Where Huckleberry Finn was Headed

At the time in NYC when Willa Cather was surrounded in a social and literary environment where the up and coming boys like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and perhaps even George Bernard Shaw after her “London Roses,” were freely taking her understated and ground-breaking words as their own and giving extremely-minimal-to-non-existent credit to her—she an accomplished novelist, poet and top magazine editor—and what after her passing Truman Capote would do to her in culling together Breakfast at Tiffany’s from her vision, characters, and stories and making it about his dark self instead of her extraordinary vision—intrepidly reinstated by Audrey Hepburn—Willa impelled herself further into deep, careful contemplation of how to take her revolutionary insight of the feminine and the possibilities of American culture all the way to its ultimate realization: manifestation, the embodiment on these boundary-less, indomitable American shores which had heretofore short-sightedly turned itself into the obvious end of “free-enterprise,” mean captured boundaries of capitalism—empty form, nothing sacred (except perhaps in vagueness the unfulfilled promise of confusion and hope)—and leaving off on enchantment as an attraction and “mysterious” (actually confusing) spectacle whose uncertainty ultimately wins out over that inaccurate, miscalculated hope.

Of Huckleberry Finn who had once been forced to set out into American freedom on the Mississippi, Willa knew she had no retreat. In her “Tom Outland’s Story” Willa delivers the treasure—the ancient culture on the monumental rock of Mesa Verde in all its realness—to the adventuring minds of two young girls in order to change the course of their prescribed lives. Eden Bower at Coney Island in “Coming, Aphrodite!” takes up in a likewise hot air balloon to change the boundaries placed on her and it is not fantastical. Cécile in Shadows on the Rock comes from a river: the Seine across an ocean to the St. Lawrence. What she establishes there is that difference of the internal that surpasses even the cathedral. I was born on the shore of the Ohio River where Huckleberry was headed.