Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

6. Willa Cather and Henry Blake Fuller: More Building Blocks for The Professor’s House

114 6 Willa Cather and Henry Blake Fuller More Building Blocks for The Professor’s House R I C H A R D C . H A R R I S In his study of the making of The Professor’s House, David Harrell asserts that the influence of Mesa Verde “accounts for more of the novel’s final form and meaning” than any other material. He concedes, however, that there were clearly many in- fluences on the novel and that The Professor’s House apparently derived, “more thoroughly than other works, from disparate origins whose separation in both time and place were no doubt a challenge to the creative power that finally brought them all together” (5). In the historical essay to the Scholarly Edition of The Professor’s House, James Woodress, drawing on Harrell, notes written sources as diverse as Gustav Nordenskiöld’s 1893 archaeological study The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, Anatole France’s 1897 novel Le mannequin d’osier, and Cather’s 1902 short story “The Professor’s Commencement,” adding that because Cather “had a very retentive memory, the hundreds of books she read lay in the deep well of her consciousness, to use William James’s phrase, as a literary source to be drawn upon” (302). I would suggest that several of the works of Chicagoan Henry Blake Fuller were among the sources that Cather re- 115 Willa Cather and Henry Blake Fuller trieved from that “deep well” in creating The Professor’s House. In particular, at a time in her life when Cather was most concerned with the human consequences of modern material culture and with the passing of what she increasingly came to see as a nobler past, Fuller apparently provided themes, plots, and characters that enabled her to articulate her own fictional response to that modernized commodity-driven culture and to generational conflict and change. Though little known today, Henry Blake Fuller was the leading Chicago novelist of the late nineteenth century. He originally established his literary reputation in the early 1890s with the publication of two Italian romances. His two major “realistic” novels of the 1890s—The Cliff-Dwellers, published in 1893, and With the Procession, published in 1895—both deal with the successful business and social classes of Chicago. William Dean Howells and other eastern critics praised the latter two books highly. Although he continued to write fiction, in the first two decades of the twentieth century Fuller spent much of his time writing book reviews and essays for the New York Times, the New York Evening Post, the New Republic, the Nation, the Dial, and other important periodicals. During this period, Harriet Monroe invited him to be an advisory editor for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. He was considered by his contemporaries an excellent critic and interesting conversationalist; at the same time, however, a rather enigmatic and very reticent personality (perhaps a result of his homosexuality) contributed to a kind of social isolation. In 1919 he made a brief reemergence as a writer of fiction with his novel Bertram Cope’s Year. Poor health and his disappointment at the negative reaction to Bertram Cope’s Year apparently limited Fuller’s attempts to publish his fiction in the 1920s, although he published two novels in the six months before his death in 1929.1 Theodore Dreiser declared Fuller “the father of American realism ” (1), but by 1954 the author of a scholarly article on Fuller ’s career in American Quarterly characterized him as “only a 116 richard c. harris footnote in the history of American writing” (Lawrence 137). Edmund Wilson’s lengthy 1970 New Yorker article seems to have done much to revive interest in Fuller, whom Wilson identi fied as one of America’s undeservedly “neglected” artists. He declared Fuller “a unique and distinguished writer” whose Chicago novels are characterized by an admirable “precision and elegance ” of style (112, 114). Wilson, in fact, judged Fuller superior to Howells as a novelist of manners, an opinion that Howells himself had voiced. Three book-length biographies followed within a decade of Wilson’s article; since then, however, Fuller has again largely been ignored.2 So, then, what is the possible connection between Fuller and Cather, and, specifically, what influence might Fuller have had on The Professor’s House? Although there is no mention of him in Woodress’s biography or in Andrew Jewell and...