Also let me say that every time I read something
from Willa Cather, my estimation of her as a writer rises. She ranks in the upper echelon of American
writers. If you wish to read one of the
great American novels, read Cather’s My Ántonia.
“Paul’s Case,” which has its own Wikipedia site, is a story about a disaffected adolescent,
Paul, living in Pittsburg with an overbearing father in a dourly, conventional
neighborhood, who dreams of exotic travel and whimsical experiences. One day he steals a substantial amount of
money from his father’s account and runs away to New York City where he spends
about a week enjoying the freedom, until it seems he’s going to be found. It should be noted that in some editions
(though not mine) the story is subtitled, “A Study in Temperament.” The structure of the story is of two halves, Paul’s
life in Pittsburg and his week in New York.
Indeed, much of the story suggests polar contrasts, so much so that one
can state that the aesthetic, organizing principle of story is that of duality.
The opening scene provides much insight into Paul’s
temperament. It’s the longest scene in
the story and worthy of close examination.
Paul is facing the Principal at his high school in order to be
readmitted after apparently being expelled.
It was Paul's afternoon
to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh High School to account for his
various misdemeanors. He had been suspended a week ago, and his father had
called at the Principal's office and confessed his perplexity about his son.
Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle
outgrown, and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and
worn; but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore
an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in
his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly
significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension.
To
be “suave and smiling” and “something of a dandy” after being expelled, to
display an “opal pin” and a “red carnation” as a high school student suggests
something eccentric about him, perhaps even bombastic.
When questioned by the
Principal as to why he was there Paul stated, politely enough, that he wanted
to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed to lying;
found it, indeed, indispensable for overcoming friction. His teachers were
asked to state their respective charges against him, which they did with such a
rancor and aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder
and impertinence were among the offenses named, yet each of his instructors
felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of the
trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the boy's; in
the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he seemingly made
not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been making a synopsis of a
paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher had stepped to his side and
attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started back with a shudder and thrust
his hands violently behind him. The astonished woman could scarcely have been
more hurt and embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary
and definitely personal as to be unforgettable. in one way and another he had
made all his teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of
physical aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his hand shading his
eyes; in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; in
another he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous intention.
“Disorder,”
“impertinence,” defiant” are the adjectives used to describe Paul, but it goes
further. The lie, which apparently is
frequent and which will multiply as the story moves along, and the reflexive
flinching away from the teacher’s hand suggest a subversive nature, not
subversive in the sense of undermining authority, but subversive in the sense
of not being in sympathy with an established order. It’s as if the boy lives in a different plane
of reality.
As the inquisition
proceeded one of his instructors repeated an impertinent remark of the boy's,
and the Principal asked him whether he thought that a courteous speech to have
made a woman. Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.
"I don't
know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite, either. I
guess it's a sort of way I have of saying things regardless."
Paul
is not deliberately fighting authority. It’s
that the authority doesn’t fit with his mode of being. There is a disconnect, and the teachers can’t
seem to figure him out.
His teachers were in
despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling of them all when he declared
there was something about the boy which none of them understood. He added:
"I don't really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence;
there's something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong, for one
thing. I happen to know that he was born in Colorado, only a few months before
his mother died out there of a long illness. There is something wrong about the
fellow."
The drawing master had
come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the
forced animation of his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at
his drawing board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white,
blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes,
the lips twitching even in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that
drew them back from his teeth.
And
so we now get a fuller portrait of the boy, one who has lost his mother in infancy,
a boy who has a “haunted” smile, “with forced animation of his eyes.” And then in contrast with the boyish persona,
he also exhibits the very opposite, the “blue-veined,” “wrinkled” face of an
old man. The polarity is striking.
The
disparity between the boyish image and that of the wrinkled old man is
startling. But Paul’s character has extremes. Following the scene at the Principal’s
office, we see Paul off to his after school job, not some sort business or
industrial job as one might expect in what at the time was the center of the
steel industry, but an usher at a concert hall.
As for Paul, he ran
down the hill whistling the "Soldiers' Chorus" from Faust, looking
wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of his teachers were not
there to writhe under his lightheartedness. As it was now late in the afternoon
and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at Carnegie Hall, he decided that he
would not go home to supper. When he reached the concert hall the doors were
not yet open and, as it was chilly outside, he decided to go up into the
picture gallery--always deserted at this hour--where there were some of
Raffelli's gay studies of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two
that always exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but
the old guard, who sat in one corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the peace and
walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a while he
sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought him to look at
his watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with a start and ran
downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering out from the cast room, and an
evil gesture at the Venus de Milo as he passed her on the stairway.
The
boy who hated school whistles a stirring chorus from the opera Faust, which perhaps is an allusion that
has significance here since the opera is about characters who are
outcasts. Interestingly Paul is
exhilarated by the art in the hall, and yet rebuffs the classical statues of
Augustus Caesar and Venus de Milo. The
opera and the paintings (Rico is apparently the artist) come from the Romantic
tradition, which associate Paul to a freeing motif, while the classical art
suggests an authoritative tradition, in one sense, a reduction of freedom. Later we see that Paul’s father keeps
portraits of George Washington and John Calvin in the house, again figures that
are authoritative and constraining.
In
his element at the concert hall, Paul’s personality bursts out.
When Paul reached the
ushers' dressing room half a dozen boys were there already, and he began
excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one of the few that at all
approached fitting, and Paul thought it very becoming-though he knew that the
tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest, about which he was
exceedingly sensitive. He was always considerably excited while be dressed,
twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the preliminary flourishes
of the horns in the music room; but tonight he seemed quite beside himself, and
he teased and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put
him down on the floor and sat on him.
Sensitive,
excited, even “crazy,” the other boys forcibly restrain him. Cather is understating the emotional height
that Paul reaches. He is like the music
that the instruments blare out, taunt and brassy.
When the symphony began
Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long sigh of relief, and lost
himself as he had done before the Rico. It was not that symphonies, as such,
meant anything in particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the instruments
seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit within him; something that
struggled there like the genie in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He
felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert
hall blazed into unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on Paul
forgot even the nastiness of his teacher's being there and gave himself up to
the peculiar stimulus such personages always had for him. The soloist chanced
to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the mother of many
children; but she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all she had
that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, which, in
Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of Romance.
The
music frees “some hilarious and potent spirit within him.” The hall is ablaze in “unimaginable
splendor.” The German soprano—a mother
figure to him?—becomes a “queen of Romance.”
Paul is completely transported.
The other plane of reality that Paul lives in has been released, and he
is at the height of elation.
And
then the concert is over.
After a concert was
over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to sleep, and tonight
he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to
let down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which
was the only thing that could be called living at all. During the last number
he withdrew and, after hastily changing his clothes in the dressing room,
slipped out to the side door where the soprano's carriage stood. Here he began
pacing rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.
The
elation has dropped. He becomes
engrossed with the soprano. When she
comes out he follows her and her male friend in the rain and watches them go
into a hotel.
A quick gust of wind
brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that
he was still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that his boots were
letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet about him; that
the lights in front of the concert hall were out and that the rain was driving
in sheets between him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it
was, what be wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the rain beat
in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the
black night outside, looking up at it.
The
rain projects his emotional state. His
excitement is over, and by the time he reaches home his emotional state has
plumbed to the other extreme.
Paul never went up
Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the house
of the Cumberland minister. He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of
defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and
commonness that he had always had when he came home. The moment he turned into
Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these
orgies of living he experienced all the physical depression which follows a
debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house penetrated
by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of
everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh
flowers.
From
an emotional high, he has dropped to depression. Here again is the polarity, elation and
despondency, a soul wanting to expand, but forced to contract. I don’t know whether Cather knew of the
psychological disorder of bi-polar, but Paul seems to exhibit its tendencies. The story is a psychological study. Even the detail of Paul’s search for a mother
figure suggests mental analysis by the author.
Indeed, the title of the story “Paul’s Case” alludes to a psychological
dossier, a case study of a strange boy who steals an exorbitant amount of
money, runs away, and goes on to commit suicide. Cather is pushing us to ask why.
The
story goes on. Paul steals the money and
is off on a train to New York. In New
York, he lies that his parents are trailing behind him and he’s able to book an
expensive hotel room. He enjoys nights
on the town. In a past blog of ‘Lines I
Wished I’d Written,” I presented this wonderful scene of Paul on a carriage
ride through the city during a snowstorm.
Even in New York Paul experiences elations
and despondencies. The bi-polar tendencies
seems to follow him.
So
why is Paul the way he is? Is it a
mental illness? Bi-polarism only
describes the behavior; it doesn’t describe the character, unless Cather
intends to create Paul with mental illness, and there is no evidence of
that. It’s as he sits down to eat alone
at the dining room of the hotel when Cather gets to the heart of Paul’s nature.
He was not in the least
abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these
people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the
pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely
later in the evening, in his lodge at the Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid
of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative
desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his
surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear
it passively. He had only to glance down at his attire to reassure himself that
here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.
The
heart of Paul’s nature is to live in that plane of reality he calls his own and
for others to not think anything of it.
He can do it in the anonymity of a huge city, a city that values the
individual spirit.
So
what of his suicide? To end a story with
a suicide is, I have to say, rather easy.
It’s overly easy, too neat. Sure
it provides that closing cadence. But
unless that closing cadence is well prepared, it rings discordant, at least to
me. To have a suicide at the end, out of
the blue, is to crash the story close.
Was
the suicide unprepared? First, I don’t
recall any suggestion in the story of Paul wanting to end his life. Sure, his emotional state drops low, but he
always has a plan to go forward. He
comes up with the idea of embezzling his father’s account. Cather could easily have ended with Paul
living off the streets when his money runs out.
He could have found a way to head across the country into the mountain
west as some of Cather’s other characters do.
There is no reason he had to throw himself in front of the train. The only rationale for such a conclusion is for
Cather to say that Paul was after all mentally ill. He really did have a bi-polar condition, and
all the suggestions of his emotional extremes build to that suicide. If you really want to read between the lines,
then that’s a viable reading.
However,
I don’t think so, not to my reading. The
theme of his societal alienation overwhelms the motif of his mental tendencies. He is alienated not because he is mentally
ill, but because he is different. The
mental illness reading would dissipate the alienation theme, because he would
be a sick person, not a different person.
This calls to mind another story
of a character who throws herself in front of a train, Anna Karenina from
Tolstoy. I think Cather’s story owes
something to Tolstoy’s novel. But in
Tolstoy’s novel, Anna contemplates suicide before she actually commits it. She may have even attempted it once—I just
can’t quite remember. It’s
prepared. When she does it, it’s not a
shock.
Nonetheless
“Paul’s Case” is still a fine story. Cather
gives it such fine touches, establishing motifs which reoccur to shape the
story. I want to end with a passage just
before Paul commits suicide. Here Cather
pulls together the flower motif, which we first saw in his button hole at the
Principal’s office. Here, he has been
walking in the snow along the train tracks and stops to take a rest.
The carnations in his
coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over. It
occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first
night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid
breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the
glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the
homilies by which the world is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully
from his coat and scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up.
Then he dozed awhile, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to the
cold.
So
nice.
One
last thing I must mention or I would be remiss.
It has been suggested that this story reflects Willa Cather’s possible homosexuality. That Paul is a homosexual who can’t fit into
the heterosexual world. That this story
is a sublimated or cloaked expression of Cather not fitting into the
world. Though it has never been proven
that Willa Cather was homosexual, and despite the literary community endlessly
conjecturing that every other writer was a closeted homosexual (Shakespeare and
Herman Melville—not—come to mind), it is quite probably that Cather was
homosexual. She never married and she
did live with a woman friend for decades and she wore boyish haircuts
throughout her life and she had an obsessed writing habit of writing from a
male point of view. I believe she said
she felt uncomfortable writing from a woman’s point of view. It’s probable she was, though she never acknowledged
it. But she also wrote from a Christian sensibility, and from what I understand
her politics were Conservative, so who knows.
Does
it matter if this story was inspired from her possible alienation because of
her sexuality? It’s an interesting
thought, but it does nothing to understand the story. And there is nothing in the story to suggest
that it’s a cloaked expression of homosexuality. We readers can only go by what’s written
down. How the story comes about is the
author’s privy. And he/she may not even know
the why and where.
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