Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

Author:Benjamin Taylor [Taylor, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

In other words, the grave: one’s ultimate house, and home. He knows himself to be disengaging from all that has bound him to life: marital love, parental love, heroic research. “Lying on his old couch, he could almost believe himself in that house already. The sagging springs were like the sham upholstery that is put in coffins. Just the equivocal American way of dealing with serious facts. Why pretend that it is possible to soften that last hard bed?”

The book received an overwhelmingly enthusiastic press. Interest in it had built from the time of its serialization in Collier’s, beginning in June 1925, with the proceeds from which Willa bought a mink coat, the first possession of any value she had ever owned. The book would appear in September. It was understood as a study in the great-heartedness of two protagonists, a book against the grain of its time. At Mandel Hall of the University of Chicago she spoke that November on the topic “The Tendency of the Modern Novel,” implicitly distinguishing herself from modernism. “There is such a thing in life as nobility,” she told the capacity crowd, “and novels which celebrate it will always be the novels which are finally loved.”

This did not keep her from liking one of the greatest of modernists, D. H. Lawrence, when they met through their mutual friend Mabel Dodge Luhan. Cather was finishing The Professor’s House; Lawrence had recently published Studies in Classic American Literature, a book famously arguing for the instinctual, the mythical, the primitive in American works. He would likely have responded to Cather’s celebration of the aboriginal yet highly civilized Anasazi, though whether he read The Professor’s House is unknown.

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