Two Friends

I enjoy reading Willa Cather, although I think, if we’re going to compare late 19th-century/early 20th-century female writers, I’ll take Wharton. Cather is very…sincere with a tinge of romanticism, while I connect more with writing that has a tinge of knowing, brittle cynicism instead.

As I read this story last night – originally published in a collection called Obscure Destinies and available here – I couldn’t help but connect it to the present day. There’s a lot to recommend it – Cather herself thought it was one of her best stories, and the descriptions are evocative and profound – but what struck me even beyond all of that was her insight into the impact, not just of politics, but of “issues” on interpersonal relationships and community.

Timely.

The story is a memory-picture. The narrator is remembering a few years in his/her childhood (the sex of the narrator is never defined, and although Cather is obviously a woman, her first-person narrators are often male), and her (okay, I’ll just assume) observations of two middle-aged male friends, both prominent local citizens – one a banker, the other a cattleman. The two men have a deep connection, socializing every evening inside a local business or outdoors when the weather is fine:

I liked to listen to those two because theirs was the only “conversation” one could hear about the streets. The older men talked of nothing but politics and their business, and the very young men’s talk was entirely what they called “josh”; very personal, supposed to be funny, and really not funny at all. It was scarcely speech, but noises, snorts, giggles, yawns, sneezes, with a few abbreviated words and slang expressions which stood for a hundred things. The original Indians of the Kansas plains had more to do with articulate speech than had our promising young men.

To be sure my two aristocrats sometimes discussed politics, and joked each other about the policies and pretentions of their respective parties. Mr. Dillon, of course, was a Democrat,–it was in the very frosty sparkle of his speech,–and Mr. Trueman was a Republican; his rear, as he walked about the town, looked a little like the walking elephant labelled “G. O. P.” in Puck. But each man seemed to enjoy hearing his party ridiculed, took it as a compliment.

In the spring their talk was usually about weather and planting and pasture and cattle. Mr. Dillon went about the country in his light buckboard a great deal at that season, and he knew what every farmer was doing and what his chances were, just how much he was falling behind or getting ahead.

“I happened to drive by Oscar Ericson’s place today, and I saw as nice a lot of calves as you could find anywhere,” he would begin, and Ericson’s history and his family would be pretty thoroughly discussed before they changed the subject.

Or he might come out with something sharp: “By the way, J. H., I saw an amusing sight today. I turned in at Sandy Bright’s place to get water for my horse, and he had a photographer out there taking pictures of his house and barn. It would be more to the point if he had a picture taken of the mortgages he’s put on that farm.”

Trueman would give a short, mirthless response, more like a cough than a laugh.

Those April nights, when the darkness itself tasted dusty (or, by the special mercy of God, cool and damp), when the smell of burning grass was in the air, and a sudden breeze brought the scent of wild plum blossoms,–those evenings were only a restless preparation for the summer nights,–nights of full liberty and perfect idleness. Then there was no school, and one’s family never bothered about where one was. My parents were young and full of life, glad to have the children out of the way. All day long there had been the excitement that intense heat produces in some people,–a mild drunkenness made of sharp contrasts; thirst and cold water, the blazing stretch of Main Street and the cool of the brick stores when one dived into them. By nightfall one was ready to be quiet. My two friends were always in their best form on those moonlit summer nights, and their talk covered a wide range.

I suppose there were moonless nights, and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, just as in the spring. But I remember them all as flooded by the rich indolence of a full moon, or a half-moon set in uncertain blue. Then Trueman and Dillon would sit with their coats off and have a supply of fresh handkerchiefs to mop their faces; they were more largely and positively themselves. One could distinguish their features, the stripes on their shirts, the flash of Mr. Dillon’s diamond; but their shadows made two dark masses on the white sidewalk. The brick wall behind them, faded almost pink by the burning of successive summers, took on a carnelian hue at night. Across the street, which was merely a dusty road, lay an open space, with a few stunted box-elder trees, where the farmers left their wagons and teams when they came to town. Beyond this space stood a row of frail wooden buildings, due to be pulled down any day; tilted, crazy, with outside stairs going up to rickety second-storey porches that sagged in the middle. They had once been white, but were now grey, with faded blue doors along the wavy upper porches. These abandoned buildings, an eyesore by day, melted together into a curious pile in the moonlight, became an immaterial structure of velvet-white and glossy blackness, with here and there a faint smear of blue door, or a tilted patch of sage-green that had once been a shutter.

The road, just in front of the sidewalk where I sat and played jacks, would be ankle-deep in dust, and seemed to drink up the moonlight like folds of velvet. It drank up sound, too; muffled the wagon-wheels and hoof-beats; lay soft and meek like the last residuum of material things,–the soft bottom resting-place. Nothing in the world, not snow mountains or blue seas, is so beautiful in moonlight as the soft, dry summer roads in a farming country, roads where the white dust falls back from the slow wagon-wheel.

In addition, the men take regular trips to Kansas City and St. Joseph, Missouri together (I’ve been there!) – where they enjoy good food, the theater and one of them, it seems engages in some sporting life. Dillon, in addition, takes an annual buying trip to Chicago – Trueman doesn’t go on that one, since Chicago is too big for him – and it’s because of one of those Chicago trips, coinciding with Democratic national convention that nominated William Jennings Bryan, the friendship starts to fracture:

R. E. Dillon had never taken an aggressive part in politics. But from that night on, the Democratic candidate and the free-silver plank were the subject of his talks with his customers and depositors. He drove about the country convincing the farmers, went to the neighbouring towns to use his influence with the merchants, organized the Bryan Club and the Bryan Ladies’ Quartette in our county, contributed largely to the campaign fund. This was all a new line of conduct for Mr. Dillon, and it sat unsteadily on him. Even his voice became unnatural; there was a sting of comeback in it. His new character made him more like other people and took away from his special personal quality. I wonder whether it was not Trueman, more than Bryan, who put such an edge on him.

While all these things were going on, Trueman kept to his own office. He came to Dillon’s bank on business, but he did not “come back to the sidewalk,” as I put it to myself. He waited and said nothing, but he looked grim. After a month or so, when he saw that this thing was not going to blow over, when he heard how Dillon had been talking to representative men all over the county, and saw the figure he had put down for the campaign fund, then Trueman remarked to some of his friends that a banker had no business to commit himself to a scatter-brained financial policy which would destroy credit.…..

……The election and Bryan’s defeat did nothing to soften Dillon. He had been sure of a Democratic victory. I believe he felt almost as if Trueman were responsible for the triumph of Hanna and McKinley. At least he knew that Trueman was exceedingly well satisfied, and that was bitter to him. He seemed to me sarcastic and sharp all the time now….

….After that rupture nothing went well with either of my two great men. Things were out of true, the equilibrium was gone. Formerly, when they used to sit in their old places on the sidewalk, two black figures with patches of shadow below, they seemed like two bodies held steady by some law of balance, an unconscious relation like that between the earth and the moon. It was this mathematical harmony which gave a third person pleasure.

Are politics not important? Should citizens not be engaged?

Of course not.

But Cather’s gorgeous, melancholy story, written in another place and another time, seemed, nonetheless, quite timely. It’s a reminder, it seems to me, of the primary ties of the neighbors, friends and family that we actually live with and see day-to-day and the relationships out of which actual community is built – and the disruption – in the name of our own good– offered by smooth talkers and glittering images – that seems to always await.