Blood on the Rock: Cather’s Southwestern History

The history major is a bit of a gut at Hamilton University, and fiction is apparently to blame. Professor Horace Langtry, whose specialty is “supposed to be American history,” panders to the undergraduates by assigning them novels and crediting “the time spent in perusing ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to Colonial history, and ‘Tom Sawyer’ to the Missouri Compromise” (Professor’s House 55–56). Those who want to do more demanding work are better off studying under Professor Godfrey St. Peter, who holds a chair in European history and finds the “collateral reading” in Langtry’s classes to be “lax” (56). Unlike his literary-minded colleague, St. Peter maintains his discipline’s discipline and guards its borders. Yet even he is not so traditional a historian as he might seem: indeed, he was nearly fired in his younger days because “he was carrying on another line of work than his lectures, and was publishing books that weren’t strictly text-books” (Professor’s House 56–57). Langtry and St. Peter have been feuding over the department’s curriculum for years, but each man has run afoul of professional standards, and neither seems entirely committed to history as such.

This dispute, and the larger question it raises about whether novelists and historians are capable of working toward a common intellectual purpose, is at the heart of The Professor’s House, Willa Cather’s 1925 tale of a distinguished scholar’s decline into apathy and enervation. She published it just before making a turn to the past in her fiction—of the five novels she wrote during the rest of her life, three were historical—and the story of Professor St. Peter was an opportunity for her to consider the basic methodological problems that such a turn would present. What are the guiding principles, she seems to ask, of serious historical study and effective historical narration, and how far can historical fiction go in following them? The 1920s were a time of intense research and academic engagement for Cather, and she was so invested in becoming a better historian in those years that she may have modeled St. Peter on one of the leading scholars of her day. Yet she never lost sight of how her encounters with history could make her a better novelist, as well. In a revealing passage that she eventually cut from the final draft of The Professor’s House, Cather expands upon St. Peter’s reasons for banning fiction from his classes, arguing that doing so is as healthy for art as it is for the historical profession:

Certainly none of the great English novelists took “courses” in the novel in their undergraduate days. Pupils and masters were engaged with sterner stuff. It was supposed that a wide reading in the Greek and Latin writers gave a young man the best possible training for the study of other literatures, or for the profession of letters, and that theory seems to have worked out very well. The perfecting of classical scholarship had its advantages for the undergraduate, and the revolt from scholarship, the bold plunge into something intimate and personal, had great advantages,—had indeed, something of the fire and exaltation of revolution.

(Professor’s House TS N.pag)

Historical study, like the classics, may be “sterner stuff” than fiction, but it can also be a servant to it, for its scholarly rigor is capable of inspiring “revolt,” “revolution,” and, eventually, a greater art than had been possible before. And while a novelist like Cather might never have been capable of writing a book that a professor like St. Peter would assign to his students, historical labor could still kindle “the fire and exaltation” of her literary achievement.

Two years later, Cather published her meditative, episodic novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), one of the most explicit and successful attempts at merging the disciplines of history and fiction in all of American letters. Considered as a study of the past, it was a remarkable work. It told stories that up to that point had been relatively neglected, bringing readers to the Southwestern corner of...