Silences (28 page)

1887, to Bridges

            
It was quite right to tell me what Woolridge thought—that is what I wanted to know—and to use it as a dissuasive, if you liked; but not as a discouragement (yr. own word): discouragement is not what my complaint, in my opinion, needs. Our institute provides us means of discouragement, and on me at all events they have had all the effect
that could be expected or wished and rather more. . . .

1887, also to Bridges

            
Tomorrow morning I shall have been three years in Ireland, three
hard wearying wasting wasted years. . . . They should see my heart and vitals, all shaggy with the whitest hair. In those I have done God’s will (in the main) and many many examination papers. . . . I only need one thing—a working health,
a working strength. . . .

1888, to Bridges

            
I laughed outright and often, but very sardonically, to think you and the Canon [Dixon] could not construe my last sonnet; that he had to write to you for a crib. It is plain I must go no farther on this road: if you and he cannot understand me, who will?

Hopkins died in 1899 at the age of forty-five.

                      
. . . Only what
word

              
Wisest my heart breeds, dark heaven’s baffling ban

              
Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,

              
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.
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. . . See, banks and brakes

              
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

              
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

              
Them; birds build—but
not I build; no, but strain,

              
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

              
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
^**

Herman Melville (1819–1891)
^▴

“O who shall reveal the horrors of poverty in authorship that is high?”:

1849

            
When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over the back of his chair, and
perching on his pen, and dancing in his inkstand—like the Devils about St. Anthony—what can you expect of that poor devil? What but a beggarly
Redburn?

1851

            
I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever
grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,—I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the
other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

1863 All attempts at
making a living from writing had failed. Melville yielded himself to silence, except for occasional poetry; burned the work no one had cared to publish (“Have I not saved you from the drear/Theft and ignoring?”) and wrote to it—and to work that sought to be written, the poem “Immolated.”

              
Children of my happier prime,

              
When one yet lived with me, and threw

       
       
Her rainbow over life and time,

              
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!

                      
O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air,

              
And fed on flowers and light, and dew

              
Of morning meadows—spare, Ah, spare

              
Reproach; spare, and upbraid me not

              
That, yielding scarce to reckless mood,

              
But jealous of your
future lot,

              
I sealed you in a fate subdued.

1865–1885 (Fragments from the years of occasional poetry)

From
Camoëns

(Before)

              
And ever must I fan this fire?

              
Forever in flame on flame aspire?

              
Ever restless, restless, craving rest—

              
The Imperfect toward Perfection pressed!

              
Yea, for the God demands thy best.

              
The world with endless beauty teems,

              
And thought evokes new worlds of dreams:

              
Hunt then the flying herds of themes!

              
And fan, yet fan thy fervid fire,

              
Until the crucibled gold shall show . . .

(After)

              
What now avails the pageant verse,

              
Trophies and arms with music borne?

              
Base is
the world; and some rehearse

              
How noblest meet ignoble scorn.

              
Vain now thy ardor, vain thy fire,

              
Delirium mere, unsound desire:

              
Fate’s knife hath ripped thy chorded lyre. . . .

              
From
The American Aloe on Exhibition

              
[flowering once every hundred years]

              
But few they were who came to see

     
         
The Century-Plant in flower:

              
Ten cents admission—price you pay

              
For bon-bons of the hour. . . .

              
But lone at night the garland sighed

              
While moaned the aged stem:

              
“At last, at last! but joy and pride

              
What part have I with them?

              
Let be the dearth that kept me back

              
Now long
from wreath decreed;

              
But, Ah, ye Roses that have passed

              
Accounting me a weed!”

              
From
Thy Aim, Thy Aim?

              
Thy aim, thy aim?

              
. . . By some deed shall ignite the acclaim?

              
Then beware, and prepare thee

              
Lest . . . yearning be sequelled by shame.

              
. . . Then if, living, you kindle a flame,

              
Your guerdon will be but a flower,

              
Only a flower,

              
The flower of repute,

              
A flower cut down in an hour.

              
. . . And, dying, you truly ennoble a name—

              
Again but a flower!

              
Only a flower,

              
A funeral flower,

              
. . . The belated funeral flower of fame.

The belated funeral
flower of fame.

Willa Cather (1876–1947)
^▴

In 1906, when the thirty-two-year-old Willa Cather’s first book of fiction,
The Troll Garden,
was published (in it, two imperishable Nebraska and Pittsburgh-inspired stories: “Wagner Matinee” and “Paul’s Case”), she had been writing and publishing for years. (Assorted earlier writings, now being collected, already fill two thick
volumes.) A future of steady, ever more distinguished productivity seemed assured.

Yet that year the abundant flow ceased. For the next five years she produced one (mostly Jamesian) story a year, stories which she later repudiated, forbidding their ever being republished. In 1912, there was a novel (also Jamesian),
Alexander’s Bridge,
which—as with the stories—she later rejected, characterizing
it as an attempt to be acceptably literary, that is, “genteel” in treatment, milieu; written because

            
. . . usually the young writer must have his affair with the external material he covets; must imitate and strive to follow the masters he most admires, until he finds he is starving for reality and cannot make this go any longer. Then he learns that it is not the adventure he sought,
but the adventure that sought him, which has made the enduring mark upon him.

The master she most admired in 1906 was Henry James. Cather had sent
The Troll Garden
to him on its publication, with a letter. James never responded. When Cather learned that her friend Witter Bynner knew him (as a result of having sent James
his
first book), she asked that he inquire of its reception. Bynner did so,
in spite of remarks from James on “lady novelists who victimize the supine public.” James wrote back:

            
I have your graceful letter about “The Troll Garden” which only reached me some time ago (as many works of fiction duly reach me), and if I brazenly confess that I not only haven’t read it, but haven’t even been meaning to (till your words about it thus arrived), I do no more than
register the sacred truth. That sacred truth is that, being now almost in my 100th year [he was sixty-three], with a long and weary experience of such matters
behind me, promiscuous fiction has become abhorrent to me, and I find it the hardest thing in the world to read almost
any
new novel. Any is hard enough, but the hardest from the innocent hands of young females, young American females perhaps
above all. This is a subject—my battered, cynical, all-too-expert outliving of such possibilities—on which I could be eloquent, but I haven’t time and will be more vivid and complete some other day. I’ve only time now to say that I
will
then (in spite of these professions) do my best for Miss Cather—so as not to be shamed by your so doing yours.

Cather was given the reply; waited. No letter ever
came. (Perhaps, or so I wish to believe out of regard for his literary judgment, James did not open the book.)

It was after this that the constriction of writing (a true hidden silence) began.

The course of Willa Cather’s development had not been as that of the young writer she describes above. She had not had to work her way through imitation; she had
begun
—unselfconsciously—with writing the
“reality” that had made “the enduring mark” on her. But her landscapes and people, her developing vision of what was significant in them, even her direct, vigorous voice, were outside the prevalent, the admired, as was increasingly being impressed upon her.
^*
James himself, the model, was in massive contradiction—attitude, content, form (not excellence)—to all that was deepest in her to write.
By the time she sent him
The Troll Garden,
she was starving for validation that her “reality” was material for art; for encouragement to go on. His seeming disesteem was the last heaviness added to the other near-unendurable pressures to scorn, deny her own material and vigor—write in the manner
and of what was not hers; almost give up on herself as a serious writer.
^*