WHOSE RELATIONSHIP WAS IT ANYWAY?

 

The distilled ardor, the astonished, silenced respect, hangs in the air as Willa Cather describes her “A Chance Meeting” with “’Caro’ of the Lettres à sa Nièce Caroline,” Flaubert’s niece whom he raised and of whom he wrote. For Willa what was so unexpectedly happening in this auspicious encounter was laden with the immensity of her own childhood literary personal history looking back at her, speaking to her. They had this shared childhood in a summit of literature, and here now was the little girl, now as an old woman who had lived that reality in the very home of Flaubert as the works were being written, and an eloquent and learned Caroline, too, a help in that. Willa, who had read and adored and was deeply inspired by this epoch of French literature, had arrived at her affinity in France following the inspiration, and now it was alive and deepened beyond imagine in the woman speaking to her. Flaubert and his Caroline were engaging with her. (Caroline’s reaction, too, is one of assuagement when she has found the rare kindred spirit of someone who ‘knows’ and understands, and for that brief moment can relive the unimaginable impact that has been lost.)

In the rare instances of the exaltation of life, one of the few graces to experience is respect and deep admiration of a rare soul, and if it by chance happens, it is a welling up of feeling as if never quite expecting to reach the crescendo of an opera after it has long been learned of what is hard-won and finest, of what that held top bittersweet triumphant and sometimes mournful note is, and how it pierces the soul, a recognition of being able to look inside and know exactly what that pain is, what effort it took to get there, and to transcend with it, even if for a brief moment, but to have witnessed it and recognized it is inenarrable happiness.

(The other end of this, the lack of this is what makes social media so strange and unreal, that entities with no insight will attack a person who has been playing music for 60 years as if they know better. If they only knew what they didn’t know . . . ah, but that would take a lifetime of learning how to love.) Respect can distill life into its finest, and in this case make possible the rapture of experience, of a suddenly connected human transcendence, what has been removed and set apart by a soul in the pilgrimage that has obviously been taken into the depths and heights, the reaches of where the human heart can go, where hard labour of the mind and hands can go. Without recognition it is as if the artist or person isn’t even there—all the effort, all the love; but nonetheless, the soul still has taken the journey, even if unrecognized. It has grasped its own beauty. But in this rare meeting there is grace and a sense of completeness, overwhelming gratitude, all from inwardly feeling the knowing of the value of something or someone who has moved living into the beyond. It is that rare bond, that rare connection.

Willa’s expresses her distilled eloquence of what was brought up in her in that moment:

There was nothing to say, certainly. The room was absolutely quiet, but there was nothing to say to this disclosure. It was like being suddenly brought up against a mountain of memories. One could not see round it; one could only stupidly realize that in this mountain which the old lady had conjured up by a phrase and a name or two lay most of one’s mental past. Some memories went by. There was no word with which one could greet such a revelation. I took one of her lovely hands and kissed it, in homage to a great period, to the names that made her voice tremble.

It seems sacrilege, then, to speak now of how Truman Capote lifted these moments from Willa, her lived moments that so carefully went into the rarefied expression on the page, the priceless gift of shared experience through her select, masterful mind and careful, learned hand and spirit that delivers that opening to the opportunity of the map she left. It is not quite appropriate here to discuss the patterns of the personality disorder in her presence which did not, could not, respect other people’s lives, let alone the brightest of the bright creations and hold them in—any—esteem. It is a broken toddler arrested mind that still thinks the world revolves around it, is the center, and that everything belongs to it, and everyone and everything is to be abused. (It is also sacrilege to say “because of what they are” or “because of what happened.”) 

The thing to address here is the effect of the gift.

Writing to Willa Cather had been the same way for Stephen Tennant as it had been for her coming into unexpected contact with what thrills your soul, and he was flabbergasted to receive a letter back from her. They matched on the carefulness, the profound ability to articulate this touched beauty, the rare opportunity of a shared peering inside. Stephen had been born privileged with English titles and estates along with a mother who encouraged the arts. But it was Stephen’s spirit that met with Willa’s. He was a young vivacious socialite who had encountered the likes of Virginia Woolf, but this was a meeting of recognition, finding the soul that commiserates with one’s own, and for Willa the joy of finding one’s life’s work has reached, been understood, been delighted in, taken in.

It is said that Willa did not write love stories, nor about love at all. But that she called Prosper Merimee’s Carmen the greatest love story of all time (in a speech in May 1925 at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine) is telling of what love might have been to her, perhaps the willingness to play the game for another and never surrender, and in all of that it is the care that is taken. The recognition of that Leon Edel points to when he finished E. K. Brown’s critical biography of her and her works, in his epilogue seeing in her vision that creators are pioneers, and pioneering is creation and not for the faint of heart. It is the spirit to take to the unknown on one’s own when life’s circumstances and too rigid structures call for the open, free land, and for Willa, the importance of knowing what to take with one of the things that will continually buoy the spirit—music, painting, a book, a meal, a wine, a garden—and help it to carry on in the unimaginable bereft-ness of a territory so few have gone. What could be more about love than a priest, like a Jesus, leaving behind everything of humans except the exquisite, going on horseback or mule, to establish a different religion from this carefulness of discernment, carefulness of heritage, willingness to break the fake bonds that must be broken in order to speak a more rarified not, take the care to carry close those bonds that one forever holds.

And so what Edith did with Willa’s life and works upon her passing is a love story. It involved Stephen Tennant and the lengths to which one will go as a renegade for one that matters to them, when they know what matters, when that recognition has been made. For this moment of the story there are three precise places to look, and Edith Lewis set them all in motion without leaving a mention of herself of exactly why she was going to such lengths to protect and give unending passageway into the making of a new world to Willa’s spirit and writing.

 

Truman Capote Sells Himself as Willa Cather

 

Whatever lies Truman Capote told and endlessly repeated as his own “chance encounter,” with Willa Cather, as malignant narcissist do to make others accept an altered reality to fit their needs, while deliberately doing the purposeful shock of crossing private perimeters to alter opinion, the truth is still in print, if one cares enough to find it. Unseen, it isn’t just a story that is repeated. In this situation in particular, it goes further into this ‘adopting details and stories,’ into covertly behind the scenes (disappearing to ‘write’ without anyone seeing, then making a dramatic show of the writing process to cover it, even quoting theory that is very close to the originator) into adopting, taking, the life’s expression and work as personal credit and assumed reality. Writing of this then here is a reclamation of both the art and the exquisite hard-won lives that were wrongfully assailed by what may appear to be “respect” or admiration, but is quite the opposite and especially when it becomes evident in the intent to take it for oneself, doing harm. It is not friendly or intimate to trespass. It isn’t ‘being influenced by’ or making reference, for example, as Willa did with Walt Whitman, or the fact of art itself being intertextual.

This goes deeper than plagiarism as Truman was patterning his life, choices (choosing to write on opera or travel to Kansas for an immediate story, for example), and expression on those he was jealous of over and over throughout his lifetime. This was not a well of creativity or inspiration, but a more parasitic relation. It is common societal practice to at first have grace for a person like Truman, no harsh judgement, and in fact books and movies based on him do not take into consideration personality disorders, and they could not have, given the times in which they were written and made. However, and without a clinical diagnosis, it is still evident that Truman showed his excessive suffering (while making up unsubstantiated stories of its origins, a sign of a personality disorder) in the midst of his narcissistic and histrionic tendencies (extreme emotional, inappropriately sexual, excessive desire to be the center of attention, for example). But when lines were obviously crossed, it wasn’t innocent gossip or finally speaking up for oneself (in the guise of victimhood that is ‘too wounded to be healed’). It was an agenda, a script, an opportunity, and the lie harmful to another person, other people. There isn’t enough awareness in culture yet for that to be understood. However, it isn’t too soon for the awareness of the value of the original art and the lives who created it. And so when taking on the plagiarism and the personal biography invasion, the repeating of life stories as one’s own, it is to both have to be careful that people are not familiar with these personality disorders, and to reclaim the priceless gifts that have been obscured, even unknowingly. That is certainly worth doing.

That Truman Capote’s closely imitated his first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms from Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House but made it darker and more manipulative, and lifted other elements as needed such as from My Àntonia and Huckleberry Finn and then simply added a multitude of contrived similes (“merely feats of literary athletics”) and making it “a self-conscious titillation of the nerves of the reader” about himself wherein he is a “passive victim of his early circumstances” only to arrive at a point where he “create[s] an adult world of passive acceptance in which we are rendered incapable of thinking anybody responsible for his [or her] behavior in any department,” (Fiction critic Diana Trilling in The Nation, 1948 qtd. by George Plimpton) is not art that offers a brilliant way forward. This would never have been lost on the literary socialite Stephen Tennant who was known as the loveliest and brightest of the “Bright Young Things” decades earlier than Truman in London’s 1920s and 30s, and knew the value of the art itself. Stephen adored Willa Cather and her work and knew it intimately. Stephen and Willa become close friends and confidantes from the late 1920s, exchanging letters the rest of her life and he coming to visit her in New York City, and she leaving him in her will so that he would write. But Truman needed a personal story to cover his lies and no story or life or work of art was off-limits. It was as if even their existences, their Beings, belonged to his creative commons.

Stephen would come to write the loveliest things possible, and for this he should be widely known. It is an incredible posthumous love letter to Willa at her passing written purposefully when this was personal invasion was happening to her work. Truman had turned Willa’s minutely, carefully constructed My Mortal Enemy, a question of love over money and the resulting anger, resentment, and withdrawal of Myra, into his “Miriam” in 1945. Stephen would have been aware even before Other Voices, Other Rooms was published, but he most certainly was afterwards so close upon Willa’s death. Over the decades Truman would still be repeating the lie, the borrowed story, about Willa, changing details of how they met, and even later adding in Stephen because Stephen actually had been invited to her NYC apartment and the meeting between Willa and Stephen meant a great deal to both of them. Truman told Cecil Beaton biographer Hugo Vickers in 1983 (the year before Truman passed) that he visited Stephen’s home in 1948 right after the publication of Other Voices and gave Stephen a signed copy. What an odd time that would have been for him to go to an intimate friend of Willa’s!

In actuality, it was Edith Lewis, Willa’s life partner, who was there in Europe with Stephen Tennant. In his lie Truman was placing himself in the room that was set on exposing him of his effort to control the reality over the brilliance of Willa Cather so that he would be looked upon a certain way, so that he could sway popular culture at large with “bigger, louder, more visible, more conspicuous, more audacious” fame, and never enough of that. But there is an actual reality that only needs to blossom to show the true happenings, the inspiration, the dedication, purpose, and exquisite evidence, with very little said out loud, that Edith and Stephen set out to show in the face of another ‘shadow’ on the eternal, irreplaceable, immovable rock of this spirit. This was carrying Willa’s pioneering spirit forward. It was making sure Willa’s religion of art would be sustained in the new world and that its value was widely known. And that is where Edith and Stephen’s spirits matched.

What actually happened is that Edith Lewis started taking brilliant, deliberate action. She put into motion three particular books: a critical biography of Willa’s life works, notes of her own personal experience with Willa and her writing documenting how they came about, and a collection of Willa’s non-fiction with publisher Alfred Knopf which would become Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art, with Willa herself having described her inspirations and intentions in previously written letters and essays. Her own voice would have the forward by Stephen Tennant. All three would put into articulation the feats and the brilliance. It would be hard to surpass or to have done a more loving act by those involved.

Willa had approved of and was excited about scholar E. K. Brown’s take on her work and had communicated with him herself. And so that is to whom Edith reached out to officially and personally support and assist with a biography focusing on the critical aspects, the profound discernments, of Willa’s complete works and where they lead. Edith then said herself in her introduction that she began writing down her own experience with Willa of how and when she wrote as notes to provide to Brown, but as both projects developed alongside each other, assisting, Edith decided for it to be a book to go along with E.K.’s and become Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, thus producing both a scholarly record and a personal one on how the literature was written and how it speaks. It was giving the humanity to it also. Now there would be three prime, articulate, and deeply insightful people speaking in tandem with each including statements that squelch the harmful, coercive voice.    

Edith put her whole self into this. The brilliance with which this was implemented shows how caring, careful, and compassionate Edith was about it. She became personally, intently involved in seeing the books through with Alfred Knopf with each of these exceptional minds. She had the exact right people and their statements are inspired and perceptive. It was a passion she came to share with Stephen Tennant, finding this affinity over it with one another. What then followed was the actual beautiful relationship that was happening in expression that even Willa would have loved.

The extant letters between Edith Lewis and Stephen Tennant show that in September 1947 Edith Lewis responded in a letter back to Stephen when he had written to her upon Willa’s passing. What happened next was the meeting of kismet, again. Stephen’s biographer Philip Hoare describes the fast deepening friendship between Stephen and Edith in that moment:

Stephen was pleased to hear that Cather had kept all his letters: ‘They are here, tied together in her secretary - just as she left them …’ Edith wrote to him. “Soon Stephen and Edith were planning to meet, to tour Europe together. An initial plan to meet in Cyprus had to be put off, and it was not until 21 August 1948 that Edith sailed from New York for France, arriving a week later to find a telegram from Stephen welcoming her to her hotel in Paris.

The relationship bloomed beautifully, and with a fortuitous exclamation by Edith: “First was a visit to Switzerland; Edith recalled ‘that first morning we dashed out of the train at Lausanne, and had a wonderful breakfast in the station.’

 

“It was the best breakfast of my life.”

 

Her excitement was showing, and Stephen was taking exquisite care of her. Given that it is on the passing of Willa and their plans of writing, it is more lovely as this happens:

 

By early October they were in Venice, at Proust's Daniel hotel, 'doing' St Mark's Square, and loving it [ . . . ] Edith judged the two weeks she and Stephen spent in Rome 'one of the great experiences of my life: it somehow means more to me than Paris, more than Venice - beautiful as they are.' Stephen brought her roses, tuberoses, carnations, and whisked her around the city showing her its famous sights. All too soon Edith had to return to the States, but plans were already drawn up for Stephen to make a return trip to New York York, to stay there with Edith, then explore Florida, and, perhaps, further south.

 

Their friendship deepened into further travels together, the exploration of souls, something Willa had wanted for him for she knew what it brought to writing, and now Edith made sure to see that wish fulfilled for Willa and Stephen:

But one problem might prevent this happy schedule. Stephen intimated that his finances, already depleted by the post-war depression, and further run down by his recent travels, would not stand up to such an expensive trip (also stringent post-war currency rules meant British subjects could take only £25 out of the country with them). The solution was very simple, said Edith. She would pay. She had been the major beneficiary of Cather's will,* and nothing would please her more than to share her good fortune with such an old friend of Willa's.

The added note reads: “Which had also left Stephen a modest bequest, money deposited abroad for use when Stephen travelled (a clever device to prevent him squandering it on Wilsford [his estate], rather than using it to broaden his horizons and help him to write Lascar as Willa wished).” But now the inspiration was writing about and for Willa in a very personal and literary way. Stephen had begun his preface to Willa’s book calling it, “A Room Beyond,” purposefully entitling it close to the repeater’s work, but taking it much further in insightful eloquence that illuminates the very difference of the voices speaking—what was radically, wrongfully changed in copying Willa, and with the very reasons why the differences matter, and bringing his observations of her to their glory. And now, even more personally, he would finish it with Edith:

Stephen arrived in snowy New York in the early spring of 1949. He stayed with Edith at 570 Park Avenue, last seen twelve years ago and here, with Edith's help, he put the finishing touches to his essay on Willa Cather for Knopf. Stephen loved being back in ‘Babylonian New York', riding across the park in open horse-drawn carriages, or cruising his favourite shops. But Edith had even more exciting plans, and within a few days they were driving across the Florida countryside, past canals full of water-hyacinths, to Sarasota, where they settled down to enjoy spring.

Edith knew how the inspiration of life and writing came, and now, as she had shared it with Willa getting to know Willa’s beloved “new” territory, the new being in seeing it such a different way of its and humans’ and culture’s possibilities, she was giving this experience to Stephen. He was to see all of it, take the experience of it all in, and further to answer to his own sensitive, intrepid soul:

From Palm Beach, it was overland to California, where Stephen stopped to draw the gigantic redwood trees and their massive roots; thence to Santa Barbara and San Francisco, staying at the elegant Fairmont Hotel. Then came Stephen's most adventurous expedition yet—to Cuba, and Havana, where Stephen approved of 'the Catholic flavour . . . very pleasing—one meets very cultivated priests of great charm', he noted, whilst admiring the coral-decorated cathedral in pre-revolutionary Havana.

On yet further, to America's Mexican playground, Acapulco. They stayed at the Hotel de las Americas. Stephen found it all 'so beautiful, a resort of fantastic Spanish-Mexican exoticism . .. vast sea-turtles basking on snowy coral beaches, lizards, mountain lions, crocodiles in a lake!! And a comical musical comedy atmosphere.' Stephen saw everything in terms of theatre. There was 'barbaric colour everywhere - a purple-blue warm sea ... Iguanas ... Macaws. Parrots'. Stephen felt the ancient races of Central America, 'Maya, Aztec, Toltec, so close, more potent, to me, than any Spanish quality' and bought a large plaster replica of a Pre-Columbian head to take back to Wilsford.

 

But Stephen and Edith were not content with Central America. They wanted to go on, out into the Pacific - to Hawaii and Honolulu. It was the furthest from home Stephen had ever been, and he found it all very romantic, especially the native islanders, and Polynesian faces soon became part of his creative repertoire. Stephen's fertile imagination was particularly caught by the rocky coastline of Honolulu, where huge metal chains seemed to tie the land in. 'Can you think of anything more perfect than chains binding the sea?" he said, and sketched the scene in his journal. It was June, and incredibly hot on the paradise island, the most exotic place he had yet visited; but perhaps that very remoteness induced homesickness in Stephen, for he felt sad and a little depressed. Reading the poems of Keats, in a volume illustrated by Michael Ayrton, at breakfast in his hotel, he found that he had signed his check on the page, and a carboned 'Stephen Tennant' had been left over the lines 'We rest in silence, like two gems upcurl'd /In the recesses of a pearly shell.' 'Fateful, perhaps?' added Stephen in the margin.

Their book Willa Cather On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as Art would then be released:

In early autumn Willa Cather's essays, On Writing, were published, with the proud announcement on the title page, 'Foreword by Stephen Tennant'. It was the first really serious piece of writing Stephen had had published. Stephen's critique, 'The Room Beyond', draws on the metaphor of the open door in Cather's work. 'There is for me a profound symbolism in this idea of seeing beyond the immediate room,' he observes, 'either to sky or sea or mountains, or to the Room Beyond . . . Willa Cather's art is essentially one of gazing beyond the immediate scene to a timeless sky or a timeless room, in which the future and the past, the unspoken and the unknown, forever beckon the reader.'

He was providing the ticket, the voice, the articulation forward and making sure it had careful passage.

A Purloined Letter

 

“Meanwhile Archbishop Lamy, the first Bishop of New Mexico, had become a sort of invisible personal friend.” —Willa Cather in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art with Foreward by Stephen Tennant

 

“Proust had not influenced his writing style—Flaubert would always be the master there—but he had set a personal example. ‘I always felt,’ Truman confessed, ‘he was kind of a secret friend.’ —Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

 

After Willa delivers the immensity of her meeting Flaubert’s niece Caroline on 5 September 1930 in Aix-le-Bains, while the heart aches at her delivery of it, delivering the impact itself as lived and what it meant, even in the manner she describes of Flaubert, the magnitude of the synthesis, the contemplation of Willa’s life works met in an old hotel in France with the very female who lived in the house with Flaubert, raised by him, his young female editor, the living being that helped to shape Willa’s own impressions and experience and the shared stilled magnitude of the moment, Willa ends on a disquieted note that delivers the unexpected potency for both of them and for all of literary history, met once again in the silence she felt when the realization had first sunk in.

“The old lady, a Frenchwoman” (that emphasis of who this was in such a profound, understated way) had sent her a priceless gift contained with her letter:

I sailed for Quebec in October. In November, while I was at Jaffrey, New Hampshire, a letter came from Madame Grout; the envelope had been opened and almost destroyed. I have received letters from Borneo and Java that looked much less travel-worn. She had addressed it to me in care of an obscure bookseller, on a small street in Paris, from whom she had got one of my books. (I suppose, in her day, all booksellers were publishers.) The letter had been forwarded through three publishing houses, and a part of its contents had got lost. In her letter Madame Grout writes that she is sending me "ci-joint une lettre de mon oncle Gustave Flaubert adressée à George Sand—elle doit être, je crois, de 1866. Il me semble qu'elle vous fera plaisir et j'ai plaisir à vous l'envoyer."

 

This enclosure had been removed. I regretted its loss chiefly because I feared it would distress Madame Grout. But I wrote her, quite truthfully, that her wish that I should have one of her uncle's letters meant a great deal more to me than the actual possession of it could mean. Nevertheless, it was an awkward explanation to make, and I delayed writing it until late in December. I did not hear from her again.

 

In February my friends in Paris sent me a clipping from the Journal des Débats which read:—

MORT DE MME. FRANKLIN-GROUT Nous apprenons avec tristesse la mort de Mme. Franklin-Grout, qui s'est éteinte à Antibes, à la suite d'une courte maladie. Nièce de Gustave Flaubert, Mme. Franklin-Grout a joué un rôle important dans la diffusion et le succès des œuvres de son oncle. Exécutrice testamentaire du grand romancier, qui l'avait élevée et instruite, Mme. Franklin-Grout a publié la correspondance de son oncle, si précieuse pour sa psychologie littéraire, et qui nous a révélé les doctrines de Flaubert et sa vie de travail acharné. Mme. Franklin-Grout publia aussi Bouvard et Pécuchet… . Mme. Franklin-Grout était une personne charmante et distinguée, très attachée à ses amis et qui, jusqu'à la plus extrême vieillesse, avait conservé l'intelligence et la bonté souriante d'une spirituelle femme du monde.

 

“There was nothing to say to this disclosure.”