Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner

3. Possession

now we must face that harder question: why did Willa Cather care so much what Faulkner had done to The Professor’s House in Mosquitoes, since nobody was any longer reading Mosquitoes anyway? It was out of print by 1944 when she wrote her story “Before Breakfast.” Obviously, these two writers had more unfinished business. What it was and why they had it is the subject of this chapter. Here are the facts: William Faulkner, under the tutelage of his friend and literary coach Phil Stone, first intended to be a poet. He struggled long and hard to write poetry and eventually collected enough verse to make a volume. After securing a publisher, Phil Stone wrote a short, three-page preface for the collection, mainly to introduce the poet, who was Stone’s main interest; the two marketed the volume as The Marble Faun. The verse here describes being frozen in a form, like sculpture. The Four Seas Company of Boston brought out the book, which finally arrived on December 15, 1924. Even before the book appeared, however, the two had provided four separate, multipage lists (sent by Stone to Four Seas on October 5, 13, 19, and November 5) of names who should receive publicity flyers and order forms. These names included not only periodicals and newspapers but also individuals as remote as William Howard Taft, and addresses as far afield as Possession| 41 Nova Scotia (Blotner 374). That Willa Cather and several of her friends would have received such a notice is not a stretch. Further , Edith Lewis recounts the fact that Cather was at this time hosting a literary salon on Friday afternoons at 5 Bank Street. Before it grew overcrowded and was abandoned, the salon entertained habitually such founts of current information as woman about town Viola Roseboro’ (Lewis 134–35).1 Roseboro’ not only heard all; she told it. After Faulkner’s poetry book finally materialized, Stone acted as agent and sent copies to those who might prove useful. While the fire that later destroyed the Stone house erased many such records ,2 I am guessing that Willa Cather got such a book, or soon possessed a copy, and surveyed it with interested amusement. Then she used it, ostensibly respectfully, but also parodically. The volume she was finishing at the time Faulkner’s poetry saw print was The Professor’s House. Faulkner’s poems, of course, should have validated the promise she had acknowledged through his fictionalized lookalike, Victor Morse. What his volume of poems actually provoked, I’m suggesting, was the new name Tom Outland (for the Outlandish Tom, Tom, the Piper’s son). Faulkner’s poetic persona, the marble faun, is a Pan, or piper, who outlandishly enough toward the volume’s end, plays the violin. Even if Cather was handed this once-rare volume by some well-meaning or amused friend (for it contains enough mixed metaphors to amuse any attentive or sophisticated poetry lover), we can infer that she got hold of it quickly, for immediately she assessed and absorbed it, then assimilated it, her way. “Tom Outland’s Story” is brilliant but also perplexing. Edith Lewis recounts that Willa Cather had called on a Wetherill brother in Mancos as early as 1915, and had heard firsthand the story of Richard Wetherill’s discovery of the Cliff City ruins on Mesa Verde (Lewis 94). But the story Cather eventually based on Wetherill family facts was a long time ripening. According to Woodress she probably wrote “Tom Outland’s Story” at Grand 42 | possession Manan (where she eventually set “Before Breakfast”) in the summer of 1922: “She pulled out of her portfolio a long story she thought had gone to pot and finished it promptly” (Woodress 323). I have no doubt that the story was essentially finished before The Marble Faun arrived for additional interpolations. While the revisions that textual parallels suggest may vastly enrich an already brilliant performance, they are added almost entirely at the beginning and ending—that is, after the center had “set.” We know certainly that starting in late spring of 1925, The Professor ’s House was serialized by Colliers, to which it had been sold in March.3 However nearly complete that manuscript had seemed, as the new year of 1925 came in, time was still left in January and February for Cather to seize on Phil Stone’s short and florid preface, and to...