The Professor's House

I’m not yet to an age where I worry much about how people will remember me. In fact that notion has never crossed my mind until reading this book, in which the titular character is a person of my exact age doing exactly that. Prof. Godfrey St. Peter does not want to leave his old house and move into the new one. The old house seems to represent something different to him now that it is emptied of its people and furnishings. It is no longer a place of life and work. Instead it crosses a threshold to become a symbol of the domestic, familial, and professional activities that happened in the house and are now, for a time, memorialized as ideals in the house as a Platonic form, at least until it is sold and its surface is re-written with show more new significance.

The occasion of emptying the house causes St. Peter to reflect on his encounter with Tom Outland, an unlikely and curious student who crossed his path in the early years of St. Peter’s professional ascendancy and made a profound impression on the professor. Tom relates an experience to the professor in the middle part of the book about Tom’s time discovering and exploring a cliff-dweller community in Arizona during his time as a cattleman. Tom’s passionate interest in the cliff-dwellers is deeply romanticized, probably to underscore his disappointment at interesting anyone in the mysteries and significance of the place. Even people who he was certain would be interested on principle (e.g., officials from the Smithsonian) are really just interested in awards and recognitions and appropriations from the government. Even Tom’s partner turns out to be less interested in the cliff-dwellers as an ideal than in the potential (and actual) profit they represent. All of these outcomes are symbols that are tied to the cliff-dwellers with more or less permanence: we might remember awards and recognitions and the work that they are tied to, but who remembers what a five dollar bill in your wallet is connected to?

Memories and accomplishments have a kind of fungibility to them. They can be converted into other things, symbols and abstractions that more or less reflect what they represent and with more or less permanence. The professor has his books. He has his house. And he has his memories of Tom who went on to some success with an engineering innovation before he dies in the war. Tom’s memories and accomplishments are left as trinkets that hold some memorial value to the professor, but other experiences, like his engineering success, were converted to abstractions like patents and money that have more tenuous memorial qualities to them. And I have to think that it is when the professor learns that his daughter (the beneficiary of Tom’s will) and her husband have taken the earnings from Tom’s patents and bought a house that they dubbed “Outland” that St. Peter sees how even well-intended memorialization fails to stand up. “Outland” becomes a nearly empty referent, more a symbol of conspicuous consumption and affluence than any meaningful remembrance of a person.

This is an odd and likable book in the way that I find many of Cather’s books. And there is an ongoing fascination that she has with the American Southwest and the native peoples who lived there. It shows up here, in Death Comes for the Archbishop and in Song of the Lark. I can’t tell if Cather thinks about these cliff dwelling communities as symbolic of a more edenic time or just as symbolic of the ways that people remember and idealize and abstract the objects of remembrance. The cliff dwellings are not remembered as those domiciles and places of daily labor that they surely meant to the inhabitants of the time. They are remembered instead as ideals of earlier, maybe simpler civilizations. To the characters in Cather’s books, the cliff dwellings are mystical places, full of significance that we imagine to have always been there but that we really bring to the space. show less

Godfrey St. Peter, by all accounts, is doing well. He is a professor of history with a distinguished publishing record, a beautiful wife, two married daughters one of whom has become surprisingly wealthy, and over the years he has had a few pleasant colleagues, a handful of good students, and one very important, even transformative, relationship with a student, protege, and later fiance to his oldest daughter. Unfortunately, Tom Outland then went off to do what he could in the First World War and died there, leaving all his worldly possessions, including a patent on a gas that would become very lucrative, to St. Peter’s daughter. At the opening of the novel, Godfrey and his wife are in the process of moving into a new house that he show more has built with money his multi-volume historical work on Spanish adventurers has won. But Godfrey is uncomfortable in his new house and wants to keep his pokey study in the old house that they rented. The truth is that Godfrey is uncomfortable in his own skin, and like his former protege, he would like to shed it.

The novel follows Godfrey over the course of a year with one extended intermission telling the story of Tom prior to his arrival in the university town of Hamilton. It is utterly fascinating. Characters step forward and recede without a later nod. St. Peter’s daughters and their spouses reveal admirable and not so admirable facets of character but without apparent purpose. Indeed, all are merely window dressing for the existential crisis that Godfrey is about to undergo.

I’m astounded by the surety of Cather’s writing and the fact that every novel of hers that I read seems to be a new departure. As is the case with all challenging novelists who challenge themselves. Well worth reading, pondering, and then reading again. show less

"The Professor’s House" is a strange title for this book. The purchase of a new home may have been the catalyst for the events that ensued, but the novel is not so much a series of chronological events as much as it is the metamorphous of Professor St. Peter that is in scrutiny. Or maybe the “house” referenced in the title is a metaphor for the Professor’s spiritual abode.

Coming to terms with the meaning of life can be an exhilarating or very painful experience; perhaps a combination of both. It may be a common phenomena that occurs to millions of people every day, but when it becomes personal and happens within your own life, it takes on epic proportions. It’s not just the changing of ones mind about an individual person, show more place, or event. It is an awakening- an epiphany that could possibly effect your close relationships with loved ones and alter your entire life.

"The Professor’s House" was written in 1925 and while some of the events of this parable are hard to relate to in today’s modern world, the message is timeless and universal. The plot is trite and hardly worth mentioning. Some of the actions- specifically of secondary characters- are of questionable credibility which makes it difficult to visualize them as real people.

But Willa Cather does create a memorable character in St. Peter. She expertly describes the poignant and melancholy feeling of St. Peter’s realization that each of us- in the end- are responsible for our own moral and ethical compass and responsible for our own personal deeds. She captures the joy and beauty of St. Peter discovering we have no one to blame (or thank) but ourselves for the way we conduct our lives. That takes courage. St. Peter is an tenacious character.

She also eloquently expresses St. Peter’s sadness in the discovery that much of life is pointlessly filled with meaningless trivialities and accumulation of non-essential material wealth. Keep in mind this story took place almost 100 years ago- prior to the explosion of ostentatious and decadent materialism that came after World War II with the Industrial Revolution. Just imagine the fodder for fiction Willa Cather would have had in today’s consumerist culture.

"The Professor’s House" is not plot driven. It’s more of a character study. Mrs. St. Peter could have been the the focus of the story and I’m sure she would have had her own tale to tell, but I don’t think it would have been quite as interesting.

"The Professor’s House" was published two years after Willa Cather won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for the novel "One of Ours". show less

How do we gradually slip away from simple uncluttered lives into a more and more complex existence, full of busyness and things, but one in many ways less rewarding and challenging than that lived by our younger selves? Often the individual changes are incremental and unnoticed, yet layered one of top of another their weight can overwhelm. Then one day we wake up and wonder how it all happened. Is it possible to go back, to regain some modicum of our better selves?

This was the dilemma facing Professor Godfrey St Peter. The professor was highly respected in his field of Spanish American studies, a published author. He worked in his much admired garden in the French style in the summers, or travelled for research. His two married show more daughters did him credit and his wife kept the family engaged socially.

These social ambitions, however, were the source of his current difficulty. His wife had decided they needed a house more reflective of their standing in the community. When Godfrey won the Oxford prize for history, his wife had a house built for them: one with separate bedrooms and bathrooms, separate closets, all the latest in plumbing and electricity.

Now Godfrey was faced with moving from his cramped attic study in the old house. He had shared this study twice a year for the past twenty years with Mrs St Peter's seamstress for three weeks each time. Her dressmaker's forms and patterns were there year round. He had endured cold winters and stuffy summers. Still, it had been good enough to allow him to write his award winning eight volume Spanish Adventurers in North America. He loved this room for the peace it gave him. Now, something in him rebelled. He would keep his awkward study, even if it meant continuing to rent the rest of the now unoccupied house just to have it.

The family was horrified. They did not understand. "...don't you think it's a foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?" His landlord was annoyed, and worried about insurance. The sewing lady thought it a great and unusual joke. St Peter dug in and kept renting the old place just to use that attic.

Juxtaposed against St Peter's story is that of Tom Outland, the best student the professor had ever known. "Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth." Tom had made an important discovery which unknown to him would later become highly lucrative. He then died in battle in World War I, leaving the rights to the professor's daughter Rosamund. Tom would never suffer age, routine and committees. "He had escaped all that. He had made something new in the world--- and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he left to others"

This is a melancholy book, filled with loneliness and reflection. St Peter is aware of the costs both of continuing on the way things had been going, or of reclaiming that better self. Cather's skilled writing avoids slipping into the maudlin, giving the novel and the reader the strength to believe that individual redemption is possible, while recognizing the price to be paid. show less

I've really liked the other Willa Cather novels I've read (My Antonia, O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady), and the way she was able, in those, to create such a vivid and believable sense of both character and place with her elegantly simple prose. But a few chapters into this one, I found myself thinking that probably there was a good reason why this wasn't one of her most well-known novels, or at least why I hadn't heard of it before encountering it on the shelves at my local library sale.

It's a novel in three unequal parts. The first focuses on the titular professor and his family. They've just had a new house built, but the professor still prefers working in the attic of the old place. Also, one of his daughters has come into a lot of show more money, and it's causing some conflict between her and the other daughter. And constantly haunting the narrative is the memory of one Tom Outland, the professor's former pupil and the rich daughter's former fiance, who died in WWI and left her the rights to the inventions that made her all the money. And all of this is... sort of okay? The characters are believable enough, the prose is fine, but whatever magic Cather's other books had, I couldn't really find it here, and it was a struggle to make myself care about these people at all.

The second, much shorter part, is Tom Outland's story, involving him finding the incredibly well-preserved ruins of a Native American cliff dwelling on a mesa in New Mexico and trying to get someone in authority interested in doing some proper archaeology on it. I found this quite a bit more interesting, and thought it demonstrated a lot more of Cather's gifts with character and place. Mind you, it does feel a bit different reading this a hundred years later than Cather presumably meant it to at the time, as Outland's genuinely noble sentiments about his find seem somewhat less so to modern sensibilities about the treatment of archeological finds and the question of who they properly belong to. But it's possible that might actually add a bit to the sense of poignancy rather than detracting from it. Much as I preferred this part, though, it does feel rather awkwardly grafted on to the first part, and it's hard not to think that it might have done better as a separate short story.

The very short final part returns to the professor, and gives us a beautifully written and rather sad reflection of a man torn between the domesticity society has pressed upon him and his desire to be alone. This is much more what I'd have expected of Cather, and brings out all the themes that were sort of trying to be present in the first part, but were nowhere near as interestingly done.

So, it's lovely that she got there in the end, but I wish I'd had a less boring time getting there, and I very much wish the novel felt more like a properly unified whole. show less

This is the moving story of a man reaching the end of himself. In many ways, it reminded me of Rosshalde. We have a man who has achieved much yet finds that the fruit of his labours does not bring him the deep satisfaction he feels his soul longing for.

Professor, like Rosshalde, ends inconclusively with both men left with choices about how to face their families and their futures. While Rosshalde is laced with tragedy, Professor has a more subtle pathos. It nevertheless deals with the loss of a friend and the longings of a life lived beyond societal trappings.

The book is most notable for its unusual structure. Split into three sections, the first sets up the relationships of the Professor and his young adult family as he leaves the show more family home for a new house.

While the purpose-built, newly-completed dwelling typifies an ideal, there’s too much reality in the old idiosyncratic house and the interpersonal relationships the family are taking with them.

Stresses are quickly apparent between the Professor and pretty much everyone else. The only relationship that is encased in amber is that of the Professor and Tom, a virtual vagrant who turns out to be an engineering genius and is then killed fighting WW1.

Tom’s story is told in the middle section, a lucid account of herding cattle in New Mexico and discoveries there which create iconic visions of the nation.

The book concludes in a short section with the Professor isolated in the study he keeps in the now otherwise abandoned old home while the rest of the family holiday in Europe. A crisis precipitates a necessity to face his advancing years and choices that he is left with.

This structure is thought by some to be clumsy. I thought it absolutely perfect. It enables you to read the Professor’s life in two very different ways and creates a deeper understanding of his inner tensions than you would have if the novel were chronological. show less

The protagonist, The Professor, is someone we would normally warm up to quite quickly. He's an expert in his field, his books are celebrated, he still teaches students and he has a wife and two daughters who love him. So far so good. But we immediately meet him when he's being difficult and snapping at people. He's purchased a bigger house with proceeds from his books but he doesn't want to move his home office from a small attic room in the old house. He even goes so far as to rent the old house for a year so he doesn't have to move. It's down hill from there. He is feeling distant from his wife and he doesn't want to interact with his daughters' husbands.

Slowly we get hints of a back story. The Professor had an exceptional student, show more Tom Outland, who appeared on his doorstep and changed The Professor's world. It takes a while to learn about Tom but the Professor's wife thinks The Professor had hoped that Tom would marry his older daughter and believes that's why The Professor never warmed up to the man his daughter eventually married. Turns out Tom died in WWI and in his will leaves the daughter with the rights to a patent. The new husband turns the patent into a fortune. Yet the fortune leads to problems between the two daughter and even with another Professor who had helped Tom but now felt he was being excluded.

At this point the book focuses on Tom's history before coming to Hamilton and working with The Professor. It's based in New Mexico and the most interesting part of the book. This is where Cather writing truly sings. He's a selfless guy who discovers lost Indian cliff dwellings. He even tries unsuccessfully to get the Smithsonian interested. While he's in DC his partner sells off everything which leads to their splitting up. Throughout this Tom is the nice guy.

Back to the Professor. He finally realizes he happier without anyone, especially his wife and daughters but also his students. He's giving up on everything.

Bottom line, it's hard to recommend a book where the main character wants to go nowhere. I felt the book went nowhere. show less