To the average reader the name of American novelist Willa Cather conjures up images of the prairies, of frontier Nebraska, and of the nineteenth-century Southwest, the harsh and austerely beautiful landscapes of some of her best known novels, My Antonia (1918), O Pioneers! (1913), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). But Cather was a cosmopolitan—widely traveled, knowledgeable of languages, passionate for high art and culture, sophisticated in taste, and acute to the nuances of manners, customs, furnishings, and dress. Born in 1873, she worked from 1906–1911 as a writer and editor for McClure’s Magazine in New York City, and was to live in the city on and off for much of her life, mainly in Greenwich Village, and then on Park Avenue. From this experience come a clutch of enchanting stories and a couple of longer works that conjure up a world now lost yet tantalizingly still viewable today. These stories yield a wealth of fascinating details about New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they are also remarkable for the way the city becomes one of their characters, part of the felt life of their imaginative worlds, much as was the case with the landscapes and settings of Cather’s Western fiction.
Set around the turn of the century and somewhat after, these stories portray New York as a place of unspeakable elegance and civilization, a contrast to the “raggedness” of the Western and Midwestern cities from which many of her characters come. In those years there was still a high degree of Englishness afloat in New York. People took tea, lived in flats, sat on sofas called Chesterfields. Social engagements might begin as late as ten o’clock. Gentlemen had men servants to help with their attire, donned smoking jackets at home, fastened their cuffs with “sleeve buttons,” wore top hat, gloves, and cane to breakfast out. Ladies, too, dressed with a degree of formality once they were “out of short dresses.” An outing in winter meant putting on one’s “furs,” and perhaps carrying a muff. Some of Cather’s characters are artists and divas who dress dramatically, in “a dark purple velvet carriage cape lined with fur and furred at the cuffs and collar,” for example, or in “black velvet with long black feathers and a lace veil” (in daylight).
The railroad that brought many young hopefuls from their prairie towns to the metropolis did not come into New York proper, but stopped in Jersey City, whence travelers would take a boat that crossed the river to 23rd Street. This entry formed a kind of vestibule in which the voyager might ponder his experience, as happened with Nellie Birdseye, the narrator of My Mortal Enemy (1926). Years after her visit Nellie remembers her first glimpse of the city as a young woman, and manages to make it seem almost as magical as something out of Arabian Nights:
The boat was pulling out, and I was straining my eyes to catch, through the fine, reluctant snow, my first glimpse of the city we were approaching. We passed the Wilhelm der Grosse coming up the river under tug, her sides covered with ice after a stormy crossing, a flock of sea-gulls in her wake. The snow blurred everything a little, and the buildings on the Battery all ran together—looked like an enormous fortress with a thousand windows. From the mass, the dull gold dome of the World building emerged like a ruddy autumn moon at twilight.
New York will also be the locus of Nellie’s education in the limits life can set to such portentous beginnings, a theme that courses throughout these stories. An ominous note sounds even in the passage itself, with its comparison of the city to a “fortress.” Further, the reference in the passage to the dome of the World Building alludes to the journalistic hegemony that once ruled New York and is still commemorated in its place names today—notably Times Square and Herald Square. A character in another of Cather’s New York stories, “Consequences,” can see the Times Building—which stood then on the narrow triangle that lies between 42ndand 43rdStreets on Broadway—all the way from the window of his “bachelor apartment house” on 58thStreet.
Driven by the accelerating pace of commerce, business, and journalism, the New York of that time had surpassed Chicago as the first city of the United States, and Cather’s New York fiction explored how these forces affected the world of human scale going on beneath that rising skyline. One of the main characters in “The Bookkeeper’s Wife,” for example, a young man who pursues and captures a woman much too “sporty” for him, is pictured in his office, “crouched on his high stool and staring out at the tops of the tall buildings flushed with the winter sunset, at the hundreds of windows, so many rectangles of white electric light.” The city becomes a kind of crucible for Cather, where changes and contrasts could be examined, where dazzling possibilities are held out, pursued, attained, and sometimes lost, or found not to be what they seemed; where the extraordinary pace of change, especially in the early decades of the century that Cather wrote of, will offer enormous opportunity but also exact a price.
Another example, more in the comic mode, is the short story, “Ardessa.” The rapid beat of the twentieth century catches up with Ardessa, the eponymous heroine of an amusing short satire on the new muckraking journalism of the time. Ardessa Devine, a senior stenographer steeped in the editorial traditions of the 1880s and 1890s, faces a changed universe when her conservative editor, “out of place in the world of brighter, breezier magazines that had been flowering since the new century came in,” sells his publication to Marcus O’Mally, a young firebrand from the West who renames the publication The Outcry and “turns it into a red hot magazine of protest.” The story is based on S.S. McClure himself and his brand of journalism, still thriving, with some updating, in some quarters today: