Timothy Schaffert on how Ambrose Bierce, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner have treated “our often tawdry funerary customs”

The Coffins of Little Hope
by Timothy Schaffert
(Unbridled Books, 2011)

Timothy Schaffert joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry. Much like Essie, the 83-year-old, widowed obituary writer who narrates his recently published fourth novel, The Coffins of Little Hope, Schaffert is a bit obsessed with what can be discovered when “chronicling the dead.” Here he revisits how three master storytellers use end of life tales to plumb the nature of love, grief, prejudice, and horror.

As a child, I once saw an undertaker close the coffin lid on its inhabitant, and I’ve spent years trying to describe that dip-in-the-road feeling I got in my gut at the sight of it. The organist had stopped her wheezy hymn, bringing a thudding silence to the church. As sudden as a buzzard the undertaker then swooped up to the altar to unprop the pillow of the deceased (my great-grandfather), and a shadow slowly consumed the casket’s bed, my great-grandfather’s suit, his gaunt, stoic, pioneer’s face, then, lastly, his lovely and stately bald head. In my memory, I seem to recall hearing every squeak of the hinges and rustling of lace. The undertaker did everything but lock the lid and throw away the key. I felt I’d witnessed at the front of the church a bit of business that should’ve taken place at the back of the church, and such errors of decorum tend to echo across the years.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that some of my favorite short stories are those that have done exactly what that undertaker did—stories that offer unsettling insight into our often tawdry funerary customs.

Willa Cather: modernist or antimodernist?

Recent blog appreciations of My Ántonia, one of Willa Cather’s early novels, and of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, her last novel, bring to mind how divergent opinions once were about Cather’s early and late works. Although Granville Hicks conceded that O Pioneers! and My Ántonia “have their importance in American literature” because they have a “basis in reality,” his essay “The Case Against Willa Cather” started a trend in 1933 to denigrate her later works because they never tried to “see contemporary life as it is.” “She sees only that it lacks what the past, at least in her idealization of it, had,” Hicks wrote. Many other critics, including Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, took a similar line.

Cather’s reputation as an antimodernist stems in part from her angry responses to such criticism. She called her 1936 collection of essays Not Under Forty because “the book will have little interest for people under forty years of age. The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years.” The collection includes her 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé,” which many see as her writing credo:

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

Shelves of books have been written about what Cather meant by “the thing not named.” Does it echo Oscar Wilde’s “the Love that dared not speak its name”? Or was she aligning herself with the allusive, suggestive writing of the modernists who invite readers to create meaning as they read?

Wallace Stevens, no mean modernist, was an enthusiastic fan of Cather’s later work. In a letter to a friend about Sapphira and the Slave Girl on December 9, 1940—two days after the novel was published on Cather’s birthday—he observed:

Miss Cather is rather a specialty. You may not like the book; moreover, you may think she is more or less formless. Nevertheless, we have nothing better than she is. She takes so much pains to conceal her sophistication that it is easy to miss her quality.

Cather’s clear prose style helped make her books bestsellers, but can a writer be too readable? In Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading Deborah Carlin suggests “that it is the lucidity and seeming readability of Cather’s concise prose that make her novels difficult to place squarely within canonical modernism as we know it, despite the efforts of critics to redefine the parameters of what ‘modernism’ as a term signifies.”

The good news appears to be that today’s readers are able to discover Cather’s later works anew. As the writer who posts on The Port Stands at Your Elbow remarked with, we think, delight after picking up Willa Cather: Later Novels for Shadows on the Rock: “The collection also includes A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, Lucy Gayheart and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, none of which I know anything about.”

Related LOA works: Willa Cather: Complete Fiction and Other Writings

Willa Cather, 21, meets her first “man of letters” Stephen Crane, 23

Willa Cather was among the first readers of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. In November 1894 Crane sold the serialization rights to a shortened version of his novel to the Bacheller-Johnson Newspaper Syndicate. One of the syndicating papers, The Lincoln State Journal, employed Cather as its drama critic, even though she was then a senior at the University of Nebraska. The paper’s managing editor found “the grammatical construction of the story so faulty” that it required copyediting:

In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable performance. But the grammar certainly was bad.

The paper ran its version December 4–9, 1894 (the book version would be published the following October). The Bacheller syndicate liked Crane’s writing so much it offered him a job as a traveling reporter and war correspondent. His circuitous route to his ultimate assignment in Mexico took him through Lincoln, Nebraska, which is how in February 1895 he crossed paths with Cather, a meeting she later dramatized:

I happened to be in the managing editor’s room when Mr. Crane introduced himself. . . I considered nothing of vital importance except good stories and the people who wrote them. This was the first man of letters I had ever met in the flesh, and when the young man announced who he was, I dropped into a chair behind the editor's desk where I could stare at him without being too much in evidence.

Just two years younger yet clearly starstruck, Cather gives us one of the most vivid contemporary first-person impressions of Crane (whose birthday is today, November 1):

He was thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was shaggy and unkempt. His grey clothes were much the worse for wear and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and were badly run over at the heel.

Crane was notoriously reticent about talking about his writing and he rebuffed attempts to engage him. Yet “on the last night he spent in Lincoln,” a remarkable conversation took place when the two were alone in the newspaper office:

Other men, he said, could sit down and write up an experience while the physical effect of it, so to speak, was still upon them, and yesterday's impressions made to-day's "copy." But when he came in from the streets to write up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed, and he sat twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a schoolboy.

I mentioned The Red Badge of Courage, which was written in nine days, and he replied that, though the writing took very little time, he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood. His ancestors had been soldiers, and he had been imagining war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers, and in writing his first war story he had simply gone over his imaginary campaigns and selected his favorite imaginary experiences. . . "The detail of a thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native product, but it takes forever," he remarked.

Cather published “When I Knew Stephen Crane” in the June 23, 1900, issue of the Pittsburgh Library, less than three weeks after Crane’s death from tuberculosis, and more than five years after their meeting. In her account, the narrator senses something fateful in a one-time encounter with the fidgety, anxious young writer:

At the close of our long conversation that night . . . I suggested to Crane that in ten years he would probably laugh at all his temporary discomfort. Again his body took on that strenuous tension and he clenched his hands, saying, "I can't wait ten years, I haven't time." . . . He had the precocity of those doomed to die in youth. I am convinced that when I met him he had a vague premonition of the shortness of his working day, and in the heart of the man there was that which said, "That thou doest, do quickly."

Of related interest:

• The American Literary Blog recently wrote about the writing and publication of The Red Badge of Courage
• The Poetry Foundation links to a number of examples of Crane’s poetry

Related LOA works: Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry; Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (includes "When I Knew Stephen Crane" and two reviews of Crane's works)

Sarah Orne Jewett, “unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives”

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) turns 161 today. She was just 19 when she published her first story in the Atlantic Monthly (accepted by then assistant editor William Dean Howells). Over the next thirty-five years she would build a devoted readership through her twenty novels and story collections, each filled with carefully wrought portraits of the farmers, fishermen, and tradespeople she lived among along the coast of southern Maine. Writing about her first novel, Deephaven (1877), Howells discerned “an uncommon feeling for talk—I hear your people.”

For a more than a century, critics have acclaimed the interlaced stories of The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) as her masterpiece. Here she populates the fictional town of Dunnett Landing, a composite of coastal towns around Boothbay Harbor, with a memorable cast of colorful characters: a fiercely independent herbalist landlady, a garrulous retired sailor, a jilted, lovelorn young woman, among many others. Rudyard Kipling wrote her: “It’s immense—It’s the very life. So many of the people of less sympathy have missed the lovely New England landscape, and the genuine New England nature. I don’t believe even you know how good the work is.”

Willa Cather counted The Country of the Pointed Firs as one of three books destined for literary immortality, alongside The Scarlet Letter and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “No other [books] confront time and change so serenely.” “The 'Pointed Fir' sketches are living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air-spaces about them,” Cather wrote in her introduction to a two-volume collection of Jewett's work in 1925. “They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself.”

Sarah Orne Jewett came into Willa Cather’s life at a critical moment. As Hermione Lee notes in her biography Willa Cather: Double Lives:

Though some of her few close friends, such as Dorothy Canfield Fisher or Zoë Akins, were writers, [Cather] did not meet, or admit much interest in, the other great writers of her time, Edith Wharton or Ellen Glasgow or Gertrude Stein, and was dismissive of the only other well-known Nebraskan woman writer, Mari Sandoz. The one exception to this isolation was her brief friendship, of great formative importance for Cather’s life and writing, with the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett, which came when Jewett was in her late fifties and Cather had not yet begun to write novels.

Jewett gave Cather crucial advice about the concentration and single-mindedness needed to become a good writer. But it was her example, as well as her advice, which was important for Cather ... she warmed to Jewett’s unselfconscious, matter-of-fact love stories between women, in the sad and beautiful story “Martha’s Lady” or in the novel Deephaven.... That innocent, idealized intimacy between women, which enabled Jewett to tell Cather that she did not need to use a male narrator to describe feelings of love for a woman, was not open to the more self-conscious and self-concealing Cather. But the example Jewett gave her, at the time she most needed it, was of a woman’s writing that was strong, truthful, and authentic, and could not be dismissed as “merely” feminine.

Cather had met Jewett in 1908 at what Henry James described as the “waterside museum” at 148 Charles Street in Boston. This was the home where Annie Fields, widow of Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields, and Jewett had been keeping their “Boston marriage” for some twenty-five years. In fact, some readers chided James because they found his portrayal of Olive Chancellor and her young ward Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians objectionably close to Fields and Jewett. Cather captured the old-world charm of the house in her brief sketch “148 Charles Street,” and in “Miss Jewett” she set down her appreciation of Jewett’s work as well as a portrait of her in person:

“The distinguished outward stamp”—it was that one felt immediately upon meeting Miss Jewett: a lady, in the old high sense. It was in her face and figure, her carriage, her smile, her voice, her way of greeting one. There was an ease, a graciousness, a light touch in conversation, a delicate unobtrusive wit. You quickly recognized that her gift with the pen was one of many charming personal attributes.

In Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Work Paula Blanchard records how critical attitudes to Jewett have changed:

In recent years Jewett has become recognized by feminist scholars as an unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives.... Jewett’s women are not the self-effacing and compliant helpmates portrayed in the typical Victorian novel, but vigorous, independent country-women, mostly widows and spinsters, who support themselves and their children by farming, nursing, or whatever comes to hand. Warm, humorous, and practical, they are the mainstays of their families and communities, keeping alive not only the gardens that symbolize their vitality but also the ties of sympathy that hold any human society together.

You can read Jewett's story, “Going to Shrewsbury,” available free at LOA's Story of the Week site.

Related LOA works: Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories; Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (includes "148 Charles Street" and "Miss Jewett")