"The Old Beauty" and Others
1945
(Three varied but intimate and thoughtful portraits of life and belonging; set in provincial France, the Nebraskan plains, and a rocky Canadian island).
All text except quotations is copyright 2001 by David Lahti, and represents his views alone. Please comment on this page in my guestbook.
CONTENTS:
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This book contains three short works, "The Old Beauty", "The Best Years", and "Before Breakfast", the last stories the Virginia-born author wrote. She imbues all three of the graceful, elegant stories with a contemplative, sentimental air, giving the impression of one looking back on life serenely with the benefit of much experience. All three, in different ways, are studies of belonging, of a sense of place and of home, where one feels most fully oneself. A wisdom is evident in the stories, but is conveyed modestly. Each story is composed of multiple scenes which are portrayed memorably with economy of prose. Cather possesses a remarkable ability to impress a dramatic event or an atmosphere upon a reader in just a few sentences. Whether the story tells of life after the death of a woman's beauty, or of the hardships and lifestyles of early twentieth century Nebraska, or of a vacationing businessman who must shrink his world in order to be comfortable, she has a strange power to cause a reader to become endeared to her and her work. Moreover, her stories, while being sentimental enough to sigh or smile after, are in addition good enough to think deeply about. To read such is a refreshing and uncommon pleasure.
"The Old Beauty"
Mr. Henry Seabury, returning from a career in China, seeks out a place where things have changed little in the twenty years since he went away. He finds a hotel in Aix-les-Bains in France, where an elderly woman Madame de Couçy proves to be the famed Lady Gabrielle Longstreet, one time pride of London and New York for her marvelous beauty. She was a radiant and much-loved queen in an age past, of propriety and honor and manners. Today (in the 1920's) the era where she belonged is gone for good, and she is out of place and unknown. There is nothing left to her beauty, and the old woman lives a lonely existence with a friend Cherry Beamish who tries in vain to brighten her spirits. She is surrounded by photographs of people of those earlier days; and she regrets that she treated all her male friends, of which she had many, so lightly. Mr. Seabury is a welcome visitor from that time, and in a short time he makes her feel admired and alive again. After a wonderful dance she is so encouraged that she wishes to go into the country the very next day. During this trip she receives a shock which eventually leads to her death; she is laid to rest among the others of her time, her people whom she felt she ought not to have outlived in the first place. The story is intense, powerful in imagery but without melodrama. Scenes such as the dance with Mr. Seabury, a remembered assault on the first evening of their acquaintance long ago, and the near-accident in the mountains, emblazon themselves on the imagination despite the simplicity with which they are communicated. Overall the story is about the passing of beauty and the estrangement of an old woman from new times, and is one of Cather's finest accomplishments.
"The Best Years"
The superintendent of schools for a county in Nebraska, Miss Evangeline Knightly, takes us into the country to visit a friend of hers, the young teacher Lesley Ferguesson. Lesley has done well in cultivating a class of good children despite her young age, but is homesick for her family in the county seat, MacAlpin. Miss Knightly takes her home for a weekend where Lesley revels in familial love. We meet her idealistic father the "experimental farmer", her practical and beautiful mother, and her brothers with whom she was most at home and comfortable. When Miss Knightly arrives again Monday morning to take her back to school, we have been presented tenderly with a picture of Nebraska rural life and people. Thanks to this, we are able to be affected by the loss of Lesley in a sudden blizzard; and we can feel the sadness and nostalgia at a meeting of Miss Knightly (now Mrs. Thorndike) and Mrs. Ferguesson twenty years later. In fact the whole story, the last that Cather wrote, has a reminiscent flavor, and imparts a love for home life and for the Nebraska farm country where the author spent her adolescence.
"After Breakfast"
Henry Grenfell, a successful
businessman, regularly escapes his work and family by spending time (he never
tells his family how long or where) in a small cabin on a remote island off the
Nova Scotia coast. This year, however, some academic reflections of a professor
on the steamship had temporarily wrecked his usually exquisite appreciation of
the ocean, sandstone cliffs, spruce forest, wildflowers, and a friendly
snowshoe hare. The geologist was well-meaning, if a little conceited, but the
problem was Henry's "bitterness towards 'millions' and professors".
After a bad night, he finally regains composure during a walk in the woods
before breakfast, where he relates to an old spruce tree and a distant girl
swimming in the cold morning ocean. Henry has the good desire and ability to
make things his own-- to relate to things, such as nature, literature, music,
and people that, like him, are ambitious and spirited. However, he has the
concomitant vice of requiring that everything he contacts must be simple
and earthly enough for him to relate to it. He must make everything his
own, and needs his world to be very small. He hunts to reassure himself of his
humanity and masculinity. He is happiest and most himself when alone. A
statement such as that of the geologist about the island being 136 million
years old will shake him out of his comfort zone, and cause him to feel "spineless,
accidental, unrelated to anything". This is the instinctive fear of which
we all perhaps have at least a little, the restiveness in the face of anything
vast and mysterious, whether scientific or metaphysical or religious. As the
final paragraph of the story suggests, Henry is like a little frog, who when
his small, moist, comfortable pool has dried, must take a long, bitter,
struggling hop till he finds another small place he can feel at home in. The
story is short and trenchant, and is especially relevant today when we are
faced with the knowledge that the world is older, larger, and stranger than
perhaps is comfortable for us. We, like Henry, may have the temptation to
"humanize" the world-- to make everything into something we can
understand and stick into our pockets.
Top of Cather's "The Old Beauty" and Others
"Plain women, he reflected, when they grow old are-- simply plain women. Often they improve. But a beautiful woman may become a ruin. The more delicate her beauty, the more it owes to some exquisite harmony in modelling and line, the more completely it is destroyed."
-Seabury, "The Old Beauty", iv.
"Nobody ever recognizes a period until it has gone by, he reflected: until it lies behind one it is merely everyday life."
-Seabury, "The Old Beauty", vi.
"'I think one should go out with one's time.'"
-Lady Longstreet, "The Old Beauty", ix.
"'After one has been exaltée, there usually comes a shock.'"
-Lady Longstreet, "The Old Beauty", xii.
"Idealists are seldom afraid of ridicule-- if they recognize it."
-"The Best Years", iii.
"Yes, they were grand old warriors, those towering locomotives of other days. They seemed to mean power, conquest, triumph-- Jim Hill's dream. They set children's hearts beating from Chicago to Los Angeles. They were the awakeners of many a dream."
-"The Best Years", iii.
"They boys were much the dearest things in the world to her. To love them so much was just… happiness. To think about them was the most perfect form of happiness. Had they been actually present, swinging on the two trapezes, turning on the bar, she would have been too much excited, too actively happy to be perfectly happy. But sitting in the warm sun, with her feet on the good ground, even her mother away, she almost ceased to exist. The feeling of being at home was complete, absolute: it made her sleepy. And that feeling was not so much the sense of being protected by her father and mother as of being with, and being one with, her brothers. It was the clan feeling, which meant life or death for the blood, not for the individual. For some reason, or for no reason, back in the beginning, creatures wanted the blood to continue."
-"The Best Years", iv.
"'I tell you, people are happiest where they've had their children and struggled along and been real folks, and not tourists.'"
-Mrs. Ferguesson, "The Best Years", vii.
"…childish bitterness towards 'millions' and professors"
-of Grenfell, "Before Breakfast", sec.1.
"What was the use… of anything? Why tear a man loose from his little rock and shoot him out in the eternities? All that stuff was inhuman. A man had his little hour, with heat and cold and a time-sense suited to his endurance. If you took that away from him you left him spineless, accidental, unrelated to anything."
-Grenfell, "Before Breakfast", sec.1.
"The speeds which machinists had worked up in the last fifty years were mere baby-talk to what can go through a man's head between dusk and daybreak."
-Grenfell, "Before Breakfast", sec.1.
"He had got ahead wonderfully… but, somehow, ahead on the wrong road."
-of Grenfell, "Before
Breakfast", sec.2.
Top of Cather's "The Old Beauty" and Others
…you are calm, sensitive, ready for a simple and beautiful story which will provoke thought and reflection; or, you have an hour or two with feet up and lemonade handy, and wish to be entertained with scenes and personalities in provincial France, rural Nebraska, and a remote Canadian island.
Top of Cather's "The Old Beauty" and Others
If you like this, you'd also like...
(for the resonator with tales of American local color:)
-Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). [Mississippi]
-Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). [Maine]
-O. Henry, The Four Million (1906). [New York City]
-Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919).
-John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven (1932). [California]
(for the Catherite:)
-Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913).
-Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918).
-Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
-Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (1931).
Top of Cather's "The Old Beauty" and Others
Find Willa Cather's stories at Amazon.com:
(click on the book:)
Top of Cather's "The Old Beauty" and Others
