Empty House*

Miss Gather s Clear Native Metaphor for Middle-Age

The Story. Professor Godfrey St. Peter was a vigorous, expressive man. He swam strongly and often in Lake Michigan. His lectures had the stimulating effect of an exploring mind. His reputation in European History was established, his work on the Spanish adventurers in the Southwest was receiving wide and authoritative approval, he was in love with his wife.

But he had known Tom Outland.

That had been an experience more searching and fundamental than loving a woman, siring children or writing histories. The boy was an orphan who had grown up, big-boned, quiet, and self-reliant, in New Mexico. He had learned Latin from a Belgian priest, life from railroad men. He told St. Peter about a prehistoric city of the cliff-dwellers that he had discovered, perfectly preserved in the high, dry atmosphere of an inaccessible mesa. He had explored the place thoroughly and gone to Washington, where he was received with scant courtesy and less attention by the Government and the Smithsonian Institution. During his absence, St. Peter had visited the place with Tom and felt strongly how, having no strong bonds with the present, the boy was at one with the fine dead race that had set its city on a lofty rock-shelf of a box canyon. In later years, the time of this book, after Tom had died in France, St. Peter found that memories of the mesa filled the depths of his nature with a sacred finality.

When his wife moved their belongings into the new house he had been able to give her, St. Peter renewed the lease on their old abode and retained as his study the chilly, inconvenient third-floor cubicle that had served him for years. He was a tolerant man but a desire was growing upon him to avoid his family, to be alone and do nothing. Their solicitude stifled him. His Jewish son-in-law's florid devotion to the memory of Tom Outland--whom he had never known but whose inventions, willed to Rosamond St. Peter, had made him rich--was an affront to which bt. Peter could say nothing.

The florid son-in-law took Rosamond and the professor's wife abroad; St. Peter escaped the jaunt with difficulty. He edited Outland s diary of the year in the cliff city, wrote a foreword and lay through long thoughtful evenings on his old box couch, covered with Tom's Navajo saddle-blanket. There was a high wind the night he had a cable from his returning wife, blew out the gas in the leaky heater. St. Peter smelled the room filling and wondered if he was obliged to save his life, now that it seemed so completed. He thought not and lay still.

The household machinery was already in motion, however, and a faithful cog, the seamstress, dragged him out alive. St. Peter philosophically readjusted himself to live out an anticlimax.

The Significance of any new work of Miss Gather's is that it is likely to be a permanent addition to the national library. She is one of the major artists of our time, austere, subtle, yet warmblooded. A great lover of shapes and surfaces, she permits herself to handle only a few significant ones and those thoughtfully, accurately. A facile psychologist, she ferrets out the secrets of human action in near-at-home areas of the spiritual plane rather than in those physiological resorts whose vogue seems to increase with their distance from normal life. The Professor's House has been declared "unsubstantial" beside One of Ours and A Lost Lady. Perhaps, but as a metaphor for that imperceptible reversal of adolescence that comes over all men, which they call middle-age and which is tragic or not, according as their lives have been spent with or without spirit, it is crystal clear, thoroughly native, unforgettable.

The Author. Events in the life of Willa Sibert Gather in no way reflect her steady growth from a college-girl reporter on the Pittsburgh Daily Leader to a deanship in American letters. Born of Virginian parents 49 years ago, she grew up in Nebraska, attending that state's university. From the Leader, she went to creative Writing, helped edit McClure's Magazine from 1906-12. She did not marry, but her literary offspring appeared at regular intervals, each more admirable than the last, until One of Ours took the 1922 Pulitzer Prize. In her quiet New York apartment she is not a striking figure but rather detached, casual to the outward expressions of existence, calmly occupied with the deliberate achievement of perfection. She says she had accumulated sufficient material for a lifetime of writing by the age of 20, but that would not include years spent in the Southwest on archaeological expeditions, fruit of which is the aesthetic piece de resistance of this book.

*THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE--Willa Gather--Knopf ($2.50).