A Place of Her Own

Early classified (and nowadays mostly dismissed) as a “local colorist”–doing for Maine what the likes of John Fox Jr. had done for Kentucky, Thomas Nelson Page for Virginia, and Edward Eggleston for Indiana–Jewett was rooted in a way almost no American is anymore. She was born in 1849 in the inland port of South Berwick, upriver from Portland, the daughter of a prosperous and cultivated doctor. As a girl, she accompanied her father on his visits to patients, taking in the ways and speech of the local people. Her first story was published when she was nineteen, and soon her work was appearing regularly in the Atlantic Monthly, edited by the young William Dean Howells. With his encouragement, she produced three novels: “Deephaven” in 1877, “A Country Doctor” in 1884, and her masterpiece, “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” She died a few years after suffering injuries in a carriage accident, in 1909.

Jewett’s writing enjoyed immediate success. Before she was thirty, she was “a fully arrived celebrity,” as an early biographer put it, and she was swept into the literary circles of nearby Boston. Upon reading “Deephaven”–a youthful precursor to “The Country of the Pointed Firs”–for the third time, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote her a fan letter. Two years later, she was a guest at the seventieth birthday party of the literary lion Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Along the way, Jewett became friends with the publisher of the Atlantic, James T. Fields, and his wife, Annie, and after Fields’s death, Annie and Sarah were companions. For some years, they kept a Boston salon at 146 Charles Street, where they hosted the literati of the day–meeting, there and on trips to Europe, such luminaries as Henry James, Kipling, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and the Dickens family.

Through all this exposure to high culture, Jewett never deviated from her own vocation as a chronicler of simple country life. Her characters live close to nature, in isolated homesteads and small seaports. Above her desk she kept a line from Flaubert: “To write about ordinary life as one would write history.”

Her most famous story, “A White Heron,” is emblematic. In the story, a little girl walking her cow home through the woods encounters a young man with a gun. He is an ornithologist, come in search of a white heron. He spends the night at the girl’s house and offers the dazzling sum of $10 to any who will lead him to the great bird’s nest. He is kind and attractive. Wanting to please him, she slips away to climb the tallest tree at dawn, to see the white heron’s first flight and so discover its nest. Her plan works perfectly–until the moment comes to tell. Remembering how she had seen the great bird “flying through the golden air and how they [had] watched the sea and the morning together,” the child realizes “she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away.”

Her decision involves sacrifice, for the stranger has awakened intimations of adventure in a wider world. But her loyalty to the woods and its creatures is decisive. The story ends: “Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!”

FIDELITY, this time not to nature but to vocation, is also the theme of “A Country Doctor.” Anna Prince, an orphan, is raised in the town of Oldfields by a kind widower, Dr. Leslie, who recognizes her aptitude for his profession. Eventually, Anna herself comes to see medicine as her God-given calling. Like the girl in “A White Heron,” she is fleetingly tempted by romance but hews to her chosen path and finishes medical school. She quietly disregards the “fettering conventionalities” upheld by some disapproving townsfolk and relatives, and earns their respect for her healing art. She finds joy in serving the people of Oldfields and environs, not only by relieving their bodily pains, but also by acting as their comforter, confessor, and “interpreter of the outside world.”

This coherence of work and surroundings, and the selfless devotion to the good of others, are reprised on a higher literary plane in “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” Where “A White Heron” is crudely symbolic (the woodland child is named Sylvia; the man is never without his gun) and “A Country Doctor” intermittently reads like a tract (“our heroine” is actually likened to Christ), “The Country of the Pointed Firs” has the individuality of fully realized art.

The central characters are three single women. Two are widows–Almira Todd, a sixty-seven-year-old herbal healer, and her elderly mother, Mrs. Blackett–while the third, never named, is a writer who rents a room from Mrs. Todd for a few months’ summer stay in the coastal village of Dunnet Landing. This third woman is the narrator, the outsider through whose eyes we discover this place.

The plot is nearly nonexistent: a succession of scenes, many consisting merely of conversations. A Milton-quoting retired sea captain pines for the wider horizons of bygone whaling days. A grief-stricken widowed fisherman knits as he remembers his beloved wife, whom he honors by striving to maintain her standards of housekeeping. Mrs. Todd recounts the saga of “poor Joanna,” the daughter of a good family who, crossed in love, retreated to Shell-heap Island and lived there as a hermit till she died, whereupon the whole town turned out to bury her on the island in accordance with her wishes.

At the heart of the book is an account of a day trip to Green Island by Mrs. Todd and the narrator. This farthest offshore island is where Mrs. Blackett lives and farms, with an “odd” aging son named William who never left home.

Mrs. Blackett is Jewett’s finest creation. At eighty-six, she has seen “every trouble” short of her own death, yet she is light-hearted and light-footed. She is discerning, too–Almira Todd speaks of “mother’s snap and power o’ seein’ things just as they be”–and, above all, generous. Her hospitality is “something exquisite,” and of tact, which is “after all a kind of mind-reading,” she has the “golden gift.”

After the visitors have eaten a meal of fish chowder and explored the island while Almira gathers pennyroyal and other herbs for her syrups and elixirs, the visitors come into the farmhouse for a last cup of tea. William, conquering his shyness, sings for them, and his mother joins in the old Scottish and English tunes and Civil War ballads.

THEN, just before their farewells, while Almira is bundling up her herbs, Mrs. Blackett invites the summer guest into her bedroom to sit in her rocker and see the finest view in the house. The room is plain. There is a Bible on the lightstand, and a pair of glasses and a thimble. A striped cotton shirt Mrs. Blackett is making for William is neatly folded on the table. “I sat in the rocking-chair,” records the narrator, “and felt that it was a place of peace, the little brown bedroom and the quiet outlook upon field and sea and sky. I looked up, and we understood each other without speaking. ‘I shall like to think o’ you settin’ here to-day,’ said Mrs. Blackett. ‘I want you to come again. It has been so pleasant for William.'”

As drama, it barely registers on the Richter scale. Yet perhaps the serene climax of “The Country of the Pointed Firs” conveys why Willa Cather could quote Henry James as saying of Jewett, “She had a sort of elegance of humility, or fine flame of modesty. She was content to be slight if she could be true.”

WILLA CATHER knew Sara Orne Jewett briefly, during the sixteen months before Jewett’s death. It was Louis Brandeis’s wife Alice who took Cather–by this time no longer a refugee fresh from Nebraska, but an accomplished New York journalist and story writer in her early thirties–to the house on Charles Street. Cather showed Jewett her stories and took to heart the older woman’s advice: to work at writing fiction full time, and write what she knew.

“Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that,” Cather summed up the injunction. After a false start with her first novel, the pseudo-Jamesian “Alexander’s Bridge” (1912), she turned seriously to her “home” material, and by 1918 had published all three of her prairie novels, “O Pioneers!,” “The Song of the Lark,” and “My Antonia.”

Cather remained deeply grateful to Jewett, her only female mentor, and in 1925 wrote the introduction to a new edition of “The Country of the Pointed Firs” and other stories, lauding them as “almost flawless examples of literary art.” She even likened “The Country of the Pointed Firs” to “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Scarlet Letter.” In an expanded essay on Jewett published in 1936, Cather was more restrained, saying only that Jewett, like Twain and Hawthorne, possessed that “very personal quality of perception, a vivid and intensely personal experience of life, which make a ‘style.'”

It was a style that was rapidly becoming passe. By the 1930s, literary fashion was running to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Eliot and Joyce. Wrote Cather: “Imagine a young man or woman, born in New York City, educated at a New York university, violently inoculated by Freud, hurried into journalism, knowing no more about New England country people (or country folk anywhere) than he has caught from motor trips or observed from summer hotels: what is there for him in ‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’?”

But the kinship between Cather and Jewett transcends fashion. Indeed, it consists partly of an indifference to fashion. Both are very American artists, responsive to nature, to landscape, and to people who live close to the land. Neither bothers much with politics or high society; both write about religion. Neither woman married or successfully portrays romantic love in fiction (Jewett doesn’t try). Both are most at home writing about, as critic Joan Acocella says of Cather, “noble-minded people living in small towns.”

It was a subject embedded in their life histories. Growing up in out-of-the-way places–Jewett in South Berwick, Cather in Red Cloud, Nebraska–they had some similar experiences. Each received her early education mainly through her friendships with adults. Just as Jewett accompanied her father on his medical rounds, so Cather attached herself to a German piano teacher, devoured the library of a Jewish couple, and rode out in the buggies of both of Red Cloud’s doctors, peppering them with questions about science. Like Jewett, she reprised all this in fiction. In “The Song of the Lark” Thea Kronborg grows up to become not a doctor but a singer, yet Dr. Archie remains her lifelong friend.

In other ways, however, Jewett and Cather’s biographies–and their writing–sharply diverged. Jewett, whose fiction evokes a single, integrated culture, never really left home. South Berwick is only seventy miles from Boston. As a young woman, she could move into a cosmopolitan adult world without cutting her New England roots. She always spent summers in the Maine house where she grew up. She died in the house where she was born.

The contrast could hardly be greater with Cather, who early lost any chance for such stable belonging. When she was nine, her family made the wrenching move from their farm near Winchester, Virginia, to Nebraska, where they lived first on the prairie, then after a year in a town of about 1,200. Going to college meant the University of Nebraska, in raw Lincoln, scarcely gouged from the frontier. Work as a journalist and teacher took her to Pittsburgh, then New York. She traveled in the southwest and in Europe, and ultimately settled in Greenwich Village, summering in New Brunswick, Canada, and spending the fall months in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she is buried. Not surprisingly, Cather gave her stories widely varied settings: Nebraska, eastern Colorado, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Virginia, a French battlefield, New Mexico, seventeenth-century Quebec. Her last, unfinished novel was set in medieval Avignon.

Similarly, where Jewett wrote about people in their indigenous surroundings, Cather studied exiles: Bohemian immigrants and Scandinavian pioneers on the plains, farm girls in town and small-town girls in the big city, a Colorado pastor’s kid on the stage of the Dresden Opera, and French priests in the lonely far reaches of the New World.

IN 1925, when Willa Cather prepared her new edition of Jewett and wrote that introduction so lavishly praising “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” she herself was incubating what would prove to be her own most nearly perfect book, “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” published in 1927. There are enough affinities between “Death Comes for the Archbishop” and “The Country of the Pointed Firs” to suggest that Cather’s great New Mexico novel was nourished by her reflections on Jewett’s masterpiece.

Cather’s essay praises Jewett’s book for its structure–“so tightly built and significant in design”–and its inherent beauty. In both respects, her own book resembles it. Like “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” “Death Comes for the Archbishop” is a succession of episodes virtually without plot. A young French missionary working in Ohio is named the first bishop of New Mexico. He goes there, explores his immense diocese on horseback, encounters some singular personalities, has certain adventures, plants a garden, builds a cathedral, grows old, dies.

True, Bishop Latour’s relationship with a second central character, his boyhood friend and vicar, Father Vaillant, appears throughout the book–rather as do the relationships among the three women in “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” And Cather’s novel is held together by two other constants: the omnipresent scenery of desert and canyon, mesa and arroyo, stone and adobe; and the central thread, the bishop’s everyday, faithful performance of his life’s work. Nevertheless, “Death Comes for the Archbishop” is mostly discontinuous close-ups and free-standing scenes, strung together like beads on a string.

CATHER COULD HAVE BEEN talking about her own New Mexico novel-in-the-making when she wrote, “The ‘Pointed Fir’ sketches are living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air-spaces about them. They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself.” This capturing of life itself is what the artist strives for, and Cather begins her introduction with an observation of Jewett’s from their correspondence about how it is achieved: “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years,” Jewett wrote, “and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper–whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”

In “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Willa Cather gave fullest expression to two themes that had teased her mind persistently for years: the Southwest and Christianity. (A third such theme –the French domestic arts as carriers of civilization–is present here but reaches full flower only in her next book, “Shadows on the Rock.”)

Cather first visited the Southwest in 1912. She returned again and again to explore the old towns and Spanish missions and cliff dwellings; and she steeped herself in the memoirs of early explorers and missionaries (including the originals of her Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant). She used the Southwest as the backdrop for a somewhat contrived passage of “The Song of the Lark”; then again for the middle section of “The Professor’s House,” a book otherwise set in a midwestern college town–and published the very year of her essay on Jewett. Perhaps as she contemplated Jewett, who embraced her Maine material so unreservedly, Cather glimpsed what it would mean to devote an entire novel to the Southwest. “If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring,” Cather wrote in her introduction to Jewett,

“it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. He fades away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be born again. The artist spends a life-time in loving the things that haunt him, in having his mind ‘teased’ by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character.”

So, too, Christianity “haunted” Cather–another link with Jewett. Reared in a Baptist home, Cather attended Episcopal services as a young woman, but it was only in 1922, when she was nearly fifty, that she was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Apparently something had ripened in her own religious life in the years just before she undertook her reconsideration of Jewett and went on to write a whole novel about Catholic priests. Fresh from meditating on “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” with its deft interweaving of place, ethos, and personality, Cather produced a book saturated with a sense of place, about two men living out lives consecrated to God.

THAT IT COULD INFLUENCE, so profoundly, a book as good as “Death Comes for the Archbishop” is sufficient reason to take another look at “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” an American classic whose memory seems to have faded even among the well-read. It is a book whose power and beauty are difficult to sum up. It leaves in the mind of the reader, as Cather wrote, “an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique. A quality that one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define.”

At the beginning of that essay on Jewett, Cather placed an epigraph from the poetess Louise Imogen Guiney: “But give to thine own story / Simplicity, with glory.” That word “glory”–while apt for Cather, never one “content to be slight”–doesn’t ring quite true for the self-effacing Jewett. Closer to the mark are the words of an early commentator who praised Jewett’s “sweet, sane knowledge of life.” The chronicler of a world where conversation is a kindness–where “fitness” is an ultimate tribute and self-forgetfulness is “the highest gift of heaven”–Jewett gave a great deal to the more restless and ambitious literary heir who so warmly acknowledged the debt. To the overstimulated, worldly-wise reader of today she has at least as much to offer.

Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.