The Professor's House, Willa Cather's exploration adventure novel

I’m going to do this backwards, writing about The Professor’s House (1925), which is not a prairie novel, first and then go back to A Lost Lady and so on.

Do you remember the fun we all had, way back in 2012, with the MLA International Bibliography and its possible uses as a way to measure the academic reputation of books and authors?  If I put in “American Literature” right now, I see that Willa Cather ranks #17 with 2,384 papers, books, etcs. tagged with her name since the beginning of the database in 1946.  Faulkner, James and Melville blow everyone else away, but #17 is high.  There is also a list of the top individual works – I can only see the top 50 – and two of them are Cather’s, My Ántonia, obviously, and The Professor’s House.  Were you expecting The Professor’s House to be the second-most studied work of Cather’s?  I was not.

The novel is short, 170 pages in the Library of America volume, and is even shorter than it looks.  The first hundred pages are about Professor St. Peter and his family.  They live in a city that may have a shadowy coexistence with Milwaukee.  The professor has just completed a life’s work, a multi-volume history of the Spanish in the American Southwest, something along the lines of Francis Parkman’s seven volume France and England in North America (1865-92).  He is casting about for a purpose.  One task is to edit a journal left to him by his best student, Tom Outland, who was killed in the war and also by chance made the professor’s family enormously rich with a patent for a mysterious gas.  There is some soap opera stuff there that I did not enjoy much.

That’s right, Tom Outland.  His journal is about that time he discovered the Anasazi ruins now known as Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, one of America’s great treasures.  What, lots of important explorers have names like Tom Outland.

I thought the journal was terrific.  It was a completely convincing piece of writing of its type, worthy of company with Hiram Bingham’s Inca Land (1922), about Bingham’s accidental discovery of Machu Picchu, or say John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).  Of course this text is a fiction, a few actual events mixed with invention.  It is an alternate-world discovery of an alternate-world ruin.

I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow.  Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep.  It was as still as sculpture – and something like that.  It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of one another, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.  (II.iii)

That tower is the iconic symbol of Mesa Verde.  The glimpse of it through the snow by a cattleman looking for strays, Cather borrowed that from the true story.  But even here she aestheticizes the incident in her own way.

Just for the subject matter, the inset novella is intensely interesting.  Then, for seventeen pages, it is back to Professor St. Peter – these symbolic names! – and his problems.  Then The Professor’s House is over.  One major critical issue with the novel is how or frankly whether the pieces mesh in any but the crudest way.  But the novella, the discovery, that was thrilling.  And not in any way about the Great Plains.

Plunging into the Australian desert with Burke and Wills - despite the fact that he had painted his body like a skeleton

My last disastrous exploring expedition was to the Panamanian jungle, about a year ago.  This time I crossed Australia from Melbourne to the northern coast and back with the 1860-61 Burke and Wills expedition, courtesy of Alan Moorehead’s Cooper’s Creek (1963).  Wikipedia has a simple, useful map of the route.

Nineteen men were part of the expedition at some point of other; a third of them died, including the leaders Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills; only one, John King, actually made it across Australia and back.

Cooper’s Creek is the site of the story’s tragic end.  The expedition established an outpost at the creek.  The leaders and a couple of other men pushed on to the coast through unexplored country.  Those remaining at the outpost waited for four months, suffering from malnutrition and scurvy, for the return of the exploring party, abandoning the post exactly one day before the starving Burke and Wills and King staggered into the camp.  Sympathetic aborigines kept the exploreres alive for a time, but only King lived long enough to be saved by a rescue party.

As I have asked before, why are these terrible stories of hardship and struggle so satisfying to read in comfort?  I suppose I find the story of survival most appealing, of Burke and Wills hanging on and King actually making it, but the body count, and the bureaucratic bungling, and the wrong turns, and the truly bad luck, certainly heighten the tension.

Alan Moorehead is a clear and efficient writer.  He freely mixes documents, second-hand history, and his own observations – the book, as is typical of the genre, ends with an account of Moorehead’s own tracing of the expedition’s path.  Moorehead has a good sense of the explorers’ point of view and a good eye for strangeness:

He [an indigenous Australian] was very friendly, despite the fact that he had painted his body like a skeleton, but when they tried to find out from him if he had seen any white men with camels he could not understand. (Ch. 12, 141)

The poor camels are an element of strangeness brought by the expedition to Australia from India at enormous expense.  Moorehead writes that “by the end of the century there were 6,000 of them” in Australia, but they were rare by the time of his visit in the 1960s (Ch. 15, 203).

The spectacle of human folly; I suppose that is the attraction of adventure books, catastrophic or heroic.  Without heroic fools like Burke and Wills, nothing would happen.

Page numbers are from the 2010 Skyhorse Publishing edition.

Tomorrow, Emma joins me for Henry James and Washington Square.

Exploring Panama with Todd Balf

The principle I’m going by here is that, when reading tales of exploring gone disastrously wrong, one should read the desert and jungle stories in the winter, and read about the polar explorers in the summer.  But perhaps I have it backwards.  Explore the poles wrapped up in a blanket in front of a fire, and wander the jungle with a drink in a coconut or pineapple?  I’m consumed by doubt.  But not by parasites, like the hapless members of the 1854 United States Darién Exploring Expedition.

The book is The Darkest Jungle (2003) by magazine writer Todd Balf, about an attempt to explore an especially difficult piece of the Panama isthmus in hopes of finding an easy route for a canal.  I suppose it would be an exaggeration to say that everything goes wrong.  After all, most of the explorers survive.  But it’s rough going.

Balf does a fine job with the story.  His prose is clean and efficient.  He skillfully blends current knowledge with the perspective of the explorers:

In the morning when the men awoke, some found themselves weak and disoriented, their night clothing saturated with blood. The culprit, a vampire bat, excised such a tiny piece of flesh, and bit so surgically, a sleeping man almost never stirred. An anticoagulant in the bat’s saliva produced a steady trickle of blood that flowed freely all night long. (138)

What did the explorers experience, why was it not quite what they thought it would be, that’s the pattern.  There’s a nice bit in Chapter 7 where I kept trying, futilely, to compare Balf’s account to the map at the front of the book.  Something was wrong.  Did Balf botch this passage?  Is the map no good?  But it’s a trick:  Balf has been writing entirely from the point of view of the explorers, who were completely confused about their location; he ends the chapter by showing how far off they were from where they thought they were.  The map snapped back into place, and I was left in a fine state of suspense – now things were going to get really bad!

I give Balf great credit for not claiming that the story he is telling is particularly important.  Academic and popular historians both suffer from this terrible disease, insisting that their study of body-building in Chicago from 1892-1901 informs us about all sorts crucial points of historical importance, when in fact it is a tiny project of minimal import that might someday help a scholar working on a genuinely important project write a footnote (I am describing, in disguise, my own dissertation).  Balf makes it clear that his book is not about a turning point in history, or an essential stage in the building of the Panama Canal, but is merely a great story.  Merely.

Recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing, and not to anyone who does not. Why do we read these horrible stories of catastrophe?  Where else do we see such human ingenuity, such fortitude, such stubbornness?  I hope to never see it in my own life.  Other people can explore for me.