A Second First Essay

There is a point beyond which the clutter in one's space can no longer go unremarked. Trying to tidy things by moving some paper-choked boxes around, I came across an old folder of undergraduate essays.  There it still lay: my first university essay on a literary subject: a required consideration of Willa Cather's compelling story, "Paul's Case".  The following will be, I suppose, an elective consideration of "Paul's Case". <1>

II.

Reading Cather's story again these years later, I noticed a detail I don't recall raised in our lectures or tutorial group.  It comes early in the narrative, after Paul has just finished delivering one of his sub-Wildean performances ("there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin...and a red carnation") to a group of faculty at Pittsburgh High School.  After Paul bows "gracefully" from the Principal's office, it's his Art teacher that notes Paul was born "only a few months before his mother died".

III.

Paul doesn't have much of a relationship with his parent that remains, and seems to work hard at keeping it that way.  Coming home late one evening, for example, Paul actually prefers breaking in through a basement window than to be "accosted" by his father for explanations, if he were to enter their house through the main entrance.  In a certain way, Paul only tolerates his father by the nature of their bond - and his father would seem to return the sentiment.  Paul is only too aware of being compared to another neighbourhood young man, whom his father "daily held up to Paul as a model...a young man with a future". Paul will have none of this, his father's attempt at sensible guidance, as he is being led by a sensibility (or a sensibility in the making) of his own.

Having the sensibility of an aesthete, Paul suffers and humours the banal and tiresome routines of his middling circumstances, so that he can escape to the world of art and beauty. The access to his preferred society comes from Paul's part-time job as an usher at Carnegie Hall.  Only here, he "really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting", and when the orchestra played "the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto...his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired." But because of his various delinquencies, Paul loses his job at the Carnegie.  He responds by running away to New York on stolen money. Cather resolves Paul's truancy there in the big city, with a most sombre conclusion.

IV.

Let us come on back now to the detail of Paul's mother passing away, just months after his birth.  Was this Cather only emphasizing the sense of Paul's isolation and estrangement? Given the precise highly-wrought text, it's hard to think it a crude emphasis, certainly. Willa Cather has made sure though that Paul have no mother to turn to.  Such a maternal presence might have proved crucial, in Paul's case.
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<1>Cather, Willa. "Paul's Case". The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (1986).