Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

The Dialectics of Seeing in Cather’s Pittsburgh: “Double Birthday” and Urban Allegory

253 The Dialectics of Seeing in Cather’s Pittsburgh “Double Birthday” and Urban Allegory J O S E P H C . M U R P H Y Willa Cather’s stature as cultural icon is inextricable from the iconography of her settings. Her fiction famously engages the spectacles of the Divide and the Southwest, but it draws equally and fundamentally upon those of the modern city. Cather’s modern cities are in a sense anti-iconographic: they resist as well as attract the eye. They instill desire in characters who can weather their anonymity and competition; still, their treasures hide behind walls of concert halls and museums, fog and memory, at times as inaccessible as the dead cities of the Southwest that set them in cultural relief. As Susan J. Rosowski has demonstrated in her essay “Willa Cather as a City Novelist,” Cather’s urbanites tend to be reluctant sojourners in cities rather than devoted metropolitans. For Anton Rosicky the city is an extended stopover on a life journey that begins and ends on the land; for Jim Burden it is only a practical point on the larger, continental map of his imagination; for Thea Kronborg the city fires the imagination and the will but gives no personal repose; and for Lucy Gayheart it is a deception, a “city of feeling” masking the “city of fact” (24). Surveying this field, one wonders whether it is possible for the “eyes [to drink] in the breadth of” the city as Alexandra Bergson’s do the land in O Pioneers! (64). Is a radical —that is, rooted—city life possible for Cather? Can one settle in the city as one might settle on the land? Cather’s 1929 story “Double Birthday,” set in Pittsburgh, offers a response to these 254 jo s e p h c . m u r p h y questions. “Double Birthday” stands out among her portrayals of modern cities in the way her protagonists, a nephew and uncle both named Albert Engelhardt, define themselves imaginatively in terms of urban geography and history. Among Cather’s fictional representations of Pittsburgh, the one we find in “Double Birthday” is unique for its sophistication and range. “The Professor’s Commencement” (1902), “Paul’s Case” (1905), and “A Gold Slipper” (1917) each portray an almost unbridgeable gap between art culture and commercial values (although the professor tries to build that bridge). Set on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, “Uncle Valentine” (1925) regards the city furtively as a menacing “black pillar of cloud” (24). By contrast , “Double Birthday” portrays the artist-intellectual trying to domesticate the city by bringing its spatial and historical coordinates into dialogue. In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century, where “Double Birthday” is the Cather selection, John Updike characterizes Cather’s Pittsburgh here as “a great city as cozy and inturned as a Southern hamlet” (xvii). The protagonists’ relationship to Pittsburgh is not oppositional but rather dialectical—in Walter Benjamin’s sense that capitalist society can be reimagined by reading its fragmentary forms against the grain of progress. The Jewish messianic Marxist critic’s world might seem remote from Cather’s, but Benjamin’s life span (1892–1940) falls within her own, and both harshly criticized modernity while drawing vital energy from it. Benjamin loved cities not for what they show but for what they conceal. For him the modern city, the epitome of progress, is lost in an extended dream fueled by its commercial and industrial engines. Awakening requires stepping through the city in syncopated rhythm, distractedly, close-up—the perspective of the flâneur, the walking city observer—to discover dialectical images. Dialectical images juxtapose past and present forms, expose the vanity of what is called progress, and project a possible future invisible to those caught in the machinery of modern life. In his great unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin applies this method of analysis to the Paris arcades: glass and iron commercial passageways that represented modernity to the nineteenth century but lay in ruins by the 1930s. The rise and fall 255 The Dialectics of Seeing of the arcades epitomizes for Benjamin the transience of capitalism at large. “With the destabilizing of the market economy,” he writes, “we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled” (Arcades 13). This recognition creates a space for imagining “the utopia that has left its trace...