The Professor’s House – Willa Cather (1925)

During May, the Librarything Virago group are reading books by the wonderful Willa Cather. The Professor’s House was the last of her novels I had left to read. I had heard mixed reports of it, but I think it is a small masterpiece – although I would probably say the same about several of her other books.

A beautifully introspective little novel, in The Professor’s House Cather introduces us to Godfrey St. Peter a mid-western university professor. St Peter and his family have lived for many years in an ugly though rather loved house which they are finally moving out of – their two daughters married and off their hands, finally Mrs St Peter can have the house she has dreamed of. As the contents of the old house are moved into the new house, the Professor remains in his study in the old house – surrounded by the objects he has lived with for so long. Books, papers, his old couch, and the dress making forms left behind by Augusta with whom Professor St Peter has shared his study twice a year – and now feels oddly at home with.

“The low ceiling sloped down on three sides, the slant being interrupted on the east by a single square window, swinging outward on hinges and held ajar by a hook in the sill. Walls and ceiling alike were covered with a yellow paper which had once been very ugly, but had faded into inoffensive neutrality. The matting on the floor was worn and scratchy. Against the wall stood an old walnut table, with one leaf up, holding piles of orderly papers. Before it was a cane-backed office chair that turned on a screw. This dark den had for many years been the Professor’s study.”

As the summer continues the Professor is less and less inclined to make that one last move – and relocate his attic study to the new house. Instead he keeps on the old house, making his way each day to his beloved study – surrounding himself with the objects with which he is most familiar. Here Professor St Peter recalls his life, and the people he has loved; his wife Lillian, his daughters; beautiful, pretentious Rosamond and Kathleen lost in her sister’s shadow, but the person he remembers most is Tom Outland.

“But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning.”

Tom, a brilliant young pioneer, whose discoveries relating to a gas have brought about great engineering advances. Tom’s legacy is now quarrelled over, the subject of jealously and betrayal.

Rosamond was engaged to Tom before he went off to the First World War and is killed. Now Rosamond is married to prosperous engineer Louie Marsellus, as his heir Rosamond was able to pass on her former fiancé’s discoveries, and the couple have benefitted greatly. Meanwhile Kathleen is married to a less wealthy man, Scott McGregor a journalist – who was once also a friend of Tom Outland’s. So, when Louie waxes lyrical at dinner about Tom – a man he never met – and reveals the house he is building is to be called Outland – Scott and Kathleen are more than a little irritated.

The Professor is a tired man, torn between the past and the modern progresses he sees around him – like the new house, so much better appointed and convenient a real step up – he doesn’t really want to be there.

The book is told in three sections – of unequal length – the first section; ‘The Family’ being the longest, the middle section tells Tom Outlands story, taking us to the beautiful landscapes of New Mexico. Here a young Tom while exploring the mesas of New Mexico finds carved into the rock, long abandoned villages – evidences of an earlier civilisation. Learning more about these cliff dwellers becomes all consuming, and leaving his friend Rodney Blake behind to take care of things Tom sets out for Washington to find someone to take his finds seriously. The final section – just called ‘The Professor’ – sees Godfrey St Peter contemplating his own place in the world – as, with the rest of the family on holiday he spends all his time in his study.

“He could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him, when the idea of it was insupportable. He used to feel that if his wife could but lie in the same coffin with him, his body would not be so insensible that the nearness of hers would not give it comfort. But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth.”

The Professor’s House is a quiet novel, a novel of memory, loss and which contrasts modern advances with more traditional living.

(Just a note to add – I am currently off work unwell – long story – so my reading and reviewing routine, such as it was, is completely up the spout. Which is why this post is appearing at a time I don’t usually post things.) Bear with me. 😊