ASI SAW IT

Once more on the campus trek

A. LROWSE

'Working one's passage' in America for me means lecturing my way from campus to campus—a very good way of getting round the United States and seeing what an enormous country it is. Thus it is that I have been in or through most States of the Union, seen every section of the country represen- tatively—more than most Americans have done—and spoken on well-nigh two hundred University and college campuses. Yet I must be the only person who has never written up his Impressions of America (I am saving that up for my mellow old age).

The University of Nebraska had very kindly asked me back, for the third or fourth time. I first went there years ago in pursuit of Willa Cather, an author for whom I have a particular admiration: novelist and short- story writer, she has the combination of historical sense, atmosphere and poetry that I specially value in a writer. A generation ago she was very famous; a little in the trough now, she will certainly come back—among the three or four best of American women writers: she will achieve the status of a lesser classic, along with Edith Wharton, and a class above Ellen Glasgow.

Too late to know Willa, I was in time to become acquainted with her youngest sister, another school-teacher, who showed me the family treasures, their early books and photographs of Willa all the way along from childhood to famous writer. It was rather wonderful to think that out of those early pioneering days in Nebraska, the first generation of the university at Lincoln when it can have been only two or three hundred strong, there came three such figures as Willa Cather, Roscoe and Louise Pound. Roscoe Pound became the chief shaper of the celebrated Harvard Law School; his sister one of the leading Romance philologists in America. I was in time to meet her—and find, with some amusement, that the old academic lady was rather jealous of Willa's celebrity.

I was taken down to Red Cloud, that little rural community where Willa grew up and which appears in her earliest novel and several stories—best of all, in her classic My Antonia. She was not born there, but in Virginia—of half-German, half-English stock: the earlier family background there, with a portrait of her grandmother, is drawn in her fine novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

It was rather touching to stand on the kr dian Mound above the Republican River and look up across the cotton-woods to the farmhouse of that perfect novella—a rather late work, I fancy—The Lost Lady. I have subsequently followed in Willa's tracks again to Santa Fe in New Mexico, the scene of her Most popular book, a best-seller, Death Comes for the Archbishop. This is based on the story of the pioneering missionary, Archbishop Lamy, a good deal of a saint: \ once again there is Willa's infallible historical perception, rare in a novelist, along with the marvellous evocation of at- mosphere. (Here is why I love her—as also for herself : a wonderful woman, a personality courageous and strong, but also sensitive and tender.) This time I met again at Lincoln the two excellent scholars at work on Willa's Nachlass. One of them is writing what will be the standard biography: Willa's life, and her determined reticence, present. certain difficulties. There will be an edition of her Letters, and various anonymous pieces are coming to light as her work: I suppose it will add up to her Collected Works—very pro- perly, she is worthy of it.

I knew that Willa had ghosted the remarkable autobiography of Sam McClure, the Scots farmboy who created McClure's Magazine and brought . Willa out of schoolteaching to give her her chance as a writer: this is why McClure's autobiography is so good a book, very well worth reading. But I learned this time that she had also ghosted Ellen Terry's autobiography; I've no idea how that worked out.

Since last in Lincoln, I observed two striking improvements. Landscaped down the slope from the massive State capitol, for a quarter of a mile, a vista of a dozen or so fountains has been created. At the end of it, close to the university, there is a really beautiful new sculpture gallery, designed by Edward Stone.

So far as I have seen, the best con- temporary architecture anywhere is to be seen in America—from Frank Lloyd Wright

on to Saarinen, Johansen, Stone, Philip Johnson. One night my friends took me to see the outdoor exhibition of contemporary sculpture, flood-lit in the open space around the new gallery, dominated for me by a very characteristic and recognisable work of Lipchitz.

It was something to have persuaded the State legislature to do this for the arts. Not long ago I noticed between two visits that something comparable, even more creditable, had been accomplished by the State of North Carolina. It had given a million and a quarter dollars to the picture gallery at Raleigh, the little ante-bellum capital. Within a few years they had built up a fascinating collection. My visit was brief—I had a lecture impending—but I was much impressed by the English pictures they had acquired in no time, the fine Hoare portrait of Chatham, the Nollekens busts, one of Charles James Fox.

Little Raleigh had made a better option than big Atlanta, which was spending its money on a vast building, but the pictures are few. Still, almost everywhere one goes in America there art 'wonderful pictures to see, nearly all got together in the course of this century.

Just as the first excitement of my visit was aesthetic, the `Before Cortes' exhibition, so my last was literary. Somewhere along the line—at the charming campus of eighteenth century Dickinson College in Pennsylvania —one of the younger English Literature professors put me on to reading Flannery O'Connor. I at once recognised a master.

She wrote only two short novels and two collections of short stories, for she was only thirty-nine when she died. Her life had been ravaged by the early onset of lupus; she had much pain and suffering to endure, and this she faced with silent stoicism, like Emily Brontë. A believing Catholic of old Southern stock, she does not obtrude it in her books, like Greene and Waugh: too good an artist. Indeed she is a superb .artist : I have never read short stories more powerful in their im- pact, more complete—a whole novel com- pressed into some of them (like Hardy's)—or more concise and compelling.

She has her own idiom, no one quite like her that I can think of. Of course she has the immense advantage of the South to write about, with the authentic stories of old decayed families, the mad revivalists bap- tising in the rivers, the crazy characters and wayside murders. Such things can happen in the backwoods of the South! Then there is the advantage of the Southern speech, the dialogue of which she has such mastery.

In America she was thought of as a comic writer, and she certainly has a sardonic humour. But she goes deeper : her stories are as tragic as they are comic; her characteristic mode—and this is rare in America, perhaps anyirhere—is a savage irony, a curious realism along with the improbable fantasy, and an unflinching philosophic quality in the way she looks at life. Another Emily Bronte, she completely fulfilled herself in her narrow intense vision before dying young. I like Time's welcome to her on her first appearance: 'Another talented Southern lady whose work is highly unladylike • And I am glad that my friend Robert Lowell was as impressed with her work as I am. She should be published over here in one volume, with a proper Introduction.