The Hand of the Artist in Shadows on the Rock

THE HAND OF THE ARTIST IN SHADOWS ON THE ROCK John Hinz The College of Staten Island Willa Cather, who "rarely talked about her mental processes . . . disliked any form of self-analysis," according to her lifelong friend and companion Edith Lewis.1 Her aversion to formal literary analysis dates back at least to her scornful rejection as an undergraduate of an English professor's methodical pedantry.2 Between reticence and disdain, then, Willa Cather's critical pronouncements are somewhat less than systematic and complete. They comprise mainly her personal subjective responses spoken ex cathedra. Stephen Crane, whom she admired, was "a reticent and unhelpful man, with no warmhearted love of giving out opinions."3 Yet, she observed in her "Preface" to Wounds in the Rain, "sometimes when a man is writing carelessly, without the restraint he puts upon himself when he is in good form, one can surprise some of his secrets. . . ."4 Willa Cather took great pains to prevent any such carelessly unbuttoned passage of her own from coming to light. Without violating her personal privacies, one might still hope for a glimpse in her own practice of that obscure process by which the artist transmutes his material, whatever its sources and by whatever stages, into imaginative literature. Certainly Willa Cather was intensely interested in viewing this transformation in the work of others. How "in some of Miss Jewett's earlier books . . . one can find first sketches, first impressions, which later crystallized into . . . almost flawless examples of literary art" excited and fascinated her. Here she observed, "one can, as it were, watch in process the two kinds of making: the first, which is full of perception and feelingbut rather fluid and formless; the second, which is tightly built and significant in design. The design is, indeed, so happy, so right, that it seems inevitable. . . ."5 Happily, any reader sufficiently curious can find at least one brief such revelatory passageby Miss Catherherself: one facsimile page of the author's original typescript, with corrections, printed as a frontispiece to Shadows on the Rock in the thirteen volume Library edition of her works published by Houghton Mifflin in 1937-41.6 After so many years this single published typescript page has not escaped notice: Elizabeth 264Notes Shepley Sergeant and Ferris Greenslet both remark on it.7 Yet it invites closer scrutiny than it has yet received. For the original version is clearly legible through superimposed corrections and revisions. One may observe the stylist at work: the unedited images and language before, the painstaking process of emendation and self-correction, the "finished" product after. These five sentences of the opening paragraph of Book IV of Shadows on the Rock demonstrate unmistakably how rigorously Willa Cather pruned her original explicitness and extravagances to produce that "overtone divined by the ear but notheard by it."8Viewed together, they suggest some answers to the question raised, but not resolved, in The Song of the Lark and elsewhere. How much of the artist's achievement is intuitive, spontaneous, unpremeditated? How much does it owe to discipline and control? Even a cursory examination and comparison of the corrected typescript with the corresponding printed page reveals four distinct stages of revision. The first (in which "toy village" becomes "holy city") presumably was made on the spot by the typist-authorherself. A second (in which "the Auclairs" and "that morning" are added) is penciled in. The heavily inked additions and emendations constitute a third revision. Finally, the difference between the "corrected" typescript and the printed version (in the paragraph's last sentence) indicates at least one further subsequent change. Actually, the "original" typescript is itself a revision, for Willa Cather normally penciled her first draft in longhand. But let Miss Lewis explain the procedure: When she had written the first draft ofher story by hand, sherewrote the whole thing on her typewriter, keeping the hand-written version beside her, but not always following it—she would sometimes write several pages quite differently, would add things thatwerenot in the first draft, or omit parts altogether. This type-written version she would then give to her secretary to copy. She generally had it recopied more than once, making corrections and changes each...