Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner

7. Tit for Tat

light in august seemed to leave even William Faulkner feeling ambivalent. He stated, “I seemed to have a vision of it and the other ones subsequent to The Sound and the Fury ranked in order upon a shelf while I looked at the titled backs . . . with a flagging attention which was almost distaste” (Blotner 311). Willa Cather, on the other hand, took a deep breath and constructed a reply, delivered, it would seem, under an arched eyebrow. It arrives in an essay entitled “148 Charles Street,” after which dull title the merely curious browsers could be trusted to pass on. The book in which this essay serves as centerpiece is entitled Not Under Forty. The book title, of course, could be read one way by the creator of that fictional Joanna Burden, who lied that her age was merely forty, while it would send other readers on a detour. But William Faulkner, who was thirty-nine when Not Under Forty was published, had at least the warning do not enter here to compel him to open the volume. He would find a series of comments to ponder hard. Cather supplied her first-time or literal-minded reader with these intriguing words pointing a detour arrow in the form of a prefatory note: The title of this book is meant to be “arresting” only in the lit-| 117 Tit for Tat eral sense, like the signs put up for motorists: “road under repair,” etc. It means that 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. Thomas Mann, to be sure, belongs immensely to the forwardgoers , and they are concerned only with his forwardness. But he also goes back a long way, and his backwardness is more gratifying to the backward. It is for the backward, and by one of their number, that these sketches were written. One reader might recall that in the last glimpse of Catheresque Joanna Burden she was backward-looking because her decapitated head was face-backward. For the many general readers of Not Under Forty, the prefatory note raised speculation in every line, and still does. As a matter of “design” in this collection of essays with its own integrity, the flagged date 1922 ends the volume as well as beginning it. It’s also just in the middle, for not only was it the year when the world broke in two, announced in the prefatory note; it was also the year when young genius Katherine Mansfield, hailed in the last essay, stopped writing in her journal “some months before her [untimely] death” (nuf 138). The volume suggests that for Katherine Mansfield, the world broke in two because approaching death killed her impulse to record herself spontaneously. I have argued elsewhere1 that Cather was referencing in this line about world breakage Henry James’s novel Roderick Hudson, in which the statement is made that no genius is permitted to create works out of youthful energy and verve more than six times. After that, any important creation must emerge from discipline and technique. After Cather had collapsed her two volumes of short stories into one, her sixth fiction was One of Ours, published in 1922. The world broke in two because her work hereafter, she felt in retrospect, would be difficult and demanding, and not at all “a 118 | tit for tat child’s attitude toward everything [which] is an artist’s attitude” (Lark 460 [1st ed.]). That child’s attitude is what Thea is still relying on at the end of The Song of the Lark, but as the novel ends she’s still under forty (465). Faulkner’s sixth novel, coincidentally, is Sanctuary. Light in August would have been the first to need, by the standards of early James, harder work and seasoned discipline , not merely youthful energy. The year 1922 is also when One of Ours was published, including its admiring portrait of Faulkner-lookalike Victor Morse. It’s the year that could be said to start the real relationship between Cather and Faulkner. To salute its publication year at the beginning of this collection of essays is to salute the relationship itself as a bce/ad divide affecting the perception of time and history. That’s a remarkable tribute to William...