Issue Four

If one had to guess what type of work espoused such counterintuitive values as hatred of progress, suspicion of family, distrust of women, mockery of religion, and, for good measure, xenophobia, one would most likely guess the work to be something akin to the Unabomber’s manifesto. One would not expect such values within a great American novel. Perhaps one or two of these ideas would not be surprising, but certainly not the whole bunch. Yet, all of these values are part of the foundation of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and, startlingly, both in spite of and as a result of these values, the novel is beautifully written and moving.

The Professor’s House is the story of Godfrey St. Peter, a writer and professor in the Midwestern town of Hamilton. After years of working in relative obscurity on an eight volume History of the Spanish Adventurers in North America, St. Peter has finally achieved fame and financial reward–a five thousand pound Oxford prize in history. Though he should be exulting in his newfound success, he is strangely melancholy. He has purchased a larger and more luxurious house, yet he procrastinates in moving there, and remains, instead, in his old run-down one. He has become recently distant to his wife, Lillian, to his daughters Rosamond and Kathleen, and to their respective husbands, Louie Marsellus and Scott McGregor. While he is only in his fifties, St. Peter gives off a sense that he has already lived the best part of his life.

He tells his wife, “If with that cheque I could have brought back the fun I had writing my history, you’d never have got your house.”

Here, the Professor both hints at his dissatisfaction and voices a major concern of the novel: the distinction between the contentment of self-fulfillment and the creature comforts of material wealth.

This distinction is most apparent in the new riches of Rosamond and Louie. Louie has sold the patent for an invention called the Outland Engine (an invention which is never fully explained, but involves using a certain gas to create a vacuum that is revolutionizing aviation). The true creator of the Outland Engine was a man named Tom Outland, Rosamond’s former fiancée, who was killed in World War I. Tom didn’t live to see any of the profits, and while he was interested in the Engine as an intellectual activity and not as a potential moneymaker, he did have it patented and left to Rosamond in his will. The patent has made Mr. and Mrs. Marsellus a fortune, and they freely spend it on furs, jewels, and a lavish estate house they have named “Outland.”

In contrast to how Rosamond and Louie are reaping the rewards of Tom’s work is the Professor’s attitude. Rosamond offers St. Peter a large stipend so that he can quit teaching and focus on writing. In response, he answers: “There can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can’t explain just how I feel about it, but it would somehow change my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. I’m purely selfish in refusing your offer; my friendship with Outland is the one thing that I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue.” For the Professor, to cash in on the work of Outland would be to taint the purity of their friendship.

He further tells Rosamond that she didn’t have a choice in accepting the money, for her “bond with him was social, and it followed the laws of society, and they are based on property.”

His friendship, on the other hand, did not have such a “material clause.” Though the Professor is tactful as always in such a response, the implication is clear: his friendship was of a higher order even than marriage because money was in no way attached.

For a character who is long dead even before the start of the novel, Tom has quite a presence. He continually hovers in the Professor’s thoughts and conversations, but aside from the discussion of his role in the invention and cryptic references to his nobility of character, he is left mostly unexplained for almost a hundred pages. Cather chooses to reveal him slowly and piques our interest in doing so.

When she finally does introduce him, the Professor recalls how a sun-weathered Tom, wearing a Stetson and duster, appeared at his house one day and informed him that he was interested in enrolling in the university. Tom’s parents are dead; he has no formal education, and he has spent the last years of his life working as a cattle hand on the open range in New Mexico. Though such a background seems a dubious preparation for the university, the Professor observes a special quality in Tom’s character and he helps him enter the school. Tom not only proves himself to be the best student the Professor has ever taught, he becomes almost a part of the St. Peter family.

Tom’s idyllic relation to the St. Peters continues uninterrupted for some time, save for one aspect: he falls from Mrs. St. Peter’s favor. Lillian begins to grow jealous of Tom’s friendship with her husband and she also suspects that he is disingenuous and has something to his life that he is withholding from them. It turns out that she is right, and what Tom has withheld is the subject of the second part of the novel titled “Tom Outland’s Story.”

When the rest of the family is on vacation, Tom finally tells St. Peter what he has hidden from them. Of the story, St. Peter remarks, “It was nothing very incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about–until he grows older.”

While working for a cattle company in New Mexico, Tom discovers, inside an almost impenetrable mesa, an ancient cliff city. He can hardly articulate the nearly religious wonder he experiences at the sight: “Such silence and stillness and repose–immortal repose. That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity… I can’t describe it.”

He and his best friend, Roddy Blake, quickly go to work and set-up a camp on the mesa and clean and organize the contents of the city. Tom eventually decides to go to Washington, D.C. and petition for a group of professionals to come and investigate the site. His experience there is humiliating: he is shuttled from one secretary to another, and the officials in D.C. are more interested in receiving a free lunch than in discussing his find.

Dejected, Tom returns to the mesa only to find out that Roddy has sold off the contents of the city to a German for a substantial profit. He is incensed, and tells Blake, “If it was money you’d lost gambling, or my girl you’d made free with, we could fight it out and maybe be friends again. But this is different.”

Tom makes his point all too well, and Blake leaves. Dismayed at his cruelty to his old friend, Tom tries to track him down, but though he leaves notices and offers rewards all over the Southwest, he never sees Blake again.

On the surface, “Tom Outland’s Story” has almost nothing to do with the earlier section, “The Family,” except in the most tangential sense that it is the past history of a person who, in spirit at least, is integral to the novel. The first section of the book has an almost Henry James-like quality in its fastidious attention to the social mores of a well-educated and well-monied set (as seen most evidently in the dialogue, which manages to be faultless and most often loaded with varying degrees of undertone). The second section, on the other hand, seems stripped down. Tom Outland is alone, or with one solid friend or two, amidst the magnificent and impassive landscape.

Yet, the section works perfectly with the rest of the book. The reason why it works is largely a thematic one. Early on in the novel, St. Peter remembers telling his sewing woman, Augusta, how, in calling one of her female work models, “the bust,” she was using a “natural law of language” called metonymy. Cather is indulging in a little metafiction here, for she is describing a literary device that she herself has used in titling the novel The Professor’s House. On the most basic level, St. Peter’s house with its “stairs that were too steep,” and its “halls that were too cramped,” is the object that metonymically represents him. It’s important not to get carried away with such analogizing, but, suffice to say, the Professor does not want to leave his old house, with its host of imperfections, for a more lavish one for the same reason that he does not want to become someone who he isn’t. The substitution of the house for the Professor is largely self-evident. After all, there aren’t many novels written strictly about inanimate objects.

Cather’s use of metonymy (or, in this next case, more correctly, synecdoche) becomes more interesting when the word “house” is considered in its denotation of family. In this scheme, the professor’s house, or his family, becomes the stand-in for something larger, which is America. This comparison might seem a bit extreme, but Cather lays it out quite clearly. A great portion of the Professor’s sadness owes itself to the fact that his family is not truly his own. Louie is specifically (if offhandedly) described as a foreigner, a foreigner who sinisterly looks like the family he is invading. Of Louie, the narrator states, “There was nothing Semitic about his countenance except his nose—that took the lead.” The Professor is also amazed that his wife could have so willingly accepted such a son-in-law. He thinks that she “would have cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt someone so foreign into the family circle.” Louie has infiltrated St. Peter’s family, not with force, but with congeniality. Now, the Professor has to sit by and watch as Louie and his converted daughter, Kathleen, turn the sacred memory of Tom Outland, into dollars and cents.

The tragedy that occurs within the Professor’s family occurs on a much larger scale in “Tom Outland’s Story.” Tom invites Father Duchene, an old, worldly priest, to examine the city and, of its past inhabitants, he says, “your tribe were a superior people…who lived for more than food and shelter.” They were also, subsequently, most likely wiped out by “brutal invaders.” Not only were these people destroyed in the past, their memory is disregarded in the present. Tom’s reverent attitude toward the Cliff City is contrasted with the D.C. government officials who are only interested in expensive lunches, and, quite pointedly, an “International Exposition of some sort in Europe,” an exposition that will bring them money and fame. In other words, they are interested not in America’s past, but in something outside, in this case, Europe. As if these examples are not enough, Tom’s friend Blake sold the remains of the Cliff City to a German. For the right price, foreigners, with the eager help of Americans, are walking off with the country’s past and, thereby, its identity.

If it sounds like Cather does her fair share of allegorizing, she does and she does not at the same time. The story of the Professor is always the particular story of him, at a tenuous stage of life, and his family. His story is not to be interpreted simply as a symbol for some other, deeper stuff that is going on. Similarly, Tom Outland’s story (though it does contain Father Duchene whom Cather uses as a bit of a soapbox to voice her more overarching ideas) should not be viewed merely as some metaphor to explain the state of the country. This section is most engaging on the concrete level of the actual story. And Cather hooks us on the story through her exquisitely spare prose.

In another instance of Cather’s self-reflective metafiction, the Professor notes of Tom’s writing, “the adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s emotions.” Such an analysis applies to Cather’s own writing, where there is never a superfluous word, never a word that does other than drive the story along. Cather points to her larger concerns, not with the clumsy use of symbols, but instead by writing each particular section so clearly and concisely, that we can not but see the parallels she draws.

The Professor’s House is a truly remarkable novel. Its smooth surface belies the mass of contradictions beneath. While never straying from the simplicity of her writing, Cather manages to invoke ideas of the utmost complexity. The novel beautifully argues for purity of spirit over commercialism, even while it dismisses religion (as the paradoxical, and perhaps unsubtle, name Godfrey (God-free) St. Peter implies). It exhorts the importance of friendship, but warns of female progeny who will run off with one’s bloodline. The human mind is admired, but science is denigrated as a “sleight-of-hand” that distracts from “the old riddles.” Community is sacred, but at the cost of shutting out “foreigners.”

Not all of these ideas are exactly high-minded. It’s always a treacherous game to ascribe the thoughts of the narrator to the author, especially when the narrator tells the story mostly through the perspective of a character who is in the throes of what could accurately be described as a mid-life crisis. However, because the Professor’s perceptions are usually dead-on, even if jaded, and because of Cather’s precise organization of her material, it seems safe to say that she shared the sentiments of her book. In light of this, we can see an author who seeks transcendence even while she is tied down by her own prejudices. Cather, to a certain extent, realized the ultimate impossibility and, perhaps, undesirability of her vision. In the last section of the book, “The Professor,” St. Peter becomes again “the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter,” who existed before the “secondary social man.” This reversion implies the underlying dream of the entire book: to be the absolute essence of oneself, untainted by any social relations or obscured by any profession. Of course, pining for this type of existence, however poignant, is a quixotic fantasy. The undiluted self is a fleeting and romantic dream, and, inevitably, the Professor receives word of his family’s imminent return.