Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

11. “ The Nude Had Descended the Staircase”: Katherine Anne Porter Looks at Willa Cather Looking at Modern Art

225 11 “The Nude Had Descended the Staircase” Katherine Anne Porter Looks at Willa Cather Looking at Modern Art J A N I S P. S T O U T The phrase quoted in my title, “the nude had descended the staircase,” comes from Katherine Anne Porter’s essay “Re- flections on Willa Cather.” Its allusion is of course to the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) by Marcel Duchamp , first exhibited in the United States at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. In making her passing reference, Porter assumed that readers would recognize the allusion and understand its significance. And it was a good assumption. Duchamp’s cubist nude has long served as an icon of modernism’s break with traditional concepts and praxis in art. I have argued elsewhere that “Reflections on Willa Cather” is an essentially duplicitous essay in which the ever insecure Porter, herself an icon of literary modernism but fearful that her halting production would erode her future place in literary history, sought to strengthen her position in that prospective history by weakening that of her slightly older contemporary. Invoking the nude on the staircase as a touchstone, she sought to position Cather outside the project of modernism altogether where, she strongly implied, Cather persevered in a stodgy and backwardlooking aesthetic (Stout, “Porter’s ‘Reflections’”). 226 janis p. stout Porter’s essay on Cather was first written as a book review of the posthumous collection of essays and aesthetic statements Willa Cather on Writing. Published in the New York Times in 1949, it was titled “The Calm, Pure Art of Willa Cather.” When it reappeared in greatly expanded and revised form three years later in Mademoiselle, it bore the title “Reflections on Willa Cather”—a title that well describes both the loosely associative form of the essay and its shift in emphasis from appreciation to assessment. It appears under this latter title in Porter’s Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (1970). The passage in which the nude makes her appearance asserts Cather’s indifference to modernism in music and literature as well as visual art: Stravinsky had happened; but she went on being dead in love with Wagner, Beethoven, Schubert, Gluck, especially Orpheus, and almost any opera. She was music-mad, and even Ravel’s La Valse enchanted her; perhaps also even certain later music, but she has not mentioned it [in the essays collected in On Writing]. The Nude had Descended the Staircase with an epochshaking tread but she remained faithful to Puvis de Chavannes , whose wall paintings . . . inspired the form and tone of Death Comes for the Archbishop. . . . She loved Courbet, Rembrandt, Millet and the sixteenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters, with their “warmly furnished interiors” but always with a square window open to the wide gray sea. . . . Joyce had happened: or perhaps we should say, Ulysses . . . [but] that subterranean upheaval of language caused not even the barest tremor in Miss Cather’s firm, lucid sentences. (37–38) There can be little question that Porter genuinely admired the “firm, lucid sentences” that characterized Cather’s style and paid tribute to her as a stylist and a formalist in her review- 227 “The Nude Had Descended the Staircase” turned-essay. At the same time, she reinforces her own position of prominence as a “writers’ writer” admired within a circle of other literary modernists—Glenway Wescott, Robert Penn Warren , Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Eudora Welty—while removing Cather to a different category altogether. As a result of such mixed purposes, her “reflections” are skewed, partly right but often very wrong. Much of the evidence that it is wrong is provided by Cather’s letters, which were of course unavailable to Porter. Since the time of her writing, however, hundreds of Cather’s personal letters have become available at university libraries. Today’s scholars are privileged to read Cather’s own expressions of her likes and dislikes, experiences and goals. In contesting Porter’s construal of Cather as a writer whose “plain” face was turned squarely toward the past (“Reflections” 30), I will draw freely on these materials and on Cather’s nonfiction. Moreover, the enormous theoretical and historical literature on modernism of recent decades has enriched the definitional basis for revisiting the issue of Cather’s relationship to modernism in the arts. Three works in particular seem to me both exceptionally cogent...