Willa Cather's Table at Mark Twain's 70th birthday at Delmonico's. Cather is third from left.

After 10 years in New York, I’ve finally started to understand a thing or two about this city. One thing that I’ve learned several times over and am constantly reminded of is that New York University rules Gotham’s real estate. The University’s shaping the New York cityscape is beyond question, but it also has a cloak of invisibility on it. Once they’ve demolished and redeveloped, the city moves forward leaving hidden architecture and stories peering out from the alleys and corners of its buildings. Of course, NYU’s bullish expansion had a direct impact on the preservation of historic sites and buildings. In 2000, for example, a storm erupted around NYU’s plans to demolish Edgar Allan Poe’s house at 85 West 3rd Street. The facade was spared, but barely, and questionably.

Today, Writers’ Houses welcomes poet, essayist, and novelist Terese Svoboda as a new Guest Curator. The title of Svoboda’s new novel, Bohemian Girl, is inspired by Willa Cather’s short story of the same name. In her essay for Writers’ Houses, Svoboda hits the pavement in search of Willa Cather’s New York, and discovers a buried Bohemia. Cather’s New York is much changed by NYU’s mark on the city, but Svoboda finds that glimpses remain. Lucky for us, they glitter in the asphalt.

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Willa Cather's apartment building at 82 Washington Place. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda.

I fell in love with New York City at dawn decades ago, watching a huge black man in a turban chant for the sun to rise behind Washington Square fountain. Bohemia was mine only a few months out of Nebraska! Willa Cather also quickly fell for the spectacle of the City. After all, men wore top hats to breakfast. But its enormous possibilities exact a price now from its tenants just the way the prairies’ seemingly unlimited opportunities did for the pioneers. All the distractions! All the ways we could fail! But mostly, what prospects! Moving from staid Pittsburgh, Cather chose to live downtown—as I did—for its Bohemian lifestyle, far from the mores of the real Bohemians she’d left behind.

Cather spent her formative years in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Unlike Cather, I am a native Nebraskan, but I too fled to New York. We both feared “we might die in a cornfield”—her words. But I am Bohemian, and have stolen the title of her most famous short story for my most recent novel: Bohemian Girl. She stole her title part of the plot and even some of the lines from the Balfe opera “The Bohemian Girl.” My story concerns a Bohemian girl living in the 19^th century West who answers Cather’s tales with her hard-won success. I wrote the book in New York City, not so far from where Cather lived, and I decided this summer to celebrate the expatriate in us by touring all five of her residences.

Like any sane New Yorker, I’m out of town. I have to take the Jitney in from Greenport, a small maritime village at the end of Long Island. Cather too found summer in the City intolerable and left for upstate or Provincetown or New Mexico or New Hampshire or New Brunswick. I don’t think she ever spent the season in New York—I wouldn’t run into her now even if she hadn’t died seventy years ago.

82 Washington Place. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda

Washington Square Park is a glorious 90 degrees in the shade. The NYU coeds sun themselves nearly naked on the grass, and the fountain is in full force, with kids screaming and the police standing by for possible drownings—or maybe just to enjoy the spray themselves. The wading pool wasn’t there in 1906 when Cather took a studio apartment at 60 Washington Square South, and certainly NYU hadn’t yet gobbled up most of the surrounding buildings, including Cather’s own. Since 2003, the address has been the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life, with a guard partial to interrogations about I.D. A NYU Prague advertisement blinks its LEDs above him—shades of “The Bohemian Girl.” NYU also came close to demolishing the Lombardi-Romanesque frill of the Judson Memorial Church next door, built to memorialize a missionary to Burma, an institution that originally catered to the Irish and Italian immigrants who, along with Cather, occupied this side of the square. The elite, including Edith Wharton, lived opposite. But Cather’s view wasn’t so bad—her building faced Stanford White’s Arch and “ over yonder, Garibaldi, drawing the sword for freedom,” as Cather put it in her story “Coming, Aphrodite” about living in a Washington Square garret.

60 Washington Square South. Photo credit Terese Svoboda.

As I head for her next apartment at 82 Washington Place, dudes with multicolored tattoos pass me in hordes and I hear drumming from somewhere deep inside the park, a staple entertainment since the Beatnik era. Cather would have heard the clipclop of carriage horses—and the occasional roar of an early model car—which were then allowed passage under the Arch. The year before her move, all the Fifth Avenue front yards were condemned to make room for the increased traffic that forever slows to a crawl where it runs into the park-as-obstacle.

I pause at the park’s edge, with its chess players and sketch artists and note-taking benchwarmers.  The environs are perfect for an editor, the job Cather had when she arrived. The Square is still lively, unpredictable, stylish—but she, like many of the editors who live nearby today, wanted to write. A front row seat to the circus of the park might not be the best place to make the switch. Cather moved in just two years.

Willa Cather's table at Mark Twain's 70th birthday at Delmonico's. Cather is third from right.

She settled into what was described as an elegant Beaux-Arts inspired building with her companion of five years, Edith Lewis. Hopefully, I thought, the place would be similar to 76, with its exquisite marble lintel and pale green brick, and not Number 78, peeling badly or 80, suffering major construction. But what’s left of 82 is sans Beaux-Arts anything, there’s just a plaque on the wall that she shares with Richard Wright, who wrote Black Boy in the same location thirty-some years after her tenancy. Trees still shade most of the block, keeping the leafy Village look intact. Not very far away Mark Twain rented an apartment—and she attended his 70^th birthday further downtown at Delmonico’s. Around the corner is bustling Sixth Avenue with its two blocks of outdoor bookstands, the Keats & Shelly Cliff Notes guarded by a elderly black man reading Walter Mosley. Psychics, banks, cafes—surely the same lineup in Cather’s time, but not the “Fuck the Fuckers” t-shirt of a passing coed. Cather probably ate at the very popular Gonfarone’s Italian restaurant that flourished nearby at the time. To get to the uptown plays she reviewed, she would have taken the elevated subway that ran alongside Jefferson Market Library, then a courthouse and jail.

One Bank Street now serves as the entrance to Five Bank Street. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda

Despite my Google map, I’m lost looking for 5 Bank Street, her next address. It doesn’t help that West 4^th street crosses West 10^th Street and there’s Little West 12^th as well as West 12^th. After a while, the confusion becomes more sexual, perhaps why Cather and Lewis kept this apartment the longest. What gender is the person walking the two Pekinese in front of me? The small buildings I wander past look turn-of-the-century as befitting their antique-collecting, often gay, inhabitants. A rock garden decorates the base of a parking meter, surrounded by a bamboo fence. Wrong way, says one of the workmen troweling a repair on a brownstone stoop not far from the White Horse Tavern and the Hudson. As I turn back, I notice deliverymen, supers, and construction workers enjoying breaks up and down the shaded streets. How many more would have been outside during Cather’s AC-free era?

The man detailing the inside of his car with the windows rolled must be air-conditioned. At first I think he is stealing the car. At last, staring through his windshield, I spot 5 Bank Street. It turns out to be plaqued too:  Cather wrote nine novels at this location, and left only because the building was slated to be torn down for the 7^th Avenue subway. Cather’s seven rooms had no central heating, but she did employ a maid and a cook, and disconnected her phone so she could work. She and Edith held at-homes there on Fridays, with written invitations for the likes of Elinor Wylie, Alfred Knopf, and Carl Van Doren. The back of the now defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital faces the building, an institution that must’ve been handy during her frequent illnesses. Two men dicker over the sale of an ex-ambulance parked in its driveway.

Crossing onto 11^th Street and heading toward Fifth Avenue, I spot a grand piano on a second floor that seems to be floating from my street-side perspective. At night you can see many of the interiors still have original moldings, 19^th century light fixtures, and grand mirrors. Reaching Fifth, I pass the First Presbyterian Church with a tower resembling Magdelan’s at Oxford, and then Cather’s favorite place of worship, the Church of Ascension, chained off now from casual visitors. The neighborhood’s full of doctors, dentists, even PhDs proclaiming themselves on the plaques in front of the buildings—but this time none for Cather.

Cather hated living at 47 Fifth Avenue, but more because of troubles at home than problems with the very respectable Grosvenor Club, whose building still boasts dark wooden paneling in the reception area and wall sconces that look original. NYU has again taken over here, and is in the process of converting it into another residence hall. Posing as an anxious parent doesn’t get me past the construction guard.

Doorman at 570 Fifth Avenue. Photo credit: Terese Svoboda.

Cather, who had shunned attention and favored the simple life, finally moved uptown to 570 Park Avenue. My bus slowly fills with its denizens: nurse attendants, maids, elderly women with alligator shoes and big flowered purses, and a black man in a bespoke suit saying into his cell phone: “A true friend doesn’t do that.” Sixty-third Street, where I disembark, is the bastion of Jimmy Choo and Hermes and plaques remembering the 1922 founding of an insurance company. Money, money, money. The exclusive Colony Club still abuts Cather’s building. Arriving at this address in 1931, she escaped the Depression and World War II with a drawing room large enough for a dinner party of thirty. Now the space is surely worth over six million dollars. I ask its doorman if he knows which apartment was Cather’s and he smiles. So many important people have lived here, he says. And now? I ask. He laughs at my impertinence.

570 Park Avenue. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda

The Christian Science Church and Reading Room still faces the building’s Park Avenue side, perhaps reminding Cather daily of her first struggle with long-form prose, a biography of founder Mary Baker Eddy that she disowned. The church has been a focus of controversy in the neighborhood for some years because it rents out the ornate interior for events to support itself. “On-Time Elite” reads the media bus beside it. That could have been Cather’s motto, arriving on the literary scene like Amy Tan, with her great stories of immigrants just when the country was curious.

I wave down a cab to take me to a jitney that will bear me back to my summer place. It’s hard to leave the City once you’ve gone to all the trouble to arrive. Eight blocks away, in his 34-room Park Avenue home, Saul Steinberg drew his famous New Yorker map, with Nebraska just a skip and a jump away from Central Park. For those of us who have made that journey, it’s a much longer and willful trip.

Terese Svoboda is the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, including Tin God (Nebraska 2006); a collection of short stories, Trailer Girl and Other Stories (available in a Bison Books edition); and a nonfiction book, Black Glasses like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her new novel, Bohemian Girl, appears this month.

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Photo courtesy of Terese Svoboda

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Willa Cather Childhood Home

I’m a cold skeptic and don’t believe in ghosts, except when I’m in Red Cloud, Nebraska where I fell madly in love with Willa Cather and writers’ houses.

For a sub-plot of my novel The Coffins of Little Hope, I invented a writer named Myrtle Kingsley Fitch, an author of hardscrabble, hard-biscuit prose of the Plains, a lesbian before lesbians were lesbians, à la Willa Cather (and my apologies to the apologists who would prefer we think Cather a wholesomely straight-and-narrow prairie gal, her celebration in small-town Nebraska not-at-all anomalous). In my novel, Fitch is long dead, but a dying Nebraska town has revived itself by paying tribute to the places and landscapes of her fiction. Red Cloud, the childhood home of Cather, was obviously my inspiration.

It would break my heart if anyone thought Myrtle Kingsley Fitch (author of such dreary novels as A Prairie Wedding Among the Radishes and The Plumes and the Feathers), and the historic town of Lemontree (pronounced, not “lemon tree,” but “la-mawn-tree), was a lampoon of Cather and Red Cloud. It’s all meant, rather, as homage to all those who’ve built one of my favorite Nebraska towns into something unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

A few summers ago, I spent a week in Red Cloud teaching a course in fiction at the restored Opera House, the home of the cherished Willa Cather Foundation, and where once-upon-a-time Cather herself had pasted on a moustache and taken to the stage to play the gent in melodrammers. (Cather famously assumed the character of “William” Cather in her daily life too, being a young girl with a fascination for the advantages afforded men.) I was kept in a duplex owned by the local mortuary, the town’s hearse housed in the duplex’s garage. Originally, I’d been intended for the home of the real-life inspiration of My Antonia, but the rooms were still under renovation upon my arrival. During my week in Red Cloud, the Paper Plane Theatre Company of New York City had also invaded the Opera House, for a summer residency; while my workshop discussed fiction on the street level of the Opera House, we enjoyed the pleasant thump and distant music of the actors rehearsing on the stage on the second floor.

One of the things you’re quite likely to gather from your guided tour of Red Cloud, Nebraska (which includes a number of restored buildings either described in her fiction or key to her own life history, as well as the cemetery where the inspiration for some of her characters rest-in-peace) is that Cather would’ve been just as happy to douse the town in gasoline and set it afire as to leave it standing. I learned from the tour that she vowed never to be buried there, and when her brother’s corpse was on its way to Red Cloud in a box, she swiftly intervened, preventing its purchase into Nebraska dirt. She never returned to Red Cloud after her parents died, and while they were still alive, she’d sit on the verandah to write, sneering at the passersby who rubbernecked at her eccentricity, until she flung up a sheet to hide herself.

Depending on your guide, you’ll be told, should you ask, that Cather wasn’t a lesbian, but rather was in a “Boston marriage” with editor Edith Lewis, the woman she lived with for over thirty years. As a gay man originally of small-town Nebraska (I grew up on a farm about an hour’s drive from Red Cloud), I could be aggravated by this, but nonetheless I enjoy it—it feels like a refusal that embraces, in a creaky Midwest tradition of silent anxiety. Calling the Cather-Lewis partnership a Boston marriage is a creative way of both denying (for the squeamish) and affirming (for the liberated). A marriage between two women, Boston or otherwise, is typically an indication of bald-faced lesbianism; the “Boston” part even adds a nod of civility and approval. (Following the tour, I bought from the gift shop a tea towel embroidered with the name Lucy Gayheart, the title of one of Cather’s novels.)

Eventually I grew quite cranky with Willa’s Boston wife in the basement of the town’s old bank—in a display case is a prop book open to blank pages, perhaps too playfully representing the novel Cather was writing at the time of her death. Edith Lewis had destroyed the book, Willa having requested that her unfinished pieces go up in smoke. Those blank pages are what I remember most about Cather-town—it’s a lovely bit of overkill on the part of whoever curated the display, a startlingly tactile, taunting symbol of what Cather’s readers have been denied forever by Cather’s maybe-wife.

While in Red Cloud, I gathered several notes for my novel and my own perversion of Red Cloud arose from the ashes to surround my fictional Myrtle Kingsley Fitch. I actually wrote much more about Fitch than would make it into the final draft of The Coffins of Little Hope—though Myrtle ultimately died mid-writer’s block, I couldn’t stop telling her story, even writing bits of the novel that Myrtle was trying to write just before her fatal and mysterious collapse in her yard.

One of the bits that I deleted attempted to capture the experience of visiting the attic rooms of Cather’s childhood house. Cather’s parents had given her a room of her own, and it has endured miraculously for over one hundred years—the wallpaper samples she collected from the drugstore still decorate her walls, though they appear they’d turn to dust at the touch of a fingertip. In the summertime, the attic is suffocating; as you step up the stairs, you feel your breath stolen from your lungs. No, that’s not right—you just feel your breathing stop, feel it gone in a blink, the absence of air sudden and absolute. I think that’s when Cather possessed me—her imagination, her longing, her desire to escape mixed with her incapacitating nostalgia for this place of her youth—it all found in me a willing vessel.

A few weeks later, my boyfriend and I, along with our friends Janet and Kirk, drove from Omaha to Red Cloud to see the theater troupe’s performance of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. At this mention of Eurydice—a play haunted by death—I’d like to produce the aforementioned ghost (or two), via shots snapped with a digital camera in a church to which Cather had donated stained-glass windows that burst with color and light despite the overcast day:

Grace Episcopal Church Picture 1

Grace Episcopal Church Picture 2

Before the events of the first picture all other pictures taken in the church hadn’t a smudge of blurriness. We allowed ourselves onto the altar (past the velvet rope) and opened a door. Nothing odd occurred. Well, nothing odd, except for the release of specters and a rushing of souls that could only be captured on film (or, in this case, the digital approximation of film). My friends and I quite enjoyed the mystical happenstance suggested by the photo, so much so that we never paid that much attention to the second picture—only when I asked my friends last week to send me picture #1 did we notice that picture #2 seemed to have the effect of double exposure—you can see a person’s face, someone posing for a close-up, like for a high-school portrait. (The faint line of her cheek is in the middle of the photo. A few of us think she’s smiling, while a few of us see her mouth open in a scream.) We also noticed another visitor in picture #1—there appears to be someone sitting, legs crossed, on the pew at the head of the altar.

Perhaps Cather’s ghost is trapped in Red Cloud, hoping to finish her unfinished novel. I like to think so, anyway.

I conclude with another ghostly scene, one I ended up cutting from The Coffins of Little Hope. The 83-year-old narrator—an obit writer named Esther Myles—visits the childhood home of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch. In the excised paragraph, she too longs for possession.

In the attic room of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch, black nails long and short protruded from the cedar slats of the ceiling, and I longed to touch the tip of my finger to their points, to feel their rust and threat of tetanus infect me, the house diseasing me, Myrtle’s slow blood flowing into the racing of my too-rapid bloodstream. The stairs were narrow and steep enough to trip me, the humid air enough to suffocate, but I longed for far more disruption, to collapse on the hand-stitched quilt, to wreck the rickety bed into a pile of sticks, like a deliberate Goldilocks, huffing and puffing. I would dig my boot heel into the brittle hide of the buffalo-skin rug, to crack it and tear it. I wanted to lick the paint off the walls, let it twist my tongue, all the toxicity of the old house, its leads and gasses, mixing with my biology, feeding my decline. Then I would drop a match in my path as I prat-falled down the stairs like a comedy act, ass over elbows, breaking each step with my back.

Timothy Schaffert is the author of four novels: The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters; The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection); Devils in the Sugar Shop (a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and a Book Sense pick); and The Coffins of Little Hope (forthcoming May 2011), all from Unbridled Books. His short fiction was short-listed for the O. Henry Prize, and won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. His fiction and essays have been anthologized in: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales; Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales; and When I Was A Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School. He is the director of two literary nonprofits: the (downtown) omaha lit fest and the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, and is the web editor for Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the English Department of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Leave a Comment » | guest | Tags: Boston marriage, Edith Lewis, Ghosts, Lucy Gayheart, My Antonia, Myrtle Kingsley Fitch, Nebraska, Opera House, Red Cloud, The Coffins of Little Hope, Timothy Schaffert, Willa Cather, Willa Cather's Childhood Home

Photo credit: J Schumacher

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