The Immeasurable Possession of Air: Willa Cather and Southwestern Romance

AUDREY GOODMAN The Immeasurable Possession ofAinWillaCather and Southwestern Romance From her first tour of Europe in 1902 to her many travels in the American Southwest, Willa Cather asserted her fascination with unwritten regions. While in France she located a remote fishing village called Lavandou, seemingly unknown in the capital, invisible on ordinary maps, and "merely mention[ed]" in Baedeker; she and her companion Isabelle McClung chose it as their destination "chiefly because we could not find anyone who had ever been here, and because in Paris people seemed never to have heard of the place" (WCE 154). In Lavandou 's conspicuous absence of aesthetic appeal, Cather found the subject that would preoccupy her fiction: the sense of relation that renders landscape a figure of epiphanic understanding, artistic autonomy, and imaginative possession. She wrote, Out of every wandering in which people and places come and go in long successions, there is always one place remembered above the rest because the external or internal conditions were such that they most nearly produced happiness. I am sure that for me that one place will always be Lavandou. Nothing else in England or France has given anything like this sense of immeasurable possession and immeasurable content. I am sure I do not know why a wretched little fishing village, with nothing but green pines and blue sea and a sky of porcelain, should mean more than a dozen places that I have wanted to see all my life. Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 5o Audrey Goodman No books have ever been written about Lavandou, no music ot pictures ever came from here, but I know well enough that I shall yearn for it long after I have forgotten London and Paris. One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame. (WCE 157-58, emphasis added) The feeling of "possession" and "content" Cather finds along this patch of rocky coast acts as a substitute for the worldly power that other writers seek in cultural centers. With protective ambiguity, she refuses to specify whether this feeling is created by "external" or "internal" conditions and characterizes the village as "wretched" but "remembered," containing "nothing" but meaning more than all other European places. Cather assetts "immeasurable possession" of Lavandou because it will not yield its full meaning through a single comprehensive glance, and claims "immeasurable content" because its atmosphere has no significance when reduced to parts and names. In writing of the intuitive relation between place and consciousness while resisting its rational explication , Cather begins her romance with landscape. Lavandou would not, of course, be the "one place" that produced happiness for Cather or for her readers. Cather's fiction provides seemingly easy access to many regions either in the eatly stages ofsettlement or long abandoned, places she would characterize in Death Comes for the Archbishop by their "newness" or "lightness" as "the bright edges of the world" (273). Cather's early critic Joseph Wood Crutch observed that she begins "not with an intellectual conviction which is to be translated into characters and incidents but with an emotional reaction which she endeavors to recapture in her works; and she completes the whole creative process without ever having, herself, imperilled the fresh richness of the emotion by subjecting it to analysis" (55). At the time of this review of The Professor's House, Cather had already written "The Novel Démeublé," stating her aim to do away with the props of the realist novel in order to focus on the feeling upon the page, to evoke "the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood" (WCW 41—42). Debate about the value of Cather's fiction, however, has most often been concerned with the literal foundations of its emotional af- Wiíía Cather and Southwestern Romance51 feet: its association with specific places, its historical settings, its encoding of sexual content. This debate...