The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, February 9, 2025

Storytime: Willa Cather’s “Coming, Aphrodite!” reads like the draft of a chapter that never made it into The Song of the Lark, the semi-autobiographical novel where Cather’s Thea Kronborg, the Uber-conceited opera singer, finds her voice and begins to make her own way in the world. Cather must’ve edited out the chapter then reworked it into “Coming” as a stand-alone, long story (40 pages in the Library of America edition of Youth and the Bright Medusa, the 1920 collection.) It’s a mirror image of the latter part of The Song, and the main character is just as insufferable, unsympathetic, cold and narcissistic. Here, she’s Eden Bower. The story takes place around Washington Square Park in Manhattan. The seductive setting is a tease, and proves irrelevant to the story. Dan Hedger is a 26-year-old aspiring painter with a dog, Cesar, who has “lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the southside of Washington Square, and nobody has ever disturbed him.” He’s an idealist and a Platonist: the ideal for him is somewhere out there, unreachable. He works in an advertising firm to pay the bills. Eden Bower moves in with her piano and singing to disturb him. She is 20 and full of herself. “Before she was out of short dresses, she had made up her mind that she was going to be an actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be much admired by men and would have everything she wanted.” She immediately reprimands Hedger for washing his dog in an apparently communal bathtub. He gets back at her by complaining that the trunk she has left in the apartment hallway bothers him. She tells him that she’ll have it removed when she can find a man to do it. The reader is to get the impression that they get on each other’s nerves, when both get on the reader’s nerves a lot more. It’s just as obvious that they’re unaware of their mutual sparks. Cather, whose manipulations are all over the story, delays that realization for the plot’s sake. There is a closet separating the two apartments. Hedger finds himself in there doing something or other when he discovers a knot hole he had never noticed before. He looks. There is Eden exercising in the nude. He’s a peeping tom. He doesn’t stop. Not for “six or sixteen minutes.” He’s a painter. So to him, we are to believe, he’s just looking at a figure, and going through the motions of air-painting her. Cather pulls off a remarkably erotic scene in straightforward prose that appears entirely innocent even as it stumbles over its double-entendres. It’s creepy and beautiful, but mostly creepy, especially when Hedger starts repeating the peeping every single day, and cannot stop. “It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable.” No matter. It has no consequence. Painter and singer make up while looking at pigeons in Washington Square. She becomes interested in him, at least as an instrument of her recent emancipation, and as a character she finds different from the run-of-the-mill boys she’s led on until then. He becomes interested in her. He invites her to look at his paintings, but Cather is more interested in telling us about Eden’s ambitions. “She had the easy freedom of obscurity, and the consciousness of power. She enjoyed both. She was in no hurry.” She’s parked above Washington Square as she waits for a rich “capitalist” to take her to Europe. She knows the capitalist just wants to get in her pants. She has no problem taking advantage of the ride. The capitalist is apparently paying her way in New York as she waits. Hedger feels “chosen” too, but for a different purpose. She did not guess that he would “have more tempestuous adventures sitting in his dark studio than she would find in all the capitals of Europe.” Other than the peeping, the story development of Hedger’s character doesn’t live up to that line. Eden agrees to go with Hedger to Coney Island, to watch a painting model of his go up in a hot air balloon and lose as much of her clothes as possible, part of a spectacle to milk beachgoers of money. Eden angers Hedger when she slips into the balloon herself, as a dare to herself, goes up, and gives the crowd a show and plenty of skin. He considers the stunt dangerous and foolish. She thought it was fun. He sulks, but forgives. He tells her a violent mythical story about a rain queen who kills all her lovers. She’s put off by the violence, which seems odd, considering her adventurousness. She’s probably put off by the similarities between her and the queen, but that’s reader conjecture. Either way, they separate huffily, each back to their apartment, “but the thing that had roused her, as a blow rouses a proud man, was the doubt, the contempt, the sneering hostility with which the painter had looked at her when he told his savage story.” First we have the “detestable” voyeurism, which Cather dropped out of sight as if it never happened. Now we have the old trope of the woman thrilled by her man’s brutality. “Nobody’s eyes had ever defied her like this.“ (I’m reminded of the ridiculous line I read recently in Steinbeck’s Wayward Bus: “The remembered terror of the one time he had hit her lay not in the blow—she had been hit before, and far from hating it had taken excitement and exuberance from it—but Juan had hit her as he would a bug.”) it gets worse: “ crowds, and balloons were all very well, she reflected, but woman’s chief adventure is man.” I did not expect this in Willa Cather. But the Cather of Oh Pioneers was long gone by the time she wrote this story, when she was becoming more conventional and, ironically for a writer often mistaken for a feminist, patriarchal. (The full-length novel that would follow Youth and the Bright Medusa was to be One of Us, a propagandistic, syrupy novel of World War I soldiery much like Steinbeck’s mawkish dispatches from the front in World War II, when he tried to be Ernie Pyle and came off sounding like a Pentagon newsreel. It would get worse, embarrassingly worse, with his dispatches from Vietnam, when the author of In Dubious Battle and Grapes of Wrath turned full-blown reactionary.)

From peeping Tom to dog-beater: as Eden takes a walk on the roof to smell fresh air, Cesar attacks her. Hedger grabs him by the throat, goes off to beat him, then boasts about it: “‘I caned him unmercifully,’ he panted,” the panting suggesting how violent he must’ve been. “Of course, you didn’t hear anything; he never whines when I beat him.” ( “… but to appreciate a large, noble dog requires a large, noble mind,” writes Constance Fenimore Woolson in one of her stories. How noble a mind can Hedger be?) This is awful stuff, more so from Cather, but we’re supposed to consider it a period piece, as if there was a time when beating dogs and women and slaves was more acceptable (Cather’s racist asides are all over her works, come to think of it), when using brutality or voyeurism as a plot device with no consequence is the writer’s prerogative. Authorial mechanics are like bone spurs in this story. The violence brings Eden and Hedger together. He confesses his peeping “crime.” She forgives him without hesitating and does him one better. She does him. He’s madly in love. But they soon quarrel. And here we finally come to the point. She wants him to be a famous artist. He believes in art for art’s sake, in painting for artists “who haven’t been born.” She doesn’t understand. “You know very well there’s only one kind of success that’s real,” she says. They’re both Manichaeans in their outlooks. They split. Years pass. She’s famous. He’s a modernist no one can pigeonhole. But the story focuses only on Eden. Hedger by now is off stage, discarded, a steppingstone to her flourishing. All she cares about is that he’s known, and talked about: “One doesn’t like to have been an utter fool, even at twenty.” She’s no fool, but she’s no hero.

—P.T.

 

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“Ah! ah! to be rid of idleness and the drag of loneliness — to be doing and rising — to be admired, petted, raised to a state where all was applause, elegance, assumption of dignity. Her head swam as she thought of it — her little lines assumed great importance in the world. If she could only represent them as she should.”

–From Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900).

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