Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction by Loretta Wasserman (review)

248 WesternAmerican Literature criticism. Willa Gather: Family, Community and History is solid, informative, and tame; it’s time for something wilder. MADONNE MINER University ofWyoming Willa Cather:A Study ofthe ShortFiction. By Loretta Wasserman. Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction Series, No. 19. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. 178 pages, $18.95.) Willa Cather’s ties to classical and romantic literary traditions are every­ where evident in her work, but critics have just recently proposed that she be studied as a modernist. Within the past year,Jo Ann Middleton has examined the mid-career novels in Willa Cather’s Modernism: A Study ofStyle and Technique, and Tom Quirk has recreated a philosophical context in Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens. Now Loretta Wasserman provides new insights into Cather’s short stories. Although only “Paul’s Case” and “Neighbour Rosicky” are widely read, Wasserman argues that many other works—particularly “Coming, Aphrodite!,” “Uncle Valentine,” “Old Mrs. Har­ ris,”and “The Old Beauty”—reward analysis. The three-part format of the Twayne series limits extensive critiques, but Wasserman skillfully investigates Cather’s three collections (The Troll Garden, Youth and the Bright Medusa, and Obscure Destinies), the posthumousThe Old Beauty and Others, and uncollected stories aswell, without sounding perfunctory. “Part 2: The Writer”illuminates Cather’s career from 1903 to 1925 with seven commentaries by Cather herself, her friend Edith Lewis, and interviewers and reporters. “Part 3: The Critics”reprints five samples of recent criticism, includ­ ing excerpts from significant book-length studies by Susan Rosowski and Marilyn Arnold. But the firstand mostvaluable part of the book isWasserman’s own analysis of Cather’s modernism. Cather’s belief that a story begins with “a personal explosional experience”resemblesJamesJoyce’s “epiphanic moment,” central to the modernist short story. The theme of the artist in The Troll Garden is “the preeminent subject for modernism,” and Cather’s love stories express an “erotic knowing”in “the idiom of her time.”Modernist features of style include Cather’s “structures taken from myth and folktale, networks of symbol and allusion, oral stories and tales, broken chronologies, images and motifs from painting and music.” Wasserman shows how the early “The Enchanted Bluff” and the late “Be­ fore Breakfast” convey a Bergsonian perception of “the essential unity of the physical and human worlds.” Both of these stories—and many that lie in Reviews 249 between—are “thoroughly in the modern idiom: condensed, allusive, suggest­ ing the larger structures of existence beneath trivial incident.” JOAN WYLIE HALL University ofMississippi . . . When We Talk About Raymond Carver. Edited by Sam Halpert. (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991. 179 pages, $17.95.) In interviews conducted by Sam Halpert between October 1989 and De­ cember 1990 with Tess Gallagher, Maryann Carver, and nine writers who were Raymond Carver’s closest friends and colleagues, the portrait of an artist merges with husband, teacher, and friend. Revelations of these individuals re­ create the private and professional Carver from his teenage marriage to Maryann through the development of the artist and alcoholism of the “bad old Raymond”years and into the last decade of stability, achievement, recognition, and final illness. Halpert’s well-conceived questions and ability to hear the responses of the wives and Richard Ford, Chuck Kinder, William Kittredge, Jay Mclnerney, Leonard Michaels, Robert Stone, Douglas Unger, Geoffrey Wolff, and Tobias Wolff produce a readable and rewarding study of Carver’s teaching, social and family life, and career aswriter. Topics such as Carver’sficdon as autobiography or as the embodiment of minimalism or metafiction are debated and its change from bare, lean prose to a superior—fuller, richer, more spiritual—art are agreed upon. Ford contends that with “Errand,”Carver “was feeling ... a kind of exhilaration, a freedom which would’ve resulted in wonderful work.”Ford also connects Carver’s “more ample stories” with his “more comfortable and ample life.” Kittredge agrees that Carver was changing directions, having “ex­ plored the old orientation as far as he wanted to” and “trying to enlarge his scope on alarger stage”before his death. Several refer to the poetry ofCarver as something he loved and something that came easier to him than his stories...