Cather Studies, Volume 6: History, Memory, and War

Between Two Wars in a Breaking World: Willa Cather and the Persistence of War Consciousness

Between Two Wars in a Breaking World Willa Cather and the Persistence of War Consciousness J A N I S P . S T O U T Was it at the Marne? At Versailles, when a new geography was being made on paper? —Willa Cather, ‘‘148 Charles Street’’ In 1947 Willa Cather’s fellow modernist Katherine Anne Porter—a writer of whom Cather left no signs of awareness but who was keenly aware of Cather—wrote an aggressively humorous essay about Gertrude Stein in which she characterized the ‘‘literary young’’ who gathered around Stein in Paris in the 1920s as children stranded ‘‘between two wars in a falling world.’’1 Porter’s metaphoric adjective for the interwar period—‘‘falling’’—is evocative , if ambiguous, summoning echoes both of the ‘‘fallen’’ on the battlefield and of the ‘‘fall’’ from innocence in Eden, as well as the common phrase about the bottom dropping out from under one. Cather’s metaphor for the postwar period (it could not yet be called interwar at the time she was writing) was, of course, a different one—a metaphor of brokenness. In the preface to Not Under Forty (1936) she famously declared that the world ‘‘broke in two’’ in 1922 ‘‘or thereabouts’’ (812). Cather was scarcely alone in feeling this sense of rupture. The very year she alluded to (in so strangely evasive a way), 1922, was indeed the year of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its insistent images of brokenness. Michael North and others have pointed out that brokenness was a metaphor invoked not only by Eliot but by 70 71 Between Two Wars in a Breaking World many writers struggling, during the postwar years, to convey their sense of how thoroughly their lives and life in general had been disrupted . Europeans and Americans alike, perhaps people all around the world, were haunted by a feeling of having been severed from any intelligible past. They were haunted, that is, by the Great War —by a sense that, as Cather put it, the literary as well as geopolitical world had been so thoroughly sundered at the Marne or at Versailles that the present could no longer connect to the past. Many of them were troubled too by the sense that another war was impending . In that respect, Porter’s metaphor, though unusual and elusive, is perhaps a richer and more satisfying one than Cather’s. In using the progressive form ‘‘falling,’’ rather than ‘‘fallen,’’ she captured the sense of an ongoing process—as it most assuredly was. Cather’s phrase ‘‘broke in two’’ implies, instead, a one-time event, an action already complete. Writing in 1947, more than a decade after Cather affixed her preface to Not Under Forty, Porter (and everyone else) could easily see in retrospect that the years 1918 to 1939 were a time ‘‘between two wars.’’ It was by then a self-evident historical fact. But she had already been foreseeing the second war and thus implicitly defining the1920s and1930s as a period between two wars as early as1931. Several of Porter’s letters written in that year, as well as on through the rest of the decade, show that she was seized by a troubled apprehension of what was ahead.2 Not that her sense of foreboding was terribly unusual. She herself said that ‘‘everyone’’ was talking about the likelihood of war—a characteristically hyberbolic statement but one verified, to some extent, when we note that John Dos Passos (to cite just one example) was equally prescient in his view of the international situation by 1931. Various characters in his momentous 1932 novel 1919 characterize the Treaty of Versailles as a false peace and expect a renewal of war. Such fears were well founded. Though neither Porter nor Dos Passos nor the many others apprehensive about a return of war could have known it, the Nazi leaders who were seizing power in Germany in 1931 and 1932 (Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933) fervently believed ‘‘the war did not end in 1918.’’ To think it did, declared one, was ‘‘a laugh.’’3 Cather made no such pronouncements on the Versailles Treaty 72 ja n i s p. s t o u t (though she did indicate, during the Conference, that she wondered what Europeans thought of Woodrow Wilson). Nor, to my knowledge, did she make any such predictions of renewed...