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124Reviews oí the University Press of Mississippi and required reading for anyone seriously engaged in Malamud studies. University of Colorado at DenverJoel Salzberg Wasserman, Loretta. Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. 192 pp. Cloth: $20.95. This little monograph (previously unpublished work is within the first seventyfive pages) is the serious effort of an accomplished Cather critic with the good sense to look at the stories separately from the novels, be selective, and recognize that Cather has been denied the front ranks of American short story writers. Wasserman makes a case for Cather as modernist, noting that she read Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, and Proust and was influenced by Henri Bergson's ideas on memory and time and William James' evolutionary vitalism. She argues that Cather's aesthetic of selectivity, emphasis on moments of epiphany, and experimentation establish her at the vanguard of twentieth-century artists. Cather's work, she notes, suffers like Frost's in being denied the modernist label because of a homespun dependence on things. However , in attempting to separate Cather from turn-of-the-century realistic writers, because she used things "to convey something about figures in the story, not to lend verisimilitude to a scene" (p. 13), Wasserman betrays Cather's own misunderstanding of realism. The analyses begin with the early "The Enchanted Bluff" (1909) and the later, posthumously published "Before Breakfast" (1948) to prove the modernist distinction . Discussions of both are good for showing how through imagery and tableaux Cather conveys the human condition enmeshed in a vibrant cosmos and establishes the survival of "enchantment" to fill the emotional vacuum in modern life. In considering The Troll Garden and Youth and the Bright Medusa as collections, Wasserman sacrifices perceptive insights on first-rate stories by considering them with inferior ones: discussion of "Paul's Case" is abbreviated for "The Garden Lodge" and "Flavia and Her Artists." However, treatment of "The Sculptor's Funeral" and "A Wagner Matinee," where Cather links art to the austerity of the plains through imagery while exploring the spirit's need for art, gets Wasserman back on track. The analysis of "The Diamond Mine," in which Miletus Poppas, the Svengali-like accompanist of exploited opera diva Cressida Garnet, is revealed to the narrator in an epiphanic moment as "the figure of the hidden, intuitive self . . . the deep psychic levels that must be . . . mined" (p. 34), is a highlight somewhat dimmed by subsequent consideration of the less worthy "The Glass Slipper." Wasserman has valuable insights on "Two Friends" and "The Old Beauty" (which I would include among Cather's better on the strength of her argument). Both stories transcend realism through eternal perspectives managed in tableaux and "disappointed " (delayed?) epiphanies. Beauty Gabrielle Longstreet's toying with her mirror at the Grande Chartreuse is unforgettable, thanks to Wasserman. The sections on first ranked stories like "Neighbour Rosicky"; "Coming, Aphrodite!"; and "Old Mrs. Harris" fall below this level but are informing, as are discussions of less worthy stories like "Eric Hermannson's Soul," "The Joy of Nelly Deane," and "The Bohemian Girl," in which east and west, religion and art, are in tension. But these lesser stories are given consideration over "The Best Years," Cather's last. Why is a story like "Uncle Valentine" allotted five pages and this final story dismissed (p. 64) as "a Studies in American Fiction125 slackening into self-indulgence"? We could make this charge against what Wasserman calls "the remarkable paragraph" (p. 58) that closes "The Old Beauty," Cather's "most admired story" (p. 55), where Cather appeases her guilt and seeks the protection of a golden-ager. The reprinted works vary in significance as insights into Cather as short story writer. In "The Writer" section, Cather's 1913 comments on authenticity and the development of her first novel from stories make a contribution, as do the review of her 1925 speech distinguishing "spiritual" from "crude" plots, and her credo, "The Novel Démeublé." Decidedly less significant are Edith Lewis' account of meeting Cather and being captivated by her eyes, the 1921 Hinman and Mahoney interviews (except perhaps for Dorothy Canfield Fisher's suggestion in the latter to compare the 1903 and 1920 versions...

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