Youth and the Bright Medusa

Willa Cather

Description

“Youth and the Bright Medusa” is a 1920 collection of short stories by Willa Cather. The stories include: "Coming, Aphrodite!", "The Diamond Mine", "A Gold Slipper", "Scandal", "Paul's Case", "A Wagner Matinee", "The Sculptor's Funeral", and "A Death in the Desert". A number of the stories were also published in an earlier collection entitled “The Troll Garden”. A fantastic collection of assorted writing by a Pulitzer Prize winner highly recommended for short story lovers. Willa Sibert Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer famous for her novels related to frontier life on the Great Plains. Other notable works by this author include: “O Pioneers!” (1913), “The Song of the Lark” (1915), and “My Ántonia” (1918). This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an excerpt from “Willa Cather - Written For The Borzoi, 1920” by H. L. Mencken.

Sujets

• Classics
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781528790291
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

YOUTH and the BRIGHT MEDUSA
By
WILLA CATHER
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM Willa Cather Written for the Borzoi, 1920 BY H. L. MENCKEN

First published in 1920


This edition published by Read Books Ltd. Copyright © 2019 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library


"We must not look at Goblin men, We must not buy their fruits; Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry, thirsty roots?"
- Goblin Market


Contents
Willa Cather
By H. L. Mencken
COMING, APHRODITE!
THE DIAMOND MINE
A GOLD SLIPPER
SCANDAL
PAUL'S CASE
A WAGNER MATINEE
THE SCULPTOR'S FUNERAL
"A DEATH IN THE DESERT"



Willa Cather
By H. L. Mencken
Four or five years ago, though she already had a couple of good books behind her, Willa Cather was scarcely heard of. When she was mentioned at all, it was as a talented but rather inconsequential imitator of Mrs. Wharton. But today even campus-pump critics are more or less aware of her, and one hears no more gabble about imitations. The plain fact is that she is now discovered to be a novelist of original methods and quite extraordinary capacities—penetrating and accurate in observation, delicate in feeling, brilliant and charming in manner, and full of a high sense of the dignity and importance of her work. Bit by bit, patiently and laboriously, she has mastered the trade of the novelist; in each succeeding book she has shown an unmistakable advance. Now, at last, she has arrived at such a command of all the complex devices and expedients of her art that the use she makes of them is quite concealed. Her style has lost self-consciousness; her grasp of form has become instinctive; her drama is firmly rooted in a sound psychology; her people relate themselves logically to the great race masses that they are parts of. In brief, she knows her business thoroughly, and so one gets out of reading her, not only the facile joy that goes with every good story, but also the vastly higher pleasure that is called forth by first-rate craftsmanship.
I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western farmlands more real than My Antonía makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing. Beneath the tawdry surface of Middle Western barbarism—so suggestive, in more than one way, of the vast, impenetrable barbarism of Russia—she discovers human beings bravely embattled against fate and the gods, and into her picture of their dull, endless struggle she gets a spirit that is genuinely heroic, and a pathos that is genuinely moving. It is not as they see themselves that she depicts them, but as they actually are. And to representation she adds something more—something that is quite beyond the reach, and even beyond the comprehension of the average novelist. Her poor peasants are not simply anonymous and negligible hinds, flung by fortune into lonely, inhospitable wilds. They become symbolical, as, say, Robinson Crusoe is symbolical, or Faust, or Lord Jim. They are actors in a play that is far larger than the scene swept by their own pitiful suffering and aspiration. They are actors in the grand farce that is the tragedy of man.
Setting aside certain early experiments in both prose and verse, Miss Cather began with Alexander’s Bridge in 1912. The book strongly suggested the method and materials of Mrs. Wharton, and so it was inevitably, perhaps, that the author should be plastered with the Wharton label. I myself, ass-like, helped to slap it on—though with prudent reservations, now comforting to contemplate. The defect of the story was one of locale and people: somehow one got the feeling that the author was dealing with both at second-hand, that she knew her characters a bit less intimately than she should have known them. This defect, I venture to guess, did not escape her own eye. At all events, she abandoned New England in her next novel for the Middle West, and particularly for the Middle West of the great immigrations—a region nearer at hand, and infinitely better comprehended. The result was O Pioneers (1913), a book of very fine achievement and of even finer promise. Then came The Song of the Lark (1915)—still more competent, more searching and convincing, better in every way. And then, after three years, came My Antonía, and a sudden leap forward. Here, at last, an absolutely sound technique began to show itself. Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion. Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America.
I once protested to Miss Cather that her novels came too far apart—that the reading public, constantly under a pressure of new work, had too much chance to forget her. She was greatly astonished. “How could I do any more?” she asked. “I work all the time. It takes three years to write a novel.” The saying somehow clings to me. There is a profound criticism of criticism in it. It throws a bright light upon the difference between such a work as My Antonía and such a work as—. . . . But I have wars enough.




An Excerpt From Willa Cather - Written for the Borzoi, 1920



The author wishes to thank McClure's Magazine , The Century Magazine and Harper's Magazine for their courtesy in permitting the re-publication of three stories in this collection.
The last four stories in the volume, Paul's Case , A Wagner Matinée , The Sculptor's Funeral , " A Death in the Desert ," are re-printed from the author's first book of stories, entitled "The Troll Garden," published in 1905.


COMING, APHRODITE!
I
Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort.
The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told on his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very exclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl about University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was invariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottled coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler's. Hedger, as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on gloves unless the day was biting cold.
Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the rear apartment—two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west. His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors, which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy of the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She went to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing. Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young people who came to New York to "write" or to "paint"—who proposed to live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired artistic surroundings.
When Hedger first moved in, these rooms were occupied by a young man who tried to write plays,—and who kept on trying until a week ago, when the nurse had put him out for unpaid rent.
A few days after the playwright left, Hedger heard an ominous murmur of voices through the bolted double doors: the lady-like intonation of the nurse—doubtless exhibiting her treasures—and another voice, also a woman's, but very different; young, fresh, unguarded, confident. All the same, it would be very annoying to have a woman in there. The only bath-room on the floor was at the top of the stairs in the front hall, and he would always be running into her as he came or went from his bath. He would have to be more careful to see that Caesar didn't leave bones about the hall, too; and she might object when he cooked steak and onions on his gas burner.
As soon as the talking ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He was absorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out at people through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highly gratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life with another,—though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusual lighting.