NYU Lecture on Willa Cather's "Neighbor Rosicky"

Going Gentle Unto that Good Night
Death-preparedness in Willa Cather’s Neighbor Rosicky

The following is the transcript of a lecture delivered at NYU on November 20, 2023. Here is a link to the text of Cather’s story and to the NYT review of the new biography by Benjamin Taylor that inspired my choice of subject for this lecture.

Thank you, Dr. Mitsis, for welcoming me back to NYU, and for the first time on a non-Greek theme, although there is plenty of Greek influence hidden in Neighbor Rosicky! Willa Cather wrote this story in the months after losing her father, and I selected it as the shortest of her great works that deal with this class’s theme of “Mortal and Immortal Questions” and more specifically, readiness for death—for that “inevitable hour” shared by all living things. When I proposed adding Cather to your syllabus and selected today’s date I was not thinking about Thanksgiving, but I now realize we could not have a better story to celebrate the spirit of Thanksgiving, so I hope you enjoy that positive note alongside the death rattle at hand!

While many of the characters in stories you’ve already read are contending with their mortality, and often very ungently, throughout their lives, Cather’s hero Anton Rosicky has a pretty short runway of awareness on the topic. He receives his prognosis on the first page of the story, and his immediate response is to joke about getting a new heart and then to say, without a trace of morbidity, “I can’t make my heart go no longer’n it wants to, can I, Doctor Ed?”

His approach is spiritually opposite to Dylan Thomas’s idea, for those of you who know the great poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My handout provides this poem in full alongside a poem by William Cullen Bryant called Thanatopsis that is rather more Rosicky in nature. I thought you might enjoy reading both in transit or on your staycation this Thanksgiving week.

And so, while we don’t get Dylan Thomas’s rage from Rosicky, we do see him demonstrate tremendous proactivity regarding the principal matter he is anxious about.

Our Czech-born Nebraskan protagonist—a tailor-turned-farmer by trade—is anxious that, like the toxic thistles that threaten his beloved alfalfa crop, seeds of enmity will take early root in his eldest son Rudolph’s marriage. And that like any other blight, once allowed to begin, the spread of resentment is hard to stop. The new couple’s palpable tension—born of farm fatigue, a lifestyle especially bleak for his town bride, Polly—may not only make them unhappy, it make take them away from the hard-won life of first-generation land ownership that Rosicky earned and feels is the key to basic happiness. What’s more, the eldest son and his new bride are sure to set the example for the five younger siblings. Rosicky’s children will either continue the “family business” or abandon that progress for what he believes will be shorter-sighted ease but a harder road in the long run working for someone else “in the city.” The city in this case is Omaha but could just as well be Cather’s—or our own—New York.**

Handed his diagnosis, we see Rosicky begin making preparations for his unknown life expectancy, much the way someone might prepare a will. Doctor Ed evaulates his heart, “I think it’s good for five or six years yet, maybe more, if you’ll take the strain off it.” While Rosicky doesn’t react emotionally, per se, we watch the news change him. He begins taking actions to protect his estate and to ensure his peace of mind with increasing urgency. It seems he does not want to bank on having those five to six years.

The actions Rosicky calmly takes to hopefully safeguard his family’s future happiness call to mind the themes of willpower, destiny, and luck that I believe were ever-present on Willa Cather’s mind as well as demonstrated by her life. The new biography by Benjamin Taylor says that Cather

“believed in luck, particularly her own, and believed in the luck-making power of desire. She had a destiny, devoutly believed in; she swept aside impediments; her goals were vividly before her.” He says, “She was her own raw material and self-transformation was her game.”

Taylor is speaking of a woman who, way back at the turn of the 20th century, tried on men’s names, clothes, and haircuts. He is speaking of a woman who, at eight years old, was transplanted from her civilized home in long-settled Virginia to the wild, barren land of Nebraska where she sculpted herself from the dust of that raw new country into the immortal literary figure she would become.

I believe Neighbor Rosicky argues that while we can’t do a thing about the fact of our mortality, we can strive to enjoy our lives, support best outcomes in the lives of our loved ones, and leave a legacy of good feelings as well as deeds. Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Rosicky’s legacy is one of gentleness, and how he makes his children—and most importantly his daughter-in-law* Polly feel—have tangible agency over outcomes in the last months of his life.

The first action Rosicky takes after getting home from the doctor’s is deciding to give the newlyweds his car on Saturday nights, sacrificing a beloved weekend ritual for the younger children. He brings the car over to them and insists on doing the dishes so Polly can put herself together and go to the movies with her man. He compliments her by admitting vanity about her looks, “I like you to look prettier’n any of dem town girls when you go in,” then vows, “I’m goin’ to look out fur you, Polly.” It’s about the sweetest example of outright meddling I’ve ever seen.

Then on Christmas Eve, Anton and his wonderful wife Mary, mother earth personified, band together to cement the family narrative through story. The wildly entertaining stories-within-a-story they share change the mood and, potentially, the course of their family’s future.

Firstly Mary tells us about the time a fire destroyed their corn crop on the Fourth of July and, instead of panicking and starting to skimp, Rosicky decides to throw an especially lavish meal, to celebrate abundance and seize the day. This becomes an artfully told lesson in the generative power of joie de vivre. Their neighbors who horribilized in crisis ended up worse for the wear. Mary’s story then dovetails into Anton’s, Cather’s allegorical centerpiece about the dark time in the London of Rosicky’s youth that, enduring constant hunger, he gobbled up his (also impoverished) landlord’s Christmas goose.

Willa sets up a highly effective moral drama here, a fall from grace and then self-salvation helped along by a stranger’s charity. The crippling guilt Rosicky felt drove him into the streets in search of a solution and compelled him to beg for the first time in his life when he heard some well-heeled pedestrians speaking his native Czech. That he asks and then receives so far above and beyond the correction of the crime—he is given enough money to restore much more than the eaten goose as well as a “golden ticket” opportunity in the States—seems to set Rosicky on a path of goodness, grace, and gratitude for life.

But “what if”? Having ‘scaped whipping, Rosicky’s nature thereafter seems incapable of pessimism or despair. And yet we are haunted by the alternate ending. Had he been unable to replace the goose, would the family have driven him out? Had he not met the Czech benefactors, what would have become of him? It is this unsettling “what if” that makes Rosicky’s London chapter the sole epoch of his life he can’t bear to reflect on. Instead he seems to carry this lesson—or warning—with him, building a decent bachelor’s life in New York, deciding to move West when that life ceases to fulfill him, marrying for love, and working to live instead of the other way around. Biographer Ben Taylor calls Neighbor Rosicky a story “entirely about happiness,” but I believe that lurking behind this happiness is a spooky “what if” that functions as moral compass, keeping Rosicky’s life on track. Through Mary and Anton’s two stories, they impart their worldview and its backstory. Like the team of oxen they have always been, the mater and paterfamilias steer their family’s course.

My Cather journey this season, from reading the biography in Greece, to its Society Library launch where the staff kindly dug up the catalog from their 2018 exhibit for me, to my acquisitions of a first-edition Obscure Destinies and—so fun—a sheet of pristine 8-cent Willa Cather stamps found for around $20 on Amazon! Oh, and my agnès b. ascot tie, procured to be in character for the Gotham author event.

The role of luck—accidental or made—was on Cather’s mind in 1930. I suspect that as she looked back on her 53 years, at the peak of her powers with a Pulitzer and so many medals and honorary degrees behind her, that she was pondering, to quote her favorite poet Robert Frost, “roads not taken.” What might life have looked like for her if one critical move or meeting had been otherwise. If McClure, the founder and editor of the then-famous McClure’s Magazine, had not summoned Cather to New York after she sent him a stack of short stories, she might have never left teaching in Pittsburgh. After that seminal turn of luck, Cather wrote a friend, “At ten o’clock last Friday I was not much afraid of street car accidents and things, but when I left the office at one I had become worth saving.” Decades later she remained eternally grateful to McClure, “the man who gave me my first chance,” as she liked to say.

While Anton does “go gently,” he goes bravely, too. Telling his London story is another act of sacrifice and love as well as a cathartic act of preparation for death himself. Not only did he “go there,” he increased his discomfort by speaking English so Polly would understand him. Both his and Mary’s stories have an instinctive if not strategic intent and achieve the desired effect. After Christmas Eve dinner, Rudolph and Polly are lighter, running home arm-in-arm, their gratitude intensified. Polly’s character arc is Rosicky’s masterpiece. As he wanes, she becomes. Through his efforts she makes a remarkably fast but believable turn from resentment toward her foreign farmer in-laws to a deeper wisdom about who they are and what a good life might look like.

But Rosicky can’t rest yet. He does not feel for certain that the kids will be all right until he discovers Polly’s basic “sweetness at her heart,” when he has his penultimate heart attack on her property and she tends to him. Once he knows she has that sweetness—a sweetness that cannot be instilled but can be revealed—he is fully reassured. He is even grateful to have gotten sick in her care—to have almost died in her arms—as otherwise he would not have known her “tender heart.” He can now let go.

Neighbor Rosicky is a story that unfolds through action, reflection, and storytelling, often while our primary narrator is repairing and “upcyclying” his children’s clothes, weaving in more ways than one. He and Mary are parents as patchers of life, so long as they both shall live. Rosicky is a zero-waste story that prizes spending over saving. It is mostly about happiness.

As you complete your meditations on mortality and immortality in this course, may Rosicky provide a thanatopsis that brings you comfort this week and beyond.

Happy Thanksgiving.

ENDNOTES

*Dr. Mitsis pointed out this may well be literature’s sweetest or only father-in-law and daughter-in-law story.
**One close reader with previous Willa reading experience cited Wagner Matinée as an earlier argument FOR city life, tellingly written when Cather was still enjoying New York.

“Since it was first published, Cather’s fiction has been celebrated around the world for the beauty of its prose, the humanity of its characters, the evocations of place, and the rich reflection of themes central to human life. This great body of literature came into being, in part, in apartments in Greenwich Village and on the Upper East Side. New York is where Willa Cather became a great American writer.”
—Andrew Jewell