Thoughts on The Professor’s House by Willa Cather

I read The Professor’s House last week, by Willa Cather. I first read Tom Outland’s Story (book 2 of TPH) in the Fall of 2011 for my Willa Cather lit class. We were only assigned Tom’s story in class and it is such a strong story by itself. I had meant to return to the book and read The Family and The Professor, but I also had some reservations because I didn’t anything to change my feelings towards Tom Outland’s Story.  After I finished The Family, I couldn’t continue into Tom Outland’s Story, my brain was telling me to jump over into The Professor. I couldn’t help but think that I would alter Tom’s story if I read it sandwiched in between the arc of the professor’s life.   

I’ve found that I enjoy the way Cather separates her novels into books. IMO Cather takes on more than a story of a character, she takes on the arc of her character. The Professor’s House has two arcs, that of the professor, Godfrey St. Peter and that of Tom Outland, his student.

Cather’s characters and settings are grounded in their concrete details. She describes the physical attributes, like she has a photograph of each one in front of her. “He had a long brown face, with an oval chin over which he wore a close-trimmed Van Dyke, like a tuft of shiny black fur. With this silky, very black hair, he had a tawny skin with gold lights in it, a hawk nose, and hawk-like eyes– brown and gold and green. They were set in amply cavities, with plenty of room to move about, under thick, curly, black eyebrows that turned up sharply at the outer ends, like military moustaches.” Cather’s ability to describe is something I admire about her writing and that has helped me to realize that I need to work more at describing people, landscapes, houses, dogs, cats, well you get the idea.

Cather’s observations hold true to this day, the separation of the educated and the religious. But also the point that there can be harmony between the two if the people involved are open and excepting of each other. Cather gives the reader this ideal through the relationship of St. Peter and Augusta, forced to share a workroom, they find comfort in the other’s bothersome presence.

St. Peter’s daughters, are as different as he and his wife, yet he works hard to not meddle in their personal wars and to love them both differently, yet as equally as he can manage.

What I didn’t see coming, was St. Peter’s flippant attitude about his own life towards the end of the book and yet after my initial repulsion I found that Cather was right as usual. St. Peter is a tired man, a man who worked and worked for the success he has now gained, but this success has also brought much of the work to an end. I could relate to his letdown.

After I read The Professor I went back and reread Tom Outland’s Story. I found that the only thing that really changed, is that I had a better understanding of Tom, of the man telling his professor a story of his youth. In a way it made Tom’s disappointment,  that much more sincere to me, and also that much more sad. I simply understood Tom’s decisions better, his ability to have the happiest period in his life after he suffered the deepest heartbreak. Also, Tom’s ability to let Roddy go, which is something I struggled with, I believed Tom this time that it was his foolish youth that let him go because he was able to trick himself into believing that he could find Roddy again. I felt the weight of his prediction, “I understand what is was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it.”

I still need to finish the experience and visit some cliff dwellings for myself.