of Faulkner and Emily Dickinson have done, but my book runs to six hundred pages and contains more information than previous biographies—perhaps more than a lot of people want to know about Cather. Also I have been able to correct a lot of errors, including a good many that appeared in my own earlier book.

The further one moves away in time from the subject of a biography, the easier it is to correct the errors. Cather, along with her efforts to preserve her privacy and avoid publicity, did a rather good job of managing her image. She began this early in her career when she prepared a biographical sketch of herself for Houghton Mifflin in 1915. By writing in the third person, she disguised her own part in the account. This brief biography was used by Houghton Mifflin for advertising purposes and later was reissued by Alfred Knopf. It presented the picture of Cather as a child in Webster County, Nebraska, running wild across the prairie on her pony, visiting immigrant farm women in their kitchens, and acquiring the impressions that she later turned into memorable fiction. She claimed that she rode about the country all day and at night read the classics in her grandfather's farmhouse. She also said she did not go to school. Well, it just wasn't so. She attended a rural school, as did other children from nearby farms, and there are records to prove it. The account in My Ántonia of Jim Burden's schooldays in the one-room schoolhouse when he first goes to live with his grandparents is no doubt a more accurate report of Cather's experience than her own biographical sketch. In the novel, however, she turned a frame schoolhouse into a dugout in order to put the story back into pioneering times. Cather actually arrived in Nebraska after the pioneering era in Webster County had ended and after the pioneers had abandoned their dugouts for wooden houses.

It is a risky business to infer biographical fact from fiction, but I have taken the risk in a good many instances. Cather, to an unusual degree among authors, turned her own experiences into fiction, and her biographer is constantly having to decide what in the fiction is based on fact and what is invention. Fortunately, there is enough documentation by now from external sources to permit many of the discriminations to be made accurately. One cannot rely, however, on Cather's own public statements to verify biographical fact. She treated her life as though it were fiction, and her interviews are peppered with inaccurate details and blatant misstatements. Because she had total recall, these lapses cannot be charged to a faulty memory. She chose to forget things she didn't want to remember, or she remembered the version of facts she preferred. Let me give some examples. In her later years she claimed that she really did not use the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad as the model for her heroine in The Song of the Lark, though many letters survive making it clear that she did. She also convinced herself that when My Ántonia was published, there were only two favorable reviews. Actually, almost all of the many notices were very flattering. On one occasion she told a Denver reporter that she had been educated in Omaha, though she had graduated from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. After her brother Roscoe died, she wrote her friend Elizabeth Sergeant that he had come to see her in New York many times. The fact is he visited her only once. She told H. L. Mencken that the first draft of O Pioneers! was written before her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, a statement that is contradicted by surviving letters of 1912. Then there is the matter of her birth date, which she changed, during her years as managing editor of McClure's Magazine, from 1873 to 1876. There is a birth certificate at Richmond, Virginia, to set this matter straight, but to perpetuate the confusion, her friend and companion Edith Lewis had Cather's preferred birth date carved on her tombstone at Jaffrey, New Hampshire. These are only a few of the misstatements to be corrected.

Two more examples will illustrate the difficulty of sorting out the truth from the falsity. In the first instance I have rejected an amusing story because I just don't think it's true; in the other I have accepted Cather's statement, though it may be another fabrication. The first concerns an item that appeared in the Nebraska State Journal in January 1912, when Cather's first novel was about to be published serially in McClure's. This item, which must have come from Cather herself, reported that in order to test the real quality of her work she had sent the manuscript of her novel to the magazine from St. Louis under the pseudonym of Fanny Cadwallader. It was only after the magazine had accepted the novel, so the story goes, that she admitted being the author. Other biographers have accepted this yarn, but I did not use it. It sounded to me like another bit of Cather's fiction, and I found no other reference to this tale anywhere. As managing editor of McClure's, Cather never had any hesitation in placing her own stories in the magazine. Besides, she had been buying fiction for years and knew what was publishable and what was not. And I find it hard to believe that her close associates on the magazine, S. S. McClure himself and Viola Roseboro', the fiction editor, would not have known that she was writing a novel. Her supposed diffidence at this point strikes me as phony.

The story that I accepted appears in the letter she wrote Professor Wagenknecht when he asked her about her early stories. She told him that "On the Divide," a story about a Scandinavian farmer, had been written for a college course and that her professor had touched it up and sent it off to the Overland Monthly. She said the professor had made her stolid immigrant farmer a woodcarver who had decorated the windowsills of his shanty with fantastic images. She said she had been amazed at this addition to her tale. Well, I think Cather here probably was telling it as it was. The very specificity of the detail—supplied gratuitously forty-two years after the fact—makes it sound authentic. But who knows?

Writing a biography is something like working a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle where the definitions are deliberately misleading. For years Cather misled everyone who asked her about her part in the publication of Georgine Milmine's Life of Mary G. Baker Eddy. Cather's first assignment when she went to work for McClure's in 1906 was to work on the manuscript of this book. S. S. McClure had bought the manuscript, but the writing was impossible. Cather always told people that all she had done was edit the manuscript, but there came a time in the 1920s when she apparently decided that someone ought to know the truth. So she wrote Edwin Anderson, librarian of the New York Public Library, whom she had known when he was librarian of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and after swearing him to secrecy, told him the truth: she had completely written the book except for the first installment. The letter making this disclosure turned up in the New York Public Library archives only recently, and now we need to add another book to the canon of Cather's works.

The most interesting example to me of Cather's fictionalizing her life is her account of how she left Houghton Mifflin for Alfred Knopf in 1921. When the firm of Alfred Knopf celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1940, Cather wrote a reminiscence of her relationship with her publisher. She said that she never had met Knopf but had become interested in the books he was publishing. He was young, energetic, imaginative, and his books, then as later, were aesthetic objects to please any book lover. Cather took the subway uptown one day, she said, to ask him to be her publisher. He was surprised to see her, but they had a friendly talk during which he told her that changing publishers was a very serious business. She should go home and think about it carefully. She said she did this and it was not until the next time they met that Knopf agreed to take her on.

The facts of Cather's switch to Knopf are quite different, as the files of her correspondence with Houghton Mifflin (now in the Houghton Library at Harvard) demonstrate. Knopf actually had been wooing her for a couple of years, as had other publishers who were beginning to see her as a valuable literary property for the future. Cather was dissatisfied with Houghton Mifflin, which was an old firm with a long list of prominent authors. She thought they never advertised her books very much, and she was seldom pleased with their typography and bindings. Since they did not make much money on her, she said, they took pains not to lose very much either. Knopf, on the other hand, had been reading her books since they started coming out, and he went after her. Besides offering her advances—which she did not get from Houghton Mifflin—he outlined the ways he would promote her work. Then he offered to reprint her first collection of stories, which long had been out of print. Houghton Mifflin had told her they were not interested in reprinting the book.

The switch to Knopf was a very fortunate one for Cather, because Knopf became her close friend, made her rich, never suggested any changes in her books, and allowed her to pick her own typeface and to write advertising and jacket copy if she wished. But if Knopf had not pursued her vigorously, she never would have left Houghton Mifflin, where her old friend Ferris Greenslet was her editor. She was by nature a person who hated to make changes in her life.

Besides correcting the facts of Cather's life that she changes distorted herself, I have had to check constantly the accuracy of Edith Lewis's facts. Where Lewis is wrong on small details such as dates or chronology, these can usually be checked from extant letters. When she quotes from letters that she destroyed, one can only hope that she transcribed accurately. What she suppressed we will never know, but occasionally she can be caught in an outright falsification. One example turned up a few years ago in a study of Cather's relationship with Stephen Tennant, the youngest son of an English lord. Cather developed a close friendship with this young aristocrat, which began, according to Lewis, when Tennant wrote Cather a fan letter. Cather is supposed to have replied graciously, thus beginning a friendship that lasted the rest of her life.

It did not happen that way at all. Tennant wrote a mutual friend praising Cather's work; the friend passed the letter on to Cather, who then initiated the correspondence. Lewis must have thought it unbecoming for Cather, who already was a famous writer, to open a correspondence with someone less than half her age. So she changed the facts. This isn't a matter of great importance, but Cather's fascination with a young British aristocrat is particularly interesting because it points up a facet of Cather's character that earlier biographers missed. Cather had a great desire to be a Virginia lady like her mother and as a result had very elitist tastes She never lived ostentatiously, but one of the several dichotomies of her life was her ability to love and write glowingly about the immigrants in Nebraska and at the same time to live elegantly the life of a New York sophisticate with aristocratic tastes and little interest in the masses.

One of the great opportunities in having a second chance to write Cather's biography was the chance to revise critical opinions. During the past twenty years there have been many good critical articles and several good books on Cather. I have learned from my peers and I hope grown wiser over the years. Some of Cather's novels that I previously dismissed I have come to admire. Shadows on the Rock, for example, while lacking in energy, is really a splendid piece of literary impressionism, but one has to take it on Cather's terms. She said at the time it came out that some of her friends hated the book: it was as if they had ordered a highball and she had given them chicken broth. Lucy Gayheart, if one reads it as a Gothic romance, becomes a rich, interesting, and successful story.

My greatest change of mind came in rereading Cather's World War I novel, One of Ours. Many contemporary reviewers panned it in 1922 and seemed incensed that a woman had had the temerity to write a war story. Hemingway accused Cather of getting her war experiences from watching Birth of a Nation. It never occurred to reviewers that neither Tolstoy nor Stephen Crane had had any firsthand experience with the wars they wrote about. One of Ours actually has a lot going for it. It presents a broad panorama of war with a large cast of characters, male and female. It deals with the war's effects in Nebraska before the United States entered the conflict, the later persecution of German-Americans, life on the home front, and civilian life in France behind the lines—all done with Cather's usual skill in creating character and evoking place. Front-line action, which she admittedly could not handle well, is kept very brief, and throughout there is wonderful satire and irony that the reviewers missed completely. One of Ours may go on being read after many other World War I novels are forgotten.

A significant part of recent Cather studies is feminist criticism. This growing area of investigation now has produced a sizable body of work, much of it provocative and illuminating to a male of my generation. When I began teaching shortly after World War II, there were few women role models in the academies, and women writers were largely ignored in the male-edited anthologies we taught from. I am glad this is no longer the case. I have learned a lot from feminist critics, who have forced me, not unwillingly, to consider gender in reading Cather, and some of their readings have informed my biography. Feminist criticism ranges widely, however, and I take a conservative stance. I began my career as an eighteenth-century scholar, and I'm probably still guided by that spokesman for reasonableness, Alexander Pope: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Which brings me to my final point. New critical perspectives will alter future biographies of Cather, just as new facts will fill in the gaps that still exist in the life records. Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987) has been called by generous reviewers the definitive life, but no biography can ever be definitive, and there are sure to be others. As soon as my book appeared, two more caches of Cather correspondence turned up, among them letters Cather wrote in high school. These are now the earliest known letters extant. Others fill in important gaps in Cather's correspondence with Dorothy Canfield Fisher and explain an estrangement between the two women that I was only able to guess at (see the essay by Mark Madigan in this volume). I certainly could have used these letters with profit, and who knows what will turn up tomorrow? The last word is never said.

The friendship of Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher began in their parish, as Cather called her home territory of Nebraska, and spanned nearly the entire lifetimes of both women as they struggled and triumphed in the world. The special regard in which they held each other is drawing increased attention from Cather biographers. For example, Fisher is a prominent figure in James Woodress's expanded Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987)—and for good reason: their friendship is the only one that encompasses Cather's literary career from beginning to end. The parish was especially important to Cather, for she drew deeply from her wellspring of Nebraska material in writing of the world. The Fisher friendship, in its length and resiliency, illustrates the importance of that connection, especially during a crucial period in Cather's career: while she was writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours.

The story of this friendship is chronicled in the 104 letters (all but five written by Cather to Fisher), spanning the years 1899 to 1947, that constitute the Cather file of the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Papers at the University of Vermont's Bailey-Howe Library. Included in this collection are twenty-five letters (twenty by Cather, three by Fisher, one by Cather's mother, and one by Cather's friend Isabelle McClung) that had remained unread by anyone save the correspondents themselves until July 1987, when they were found in a barn on the Fisher homestead in Arlington, Vermont. Along with assorted manuscripts and related material, they had been inadvertently left behind when the Fisher papers were bequeathed to the university in 1958. These letters, like all of Cather's, may be neither published nor directly quoted, as specified by provisions in the author's will. Cather drew up these restrictions to protect her privacy and professional reputation; for the same reason she destroyed nearly all the letters she received. Her desire for privacy "complicated her biographer's task," James Woodress wrote in 1970 (xii); she "threw up roadblocks," he explained again in 1987 (xiv); and she "did not make it easy for her biographers," Sharon O'Brien commented that same year (3). But the half of the correspondence that Fisher saved does tell a great deal about the lives of the two authors and how they interconnected. What can be seen in clear detail is the friendship between two spirited women, a friendship that was betrayed, lost, and finally recovered by dint of sacrifice and persistence.

Cather and Fisher were first drawn to each other by mutual interests in French literature, painting, and music. Their friendship began in 1891 when Dorothy's father, James H. Canfield, became chancellor of the University of Nebraska, where Cather was a student. Cather was then publishing stories and reviews in local and campus papers; Fisher was her younger admirer and protégée. Fisher felt most honored at the time to collaborate with Cather on a short story, "The Fear That Walks by Noonday," which appeared in the university's literary magazine. Soon after Cather's death in 1947, Fisher remarked upon the regard in which she had held her older friend: "Later on, of course, as we both grew into the twenties and the thirties, this difference in years [six] dwindled to nothing at all, as differences do to adults, so far as any barrier to our close comradeship went. But my lifelong admiring affection for Willa was, at first, tinctured with the respectful deference due from a younger person to a successful member of the older generation" (Fisher, "Novelist" 42).

Cather and Fisher stayed in touch after leaving Nebraska, as they would for most of their lives. Yet long gaps in the correspondence from 1905 to 1921 remained a mystery to Cather and Fisher scholars and occasioned a good deal of conjecture; it is only now, with information from the newly found Cather-Fisher letters, that the rift may be understood. As might be expected, the reasons for it were multiple and complex, and may be best explained through discussion and paraphrase of the letters themselves.

In late summer 1905, Willa Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher's mother, Flavia Canfield, who—along with Dorothy—had refused to meet with Cather in New York's Washington Square Park one week earlier. Cather indicated that she understood why the Canfields were upset but said that the (unspecified) conflict had caused her pain and disappointment as well. It was so painful, in fact, that she could not bear to write about it. She added that she too would once have felt bad about anyone who had hurt Dorothy as she had, and that one year earlier she could not have imagined being in such a disturbing situation.

Although Cather wished she could forget the affair, she clearly did not; she wrote to Fisher only three times over the next sixteen years. At the time of her letter to Flavia Canfield, she was working as a schoolteacher and living at Isabelle McClung's house in Pittsburgh. She had published a volume of poetry, April Twilights, in April 1903; one month later she met S. S. McClure, who promptly agreed to publish a collection of her short stories, a book that became The Troll Garden. This was at once an exciting, promising time for Cather and a period of great frustration. She desperately wanted to devote herself to her writing but was forced to continue teaching as a means of support. Sarah Orne Jewett, for one, knew that Cather's literary life would have to take precedence over all else if she was ever to become an accomplished writer. In a December 1908 letter, written while Cather was working at McClure's Magazine, Jewett observed: "I do think that it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should. . . . you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that" (247-49).

There are indications in Cather's letters that her early labors and lack of a "quiet centre" adversely affected her friendship with Fisher, who came to represent an alluring world beyond the parish, a world to which Cather did not yet belong. Her frustrations intensified while she traveled with McClung and Fisher (who was then studying for a Ph.D. in French at the Sorbonne) during her first trip to Europe in 1907. A 1904 letter bears testimony to the fact that Cather had felt unsure of herself in Europe. She admitted that her difficulty in understanding French had madeher feel provincial compared with Fisher and that she had been too haughty to admit her own shortcoming. Perhaps most representative is the often told story of her calling on A. E. Housman. Although it was Cather who initiated the unannounced visit to her literary hero, it was only her companion Fisher who could break through his characteristic reserve: she and the poet chatted the entire time about Latin manuscripts, while Cather and McClung sat anxiously by with little to say. In what may have been the last letter Cather read before her death on April 4, 1947, Fisher—at Cather's request—recounted the details of the meeting and recalled that Cather was so upset that she broke into tears soon after leaving Housman's apartment.

In short, what had promised to be an exciting cultural pilgrimmage developed into a very trying summer for Cather. O'Brien has called the trip "a story of exclusion in which the daughter feels she is not welcome in the ancestral home" (247), and as Joseph Lovering has pointed out, Cather was already well aware of the differences in social status and cultural back-ground between herself and Fisher ("Friendship of Willa Cather" 151). A "daughter of the frontier" whose parents were of modest background, Cather felt a certain inferiority in comparison with the more cosmopolitan Fisher, whose father was a renowned educator and whose mother was a painter. Ironically, as Lovering has also written, Cather would turn to Fisher years later precisely because Fisher knew her background and therefore knew better than anyone else the long, difficult road Cather had traveled in becoming a novelist of first rank ("Cather-Canfield Friendship" 6).

In a letter of April 8, 1921, Cather urgently asked to reestablish her ties with Fisher. She admitted that the misunderstanding between them had been her own fault and the product of her youthful immaturity, but devoting more time to her writing had helped to make her more reasonable now. The repentant Cather even went so far as to say that she wrote only to please herself, Fisher, and no more than a half-dozen other friends. She had felt confused and defiant at the time of the disagreement, and the years of teaching all day and writing all night had temporarily discouraged her—in 1970 James Woodress called them "a real grind" (Life and Art 94)—but she promised Fisher that the regrettable hiatus in their friendship was over.

It is against this backdrop that the more acute point of contention between Cather and Fisher should be considered. The April 8, 1921, letter indicates that one of Cather's stories was as much to blame for the rift as were the disappointments of the European trip. The story was left unnamed, but Cather said she could see with the benefit of hindsight that it was a poor one and wished she had not made so much trouble over it years before. The recently discovered cache of Cather-Fisher letters establishes that the story in question was "The Profile" and that the controversy centered on Fisher's efforts to prevent its scheduled publication in The Troll Garden.

The dispute had its basis in the 1902 trip when Cather met Evelyn Osborne, one of Fisher's fellow graduate students studying in Paris. Fisher and Osborne had first met while working on their dissertations at the Bibliothčque Nationale and developed a close friendship during their time in France. Although only passing reference is made to Osborne—a young woman with a prominent facial scar and a taste for extravagant clothes-in Cather's letters at the time of the trip, it was she who would later stand at the very center of the disagreement over "The Profile"—significantly, the story of a young woman with a grotesque facial scar and an interest in extravagant clothes. More specifically, "The Profile" takes place in Paris, where portraitist Aaron Dunlap is commissioned to paint Virginia Gilbert, whose face bears a jagged scar on one side. Throughout their ensuing courtship the scar is never mentioned between the two, although Dunlap desperately wants to share the burden of Virginia's disfigurement. Even after their marriage and the birth of a daughter, Virginia's vanity prevents her from discussing the scar with Dunlap, which creates a gulf between the husband and wife. When Dunlap becomes attracted to Virginia's cousin Eleanor, who is their house guest, his wife leaves him. On the night of her departure, she arranges for a dressing table lamp to explode in Eleanor's face, so that she too is permanently disfigured. The story closes as Dunlap, mercifully divorced from Virginia, marries Eleanor—his second wife with a grotesque facial scar.

Fisher first expressed concern about the story in a telegram sent from Arlington to Cather in Pittsburgh a few days before Christmas 1904. Fisher said she had just heard of "The Profile" and that she would "suspend judgment" until hearing from Cather, whom she implored to reply immediately. Cather did so, claiming that the story was not really a cause for concern, since in her opinion Virginia Gilbert did not resemble Osborne except for the scar on her face. She pointed out that the protagonist was married, unlike Osborne; that Osborne's taste in clothes was not nearly so bad; and that the story focused on the character's domestic infelicities, which could not possibly be traced to Fisher's friend. Scars, Cather said, were not so uncommon that one would link the character to Osborne specifically.

Fisher next asked Cather for a copy of the story, which reached Arlington on December 30. She wrote to Cather just two days later, pleading that it not be published for fear of the damage it would do to Osborne's already delicate psyche: "I am quite sure you don't realize how exact and faithful a portrait you have drawn of her—her beautiful hair, her pretty hands, her fondness of dress and pathetic lapses of taste in wearing what other girls may, her unconsciousness—oh Willa don't do this thing. . . . I don't believe she would ever recover from the blow of your description of her affliction."

Fisher's letter was returned promptly, not by Cather but by Isabelle McClung, to whom Cather had turned for advice. The following passage gives insight to Cather's point of view and McClung's staunch support of her friend: It was Miss Osborne who gave Willa the idea, we know, Willa and I talked it all over long ago, and have both said that it is unfortunate that it is, as it is—that the scar on the face must play such a large part—but it does, it is one of Willa's best stories, and has been worked over hard, and faithfully, it represents serious work, and one must respect that—she teaches school in order to lay aside the things that she feels are not the best she can do. You know as well as I the time she has spent on these stories and what they mean to her. The trouble over—The Profile—has taken away most of the pleasure, and for a few days she was sick and in bed—because of it. . . . I think it right that the story should go—it is Willa's scar now, not yours or mine or any ones but hers. It seems to me that your taking away the pleasure of this first book of hers is far more cruel, more wrong even than any number of stories about any number of people—could be—you will resent my writing this to you—and I am sorry for that—but since you make it a public question. I think you ought to know that there are other standpoints—while you think it is wrong, there are people who think it right—and who do not like to wound any more than you do.

Cather followed up McClung's letter with one of her own in which she said that the page proofs of The Troll Garden had already been returned to the press and that to omit "The Profile" would make an already slim volume too small to publish. She asked for Fisher's understanding and hoped that their friendship would remain intact.

Fisher, though, persisted in her efforts to protect Osborne. She told Cather that she had consulted with her parents about the affair and that they had recommended the matter be referred to S. S. McClure if Cather did not withdraw the story on her own. When Cather failed to respond, Fisher wrote her final, unchacteristically terse, letter on the matter, dated January 19, 1905: Dear Willa:

Will you please wire me at once an answer to these questions. Have you written to your publishers about "The Profile" since the beginning of our correspondence about it, with a definite statement that friends of the original subject of the story object strongly to its publication! If you have not so written since our correspondence began is it your intention to do so immediately? Further action on my part will be determined by your reply.

In his memoir, "Autobiography in the Shape of a Book Review," the poet Witter Bynner, then Cather's editorial colleague, mentions a dispute over "The Profile" that took place at the McClure's offices. He describes the meeting between the two parties as "tense" and claims that Cather insisted on publication, even though it was suggested that Osborne might commit suicide if she read the story (253). Bynner did not name those who objected, but we can now be sure that Fisher was among them. Finally, neither side could claim victory, for although the story did not appear in the 1905 edition of The Troll Garden—which was dedicated to Isabelle McClung—it was published two years later (June 1907) in McClure's. There is no evidence of whether Osborne ever read the tale and no further mention of her in the Cather-Fisher correspondence.

Among the stories that Cather did publish in The Troll Garden, however, was one bearing Mrs. Canfield's name in its title, "Flavia and Her Artists," which may have been written in response to the dislocation Cather felt during the European trip and the imbroglio over "The Profile." There is evidence that the story was not originally so titled, for twice in a letter of March 29, 1903, Cather refers to a story in progress called "Fulvia." Could Cather have changed the classical name to "Flavia" in retaliation for the Canfields' intervention at the McClure's offices?

We may only theorize about the name change, but Susan Rosowski has argued convincingly that the shallow title character is indeed modeled after Mrs. Canfield (143-45). "Flavia and Her Artists" is the satirical story of Flavia Hamilton, an artistic dilettante whose greatest satisfaction comes from hovering over the painters, actors, and musicians who frequent her parties. Flavia Canfield, an amateur painter herself, did actively cultivate associations with professional artists. Cather's descriptions of Hamilton's "hurried visits to New York, between her excursions from studio to studio—her luncheons with this lady who had to play at a matinee, and her dinners with that singer who had an evening concert" (Troll Garden 7) closely resemble descriptions of Flavia Canfield, who-as one biographer has put it—"pursued art with the true devotion of a fanatic" (Washington 28). In one memorable episode, Dorothy had to leave her studies at the Sorbonne to accompany her mother on a trip to Madrid to see Velasquez's paintings. The trip through the Pyrenees was terribly cold and uncomfortable; Flavia arrived at the hotel, Dorothy recalled, "groaning, racked with pain, ashy-faced, bowed together weakly as she hung on my arm" (Washington 28).

It is easy to see why Dorothy and her mother would have been upset about the story. Mrs. Canfield's name had been given to a character who "could not endure being contradicted; she always seemed to regard it in the light of a defeat. . . . For all her sparkling assurance of manner, Flavia was certainly always ill at ease. . . . there is no bridge by which the significance of any work of art could be conveyed to her" (Troll Garden 9, 15, 23). Rosowski has noted further parallels to the Canfield family in "Flavia and Her Artists" as well. For example, one of the house guests, Imogene Willard, is considered "interesting" enough to warrant invitation to one of Flavia Hamilton's parties because of her doctoral thesis on a "well-sounding branch of philology at the Ecole des Chartes" (8)—very likely a reference to Fisher's graduate work in France, which produced a dissertation on Corneille and Racine. Furthermore, Flavia's perceptive husband in the story resembles James Hulme Canfield. He escapes Cather's satiric pen but suffers in the fiction as the husband of a foolish wife, as Cather must have thought he did in Lincoln.

In mid-April 1909 Cather wrote Fisher a note of condolence over the death of her father two weeks earlier, expressing heartfelt sympathy for Dorothy and her mother and offering her help. There is no evidence of a response to Cather's letter, however, and no further letters to Fisher until March 15, 1916, when Cather wrote about The Song of the Lark. She wrote again six months later (September 2) in a friendly tone with praise for Fisher's novel The Bent Twig, but she avoided mention of the prolonged gap in communication and suggested no meeting or further correspondence.

A letter of March 12, 1921, broke the five-year silence and was the first of four letters Cather wrote to Fisher that spring. By that time both women were well-established literary figures. Since the 1907 publication of her first novel, Gunhild, Fisher had brought out four more novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on education. Her work had been well received by the public and critics alike, and she was living in Arlington with her husband John Redwood Fisher, whom she had married in 1907. Cather had published four novels—Alexander's Bridge (1912), O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918)—and a collection of short stories, Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), since April Twilights and The Troll Garden. Cather's work, too, had met with positive reviews and favorable sales. She was settled in an apartment with Edith Lewis (who would be her housemate for almost forty years) at 5 Bank Street in New York's Greenwich Village. In her initial letter resuming the correspondence she thanked Fisher for her kind review of Youth and the Bright Medusa in the Yale Review (notably, "Flavia and Her Artists" was one of three stories from The Troll Garden not reprinted in that collection). Although Cather was no doubt genuinely grateful for the review, an underlying purpose of her letter became clear when she asked Fisher to contact her so that they could spend an afternoon together in New York. Cather assured Fisher that she was no longer disagreeable and that finding her own writing voice had helped her mature. If she and Fisher were to meet, Cather said, they could compare their scars like figures cut from the same dough.

Just how insistent Cather was about her offer of reconciliation can be seen in her next letter, written only three days later. In it she reminded Fisher of her "new" address at 5 Bank Street, where Cather had actually been living for ten years. Their friendship had suffered a long break, but Cather was determined to set things right once again. She made sure to mention that her new novel was four-fifths completed and that Fisher was the only person who could help her with it. Cather did not press the matter immediately, but rather politely let Fisher know that her assistance would be appreciated.

The real breakthrough was initiated by Cather's letter of February 6, 1922, concerning the editing of One of Ours; Cather wanted to know whether Fisher would be willing to read the page proofs. The last third of the story had been difficult to write, Cather said, because it was set in France. Although she had done extensive research on the war, interviewed many veterans, and even returned to France to visit her cousin's grave, she did not feel comfortable with her material. Could Fisher pay special attention to the ending and let her know if it seemed awkward or false? Two weeks later, Cather thanked Fisher for agreeing to read the proofs. The two women had taken a large step toward renewing their friendship.

But the original cause of the rift still needed to be resolved, and Cather began to address that issue in her letter of March 8, 1922, in which she revealed that her younger cousin Grosvenor had been the model for Claude Wheeler, the protagonist of One of Ours. Cather said she derived Claude from Grosvenor, whom she had often taken care of during his childhood. As time passed however, the differences between the cousins, who grew up on adjacent farms, became more pronounced: Cather was a gifted student and devotee of the arts, while Grosvenor was far less articulate and spent his time working on the farm. As a result, the two avoided each other for many years, he resenting her intellectual abilities and she not understanding his resentment. It was not until Grosvenor was about to leave for duty in Europe that they came to understand each other better. Willa Cather was staying at her uncle's farm when the war broke out, and she spent a week helping Grosvenor haul wheat to town. During those long rides they talked for the first time in many years, and Cather said she came to understand and sympathize with her cousin from that point on. Grosvenor's death at Cantigny on May 27, 1918, prompted Cather to tell Fisher that she could not put the memory of her cousin to rest without writing about him.

In many of her letters to Fisher about One of Ours (she wrote seventeen in 1922) Cather said that portraying her protagonist accurately was her primary concern. Claude Wheeler seemed absolutely real to her, and she claimed that she often felt his presence at morning tea. Cather said she tried hard to create a story that always had Claude at its center, but scenes from her own life had slipped into the last part of the book. The central figures of that final section are Claude and Lieutenant David Gerhardt, a violinist (modeled after the concert violinist David Hochstein) who had volunteered for active duty in the war. The friendship between the farm boy and the cultured musician was an unlikely one, but not unlike the friendship of Cather and Fisher. L. Brent Bohlke's collection of published Cather interviews, Willa Cather in Person (which shows that the author was not as reluctant to talk to the press as was once thought) reprints from the New York Herald book section of December 24, 1922, a lengthy account of her inspiration for the character Gerhardt (51-57). What Cather did not report, though, was that the tone of the relationship between Gerhardt and Wheeler was drawn from the time she spent with Fisher during her first trip to Europe. That parallel, first noted by James Woodress (Life and Art 192), provides an important backdrop for the novel.

A key scene in the final section of One of Ours pictures Gerhardt as he plays the violin for the last time; "Claude his lips compressed, his hands on his knees, was watching his friend's back. The music was a part of his own confused emotions. He was torn between generous admiration, and bitter, bitter envy. . . . If he had been taught to do anything at all, he would not be sitting here tonight a wooden thing amongst living people" (418). Fisher had noted in the margins of her page proofs that she found the scene particularly moving. In a late March letter, Cather said that although she gathered much of her information for the novel from war veterans, that scene had been taken from her own experience. She admitted in the same letter that Fisher's intellectual background had intimidated her, especially while they were in Europe, just as Claude had felt intimidated by David. She recalled her own early relationship with Grosvenor and said that Fisher could never have known how out of place she felt during the summer of 1902. Cather reiterated the connection between the two characters and Fisher and herself in her next letter (April 7) said she wished all old disagreements would end as happily, even though it had taken a long time for her wounded pride to heal.

On May 8 Cather elaborated further, saying she had felt like a ruffian in France. She hoped that by reading Claude and David's story in One of Ours, Fisher would understand why she had suffered so in the past. Cather later referred to her own ignorance" in her essay "148 Charles Street" (Not under Forty 65) and Elizabeth Sergeant has written that Cather "could at any time feel impatient with the limits of her prairie education" (65). It was these feelings of inadequacy and uneasiness that Cather had for so long wanted Fisher to understand. During her years of struggle Cather could not have foreseen, of course, that her own work would far outlast Fisher's, that Fisher would be remember primarily for being a lifelong friend of Willa Cather.

Cather's efforts at explaining the years of dissension were not wasted. In a review of One of Ours in the New York Times Book Review of September 10, 1922, Fisher—who apparently did not object to reviewing a book she had been intimately involved in—commented: "The figure of David, the fine, cultivated, man-of-the-world and artist . . . symbolizes to Claude all that he has missed in life and might have made his own. . . . I am swept away out of this grudging feeling toward David in the beautiful and poignant passage where David plays his violin for the last time, where the music reveals to poor Claude a Promise Land of Beauty from which, quite casually, through nobody's malice, and yet irretrievably, he has been shut out." In a late September letter Cather agreed with Fisher's assessment of Claude and David's relationship and thanked Fisher for the review, which was one of the few positive ones she had read. If nothing else, Cather said, at least the book had helped bring them back together.

What becomes evident in this and in all the letters concerning One of Ours is that by having Fisher read about Claude, Cather was able to explain why she had satirized the Canfields in "Flavia and Her Artists," to apologize for "The Profile," and to bridge the unfortunate rift in their friendship. The novel is, of course, more than an apology to an old friend. While the standard view has been that in One of Ours Cather changed methods and approaches from the more personal materials used in her prairie novels, her correspondence with Fisher reveals that in this book too she drew upon her personal experiences. In writing of Claude Wheeler's yearning for the world beyond his parish, Cather turned for inspiration to her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, with whom she too had begun in the parish and later explored the world.

When Willa Cather said that she followed the real story of Richard Wetherill "very closely" in having Tom Outland discover Cliff City in Blue Mesa ("On The Professor's House" 32), she vastly oversimplified the creation of that part of The Professor's House. The creative route from Richard Wetherill to Tom Outland was not at all the straight line that Cather's acknowledgement suggests; rather, it was a more indirect journey that began before Cather came on the scene and that once under her direction diverged into other paths on its way to the novel. By employing some recently discovered biographical and historical material, together with a modest amount of speculation, we can now trace the route of the story through four major stages of development: the discovery of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado; the meeting between Willa Cather and Richard Wetherill's brother; Cather's retelling of the discovery story in her 1916 Mesa Verde essay; and, finally, her further adaptation of the story for her novel.

In 1888, while Willa Cather was helping her father fight his political battles in Red Cloud, Nebraska (Bennett 24-25), a family of Quaker cowboys near Mancos, Colorado, were trying to make a living on their Alamo Ranch. Because the father, B. K: Wetherill, was in poor health, most of the work was done by his sons: Richard, John, Al, Clayton, and Winslow. While tending to their ranching chores, the Wetherill brothers had also been hearing stories of ancient Indians having lived in Mesa Verde and had been finding evidence of these early habitations. Then on or about December 18, as they were "on a cruise of exploration" (Mason 2), Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason stopped their weary horses, walked over to the edge of a canyon, and stared in amazement at the opposite wall. What they saw was Cliff Palace, "the grandest view of all among the ancient ruins of the southwest," as Mason himself described it. They themselves were seeing it for the first time, though Richard's brother Al said he had caught a glimpse of the same ruins the year before as he trudged toward camp through the canyon below. The two cowboys "rode around the head of the canyon and found a way down over the cliffs to the level of the buildings" (Mason 2). Then, quite literally, they stepped into history, both the ancient Indians' and their own.

Such, anyway, is the familiar and generally received version of the discovery, the one that Cather probably heard. Although there is no point in disputing it now, it is worth noting that for decades afterward-and in some quarters even today—the actual discoverer of Cliff Palace remained a point of considerable dispute. Several other men claimed to have seen the ruin years before Wetherill and Mason did (see Fewkes 13; McNitt, Wetherill 29; Nusbaum 66-68), and even among family members Richard's claim was sometimes undercut (see B. A. Wetherill 110; Gillmor and Wetherill 29ff.; M. Wetherill 5). As Frank McNitt says, Cather did not become involved in this controversy (Wetherill 29), yet it seems unlikely that she never heard of any of it. Evidently, such complications were a part of the story that did not fit into her artistic design.

Another part of the story did fit her design, however: the long-acknowledged efforts by the Wetherills to interest the Smithsonian Institution in excavating the ruins they had discovered, efforts that must have suggested to Cather Tom Outland's fruitless and demoralizing trip to Washington. This Wetherill/Smithsonian correspondence has finally been documented by the recent discovery of seven letters: four from B. K. Wetherill (not Richard, as most earlier accounts had stated, but his father), two from Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian, and one from William Henry Holmes, staff archeologist (see Harrell). This correspondence puts the Smithsonian in a less culpable light than Cather does, but it still tells the story of an opportunity lost, or at least delayed. Moreover, because they lacked the response the Wetherills had wanted, the Smithsonian letters may also account for some ill feelings between the family and the Institution (McNitt, Wetherill 36-37). It would not be surprising if Richard's brother conveyed these ill feelings to Cather, who later turned them into a major conflict of values.

Clearly, then, a good deal is now known about the first stage in the development of Cather's discovery episode, but the second—what Willa Cather was told by Richard Wetherill's brother—remains obscured in historical shadows.

The principal and, until recently, the only source of information about Willa Cather's visit to Mancos and Mesa Verde is Edith Lewis's account in Willa Cather Living. Lewis does provide some fascinating details about the tour of the ruins that she and Cather took in the summer of 1915, which was highlighted by their getting lost at the hands of an inexperienced guide and their being rescued by two "chivalrous" workers from Jesse Walter Few Fewkes's camp. But she offers frustratingly little information about meeting between Cather and the Wetherill brother (Richard had been killed in 1910). She says only that Cather had heard that one of Richard's brothers was still living in Mancos and that she "went to call on him" the evening before they went to Mesa Verde. From this brother "she heard the whole story of how Dick Wetherill swam the Mancos river on his horse and rode into the Mesa after lost cattle, and how he came upon the cliff dwellings that had been hidden there for centuries" (94-95).

Cather's own account is even less satisfying: "I myself had the good fortune to hear the story . . . from a very old man, brother of Dick Wetherell [sic]. Dick Wetherell as a young boy forded Mancos River and rode in to the Mesa after lost cattle. I followed the real story very closely in Tom Outland's narrative" ("On The Professor's House" 32).

The contents of the interview remain speculative, but there is some additional information about the possible identity of Cather's source and the place where the interview occurred. Frank McNitt was probably the first one to suggest that the brother with whom Willa Cather spoke was Clayton, the next to youngest (Letter). More recently, Carol Ann Wetherill, Clayton's grand-daughter, has reached the same conclusion: "We are now positive it was Clayt that Willa Cather conversed with at Mancos." Unlike the other brothers, who were all elsewhere during the summer of 1915, Clayton was "back and forth" between the Rio Grande drainage and the Mancos area regularly and served, in fact, as Dr. Fewkes's favorite guide in the summers of 1914 and 1915 (C. A. Wetherill). Moreover, according to an item in the Mancos Times-Tribune for August 27, 1915, Clayton and party "arrived Tuesday [August 24] from their exploring trip out in Northern Arizona and Southern Utah." Given the August 26, 1915, date of the New York Times story about the rescue ("Lost in Colorado Canon [sic]"), it would seem likely that Clayton was Willa Cather's Wetherill contact.

If he was, the interview probably occurred at the home of one of Clayton's in-laws. Contrary to what Edith Lewis says, none of the Wetherills were still living in Mancos in 1915. Their Alamo Ranch was sold at auction in 1902, nearly four years after the death of B. K. Wetherill, and shortly afterward the family members who had still been at the ranch established permanent residences elsewhere (McNitt, Wetherill 179-80). Clayton, however, acquired new family ties to Mancos when he married "home-town girl" Eugenia Faunce, whose family—including the Wattles, her mother's family—were still living in Mancos in 1915 (C. A. Wetherill). During his frequent stopovers in town, Clayton probably stayed with one or the other of these in-laws, so it must have been to one of their houses that Cather came calling.

Assuming that it was Clayton with whom Willa Cather spoke, her description of the Wetherill brother as "a very old man" ("On The Professor's House" 32) poses an interesting problem. In 1915 Richard Wetherill, had he lived, would have been only fifty-seven; Clayton, the second to youngest of the five brothers, was only forty-seven, just five years older than Cather herself and, as John Murphy has remarked, hardly an age that one would term "very old." Evidently, Cather was behaving in characteristic fashion by exaggerating or representing things as she chose rather than as they were. She did this with other details as well. After all, age thirty in 1888 Richard could hardly have been the "young boy" that Cather says he was. In short, Cather departed from her historical source in a number of ways to produce a story almost completely her own.

The recent discovery of Willa Cather's 1916 Mesa Verde essay by Susan Rosowski and Bernice Slote provides an important transition, a tangible link, between the first two stages of development and the final product in the novel itself. As these authors say, "The 1916 essay is 'Tom Outland's Story' in embryo" (91). It is also the first hard evidence of the divergent path along which Cather had already begun to direct the discovery story. In this case, differences become even more illuminating than similarities (cf. Rosowski and Slote 89) as Cather tells her version of Richard Wetherill's discovery: One must always think with envy of the entrada of Richard Wetherill, the first white man who discovered the ruins in its [Mesa Verde's] canons [sic] forty-odd years ago. Until that time the mesa was entirely unexplored, and was known only as a troublesome place into which cattle wandered off, and from which they never came back. All the country about it was open range. The Wetherills had a ranch west of Mancos. One December day a boy brought word to the ranch house that a bunch of cattle had got away and gone up into the mesa. The same thing had happened before, and young Richard Wetherill said that this time he was going after his beasts. He rode off with one of his cow man and they entered the mesa by a deep canon from the Mancos river, which flows at its base. They followed the canon toward the heart of the mesa until they could go no farther with horses They tied their mounts and went on foot up a side canon, now called Cliff canon. After a long stretch of hard climbing young Wetherill happened to glance up at the great cliffs above him, and there, thru a veil of lightly falling snow, he saw practically as it stands today and as it had stood for 800 years before, the cliff palace. ("Mesa Verde Wonderland" 83-84)

Although this account may seem accurate in general, its details are quite different from those of the actual event. To begin with, Richard was not the first white man to discover ruins in Mesa Verde. Anglo excursions had begun as early as the mid-nineteenth century (D. A. Smith, Mesa Verde 9-10; J. E. Smith 5), so that by 1888 Mesa Verde and its treasures, far from being "entirely unexplored," were already familiar to a great many people. Moreover, Richard's discovery was more recent than Cather says, fewer than thirty years before, not the "forty-odd" of the essay. Furthermore, Mesa Verde could be "a troublesome place" for cows to graze, but it was also highly desirable; in fact, the Wetherills enjoyed the unique privilege of Ute permission to graze their cows there, and other ranchers used it even without this permission. By the time Jesse Nusbaum became park superintendent in 1921, the mesa "had been overgrazed for years" (Nusbaum 77). The boy who "brought word . . . that a bunch of cattle had got away" is apparently an invention, as none of the other accounts mention him at all. Finally, the most striking divergence, which several people have noted, is Cather's version of Richard's physical point of view: at the bottom of Cliff Canyon looking up rather than from the opposite rim of the canyon looking almost straight across. As Rosowski and Slote suggest, Cather has confused Richard's perspective with his brother Al's about a year earlier (88).

Obviously, not even in this essay-ostensibly more fact than fiction—is Cather following the particulars of Richard's story "very closely." It would seem that as romanticist and storyteller, Cather is already attributing to Richard Wetherill some of the special traits and circumstances that would reach full growth in Tom Outland. By the time she wrote The Professor's House, the fourth and final stage of development, Cather seems to have left her model so far behind that a juxtaposition of significant details from fact and fiction becomes a nearly consistent study of contrasts, suggesting not a derivative story but a new creation—its parts cleaner, simpler, more noble, and more ideal than those of the historical incident that inspired it.

Tom Outland is an orphan uncertain of his age, a circumstance that arouses the reader's sympathy and automatically suggests a man who must make his way in the world alone. As such, he joins the ranks of some other American literary orphans: Huckleberry Finn, Ishmael, Billy Budd. Despite his uncertain age, however, Outland is clearly youthful enough to fulfill the "young boy" role that Cather had first assigned to Richard Wetherill. Richard, of course, was part of a large nuclear family, and he knew how old he was.

The Blue Mesa of the novel is virtually inaccessible and, like Mesa Verde in the essay, still unexplored. Furthermore, "the old settlers" told Tom Outland that "nobody had ever climbed" Blue Mesa itself, making it a remote and mysterious challenge, a stronghold still protecting a treasure yet to be claimed by someone worthy of it. Quite the opposite of this romantic myth, by 1888 Mesa Verde—or at least certain parts of it—had already been explored by several parties and individuals; artifacts had been removed; and the canyons and ruins had been surveyed, mapped, sketched, photographed, and described.

Tom Outland is the sole, undisputed discoverer of Cliff City. Unlike Richard Wetherill, he is unaccompanied at the time of the discovery, and afterward he is not bothered by jealous prior claimants or complications or controversy of any kind. Rather, the discovery remains a quiet private moment of inspiration and rejuvenation as Outland gazes reverentially upward from the canyon below, standing where Cather's Richard Wetherill had stood.

Tom Outland discovers Cliff City not on just any day in December but on Christmas Eve, suggesting the rebirth of an older, better world and a personal redemption for Outland as well. Full of reverence for his discovery, Outland is tempted "to keep it secret even from Roddy Blake" (Murphy), the Charlie Mason character, perhaps. By contrast, Wetherill and Mason tell the first people they see, three acquaintances in another camp for whom Richard draws a map showing the location of Cliff Palace (McNitt, Wetherill 27). Days after the discovery Tom Outland is still inclined to preserve the sanctity of the ruins, feeling "reluctant to expose those silent and beautiful places to vulgar curiosity" (Professor's House 205). Richard Wetherill took the tourists there himself, and soon after their discoveries he and his brothers tried to impress collections of relics upon audiences in Durango and Denver, who remained uninterested until, in the best P. T. Barnum style, the Wetherills included the mummy of a child found by Clayton and Charlie Mason (McNitt, Wetherill 30).

Tom Outland disdains both money and museums. To Mrs. St. Peter he gives a complete pot, but he will not have any of his artifacts placed in a museum. Richard and his brothers sought museums (much to their credit, incidentally), conducted paid tours, and sold photographs and whole collections of relics.

Finally, in the aftermath of his discovery, Tom Outland, this "boy of such humble pretensions" (Professor's House 231), goes to Washington to try to interest officials at the Smithsonian in excavating and preserving the ruins. The bureaucratic runaround and indifference that he encounters are now almost legendary. In actual fact, as already noted, it was B. K. Wetherill, not Richard, who made the initial contact with the Smithsonian—and that through the mail, not in person. Also in actual fact, the Smithsonian was more interested in the project than Cather's version allows, even though it was several years before it took any action.

Cather probably did not know either of these facts, but it is unlikely that they would have affected her plan even if she had known them. For her purposes in the novel, cold rejection person is far more poignant than lukewarm encouragement through the mail. Furthermore, Tom's trip to Washington allows Cather to contrast "the worst aspects of the city of the present . . . with the best aspects of the city of the past" (Murphy). Finally, there is the built-in theme of West versus East, exemplified here with irresistible romantic opposition: little man from the West with a truly significant find meets "crushing indifference" (McNitt, Wetherill 38) of large impersonal institution in the East. This was not the real story, but it certainly makes a better story.

That these divergences from fact are deliberate, calculated to heighten the qualities merely suggested by the historical incident, can be further demonstrated by noting briefly the few significant components that Cather has left unchanged. It is still a humble cowboy, a sort of western Everyman, who makes one of the grandest archeological finds of the century. There is still a light snow falling that at once obscures and reveals the scene like a vision in a dream. And there is still the reverence for the ruins, irresistible and everlasting, a reverence not so much for the dead as for an abandoned way of life, ancient and honorable, whose most mundane possessions inspire awe.

What Willa Cather found in Richard Wetherill's story was a historical frame for another story that she had been trying to write for years, the dramatization of a private myth that had haunted her since childhood (Lewis 81) Six years before she visited Mesa Verde, Cather had already begun to explore the theme of "discovering an ancient civilization on a high mesa in the Southwest" (Petty-Schmitt n.p.). In her short story "The Enchanted Bluff" (1909), a group of boys camp on a sandbar along a river in Nebraska and dream of conquering a legendary mesa where ancient Indians once lived. Two years later, in Alexander's Bridge, the "campfire on a sandbar in a Western river" is recalled, again "wistfully," as an image of a happier, less complicated life (114-15). The following year, in Winslow, Arizona, Cather was already thinking of a novel about the cliff dwellers, although she expected it to be written by her friend George Seibel, for whom she said she was saving the material (Letter).

In The Song of the Lark, written the year before the trip to Mesa Verde, the theme becomes more prominent, more fully realized. Ray Kennedy muses upon the debt to the ancient inhabitants that the cliff dwellings in Panther Canyon inspire in him, and Thea Kronborg finds during her sojourn among the ruins a kinship with those whose paths she walks and a peace theretofore unknown. The narrator speaks not just for Thea but also for Willa earlier in saying, "This was her old idea: a nest in a high cliff, full of sun" (Song 371).

That same year, perhaps with her upcoming trip to Mesa Verde in mind, Cather visited an exhibit of cliff dweller artifacts at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Sergeant 122-23), where she saw prototypes of the pots Tom Outland would find. Although no catalog of this exhibit is extant, "it is safe to say . . . that the Hall [housing the exhibit] included some or all of two collections acquired from the Wetherills" (Kaye). Thus, when Cather went to Mesa Verde the following year, she must have been familiar already with the Wetherills' work there and may even have known something of Richard's story itself. Her calling upon Richard's brother, then, was a deliberate bit of research.

In the essay written a few months after her visit to Mesa Verde, Cather puts the actual historical incident a little further into the past to make it seem more like a legend; and she makes her hero much younger than the real one to correspond to the boys in her earlier stories. Later that same year, 1916, Cather seems to have begun writing "Tom Outland's Story" itself under the title "The Blue Mesa," apparently the same manuscript that she completed in 1922 (Woodress, Literary Life 282, 323).

The parts—the dreams—of all these stories and experiences are finally brought together three years later in the published novel when Tom Outland, another boy, actually discovers such a place as Thea Kronborg and Willa Cather herself were shown. For Cather, this must have been a personally satisfying scene, especially in light of James Woodress's observation that Tom Outland is Cather's "dream self" (Life and Art 211). The vicarious pleasures do not end here, however. Cather adds yet another dimension to the relationship by having Professor St. Peter, with whom she is often identified, himself identify with Tom Outland. Rosowski offers this succinct account of the process: "In turning to Outland for his second youth years ago, St. Peter had found a surrogate, and in evoking his memory now [as he recalls Tom Outland's story and prepares to edit Tom Outland's diary], he gives himself up to the memory so completely that the surrogate (Outland) and the speaker (St. Peter) merge" (132-33). Therefore, in a scene rich with suggestive complexities, one character identifies with another, and the author identifies with them both, first individually and then collectively.

Evidently, however, not even this richness was enough to satisfy Cather for long. The myth of discovery must have continued to haunt her, because in the letter published fifteen years after the novel, she rewrote part of the story once again by making her Wetherill source much older than he was. With this one stroke Cather enhanced the picturesque aura of his tale and gave the teller something of the status of an oracle.

Within and around this historical frame, then, Willa Cather built an ideal fictional house. In doing so, she was not content merely to follow Richard Wetherill's story "very closely"; rather, she used it to help shape her private myth of discovery—the myth that began in childhood, that led her to Mesa Verde like a pilgrim to a shrine, that found its early tentative expression in the 1916 essay, and that finally came to fruition in the novel. Richard Wetherill was not a model but an inspiration, and the differences between his story and Tom Outland's show not an unfaithful historian but a careful weaver of myth.

American literature is full of male characters who cultivate solitude as a means of (self) discovery. Natty Bumppo in the forest, Thoreau at Walden, Nick Adams fishing the big two-hearted river: all have, like Whitman, somehow turned their backs on "houses and rooms" to "loafe and invite" their souls, necessarily alone.

Few women characters in American fiction share this situation; the solitary woman is far more often an absent or cautionary figure. Even the extraordinary Hester Prynne, with her heroic powers of transformation and self-knowledge, gives off vibrations of danger and loss. When she returns to her New England hermitage and resumes the scarlet letter, her solitary presence becomes a magnet for troubled women, whose needs she apprehends but is helpless to satisfy.

If we turn to nineteenth-century fiction by women, looking for portrayals of a solitude in which a woman might invite her soul, we encounter, instead, other hedged and fumbled efforts. Whatever her other achievements, Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier fails as a living solitary; the only act she can complete, alone, is her suicide. Mary Wilkins Freeman again and again poses female solitude as a problem (and occasionally as an achievement); readers still hotly debate whether Louisa Ellis, the "New England Nun" of Freeman's best-known story, in renouncing her engagement for the pleasures of solitary housekeeping, is indeed selling "her birthright" for a mess of pottage. Louisa Ellis's experience suggests a pattern that is archetypal in literature by and about women. She finds her solitude, necessary as food, not by "lighting out" for some externalized territory that might also be emblematic of inner possibilities but by literally and metaphorically "going in"—into a house and housekeeping.

Thus, an American woman writer coming of age at the end of the nineteenth century, as Willa Cather did, found herself the possessor of a complex heritage if she became interested in probing the enigma of "the solitary woman." This was particularly true for a writer who, like Cather, might continue the American romantic tradition, with its many chronicles of male experiments in antidomestic withdrawal. Such withdrawals—those of Whitman in "Song of Myself," Thoreau in Walden, Hawthorne in "The Custom House," or Cather's own autobiographical male narrator in My Ántonia—typically became sources of art; through them a (male) voice was discovered. The best-known fictional portrayals of female solitaries, such as Hester Prynne, suggest the possibility that withdrawal mutes and diminishes the woman who chooses it, disqualifying her for life and for art. That suggestion must have seemed especially significant to a woman writer who believed that her art might require her to become a solitary.

Sarah Orne Jewett, in the famous 1908 letter that was so duringly important to Cather, had enjoined her younger friend that "to work in silence and with all one's heart . . . is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world" (Letters 250). As Cather left journalism and began to write about her "own country," she was putting into practice Jewett's uncompromising advice. But it took longer for her to come to terms with Jewett's most stringent condition: that the writer, while amassing worldly experience and knowledge, must also, in some essential sense "be a solitary." Cather's personal difficulties with that condition may explain some of her apparently abrupt alternations in domicile and life style. And in the fiction of the 1920s she began to turn to worldly characters, all artists in some sense, who found themselves contending with solitude: Marian Forrester, Godfrey St. Peter, Myra Henshawe. In the mid-1920s, she also edited a collection of Jewett's fiction, for which she wrote a critical preface. Thus, when she began Shadows on the Rock in 1928, Jewett's work as well as her advice were relatively fresh in Cather's mind. Shadows, published in 1931 as her tenth novel, is the first in which she attempts a central examination of domestic ritual as practiced by a female protagonist, twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, in seventeenth-century Quebec. This book is Willa Cather's first full exploration of a world that was central to Jewett's fiction: the parish of conventional women.

As she turned to domestic life as a central subject, Cather also turned to another version of female solitude. Cécile, an only child, was removed from the convent school at eight, when her mother became fatally ill. Thereafter, she spent most of her days alone in her father's house, performing the domestic tasks her mother taught her. Recent speculation on the origins of domestic life suggests that housekeeping as a specialized, solitary female activity developed in seventeenth-century Holland, concurrently with the concept of interior life, "the deepening human recognition that the sense of reality exists within" (Lukacs 29-30). According to Witold Rybcyzynski, "Homely domesticity depended on the development of a rich interior awareness . . . that was the result of the woman's role in the home" (75).

No nineteenth-century American writer conveys a richer sense of the interwoven domestic and psychic aspects of this "interior awareness" than Jewett. In her first work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, she traces a nameless woman writer's complex relation to a remote Maine village where she spends a summer. Through her herbalist—landlady, Mrs. Todd, the narrator is inducted into the pervasive domestic rhythms of the village's life. Those rhythms are made and kept by housekeeping women who work alone, and the writer-narrator discovers that they are her true subject. She cannot write about them unless she experiences them—but if she gives herself and her solitude up to such experience, she fears she cannot write.

The central episode of The Country of the Pointed Firs is the telling of the story of the hermit, "poor Joanna." Her history emerges as the narrator whiles away an evening with Mrs. Todd (Joanna's cousin by marriage) and a visitor, elderly widows and lifelong friends. Jilted by her fiancé, Joanna Todd had "commited the unpardonable sin" by the "wickedness" of her thoughts toward God in her disappointment. As penance, she signed away her shore property and moved to a shack on small barren Shell-heap Island, to live out her life. When Mrs. Todd, then a young woman, "entreated" Joanna to return to shore life, Joanna replied, "Tell them I want to be alone" (75-76).

This tale throws disturbing light on the circumstances of the three single women who tell and hear it. Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Fosdick, thirty years later, are still perplexed by how Joanna managed her housekeeping: "What did she do for risin' for her bread, or the piece bag that no woman can live long without. . . . or company," they ask (58). Mrs. Todd reports that Joanna tended flowers and decorated her house with them; that she braided rush mats and sandals and kept a pretty dress "for best in the afternoons" (74). This seems housekeeping performed for its own, solitary sake: is Joanna's life a rejection or an apotheosis of housekeeping? Is the hermetic life on Shell-heap Island a denial or a fulfillment of female selfhood?

While such unspoken questions emerge, the writer-narrator recedes more and more deeply into reflective silence, and Joanna's tale ends. But in the next chapter she takes up the quest for Joanna herself, making a solitary pilgrimage to the hermit's island grave. Earlier, she had rather superciliously dismissed such a retreat as "something mediaeval" (69); now she concludes that Joanna's islanded life represents a universal heritage: "We are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong" (82). When the narrator returns to her writier's life in a contemporary city, she carries an heirloom given her by Mrs. Todd: a coral pin that had belonged to the hermit Joanna.

Before Joanna's tale, Jewett's narrator tended to oversimplify the domestic life she found in the Maine village. Either she turned her back on it, hiring the schoolhouse for a nondomestic place to write, or she sentimentalized it, investing Mrs. Todd's mother and her home with idyllic sweetness. But the hermit's story, physically and thematically central to the book, initiates a complex meditation, both communal and solitary, on the nature of the shelter. When the narrator visits Joanna's grave, she has identified with its occupant so completely that she confidently report Joanna's thoughts: "I knew, as if she had told me" (82). Like the older women, she must acknowledge Joanna Todd's retreat both as an endlessly compelling mystery and as a central part of herself.

Shadows on the Rock, with its subtly experimental form and its domestic focus, resembles The Country of the Pointed Firs in many telling ways. Set in the "close air" ("On Shadows on the Rock" 16) at the Auclair hearth, it is Cather's meditation on the nature of shelter, counterpointed by tales of the undomesticated Canadian wilderness. She too places at the physical center of her book the tale of a hermetic woman who never appears directly in the action: the recluse nun, Jeanne Le Ber. Jeanne's story is the center of the novel's central book, "The Long Winter," comprising the various narratives of elsewhere that engage and nourish Cécile through the hard, cold months. The tale of Jeanne, her favorite, is the only account of a woman in this section.

Jeanne Le Ber was a beautiful Montreal heiress, surrounded by loving family and suitors, who at the age of twelve (Cécile's age) began a withdrawal from that life. Under her "gay dresses . . . she wore . . . a little haircloth shirt" (131), and at seventeen she took vows of chastity. Eventually, despite her family's wished, her ample dowry financed a chapel for the Sisters of the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin. Behind the altar she had a three-level cell constructed for herself "from which she would never come forth alive" (134). There she lives, a young woman still-seeing only her confessor, eating coarse food, spurning much of the comfort that domestic life can offer, even in Quebec and even to a nun (the other nuns who figure in this novel lead comfortable, social lives). Alone in her workroom, Jeanne spins, knits, and works at artful ecclesiastical embroidery.

Of course, the tales of Joanna Todd and Jeanne Le Ber differ in some ways. Cather's character is more clearly an exemplar of conscious choice: Joanna is rejected by a man, whereas it is Jeanne herself who rejects her father's wishes and the men who vie for her hand. But the similarities are more numerous and compelling. Both characters have wills so powerful that they can reshape the patterns their respective societies offer women. They turn their backs on conventional sexual and domestic life, yet both of them project passion, and many of their occupations—Joanna's weaving, Jeanne's embroidery—are quintessentially domestic. Their meticulously ordered housekeeping is raised to a state of ardent awareness that becomes highly conscious art.

As a girl, Jeanne often knelt at her window, gazing at the spark of the perpetually burning lamp her father and uncle had placed on the altar of the parish church. "She used to whisper, 'I will be that lamp; that shall be my life'" (131). Instead of conventionally tending the male-given lamp, in patient housewifery, Jeanne chose instead to become that symbolic object. Thus she claimed for herself immortality and meaning, while forfeiting the knowable particulars of a shared, finite domestic life. Even the sound of her voice was subsumed into mystery; Euclide Auclair says, "We cannot know what her voice is like now" (180).

By their withdrawals, Joanna and Jeanne paradoxically give themselves to the very communities they left; they become their own mysterious legends, which nourish and sustain the villagers who perpetuate them. Jewett underlines this fact by the way Joanna's history emerges in her narrative: through the interchange of question, report, and invention, interspersed with reflection. Jeanne's story emerges in a fashion equally complex—Blinker brings the latest "news from Montreal" (128) of two angels who mend Jeanne's spinning wheel. Cécile quizzes him eagerly, and in bed that night she goes over the story in her mind, as she has pieced it together from many sources, adding the new "miracle." Like the other Quebec colonists, she will repeat and reflect on the tale again and again, embroidering it with "loving exaggeration" (136). It becomes her possession, her creation—a gift by which, Jeanne confirms her own artistry and conveys it to every receptive hearer.

In the constrained circumstances of Cécile's life, which all the colonists share to some degree, such tales are an "incomparable gift," ravishing as "a blooming rose-tree, or a shapely fruit-tree in fruit" (137). Such a gift does what art can do: it affirms and extends the regenerative powers of imaginative life, even in the coldest world. Cécile acts out her own small miracles as she keeps the parsley alive through the long winter and dreams of seeing an orange tree bear fruit in Quebec.

"Miracles" such as those generated by Jeanne Le Ber provide a form for "the vague worship and devotion of the simple-hearted. . . . From being a shapeless longing, it becomes a beautiful image," and thus "the experience of a moment . . . is made an actual possession and can be bequeathed to another" (137). Such language powerfully describes the experience of art. By making herself a solitary, Jeanne has become an artist as well as an art object. Like Joanna Todd, she has created a life so emblematic that it can be perceived as symbol and as art.

But the price these women pay for their apotheosis is the rich, shared particularity of their individual lives. The lack of such particulars pushes their devotees to affectionate invention. Mrs. Fosdick, for example, disturbed by the loneliness that she is sure Joanna felt, satisfies herself by deciding that she must have assuaged it by "making folks" of her chickens. Mrs. Todd's last word about Joanna is bleaker, and wiser; she both affirms the hermit's singular identity and acknowledges her own inability to penetrate it with explanation—"No, Joanna was Joanna, and there she lays on her island" (Pointed Firs 78).

Against Cécile's rapt version of Jeanne's legend, Cather pits another version: that of Pierre Charron, Jeanne's former favored suitor and the man Cécile will later marry. To Pierre, younger and more extravagantly ardent than Mrs. Todd, Jeanne's life is an unforgivable waste—worse than death. He admits that he has twice violated her cloistered privacy. The first time, she spoke gently to him in "her own voice" bidding him to marry and promising to pray for him, always. Later, when he hid in the locked chapel and listened to her prayers, that dear particular voice had become "harsh and hollow like an old crow's—terrible to hear" (180). The recluse whom Pierre glimpsed there was swathed in black and gray; with "a stone face; it had been through every sorrow" (182). Stripped of color and detail, transfigured, this embodiment of Jeanne is more than Pierre can bear. He cannot let go of her former identity without renouncing his own: "There is a such a thing as kindness; one wouldn't like to think of a dog that had been one's playfellow, much less a little girl, suffering from cold those bitter nights. You see, there are all those early memories; one cannot get another set; one has but those" (181). Pierre hears with rage and despair the groans and sighs that punctuate Jeanne's prayers. He will not grant her the universality and the distance that would allow her to be "that lamp," a shining object of art and use, to him. He demands, "Why is she unhappy, I ask you? She is, I know it!" (183).

Through Pierre's responses Willa Cather adds another and profoundly disturbing dimension to her meditation on the shelter of solitude. We may see Pierre as the ravenous male ego that cannot allow a loved woman to claim and live her own separate story. But Pierre is also a decent and loving man, a solicitous friend who speaks for some of the best, simplest values of the communities Jeanne and Joanna reject: "There is such a thing as kindness." He mourns that deep human loss which occurs when someone who has shared one's most intensely felt experiences chooses to absent herself, forever, and to discontinue that particular communion. Pierre Charron's private outburst forces us to contemplate the morality of reclusion from yet another angle. His story reminds us that Jeanne Le Ber is still a complex, living woman; her groans are a mystery that can neither be solved nor forgotten. The charming legends she generates, rich with flowers and fruit, are not the whole story.

Pierre tells his tale only to Cécile's father, carefully shutting a door so that "the little one cannot hear" (180). Jeanne is never again mentioned in the novel's remaining chapters, yet she remains an unforgettable presence; as Judith Fryer says, "her story lingers in the reader's mind like a fragment of a melody" (330). By the novel's end it is clear that Cécile cannot be shut away from the complex meaning of Jeanne's life; she must experience that meaning herself.

Jewett's narrator was in some sense the heir and successor of Joanna Todd. The hermit's solitude, her housekeeping ambivalence, and her emblematic power were incorporated into the narrator's life as woman artist, and in leaving Dunnet Landing she carried them with her, as she carried the symbolic coral pin, "a visible sign of female inheritance and attachment" (O'Brien 415). Cécile, similarly, is the heir of Jeanne Le Ber. In the book's last chapters, after her passionate realization of the depth of her commitment to the domestic rituals her mother taught her, we see feeling more and more alienated from that world of male authority, personified in the Count and her father, which hands down decisions that she must obey. Now she feels the impulse to retreat, reclusively: "Often [she] wished she could follow the squirrels into their holes and hide away with them for the winter" (Shadows 229). And now the Canadian martyrs command her imagination; she longs to seek out the "very places" in the wilderness where they died, avowing, "I would rather go out there than—anywhere" (134). It is increasingly apparent that Cécile, at least at this moment of her adolescence, shares Jeanne's extreme and passionately ardent nature. Judith Fryer notes her sensuous imagination (329). Many of the most rapturously beautiful passages of description in this novel are filtered through the girl's receptive sensibility, which certainly could be the sensibility of an artist.

Throughout this novel, Cécile has seemed an exceptionally educable and tractable child, qualities that have prompted readers such as James Woodress to see her as "priggish" (237), and Susan Rosowski reads Shadows on the Rock, quite plausibly, as the ultimate female saint's legend: an account of the education of the Virgin (184-87). In the novel's epilogue, set fifteen years later, Cécile, most complex and central of the surviving characters, is maddeningly inaccessible. She is mentioned, in conversation between the Bishop and her father, only as the wife and mother of males and seems already to have become a figure of legend. Even her father describes her in such language, reporting that she is "bringing up four little boys, the Canadians of the future" (278). Literally, Cécile inherits the man Jeanne rejected and instructed to marry another woman. In her marriage she is as remote as the legendary recluse, but her recession into unstoried privacy, unreachable via official, male culture, has been in fact the usual state of affairs for a woman in North America. We cannot know the inner landscape of Cécile's adult life any more than we can interpret Jeanne's sighs. Finally, we must perceive her as we do the hermit, as symbol.

Thus, by the narrator's and Cécile's relations to Joanna and Jeanne, both The Country of the Pointed Firs and Shadows on the Rock finally imply a fertile, enigmatic relation among hermit, artist, and housekeeping woman. The fact that Jewett returned to the setting and characters of Dunnet Landing in four important additional stories, scattered through the few remaining years of her writing life, indicates that the heritage of Joanna Todd was still alive and problematic for her; each of those stories deals somehow with the narrator's perception of an emblematic, isolated, hermetic woman. The implications of Cather's ending are even more enigmatic. For in this book, bearing the wide experience of her rich, intense life in the world, Cather returned to the traditional parish of women to probe the meanings it might yield to a woman artist. The finest fiction of her last years, "Old Mrs. Harris" and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, continues those explorations. No figure among her American literary predecessors could have offered more support and impetus for such work than the advice and example of Sarah Orne Jewett.

Cather's explorations have been continued and extended in this century's literature by American women. There the female solitary remains a striking, emblematic presence. She is the embattled countrywoman of Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground, the fumbling explorer of Anne Sexton's last confessional poems, the defiant girl-woman of Toni Morrison's Sula, the reflective persona of May Sarton's published journals, such as the enormously popular Journal of a Solitude. In such works, again, the acts and language of art and housekeeping are suggestively, speculatively combined. Each evokes a story, like Sula's, of a profoundly "experimental life."

Joanna Todd and Jeanne Le Ber lived such experiments. For them, a hermit's room could be a world-and the life one kept in that room, steeped in domestic ritual, could be an art that flowered into symbol. To Jeanne, her "chambre," which she designed and purchased, was a "paradis terrestre . . . mon centre . . . mon élément." She preferred it above all other earthly places, whatever power or prestige they might confer: "point de Louvre, point de palais . . . me soit plus agréable. Je préfčre ma cellule ŕ tout le reste de l'univers" (136). That assurance, that confidence in the validity and the value of her own solitary female world, is the heart of Cécile's heritage from Jeanne Le Ber, and of Willa Cather's heritage from Sarah Orne Jewett.

James Woodress reports that Willa Cather wrote Book II ("The Hired Girls") of My Ántonia—a portrait drawn from her early memories in Red Cloud, Nebraska-in a tent pitched in an open meadow outside of Jaffrey, New Hampshire. To refresh herself after each writing session, she took long sojourns on Mount Monadnock and through the surrounding countryside (286). This pattern, creating a private, sheltered space that opens on an expansive view of the world, recurs not only in each stage of Cather's life but also in the lives of the characters she creates. Cather's living and working spaces in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, far from her childhood home, served as a re-creation of her Nebraska "parish" transplanted into the world. A parish (from the Greek root meaning a sojourning) is a place of spiritual and practical order in which a person is nourished and from which a person can securely move into the world.

Because as a writer Willa Cather felt the importance of place, she created characters who become part of their place, who feel a sense of insulated isolation in their place. She creates for them personal sanctuaries that strengthen their spirits and enable them to better cope with their world. The characters learn to establish their own sanctuaries by transplanting their parishes into the world, an echo of Cather's own experience. That this sanctuary may be either a small room or an expansive space seems at first to be contradictory; if, however, no matter what its form, the sanctuary is based on something solid-as the wise man's house is built upon a rock in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:24)—the space feeds the spirit. There the character feels "not on the earth, yet of it" ("Old Mrs. Harris" 155) largely because of the physical structure of the space. More often than not, however, Cather combines the small room and the expansive space by creating a room with a view. This sacred space, with its insulated view of the world, nourishes the characters, as a parish should, strengthening them for their sojourn in the world.

Although Cather is highly critical of the pettiness she finds in the parish-for example, lambasting church socials "at which all loyal Christians are expected to devour frozen cornstarch for the glory of God" (World and Parish 116-18), and creating such remarkably despicable characters as Wick Cutter (My Ántonia) or the sanctimonious Enid Royce (One of Ours)—she was nourished in her Nebraska parish. Her own small attic room in Red Cloud with the window view of the expansive world was the crucible for her art. The open Neb