I keep meaning to read through my Library of America edition of Willa Cather’s work, catching up on her novels and stories I’ve not yet read, because everything I have read has been marvelous — but somehow, I never get around to it. Therefore I’m very glad the latest “club week” hosted by Simon and Karen inspired me to read The Professor’s House, Cather’s 1925 offering. Though less popular today than the book published the previous year, My Antonia, it’s considered by A.S. Byatt to perhaps be her masterpiece. And though I think Shadows on the Rock is still my favorite Cather, I agree, it’s a remarkable work of art.
Brief as it is, this is a many-layered story, literally; like a sonata or a triptych painting, it has three parts, centering on a first-person narrative, “Tom Outland’s Story.” Tom’s is a frontier tale, set in New Mexico, of cowhands and mysterious mesas and friendship valued too late. Sandwiched around this evocative picture is a seemingly more pedestrian story, that of the titular Professor.
Godfrey St. Peter is a man in the evening of life. His two daughters are grown and married, and he and his wife have just moved into a bigger house; years of research and writing have finally started to pay off. But St. Peter can’t quite bear to leave his old house. He keeps paying the rent, so he can go back to the cramped study where he did all his work, and where memories of Tom linger. For Tom, we learn in the course of the novel’s first part, “The Family,” transformed the Professor’s life and that of his whole family, before he went off to fight in Flanders, his legacy enduring even after his death.
But the results are not comfortable to live with; they have driven a wedge between the two girls, between St. Peter and his wife, and between him and others in the University. A terrible gap between the beauty of high ideals and the sordid reality of American consumerism arises, estranging people from one another, robbing life of joy. And in part three, “The Professor” as St. Peter reflects on his life past and present, on the story Tom told him (that center panel of the picture) and the diary he left behind, he almost leaves hold of life. His reflections bring him to a kind of death and rebirth — but a shadowed one, not bright and positive and neatly resolved.
I don’t mean to be funny when I say this book is about a man going through menopause. If you’ve gone through it yourself, and read the book, I think you’ll know what I mean. And why should men, too, not get to experience that profound transition, that complex reckoning with the Essential? Cather peels back the layers imposed by gender and culture and the superficial trappings of wealth and power that make us feel safe, and gets at something very deep, very elemental in the human heart.
Indeed, in a letter, Sarah Orne Jewett once told her, “In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.…To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world.” Cather took this advice, and it could be considered the theme of The Professor’s House: the solitary individual, the wide outlook, and the painful gap between, to which all honest human hearts must come at one time or another.
The book ends in a kind of blank space, inconclusive, leaving one wondering what the author meant by it, what comes next. But this is all we have, an enigmatic fragment, like the evidence of a lost civilization that Tom found on the mesa. As in all Cather’s writing, I’ve found something to treasure, and now I’m motivated again to read more. Death Comes for the Archbishop is next in my LOA volume, and I really ought not to wait for the 1927 Club to read it…
Have you read this, or anything by Cather? Do you love her writing too?
