A while back, wrapped in a blanket, exhausted and in need of rest, I pulled The Professor’s House from my bookshelf, where it had lingered for years. Willa Cather, one of the dominant voices in American literature in the 1910s and ’20s, seemed like the perfect author to accompany me while I curled in the corner of the sofa.
For me, Cather is a known quantity. I’ve read her well-known prairie novels, O Pioneers and My Antonia, and Song of the Lark, her story of an artist’s coming of age, at least twice each over the years. Shadows on the Rock, with its tales of old Quebec, was a surprise I happened upon in adulthood. And her masterwork, Death Comes for the Archbishop — a novelization of the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico — is one of the most unique and accomplished novels I’ve encountered in 20th-century American literature.
Settling into The Professor’s House felt familiar. The cadences of language were ones I knew, and the people who wandered onto the scene seemed like distant cousins of characters I’ve met elsewhere over the years. Structurally, it called to mind both Shadows and Archbishop, as it is written in three distinct parts that read almost like novellas, rather than as a single, continuous narrative. The interlaced midwestern, southwestern and European settings, and the simmering themes of invigorating friendship, faith (or its absence), and how to find meaning in one’s middling vocation, are also consistent Cather material. As I read by the fire, I felt like I was visiting a place I’d once lived in the company of old friends.
Here, Cather’s protagonist is Professor Godfrey St. Peter, a meditative, late-middle-aged historian of French Canadian and American descent whose great lifework, other than his family and his teaching, is a book titled Spanish Adventurers in North America. For him, the study is no mere monograph written to please the higher-ups at his university; it is his passion. In the novel’s opening pages, St. Peter sits in his inconvenient but beloved home office fondly recalling the moment of his inspiration, a moment when he had “the courage to say to himself, ‘I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing.’”
Although Cather may have been inspired to similar heights of greatness as Godfrey St. Peter, The Professor’s House, comfortable and gently lyrical as it may be, is not dazzling. The longer I read, the more I began to feel it was a warmup exercise for her triumph two years later in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Like Cather’s old Archbishop Latour, St. Peter reflects on life as he has lived it, but his sense of purpose is comparatively ambiguous and unsettled, and as a reader I found it less satisfying to accompany him in his musings. Unlike the faithful archbishop, the professor seems merely open to the idea of faith, but the narrative remains vague on this point, even to the end. Cather gestures at his relationship to God and to life’s meaning but leaves these realms mostly unexplored. The novel’s closing finds the professor at something of a crossroads, where life and death hang in the balance. And his housekeeper, Augusta, a stalwart German Catholic, a woman reminiscent of many a humble supporting character in Archbishop, plays a symbolic but ultimately understated role in the resolution of this personal crisis.
In the end, I was glad I had read The Professor’s House, though as novels go it is relatively unremarkable. It has flashes of Cather’s characteristic eloquence. But I experienced this book as something more like writing-on-its-way, something that allowed important ideas to emerge and develop, but which ultimately hinted at some greater work that had yet to come to be.
For those who spend their days endeavoring to create anything of lasting value or beauty, it is good to consider such misfires: works that are worthy but not quite masterful; projects that are well-wrought but land in the middle ground of artistic accomplishment. They remind us that every masterpiece is preceded by myriad preparatory moments, whether they be quieter years of education or apprenticeship, or louder, blazing conflagrations of everything-gone-wrong. It’s in these modest spaces of composition, revision, and reworking that we writers — and artists of all sorts — spend most of our time. They’re rougher regions, certainly, but we can work there in constant hope that we may yet brush up against instances of utterly impossible beauty.
Carla Galdo is a poet, essayist and Notre Dame parent from Lovettsville, Virginia. Her work has appeared in First Things, Word on Fire, Humanum and Front Porch Republic.