Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

Suddenly something flashed into her mind, so clear that it must have come from without, from the breathless quiet. What if--what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities--across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her. She opened her window softly and knelt down beside it to breathe the cold air. She felt the snowflakes melt in her hair, on her hot cheeks. Oh now she knew! She must have it, she couldn't run away from it. She must go back into the world and get all she could of everything that had made him what he was. Those splendours were still on earth, to be sought after and fought for. In them she would find him. If with all your heart you truly seek Him, you shall ever surely find Him. He had sung that for her in the beginning, when she first went to him. Now she knew what it meant.

How strange to read Willa Cather write about a city. Lucy Gayheart is a small town Nebraska girl who travels to the big city--Chicago--to study piano. She falls in love with a famous and married singer, but first she falls in love with Chicago, which makes her hometown of Haverford seem irredeemably provincial and cramped. But Cather describe the city as she does natural landscapes: the buildings are gray cliffs, and Lake Michigan is prairie-like in the way the subtle changes of the sky, purple and green, rise above its flatness. 

The singer, Clement Sebastian, seeks Lucy out because he needs an accompanist. They never play together in public, but he practices with her daily, and they are drawn into the fabric of each others' lives. In Lucy, Sebastian sees a freshness and youth that has passed him by; in Sebastian, Lucy sees an elevated spirit who contrasts with the shrewd, earthy Haverford banker whom everyone presumes she'll marry. Nothing happens between Lucy and Clement, not really, but what happens to Lucy happens in spirit, rather than the body. When the banker, Harry Gordon, comes to Chicago to propose to her, she tells him truthfully that she is caught up with another man, and when he presses her about how far their relationship has gone, she exclaims "All the way!" Harry, of course, takes this to mean she has been physically reckless, but "the way" Lucy means in the way of the spirit, or the way of the mind. She's a sentimentalist in the most literal sense; the great experiences of her life are those that happen within.

So, let me give a spoiler alert for what I'm going to say next: Cather is one of the cruelest and most bloodthirsty authors that ever existed. She's more pitiless than George R. R. Martin. First, she kills off Clement, who dies by drowning on Lake Como weeks before he's supposed to return and resume his work with Lucy. She returns to Haverford a changed woman, somewhat darkened and diminished, but having embraced the idea that what happens within her cannot die, though the man who caused it might. Still, she finds herself unable to repair the break between her and Harry, who has married a woman he does not care for just to spite her.

And then Cather kills her off. I couldn't believe it. In a fit of despair Lucy takes her skates out to the old skating spot on the Platte river, not knowing that beneath the snow the river has changed course and skating is no longer safe. She encounters Harry on the way, but he makes a lame excuse and turns his carriage away from her. Blinded by anger at Harry, she fails to notice the cracking ice before it's too late. In this way she's symbolically united with Clement, having perished the same way he did. It's not quite O Pioneers! perhaps, but it hurts. Clement is old-ish, has already felt past the best years of his life, but Lucy is young, and her youthfulness and promise are her most essential qualities. But Cather dispatches Lucy at her lowest point, and it's Harry Gordon--practical, unsentimental, philistine--left to deal with the aftermath in the book's final pages. Willa, you ogre! You beast!