Studies in American Fiction

London and Paris, by Way of Lincoln and Pittsburgh

When Willa Cather made her first trip to Europe, in 1902, with her beloved friend Isabelle McClung, a young Dorothy Canfield met them in London and together the three paid a call on A. E. Housman. It did not go well. Cather, who greatly admired the poet and [End Page 52] had anticipated the possibility of meeting him as a highlight of her trip, was mortified to find herself unable to make conversation. Meanwhile, Dorothy, who was then a doctoral-level student of French literature at the Sorbonne, readily chatted with the scholarly Housman about Latin philology. On the bus on their way back to their lodgings after the visit, Cather apparently broke down and cried.¹⁰ The visit to Housman would remain an uncomfortable memory. Word of it somehow got out in distorted form, and Cather kept being subjected to inquiries and even published pseudo-accounts of the unannounced visit to the poet. The very last letter she wrote before her death on April 24, 1947 (or the last that we know of) was an appeal to Canfield to help her clarify her memory of details of that day so that she could set the record straight).¹¹

After London and the awkward visit to Housman, Cather went on to Paris, where she was shown around by Dorothy and her mother, the artistically inclined and apparently rather overbearing Flavia Canfield. This part of the trip did not go well either. The problem was again that Cather felt inadequate or culturally inferior by comparison. Dorothy was fluent in French and well-versed in European culture from having spent extended periods there with her mother. Cather was neither. It rankled her and made her feel, as she explained in the letter quoted in my epigraph, like a “roughneck,” or as Jonathan Goldberg paraphrases it, a “hayseed.”¹²

The after-effects of these two experiences, with their common thread of her embarrassed sense of herself in comparison to Canfield, were far-reaching. Indeed, they remained with Cather in pervasive ways for the rest of her life. But the sense of cultural inferiority that washed over her in 1902 in London and in Paris, in the presence of her greatly loved friend, did not begin there. Madigan points out (citing an earlier article by Joseph Lovering¹³) that Cather was “already,” before the summer of 1902, “well aware of the differences in social status and cultural background between herself and Fisher.”¹⁴ This consciousness of “a certain inferiority in comparison with the more cosmopolitan Fisher” and her family began in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska, where the two first met. Cather, a girl whose parents were of genteel but, as Madigan puts it, “modest” background—her father a sheep farmer and rancher now engaged in real estate dealings in Red Cloud, her mother a woman who enjoyed local social life but mostly stayed at home, keeping house with the help of a live-in hired girl and mothering her large flock of children—had gone to Lincoln in 1890 for a year of college-prep study before beginning actual college work. James Hulme Canfield arrived as chancellor of the university in 1891, bringing his wife, who would make herself a mover and shaker in local women’s clubs, and the twelve-year old-Dorothy. [End Page 53]

Canfield would later recall that she felt a “respectful deference” toward the then eighteen-year-old Cather, who was already beginning to publish in campus magazines and in the Nebraska State Journal.¹⁵ But things must have looked different to Cather, who despite her brash persona was none too sure of herself. Young as she was, the charming and popular Dorothy had already made an extended trip to Europe, living for a time in Paris and attending French schools.¹⁶ When the Canfields left Lincoln in 1895, the year Cather graduated, Mr. Canfield, a prominent man in a prestigious profession, became president of Ohio State University. He was later librarian at Columbia. An acquaintance with such prominent and cosmopolitan people must have been rather overwhelming for the young, ambitious Willa Cather. We don’t have to guess at this, however, because she acknowledged it in a letter of January 10, [1898], to her college friend Mariel Gere. Writing from Pittsburgh, where she had gone to take a job at the Home Monthly magazine, she wrote, “Mrs. Canfield and Dorothy came to see me at Christmas time and I had to introduce Mrs. C to a lot of club magnates. Fancy her coming to me for that. O it does my wickid un-Christian heart good to get even, to pay off the old scores . . .”¹⁷

Besides telling us that Cather felt a consciousness of social difference between herself and the Canfields well before her visit to Paris, this 1898 letter hints at why she was prone to make satirical comments about women’s clubs during her college days as well as in Pittsburgh, and leads us to wonder if she would continue to enjoy “pay[ing] off old scores.” Even so, references to Dorothy in various letters written during these early years of Cather’s professional life show that she continued to treasure the younger woman’s friendship—as she did for the rest of her life, despite significant bumps along the way.

A particular “score” that we know Cather would want to, and did, pay off relates to the most significant of these bumps. After returning to Pittsburgh, she wrote a short story called “The Profile,” whose central character was a thinly disguised version of a young woman she had met in Paris, to whom she was introduced by Canfield. The young woman was a fellow student of Dorothy’s at the Sorbonne named Evelyn Osborne, who bore a disfiguring scar on the left side of her face as a result of a fire. In pictures, Osborne took care to conceal the disfigurement by appearing only in profile. Cather’s character in “The Profile” bears just such a scar.

When Canfield became aware in December 1904 that Cather had written the story and was preparing to publish it in her first volume of stories, The Troll Garden, she at once sent a telegram asking how closely the character in the story resembled her friend and requesting a copy. Cather replied that her character had “nothing in common with Miss O.” except the scar and asked Dorothy not to judge the story until she had read it, which she quickly did.¹⁸ On January 1, 1905, she wrote asking Cather to withdraw the story. [End Page 54] Cather refused on grounds that without “The Profile” there would not be enough material to make a volume and that anyway she doubted Miss Osborne “would take the matter half so seriously” as Dorothy did.¹⁹ Woodress appropriately labels it a “case of Cather’s insensitivity to the use of real people as suggestions for her fictional characters.”²⁰ At that point Canfield and her parents went to New York, met with S. S. McClure, who was publishing The Troll Garden, and succeeded in having “The Profile” suppressed—though only temporarily; it appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1907.

The conflict between the two friends was a serious issue of authorial ethics, which must have been made worse by Cather’s immediate response. She hastily replaced the withdrawn story with one called “Flavia and Her Artists,” although Mrs. Canfield’s unusual first name had originally been thinly disguised as “Fulvia,” and The Troll Garden appeared on schedule in March 1905. The Canfields could hardly have missed the satiric reference of the story’s culturally voracious society woman, which one would think would have been clear enough even without the pointed change of name.

After this highly wrought clash, the friendship between Cather and Canfield broke off. Just how long they were estranged is a matter of judgment. Madigan judges the rift to have lasted for seventeen years, with the “real breakthrough” to reconciliation not coming until February 1922, when Cather asked Canfield to help her with the final stages of work on One of Ours.²¹ To me, the decisive breakthrough came at least a year earlier, or perhaps even as early as 1916, when Cather wrote a pair of letters that manifest a decided move toward reconciliation. Now that it is permissible to quote Cather’s letters without violating copyright restrictions, it is easier to trace this highly emotional process with at least some degree of precision and thus to make a case for placing the reconciliation earlier than 1922.²² If Canfield’s side of the correspondence had not been lost except for a mere five letters, we might understand what happened even better.²³ My reason for reviewing the sequence of letters here is not that we need to rehearse the story of the “rift and reconciliation” again but because they reveal both the warmth of the friendship between the two and the depth of Cather’s old feelings of social inferiority and rivalry.

Long before 1922, Cather had written Canfield a note of condolence upon the death of her father in 1909 and a pair of long, chatty letters in 1916 that seem to indicate a real urge to restore their former friendship. Canfield had written her letters of praise for O Pioneers! in 1913, The Song of the Lark in 1915, and apparently (since Cather later refers to having kept “all” of Dorothy’s letters about her books) My Ántonia in 1918.²⁴ After 1916 the record that we have (which may, of course, be incomplete) is silent for over four years. When Cather wrote again in March 1921, she seems to have been determined to heal whatever degree of estrangement still remained. Thanking Canfield for her strong [End Page 55] notice of Youth and the Bright Medusa in the Yale Review (a “fine generous” thing to have done²⁵), she acknowledged the particular value of the review in Nebraska where Canfield’s work was so “beloved.” (She had earlier said that Dorothy’s readers there outnumbered her own by twenty to one.²⁶) Her tone then takes on a note of urgency: “Are we never, I wonder, to come together for a talk again? There are so many, many things I would like to ask you about and tell you about.”²⁷ The final paragraph avows her sense that despite the years of distance, they have had a special friendship:

The first letter you wrote me about “O Pioneers!” long ago was the most helpful “hand-up” I had had, and I’ve always kept it and the other generous letters you’ve written me about my books. You know better than anyone else what a long way I had to go to get—anywhere. And you know, too, the difficulties of the road. It is strange to come at last to write with calm enjoyment and a certain ease, after such storm and struggle and shrieking forever off the key. I am able to keep the pitch now, usually, and that is the thing I’m really thankful for.²⁸

She closes by repeating her suggestion that they get together and acknowledging, though without actually apologizing for the “Profile” clash, that she used to be “fierce” at times.²⁹

Only three days later, on March 24, 1921, apparently in response to a quick reply from Canfield tentatively agreeing to a reunion “in the flesh,” she wrote again. As if prophetically of what would happen the following year, she complained of the difficulties she was encountering in finishing One of Ours, specifically, the section that takes place in wartime France. It was a setting of which she had no direct knowledge, whereas she knew that Canfield had spent considerable time there during the war doing voluntary relief work while her husband served as an ambulance driver. “It has often flashed across my mind,” she wrote, “that you are the only person in the world who could help me with it.” Whether Canfield really was “the only person” who could have helped we can’t say, but we do know that she invested considerable effort in trying to do so.³⁰

Then only about two weeks later, probably on April 8, 1921, Cather wrote yet again, proposing a plan for getting together in New York, and this time explicitly apologized for the “fuss” she had made so long ago over “The Profile” and acknowledged having been “sullen and defiant for a good many years.”³¹ This last seems to refer to more than the “Profile” argument, perhaps to certain irritable behaviors during the Paris visit itself. She had admitted these behaviors to Canfield as long ago as a letter of March 1904 where she said that she knew she had “a terribly low streak of something both ill tempered and ill bred” that “[came] out” in her “only too often” and that it was “incredible that any grown person should have behaved” as she had in Paris, where she had “felt [End Page 56] very provincial and helpless and ignorant.”³² How quickly Canfield replied to the April 1921 letter we do not know, but we do know (from a reference in a letter of Cather’s the following January reporting on reading the first proofs of One of Ours) that she did so by at least November. Ten days after the reference to first proofs, Cather wrote again on February 6, 1922, to ask if Canfield would read page proofs when they became available, to see if there were mistakes in language or fact or any distortions of tone.

In response, Canfield poured time and attention into reviewing the proofs, drawing on expertise gained during her two years in France during the war. We do not know what changes were made in the text as a result, but we do know that Cather acknowledged “many... queries” that would “help [her] to better it.”³³ We also know that she overruled Canfield on at least one of these queries. In addition to trying to help ensure the accuracy of details about Claude’s service in France and the correctness of French phrases occurring incidentally in the text, Canfield wrote a strong review that helped to launch One of Ours on publication.

What matters here, of course, is not so much Canfield’s contribution to the novel’s success as the incidental revelations Cather made in her letters. In the course of the 1922 sequence she not only admitted (again) to certain churlish behaviors during her time with Canfield in France and sought to explain their causes, but indicated that she drew on these underlying causes in her characterization of Claude in One of Ours.³⁴ Faced with Canfield’s and her mother’s cosmopolitanism, Canfield’s fluency in French, and their familiarity with the Paris scene, she acknowledged in a pair of letters in April 1922, that she had become acutely aware of her own lack of international polish and had felt like a “roughneck.” Recognizing that Canfield had noted Claude’s feeling similarly abashed when he compared himself, in the novel, to his Army friend David Gerhardt, an accomplished violinist, she stressed that “That was the way you made me feel when we were in France together that time” (emphasis in original). It was also, she now realized, the way she herself had made her cousin Grosvenor (the model for Claude) feel when she saw him in Nebraska before the war.³⁵ “It’s the way helpless ignorance always feels,” she explained, “and so many of the best of ours felt it in France.” In the second of the April 1922 letters, apparently responding to a reply from Canfield in the interim, she expanded on this claim: “Well, I’ve accomplished something if after twenty years I’ve got across to you what the roughneck, the sensitive roughneck, really does feel when he’s plunged into the midst of———everything.” Many American soldiers, she believed, felt that kind of “chagrin” in France, a kind of “wound” that, like a physical wound, would “ache at odd times all their lives.”³⁶ [End Page 57]

Interestingly, when she wrote to Canfield again in October 1922 about her newly published novel Rough-Hewn, she applied to its central character, Neale, the same term she had applied to herself and to Claude, calling him a “roughneck.”³⁷

This remarkable sequence of letters provides us our fullest understanding of Cather’s reaction to being with Canfield in Paris in 1902 and how persistent its emotional reverberations had been for her over a period of two decades. They tell us that the Paris visit, usually linked solely to “The Profile,” was essentially intertwined with Canfield’s role in the end-game of the writing of Cather’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel One of Ours—the only two evidences of Canfield’s impact on Cather’s work that are usually recognized. What I am proposing here is that the resonance of the Paris experience and Cather’s admitted sense of being a cultural outsider, a “roughneck,” go far beyond these two works, reaching deeply into the formation of her sense of self and her comprehension of the effects of social class. The fact that she was so distressed by a sense of herself as a “roughneck” in comparison to the far more polished and cosmopolitan Canfields—feeling it so intensely as to retain an emotionally charged memory of that feeling twenty years later—gives us reason not merely to question the once-prevalent image of her as tranquil and self-assured but to discard it altogether. If she felt such insecurity that it manifested itself in churlish behavior, as she confessed to Canfield, and if the undercurrents of this feeling remained with her so forcefully as to evoke the letters of 1922 and her treatment of Claude in One of Ours, we can expect to see its effects in others of her works as well. Certainly it would not be surprising that such an ongoing discomfort over these feelings would lead her to think of herself and Canfield, as writers, in terms of rivalry. Before exploring these issues more fully, however, we need to think further about the shape of the two writers’ careers.

Roughneck and Middlebrow

Canfield and Cather first became linked as writers in 1894 at the University of Nebraska, when they co-authored a short story called “The Fear That Walks by Noonday,” which won a prize and appeared in a campus publication, the Sombrero. In 1903, by which time she had published short stories in such respectable magazines as Scribner’s and the New England Magazine, Cather published her first book, a volume of poems. In 1904 Canfield received her doctorate. The year The Troll Garden was published, 1905, both were well enough established in the world of letters to attend Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday banquet on December 5. Woodress denies that this meant Canfield actually belonged among the “170 literary and quasi-literary notables” in attendance, saying disparagingly [End Page 58] that she “managed an invitation” even though she “had not yet begun her literary career.”³⁸ But in fact she had begun it; she had started publishing short stories and poems in magazines by the winter of 1904–05.³⁹ In 1907 she published her first novel, Gunhild. By 1915, when Cather’s The Song of the Lark included parallels with Gunhild, a persistent echoing of each other’s books began that would continue for some thirty years.

Their careers developed, however, along quite dissimilar trajectories, and their literary reputations, in the hierarchy established by critics and scholars, are very different. From today’s perspective, with Cather so highly esteemed and Canfield usually dismissed as a middlebrow (despite what might be assumed from the fact of her doctorate), the idea of Cather’s seeing her as a literary rival, even to the point of engaging in writerly oneupmanship, seems implausible. But that would not have been so obvious in the 1920s. Canfield was widely respected both as a writer and as an arbiter of America’s reading through her position on the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee. She was also a writer with a large readership, a real presence in the literary marketplace. It may have been partly, indeed, her very popularity that led to her middlebrow classification. Faye Hammill, who has called for “a new critical approach” to middlebrow writing, has also pointed out a nexus between middlebrow-ness and celebrity.⁴⁰

Canfield’s books, moreover, seem to have appealed primarily, and may have been intended to appeal primarily, to women readers—not a way to gain high esteem in a field dominated, even more than in the nineteenth century, by men. Her books were usually domestic in nature, concerned with marital and family relationships and the dailiness of life. Yet they were by no means so conventional or unchallenging as that description may imply. She did not produce love story after love story, with marriage being the culminating hope of a woman’s life, but (in a frequently quoted Catherian phrase) showed the underside of the carpet of the marriage plot, using it to explore complexities of character and social issues. She was adept in her handling of narrative point of view—indeed, in The Brimming Cup, in particular, modernistically experimental in her handling of it. A strong case can be made for her literary merit. But that case is rarely even proposed.⁴¹

Even in her own day Canfield was not generally numbered by critics among the producers of fine literature—despite the fact that cultural arbiter William Lyon Phelps called Her Son’s Wife (1926) not only her masterpiece but a masterpiece—as Cather was.⁴² Joan Shelley Rubin, who deplores the “conventional dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture” in her book The Making of Middlebrow Culture, nevertheless dismisses Canfield as “essentially a nineteenth-century figure” and sniffs that her experimentation with shifting narrative points of view in The Brimming Cup was carried out “more skillfully” by William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, a few years later.⁴³ Canfield was [End Page 59] also a prolific writer of nonfiction, mostly directed toward educational and other social purposes. Indeed, she thought of her fiction, too, largely in terms of public education and amelioration of social problems. Rubin, however, dismisses this element as well, writing that her novels showed merely “enough concern with contemporary issues to rescue her from antiquarianism.”⁴⁴ It is beyond my scope here, or for that matter my ability, to explain why this dismissal of Canfield first occurred and has continued. Perhaps it was because however seriously she was committed to the art of her fiction, she was more committed to social benefit than to constructing an image of herself as artist.

Cather, by contrast, was at great pains throughout her mature writing life to position herself as a literary writer, not a producer of mere entertainment or a social crusader disguising polemics as fiction. She thought of her novels (and some, though not all, of her short stories) in terms of art.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that she was very glad indeed when her books also achieved large sales, even though she generally espoused the position that fine writers were not likely to be popular and popular writers were not likely to be very fine. If we think we recognize a certain defensiveness in this two-handed strategy, that too may not have been unrelated to Canfield, the friend whose sales (she was keenly aware) usually exceeded her own. Perhaps she might better have pondered, if she was aware of it, what the poet Sarah Cleghorn wrote about Canfield: that “nobody could single out the influences strongly affecting American life for the first quarter of the [twentieth] century without including Dorothy’s novels.”⁴⁶

Cather wrote Canfield letters of congratulation when various of her books were published, and when she did, she praised them, but in ways that emphasized their wide sales while managing to express surprise that her own had attracted as large a market as they did. The pejorative implication of this emphasis on Canfield’s commercial success and the unlikelihood of her own—a way of positioning her friend’s books as merely popular fiction, however well done, and her own as higher literature—is clear in a letter of February 6 [1922] where she calls herself a “slow-selling author” and adds, “Now, I am NOT, with tightly compressed lips, throwing your magnificent sales in your face!”⁴⁷ “Magnificent sales” would not be a thing to throw in another’s face if they were not assumed by the thrower to be evidence of literary inferiority, mere popularity.

From Paris to Rome

Canfield’s The Brimming Cup, the most successful novel of her career commercially and perhaps also artistically, was the second-best seller of 1921, behind only Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.⁴⁸ The novel begins with a chapter labeled “Prelude,” set in Rome in the year [End Page 60] 1909, then quickly and without transition shifts to America in 1920, silently skipping eleven years. With striking similarity, Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, published six years later, opens with a “Prologue” set in Rome in 1848, then shifts to America in 1851, silently leaping a three-year gap in time. For either of them to choose to open a book in Rome which is otherwise set wholly in America seems odd on the face of it. For both of them to do so, Cather only a few years after the friend whose work she knew so well, seems more than odd. To call it coincidence would strain credibility, especially when we note parallels of detail between the similarly titled opening chapters.

The specific locations of the two opening settings are so close that on cursory reading one might think they were exactly the same. Not quite. Canfield employs a subtitle to set the stage of her Prelude as “Sunset on Rocca di Papa,” this placing it in the Alban Hills about 25 km. southeast of Rome. The name Rocca di Papa was originally Castrum Rocce de Papa, meaning Rock Castle of the Pope, because the twelfth-century Pope Eugene III lived there. The name came to have both a geographical and a civic meaning, referring to the rocky eminence itself and to the town or township and the administrative district headquartered there. For Canfield, its reference is solely geographic; her subtitle indicates that her scene occurs on Rocca di Papa, not in or at it. Her attention is fixed on the rugged elevation and the view it affords her characters, Neale and Marise—the newly engaged “two modern young people” of the Prelude’s second subtitle—as they await a tramcar “down to the Campagna” with the “setting sun . . . full in their faces.”⁴⁹

Cather’s Prologue also begins shortly before sunset at “a villa” on an eminence “overlooking Rome,” but in the Sabine Hills rather than the Albans.⁵⁰ John Murphy’s explanatory note in the Scholarly Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop indicates that the Sabines are located east of Rome.⁵¹ Web sites providing information on the Sabines variously place them northeast or north of Rome in a curving arc.⁵² In any event, it is clearly the more easterly end of the range that Cather had in mind, giving her characters, like Canfield’s Neale and Marise, a view of the city from east to west, into the sunset.

In their narrated action, the two opening chapters, let alone the full sweep of the two novels, could scarcely be more different as, starting from Rome, they went on to very different things. At the opening of Archbishop we see, rather than a young couple in love, a group of high-ranking churchmen (three Cardinals and a Bishop) discussing over dinner the possible appointment of a French missionary priest as bishop of the about-to-be-constituted diocese of New Mexico. Despite these differences, however, there are striking similarities in their descriptions of the radiantly beautiful vista out over what Cather calls the “soft and undulating” plains to the “low profile of the city” on the skyline.⁵³ Both emphasize tones of light and a lushly toned darkening. Canfield’s newly engaged [End Page 61] couple, as they wait on the rocky eminence for a cable car that will take them back to the city, observe the sun “dipping into the sea now, emblazoning the sky with a last flaming half-circle of pure color” while the plain is “quietly sinking into darkness.”⁵⁴ Cather’s churchmen see “waves of rose and gold thro[b] up the sky from behind the dome of the Basilica” as the “folds of russet country” turn to “violet.”⁵⁵

In both cases, associated qualities that lie beyond scenic value itself enhance the lush visual descriptions. By centering her characters’, and of course her readers’, last glimpse of the vista across the darkening countryside on the Dome of St. Peter’s, Cather implies an ecclesiastical emphasis appropriate to not only the Prologue but the entire novel. Canfield’s scene, while fully realistic, is metaphorical in a more direct way. Her vision of the plain “sinking into darkness”—reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain” in “Dover Beach,” a poem well suited to the novel’s themes of threatened love and the need to be true to one another—prompts Marise, as she looks across the “dark plain” while looking forward to her marriage, to foresee that she and Neale will “go down from this high place of safety” and “have to cross [the plain], painfully, step by step.”⁵⁶ She asks him to promise that as they do so, they will not lose their way. (The main body of the novel shows them very nearly doing just that, in ways that entail such large social issues as equality for women and racial and economic justice.) For Canfield, then, the resonance of the scene is humanistic; it is “evocative of all the centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.”⁵⁷ When a small note of religious devotion enters into this humanistic meditation, it is a facetious one. Marise recalls that when she was in school in France she kept hoping to “work up” a “religious ecstasy” but only “managed nearly to faint away once or twice” in her efforts to do so.⁵⁸

Cather never treats the religious impulse humorously. Yet a skeptical or critical note is sometimes heard in her close examinations of Church hierarchy—in the Prologue, in a certain sybaritic cast to her characterization of the three Cardinals. The Spanish Cardinal is particularly attentive to vintages of fine wine and hopes that if Father Latour is made Bishop he will manage to locate and return an El Greco painting given some years ago to a missionary to “Cia” (usually spelled Xia). At the end of the Prologue the four priests chat about a “Spanish dancing-girl” and “a new opera by young Verdi,”⁵⁹ while at the end of Canfield’s Prelude the two utterly serious young lovers try to envision a worthy moral future for themselves, a future of keeping faith.

My purpose in dwelling on these details of the two openings at Rome has been to demonstrate that they invite reading against each other. But it is not so much the fact of the parallels as the question of why they occur, why Cather adopted Canfield’s setting [End Page 62] in so similarly titled an opening and why she echoed Canfield’s description, that is significant. Relying on the correspondence between them that we have already observed, I hope to tease out a possible explanation and explore what it may allow us to understand about Cather’s artistic motivations. In doing so, we will come very near to what I believe is the heart of her complex personal and writerly connection with Dorothy Canfield and an important aspect of her self-conception.

Both Cather and Canfield had visited Rome, obviously a scene of compelling inherent interest. Canfield was in Rome, apparently for the first time, during the winter of 1911–12.⁶⁰ Cather had visited Rome somewhat earlier, in June 1908, with her close friend Isabelle McClung. Since her time there was considerably less than Canfield’s, she was presumably less familiar with the city itself, though not necessarily with its history, both classical and ecclesiastical, which seems to have engaged her attention since childhood. If it were not for the parallels I have noted, we might suppose that in beginning their novels there they were simply and coincidentally drawing on personal experience. But the mere fact of having been to a place does not explain an artistic decision to open a novel there. They were not, after all, writing travelogues. But neither were their visits, in either case, matters of simply having toured the city, for which both retained a deep affinity.

Canfield’s visit in 1911–12 was momentous for her most notably in that it allowed her to observe the educational work of Maria Montessori. As a result, she introduced Montessori methods to the United States in her 1912 book A Montessori Mother, only the first of many works, including fiction, that advocated or illustrated Montessori methods. Most often cited in this connection is her novel for young people Understood Betsy (1916). But the emotional import of the visit derived not just from this but from a powerful confluence of elements—besides the discovery of a major element in her life’s work, the impact of the ancient city itself and the fact of her deeply satisfying marriage She was in her early thirties at the time and four years married to John Fisher, with whom she enjoyed (to borrow one of her own titles) a “deepening stream” of affection. It was this confluence that inclined her to write, in The Brimming Cup, the story of a rewarding though not untroubled marriage and to give it a romantic opening setting in Rome.

Cather’s only known visit to Rome was also rich in emotional and intellectual associations. Just how much so is evident in a pair of messages she wrote to her brother Roscoe. While she was preparing for the trip she wrote, “Seems queer to be really on the way to Rome, for of course Rome has always existed for one, it was a central fact in one’s life in Red Cloud and was always the Capital of one’s imagination.”⁶¹ While there, she sent him a postcard showing the dome of St. Peter’s with this message: [End Page 63]

My Dear Roscoe: This is the dome of St. Peter’s from where I first saw it—one of the wonderful Roman gardens. It looms up from the east wherever one turns, and after you stay about the church and the Vatican and the catacombs for a time it is borne in upon one that there is where the modern world was born. From the day Charlemagne was crowned there and before, the Vatican was fashioning modern Europe. Next in wonder to the Rome of the Empire is the Catholic Rome of the middle ages.⁶²

A similar intensity is reflected in the Prologue to Death Comes for the Archbishop.

However deep Cather’s feelings about being in Rome at last, that in itself would not account for her decision, more than fifteen years later, to begin Archbishop there. Certainly an opening in Rome is appropriate for a novel tracing the work of two priests: Father Latour and Father Vaillant seek to bring the authority and practices of the Roman church to a part of the world where the Catholic religion introduced hundreds of years earlier by Franciscan friars had become amalgamated with local practices and the discipline of its priests vitiated by lack of oversight. But she could quite well have opened with what is presently the second chapter, where Father Latour finds himself lost in the arid spaces of the Southwest, without sacrificing the references to Rome that recur throughout, such as when Bishop Latour is awakened at his residence in Santa Fe by the sound of Angelus bells and enjoys “a pleasing delusion that he was in Rome.”⁶³ What remains surprising is that Cather would, as she well knew, choose the same setting for her opening chapter as Canfield had chosen for hers only a few years earlier and would call it by very nearly the same title: “Prologue,” as compared to Canfield’s “Prelude.” Appropriateness to the work as a whole does not seem an adequate explanation.

We know that Cather was well aware of The Brimming Cup. But another event, which intervened between that novel and Archbishop, led to another pairing of novels and reinforces our sense that the Roman parallel was no coincidence but pointedly intentional. Canfield returned to Rome. We know that Cather was aware of the fact because of a letter of (probably) June 17, 1922.⁶⁴ She might not, however, have known the purpose of the trip: Canfield was going back in order to be able to draw on the city more fully as a setting of the novel she was then writing, Rough-Hewn—a book also, and significantly, set partly in Paris and published only some five months after Cather’s letters of April and May of 1922 about feeling herself a “roughneck.”⁶⁵

Canfield had conceived this second novel about Marise and Neale while The Brimming Cup was still in draft. She told her agent, Paul Reynolds (also Cather’s agent), that it would be the “opposite-of-a-sequel,” what we would call a prequel, with a closing chapter “the same as the beginning of [Brimming Cup], literally the same, the very same [End Page 64] chapter.”⁶⁶ That would not in fact prove to be true, though the closing chapter of Rough-Hewn is indeed similar to the Prelude to Brimming Cup in that it is set in Rome and at the moment when Marise and Neale become engaged—that is, a moment shortly before the opening of Brimming Cup, where they are still basking in its glow.

Cather took keen notice of Rough-Hewn. She wrote to Canfield about the novel the month it was published, praising it but saying she thought the characterization of Neale was developed too exhaustively, in too much detail. In addition to this letter, however, she also made a novelistic response. Only eleven months later, in September 1923, she published A Lost Lady, with a differently-spelled Niel who is indeed treated sparingly. Like Neale, who “despair[s] at his dumb helplessness before the inert resistance of social relations,”⁶⁷ Niel feels stigmatized by the relative squalor of his home environment and is driven by a need to compensate for his origins.⁶⁸ On the face of it, it would seem impossible for A Lost Lady to have been a response to Rough-Hewn, since the two were published only eleven months apart. But as a letter of (probably) May 8, 1922, shows, Cather had read an excerpt from Rough-Hewn—which she called “that sketch about the University boy”—several months prior to its publication. Thanking Dorothy for sending her the excerpt, she added, “Of course it’s the same idea; the roughneck’s miracle”⁶⁹—the same, that is, as Claude’s becoming aware of his lack of social grace when faced by his friend David Gerhardt’s playing. Dorothy also played the violin and may, as Joseph Lovering assumes, have played the violin on some social occasion while the two were in Paris in 1902.⁷⁰ And in that connection Lovering also points out that when Claude hears David Gerhardt play, he feels a “bitter, bitter envy.”⁷¹

What I am proposing is that Cather’s Prologue was written out of an underlying sense of rivalry with her friend. It was that kind of personal insecurity, the kind Claude’s “envy” manifests, that she so clearly evidenced in Paris in 1902. As we have seen, Cather clearly and painfully recalled her emotions and behavior at that time in her letters to Dorothy about One of Ours only three years before beginning active work on Archbishop. Those letters were written in April and May of 1922. In October of 1922 Canfield published a second novel partially set in Rome, but with a direct link to Paris, which echoed Cather’s term “roughneck”—the term she had already attached to a portion of the story—in its title.

From Rome to New Mexico

In the considerable body of scholarship relating to the origins of Archbishop, its primary wellsprings are consistently and correctly located in Cather’s fascination with the [End Page 65] American Southwest. O’Brien states unequivocally that her “1925 rediscovery of the Southwest inspired” the novel.⁷² Woodress, who shares O’Brien’s emphasis on Cather’s initial acquaintance with the Southwest in 1912, tells the story of her crucial discovery of W. H. Howlett’s biography of French priest Joseph P. Machebeuf, who becomes the novel’s Father Vaillant, while she was staying at a hotel in Santa Fe in 1925.⁷³ These accounts of the book’s origins have been further enriched by Homestead’s revelation that a notebook kept by Edith Lewis but also used by Cather during this 1925 visit shows “how inextricably Cather and Lewis’s travels in the Southwest intertwined with Cather’s creative process.” Archbishop, Homestead concludes, “is nestled deeply in the middle of a shared, collaborative travel experience.”⁷⁴ Murphy, who insists that religious motivations were an equally important impelling factor, anchors his argument in Cather’s experience of Catholic culture in Europe in 1902 and her wish to celebrate “the story of the Catholic Church” in the Southwest, thus, like Woodress, intertwining the two threads.⁷⁵

As I read the story of the origins of Archbishop, it goes somewhat differently. Without at all seeking to deny the importance of the Southwest and its Catholic tradition in Cather’s conception of the work, I propose that her awareness of Canfield’s having opened The Brimming Cup in Rome and her submerged need to prove herself, once again, a finer literary artist than the popular writer she conceived of Canfield as being were equally important wellsprings, at least of her decision to open the work, not in the Southwest where it is anchored, but in Rome. My version of the story is that when Cather read the Roman Prelude to The Brimming Cup and then its reprise in the last scene of Rough-Hewn—with that novel’s invocation of Paris, its title that so closely echoes the word she had used for herself and for Claude, “roughneck,” and a central female character very much like Dorothy who attends school in France—her emotions from 1902 returned in force, triggering a series of associations that contributed to her artistic decision. That is, the Roman parallel springs as much from Paris as from Rome.

Certainly Cather had already, before she came across Howlett’s Life of Bishop Machebeuf, been thinking of writing a book about the Southwest and had been struggling to catch an angle on her material. Howlett provided her angle: the incursion of ultramontane Catholicism into New Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century in the wake of the U.S. military seizure of the area from Mexico.⁷⁶ The incursion of a centralized Catholicism: the incursion of Rome. Indeed, the first of Canfield’s two subtitles for her Prelude, “On the Rocca di Papa,” may have sealed Cather’s decision to adopt the Roman opening. “Rocca di Papa,” the Rock of the Pope, is a phrase that would have resonated powerfully with her conception of the book she was launching into, the role of Catholicism in the Southwest. [End Page 66]

The beginning in Rome did, of course, harmonize with that conception. But even if this fact provides a necessary rationale, it does not provide a sufficient one. Given the longer history of Cather’s awareness of Canfield’s work, then, neither coincidence nor the inherent nature of Archbishop sufficiently accounts for the Roman parallel with The Brimming Cup, carried out with such similarities of location and description, in chapters so similarly titled. It would be simply too improbable unless Cather wrote her Prologue with Canfield’s Prelude in mind. And that is what I believe happened. I believe that Cather’s opening in Rome was a direct and scarcely unconscious response to her friend’s conspicuously successful novel. It is as if she positioned her new work against Canfield’s in order to invite comparisons, which she must have believed would accrue in her favor. It is a conjectural explanation, of course, but one based on abundant and significant biographical evidence.

Her impulse may have gone something like this: Her dear friend Dorothy had begun one novel and ended another in Rome. Dorothy was a successful writer, and one whose sales exceeded her own, but not the artist that she herself was. Rough-Hewn was in fact that quintessential middlebrow kind of fiction, a love story.⁷⁷ Dorothy had long ago made her feel inferior, like a “roughneck.” She would start from the same place Dorothy had started in The Brimming Cup, in the hills overlooking Rome from the east, and go on from there to treat material of a more elevated kind, with greater spiritual and historical significance. She would show herself, once again, to be a literary artist, in contrast to her friend the oh-so-well-selling middlebrow.

Out of some such welter of self-defensive emotions—a persistent, perverse rivalry rooted in hurt and in, as she put it herself in One of Ours, “bitter, bitter envy”—Cather produced the rarefied atmosphere of what is often regarded as her finest book. Her recourse to the Roman Prelude of The Brimming Cup for the Prologue of Death Comes for the Archbishop, and her wrenching of the Roman beginning to very different effect from Canfield’s, emerged from a depth of personal feelings of long standing. This is not to say that the well-established readings of the work locating its origins in Cather’s love of the Southwest are wrong. That was certainly her primary impulse. Nor is it to deny that Archbishop reflects a complex admiration for Catholicism. Rather it is to say that a third factor, a sense of rivalry rooted in profound feelings of cultural deprivation, feelings of inferiority of social class, provided another major impetus for her masterwork.

A close reading of the role of Dorothy Canfield in Willa Cather’s life leads us to a revised conception of Cather’s sense of self. Once regarded as a poised, fully self-assured artist who lived by and for her art, above the vicissitudes of the world, she is revealed, [End Page 67] not for the first time, to be a woman who had to struggle for her self-assurance. Feelings that washed over her in 1902 and remained with her at least in memory for decades were what impelled her to conceive of her relationship with her novelist friend Dorothy Canfield as a kind of competition. They were part of what impelled her, again and again, to adopt the stance of the writer of high literature, indifferent toward (though she was actually very concerned with) the marketplace for books..

I have proposed elsewhere that Cather’s heroizing of the Great Plains in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia was a compensatory maneuver for her chagrin at feeling like a cultural primitive during the 1902 visit to Paris. How much, too, of Tom Outland’s embarrassed awkwardness when he walks into Godfrey St. Peter’s garden in The Professor’s House is traceable to this same troubled sense of self?⁷⁸ How much of the prickly over-sensitivity of Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy, which erupts in startling moments of flamboyant gesture and needless self-mockery, is traceable to the same source? The Roman parallel between Cather’s Prologue to Death Comes for the Archbishop and Canfield’s Prelude to The Brimming Cup is only the tip of a very large iceberg that points us toward a revised understanding of the genesis and the elevated tone of Cather’s masterwork, published six years after Canfield’s novel that opens in so similar and yet so very different a way. But the sea that floats that iceberg is not ultimately Canfield’s two novels of the early 1920s but her presence with Cather in Paris in 1902 and the devastating revision in Cather’s sense of self that her presence entailed.