Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner

2. Buzzing

so far as an eye can presently see, Willa Cather hardly acknowledged Soldier’s Pay, with the exception of one nod through a name mentioned briefly in “Before Breakfast,” her last story. Nor did she exhibit any embarrassment whatsoever, at any time, about her implanted provocations to William Faulkner in One of Ours. Thus, she, a lifelong advocate of “natural good manners,” modeled the social habits to shape their exchanges. Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), however, was another matter. In Mosquitoes, Faulkner plundered thoroughly the salient possibilities he chose from Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925). During her Professor’s House preparation time, she had told an interviewer writing for The Borzoi that she had strolled on eggshells while in Washington Square Park. The comment seems relevant to Faulkner, as we shall see (Beer 27). Faulkner wrote Mosquitoes in the remainder of 1926, after the publications of his first and Cather’s seventh novel. Years later, Cather dedicated a good percentage of her last printed story, published posthumously in 1948, to addressing Mosquitoes. While we must delay a thorough look at that astonishing performance till chapter 9, we have an immediate right to be curious about why the buzzing of the immature Mosquitoes bothered her so much. Faulkner is still a fledgling writer; why couldn’t mature Cather Buzzing| 21 shrug it off? She seems unable to rest in her grave without commenting on it in particular, and commenting even after a number of more striking provocations that she might choose from by then. Even in Mosquitoes, however, the central situation Faulkner develops closely resembles another Cather work, the early short story “Flavia and Her Artists.” Mosquitoes depicts an extended houseboat party in which the hospitality of a hostess is abused by a group of ungrateful artists. To explain what riveted Faulkner’s attention to The Professor ’s House, into which his pickaxe dug deeply, is a two-chapter business. Initially, we must establish recognizable connections. The Professor’s House furnished Faulkner characterization, description , symbols, and themes for this, his second novel. The treasures once stored in St. Peter’s attic reappear on display in Mosquitoes. Most obvious are the professor’s dress forms. They condense (Faulkner will later love multiplying more) into one marble statue of a headless, armless, legless female torso, which sculptor Gordon, like Professor St. Peter, will not “relinquish.” Gordon describes this creation to which he is deeply attached as “my feminine ideal: a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me” (m 26). In turning the perhaps Platonic ideal forms St. Peter needs beside him in order to think and work, into such a sardonic definition of “feminine ideal,” Faulkner is at least one of the first to recognize the philosophical origins of St. Peter’s sexist outlook. Cather’s Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter is the shaper of histories who internalizes and summarizes the dominant institutions of the phallocentric West, especially of America. Faulkner catches on to what St. Peter embodies immediately . In the novel then quickly produced, Faulkner’s character, the niece Patricia, desires Gordon’s marble torso because “it’s like me” (m 24). In turn, this young woman, as well as the marble torso, resembles St. Peter’s daughter Kathleen in The Professor’s House; all three—the statue, the niece, the daughter—boast what 22 | buzzing Cather describes as “the slender, undeveloped figure then very much in vogue” (ph 41), which looks like a boy. That is, St. Peter ’s dress forms, which can replicate the shape of his youngest daughter so that a seamstress can make her clothes, “transmogrify ” in Faulkner’s novel to the nubile torso that young Patricia immediately recognizes as herself. Toward the end of Mosquitoes, the statue is said to be a metaphorical way to lock up a love so “she couldn’t leave” (m 269). That is, the statue keeps the female permanently immutable, static—like a Platonic form. Novelist Dawson Fairchild comments to Gordon, “I see . . . that you too have been caught by this modern day fetish of virginity. But you have this advantage over us: yours will remain inviolate without your having to shut your eyes to its goings-on” (m 318). Here Faulkner addresses, in order to elaborate, St. Peter’s fancy that his wire lady “was most convincing in her pose as a woman of light behaviour...