A Place of Her Own

...Cather could have been talking about her own New Mexico nov- el-in-the-making when she wrote, "The Pointed Fir sketches are living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air-spaces about them...

...A Place of Her Own Rediscovering Sarah Orne Jewett BY CLAUDIA WINKLER The name Sarah Orne Jewett, for those to whom it means anything at all, evokes principally the landscape of southern Maine and the particular serenity of her 1896 novel The Country of the Pointed Firs...

...A grief-stricken widowed fisherman knits as he remembers his beloved wife, whom he honors by striving to maintain her standards of housekeeping...

...As a girl, she accompanied her father on his visits to patients, taking in the ways and speech of the local people...

...Remembering how she had seen the great bird "flying through the golden air and how they [had] watched the sea and the morning together," the child realizes "she cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away...

...Todd and the narrator...

...With his encouragement, she produced three novels: Deephaven in 1877, A Country Doctor in 1884, and her masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs...

...There is a Bible on the lightstand, and a pair of glasses and a thimble...

...At the heart of the book is an account of a day trip to Green Island by Mrs...

...She quietly disregards the "fettering conventionalities" upheld by some disapproving townsfolk and relatives, and earns their respect for her healing art...

...Blackett is Jewett's finest creation...

...This third woman is the narrator, the outsider through whose eyes we discover this place...

...is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine...

...Two are widows—Almira Todd, a sixty-seven-year-old herbal healer, and her elderly mother, Mrs...

...A young French missionary working in Ohio is named the first bishop of New Mexico...

...When she was nine, her family made the wrenching move from their farm near Winchester, Virginia, to Nebraska, where they lived first on the prairie, then after a year in a town of about 1,200...

...Closer to the mark are the words of an early commentator who praised Jewett's "sweet, sane knowledge of life...

...So, too, Christianity "haunted" Cather—another link with Jewett...

...Cather remained deeply grateful to Jewett, her only female mentor, and in 1925 wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs and other stories, lauding them as "almost flawless examples of literary art...

...Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that," Cather summed up the injunction...

...Blackett lives and farms, with an "odd" aging son named William who never left home...

...Nevertheless, Death Comes for the Archbishop is mostly discontinuous close-ups and freestanding scenes, strung together like beads on a string...

...It was Louis Brandeis's wife Alice who took Cather—by this time no longer a refugee fresh from Nebraska, but an accomplished New York journalist and story writer in her early thirties—to the house on Charles Street...

...But her loyalty to the woods and its creatures is decisive...

...both write about religion...

...True, Bishop Latour's relationship with a second central character, his boyhood friend and vicar, Father Vaillant, appears throughout the book— rather as do the relationships among the three women in The Country of the Pointed Firs...

...The chronicler of a world where conversation is a kindness—where "fitness" is an ultimate tribute and self-forgetful-ness is "the highest gift of heaven"— Jewett gave a great deal to the more restless and ambitious literary heir who so warmly acknowledged the debt...

...She used the Southwest as the backdrop for a somewhat contrived passage of The Song of the Lark...

...the man is never without his gun) and A Country Doctor intermittently reads like a tract ("our heroine" is actually likened to Christ), The Country of the Pointed Firs has the individuality of fully realized art...

...Neither bothers much with politics or high society...

...Perhaps as she contemplated Jewett, who embraced her Maine material so unreservedly, Cather glimpsed what it would mean to devote an entire novel to the Southwest...

...Through all this exposure to high culture, Jewett never deviated from her own vocation as a chronicler of simple country life...

...Along the way, Jewett became friends with the publisher of the Atlantic, James T. Fields, and his wife, Annie, and after Fields's death, Annie and Sarah were companions...

...Above her desk she kept a line from Flaubert: "To write about ordinary life as one would write history...

...The contrast could hardly be greater with Cather, who early lost any chance for such stable belonging...

...She was born in 1849 in the inland port of South Berwick, upriver from Portland, the daughter of a prosperous and cultivated doctor...

...a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique...

...Where "A White Heron" is crudely symbolic (the woodland child is named Sylvia...

...Neither woman married or successfully portrays romantic love in fiction (Jewett doesn't try...

...I shall like to think o' you settin' here today,' said Mrs...

...Each received her early education mainly through her friendships with adults...

...If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring," Cather wrote in her introduction to Jewett, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material...

...Similarly, where Jewett wrote about people in their indigenous surroundings, Cather studied exiles: Bohemian immigrants and Scandinavian pioneers on the plains, farm girls in town and small-town girls in the big city, a Colorado pastor's kid on the stage of the Dresden Opera, and French priests in the lonely far reaches of the New World...

...That it could influence, so profoundly, a book as good as Death Comes for the Archbishop is sufficient reason to take another look at The Country of the Pointed Firs, an American classic whose memory seems to have faded even among the well-read...

...But the kinship between Cather and Jewett transcends fashion...

...There are enough affinities between Death Comes for the Archbishop and The Country of the Pointed Firs to suggest that Cather's great New Mexico novel was nourished by her reflections on Jewett's masterpiece...

...Cather first visited the Southwest in 1912...

...She returned again and again to explore the old towns and Spanish missions and cliff dwellings...

...Eventually, Anna herself comes to see medicine as her God-given calling...

...A quality that one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define...

...Cather's essay praises Jewett's book for its structure—"so tightly built and significant in design"—and its inherent beauty...

...In other ways, however, Jewett and Cather's biographies—and their writ-ing—sharply diverged...

...He is an ornithologist, come in search of a white heron...

...Blackett...

...Indeed, it consists partly of an indifference to fashion...

...Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child...

...And she remains worth reading for another reason: her role as mentor to a better-remembered and greater artist, Willa Cather...

...Apparently something had ripened in her own religious life in the years just before she undertook her reconsideration of Jewett and went on to write a whole novel about Catholic priests...

...In The Song of the Lark Thea Kronborg grows up to become not a doctor but a singer, yet Dr...

...Jewett's writing enjoyed immediate success...

...A Milton-quoting retired sea captain pines for the wider horizons of bygone whaling days...

...I looked up, and we understood each other without speaking...

...In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather gave fullest expression to two themes that had teased her mind persistently for years: the Southwest and Christianity...

...after suffering injuries in a carriage accident, in 1909...

...By the 1930s, literary fashion was running to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Eliot and Joyce...

...For some years, they kept a Boston salon at 146 Charles Street, where they hosted the literati of the day—meeting, there and on trips to Europe, such luminaries as Henry James, Kipling, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and the Dickens family...

...It leaves in the mind of the reader, as Cather wrote, "an intangible residuum of pleasure...

...It is a book whose power and beauty are difficult to sum up...

...Because she captured there the harmonies of undramatic lives lived out in their native place, Jewett deserves the attention of modern readers too prone to overlook so pallid a thing as contentment...

...She finds joy in serving the people of Old-fields and environs, not only by relieving their bodily pains, but also by acting as their comforter, confessor, and "interpreter of the outside world...

...Early classified (and nowadays mostly dismissed) as a "local col-orist"—doing for Maine what the likes of John Fox Jr...

...Just as Jewett accompanied her father on his medical rounds, so Cather attached herself to a German piano teacher, devoured the library of a Jewish couple, and rode out in the buggies of both of Red Cloud's doctors, peppering them with questions about science...

...The artist spends a life-time in loving the things that haunt him, in having his mind "teased" by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character...

...After the visitors have eaten a meal of fish chowder and explored the island while Almira gathers pennyroyal and other herbs for her syrups and elixirs, the visitors come into the farmhouse for a last cup of tea...

...She is discerning, too—Almira Todd speaks of "mother's snap and power o' seein' things just as they be"—and, above all, generous...

...Before she was thirty, she was "a fully arrived celebrity," as an early biographer put it, and she was swept into the literary circles of nearby Boston...

...In the story, a little girl walking her cow home through the woods encounters a young man with a gun...

...Blackett is making for William is neatly folded on the table...

...Work as a journalist and teacher took her to Pittsburgh, then New York...

...She died in the house where she was born...

...had done for Kentucky, Thomas Nelson Page for Virginia, and Edward Eggleston for Indiana—Jewett was rooted in a way almost no American is anymore...

...Like The Country of the Pointed Firs, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a succession of episodes virtually without plot...

...That word "glory"—while apt for Cather, never one "content to be slight"—doesn't ring quite true for the self-effacing Jewett...

...A striped cotton shirt Mrs...

...Her hospitality is "something exquisite," and of tact, which is "after all a kind of mind-reading," she has the "golden gift...

...This farthest offshore island is where Mrs...

...The central characters are three single women...

...She died a few years Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Going to college meant the University of Nebraska, in raw Lincoln, scarcely gouged from the frontier...

...Upon reading Deephaven—a youthful precursor to The Country of the Pointed Firs—for the third time, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote her a fan letter...

...and the central thread, the bishop's everyday, faithful performance of his life's work...

...Growing up in out-of-the-way places—Jewett in South Berwick, Cather in Red Cloud, Nebraska—they had some similar experiences...

...Fresh from meditating on The Country of the Pointed Firs, with its deft interweaving of place, ethos, and personality, Cather produced a book saturated with a sense of place, about two men living out lives consecrated to God...

...Mrs...

...He spends the night at the girl's house and offers the dazzling sum of $10 to any who will lead him to the great bird's nest...

...Two years later, she was a guest at the seventieth birthday party of the literary lion Oliver Wendell Holmes...

...In 1925, when Willa Cather prepared her new edition of Jewett and wrote that introduction so lavishly praising The Country of the Pointed Firs, she herself was incubating what would prove to be her own most nearly perfect book, Death Comes for the Archbishop, published in 1927...

...Like Jewett, she reprised all this in fiction...

...They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself...

...She traveled in the southwest and in Europe, and ultimately settled in Greenwich Village, summering in New Brunswick, Canada, and spending the fall months in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she is buried...

...And Cather's novel is held together by two other constants: the omnipresent scenery of desert and canyon, mesa and arroyo, stone and adobe...

...Both are most at home writing about, as critic Joan Acocella says of Cather, "noble-minded people living in small towns...

...Jewett, whose fiction evokes a single, integrated culture, never really left home...

...The plot is nearly nonexistent: a succession of scenes, many consisting merely of conversations...

...Wrote Cather: "Imagine a young man or woman, born in New York City, educated at a New York university, violently inoculated by Freud, hurried into journalism, knowing no more about New England country people (or country folk anywhere) than he has caught from motor trips or observed from summer hotels: what is there for him in The Country of the Pointed Firs...

...Archie remains her lifelong friend...

...She was content to be slight if she could be true...

...She even likened The Country of the Pointed Firs to Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter...

...Her first story was published when she was nineteen, and soon her work was appearing regularly in the Atlantic Monthly, edited by the young William Dean Howells...

...And this gift of sympathy is his great gift...

...At eighty-six, she has seen "every trouble" short of her own death, yet she is light-hearted and light-footed...

...Blackett—while the third, never named, is a writer who rents a room from Mrs...

...The story ends: "Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time remember...

...A third such theme —the French domestic arts as carriers of civilization—is present here but reaches full flower only in her next book, Shadows on the Rock...

...She always spent summers in the Maine house where she grew up...

...I sat in the rocking-chair," records the narrator, "and felt that it was a place of peace, the little brown bedroom and the quiet outlook upon field and sea and sky...

...Reared in a Baptist home, Cather attended Episcopal services as a young woman, but it was only in 1922, when she was nearly fifty, that she was confirmed in the Episcopal Church...

...Leslie, who recognizes her aptitude for his profession...

...He goes there, explores his immense diocese on horseback, encounters some singular personalities, has certain adventures, plants a garden, builds a cathedral, grows old, dies...

...The room is plain...

...Todd recounts the saga of "poor Joanna," the daughter of a good family who, crossed in love, retreated to Shell-heap Island and lived there as a hermit till she died, whereupon the whole town turned out to bury her on the island in accordance with her wishes...

...Then, just before their farewells, while Almira is bundling up her herbs, Mrs...

...Todd for a few months' summer stay in the coastal village of Dunnet Landing...

...Both are very American artists, responsive to nature, to landscape, and to people who live close to the land...

...Her plan works perfectly— until the moment comes to tell...

...Fidelity, this time not to nature but to vocation, is also the theme of A Country Doctor...

...I want you to come again...

...and she steeped herself in the memoirs of early explorers and missionaries (including the originals of her Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant...

...Her last, unfinished novel was set in medieval Avignon...

...Cather showed Jewett her stories and took to heart the older woman's advice: to work at writing fiction full time, and write what she knew...

...To the overstimulated, worldly-wise reader of today she has at least as much to offer...

...then again for the middle section of The Professor's House, a book otherwise set in a midwestern college town —and published the very year of her essay on Jewett...

...After a false start with her first novel, the pseudo-Jamesian Alexander's Bridge (1912), she turned seriously to her "home" material, and by 1918 had published all three of her prairie novels, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia...

...It was a subject embedded in their life histories...

...Blackett invites the summer guest into her bedroom to sit in her rocker and see the finest view in the house...

...In an expanded essay on Jewett published in 1936, Cather was more restrained, saying only that Jewett, like Twain and Hawthorne, possessed that "very personal quality of perception, a vivid and intensely personal experience of life, which make a 'style.'" It was a style that was rapidly becoming pass...

...He fades away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be born again...

...South Berwick is only seventy miles from Boston...

...Her most famous story, "A White Heron," is emblematic...

...Her characters live close to nature, in isolated homesteads and small seaports...

...Her decision involves sacrifice, for the stranger has awakened intimations of adventure in a wider world...

...In both respects, her own book resembles it...

...It has been so pleasant for William.'" As drama, it barely registers on the Richter scale...

...Willa Cather knew Sara Orne Jew-ett briefly, during the sixteen months before Jewett's death...

...Not surprisingly, Cather gave her stories widely varied settings: Nebraska, eastern Colorado, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Virginia, a French battlefield, New Mexico, seventeenth-century Quebec...

...This capturing of life itself is what the artist strives for, and Cather begins her introduction with an observation of Jewett's from their correspondence about how it is achieved: "The thing that teases the mind over and over for years," Jewett wrote, "and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature...

...He is kind and attractive...

...At the beginning of that essay on Jewett, Cather placed an epigraph from the poetess Louise Imogen Guiney: But give to thine own story / Simplicity, with glory...

...Like Sylvia in "A White Heron," she is fleetingly tempted by romance but hews to her chosen path and finishes medical school...

...Anna Prince, an orphan, is raised in the town of Old-fields by a kind widower, Dr...

...This coherence of work and surroundings, and the selfless devotion to the good of others, are reprised on a higher literary plane in The Country of the Pointed Firs...

...William, conquering his shyness, sings for them, and his mother joins in the old Scottish and English tunes and Civil War ballads...

...As a young woman, she could move into a cosmopolitan adult world without cutting her New England roots...

...Wanting to please him, she slips away to climb the tallest tree at dawn, to see the white heron's first flight and so discover its nest...

...Yet perhaps the serene climax of The Country of the Pointed Firs conveys why Willa Cather could quote Henry James as saying of Jewett, "She had a sort of elegance of humility, or fine flame of modesty...