Willa Cather In Europe by Willa Cather

Author:Willa Cather [Cather, Willa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83146-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

8

Dieppe and Rouen

In the following article we shall participate in Willa Cather’s introduction to France, hours that for many Americans are often second in importance only to touching English soil, if that. Sensitively she describes the transition, the last of the lights of England, and finally, in the murky darkness, a first flare from the Norman coast. “Certainly so small a body of water as the English Channel never separated two worlds so different.” She also in her turn must make this old discovery. At dawn, symbolically, we debark with her in another, rosy world.

She travels with humble people, and everywhere observes them closely; just as later, for instance, she will notice an immigrant family like the Shimerdas, at the beginning of My Ántonia, arrive in the West. Through some mysterious law, these simple figures always catch and retain her attention. This is true even as the two young women—with only a few hours of sleep behind them, for these are the travels of youth and energy—drive through the early-morning streets to their hotel in Dieppe. Even through her fatigue she notices an old woman ragpicker, and ponders on the activity and destinies of the whole tribe.

Then comes golden slumber; after which, at breakfast, here in good bright air again, she makes her first taste of Continental hotel life. The glass-enclosed dining-room, the yellow sands and blue sea beyond, are sketched as for a scene by the—as yet unknown—Marcel Proust. Here, “freshly created,” her heart rides high as a boy’s kite that she sees being flown from the hotel terrace.

She descends, quite obviously, to acquit herself of a few historical facts, for her readers. Yet after only a few sentences her other self breaks through once more, to enjoy her first French castle, picturing William the Conqueror, hearing the harness clank upon the knights riding with him along the road to near-by Arcques. To see such a setting was for her to re-people it, to reconstruct the past again. This will later become one of her powers.

That same afternoon, through the blond, tree-lined wheatfields of France, then even as now “sown thick with poppies,” the two companions ride further to Rouen. Here, significantly, it is Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, major figures in her literary pantheon, who are given first mention. It is wholly natural, one feels, for Willa Cather to apprehend a city chiefly in terms of its men of letters. She even would see it through their eyes; these were the serious values.

In Rouen, though, one other major impression, of architectural beauty, was to come within these next few hours; and then remain for years. She finds words of moving beauty to describe for us her first glimpse of the cathedral, its arches and its vaulting, the “burning blue and crimson” of its two great rose windows. This picture was to remain unaltered, clearly retained, over a very long period.

Twenty years later, in 1922, when she wishes to express the high meaning of France to Claude, the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.