Willa Cather In Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey

1

Liverpool

Willa Cather first touched the Old World, at a commercial port, in unexpected circumstances. At the end of June in 1902, as she and her friend Isabelle McClung were debarking, the whole of Britain was remaking plans, trying to digest news of the quite unexpected illness of Edward VII, on the very eve of his coronation. This had thrown into sudden confusion elaborate plans, throughout the nation, for a festival. They found the whole city still garlanded and flag-bedecked; although the great celebration had now to be postponed indefinitely. Parts of it, nevertheless, were to be carried through; and into these local proceedings the two women were promptly gathered.

Thus absorbing first uneven impressions, among the idle crowds, it is the appearance of the working people that strikes her. Their whole standard is deplorable; their clothing frankly a shock at first. Poverty she was familiar with; but such slatternliness, and the decrepitude, are new. The carriage of the women, in particular, she finds dreadful. She strikes out in vigorous protest at their dowdy, unbecoming clothing, their unbelievable hats, their cheap jewelry. There are also puzzling contrasts. Where place amidst this, for example, the gentle English voices?

During her first afternoon she somehow attends a public feast for the aged poor, which it had been decided not to cancel. Here she finds one grim detail after another. Her fascinated observation of the dregs of the community is typical. It is also an earnest not only of the kinds of people she will notice throughout her journey, but of those she will later prefer to write about; nearly all of them marked, as she puts it, by a real tussle with poverty.

So we find her launched in England, into quite another world than the one she may have expected. Everyone seems to have been bemused by the universal change of plans; yet it was an odd and unanticipated introduction, into a world not of beauty but of realism.

Reverting to the uncrowned new King, so much in people’s thoughts during these very hours, to close this first article she essays a brief sketch, concise and well phrased, of the thankless life she divines that he has had to live—quite contrary to his common reputation in America—during the long years of his domineering mother’s flinty old age. Here it is the human situation, rather than the political, that has drawn her interest.

Liverpool, July 1, 1902

ON the 26th of June Liverpool presented such an array of colour, flowers, and banners as very nearly disguised the grimness of the city itself. We arrived at about eight o’clock of the most radiant of June mornings, and our drive to the Northwestern Hotel was under canopies, arches, and flags. From pillar to pillar along the sidewalks ran chains of paper roses for miles. Everywhere hung pictures of the King and Queen. The shops were all closed, and workingmen were standing about the streets, yet there was a palpable shadow in the air that did not belong to a festival. Even had the news of the King’s illness not reached us at Queenstown, we would certainly have recognized symptoms of discomfiture in the streets of Liverpool. Moreover, in hundreds of places the silk draperies which bore the inscription God Save the King and been torn down and others substituted with the legend God Raise Our King.

The Northwestern Hotel, at which my friend and I stopped, is directly opposite the public square and St. George’s Hall, which is by far the finest building in Liverpool. The square was a sheet of blazing sunshine that morning, and the Union Jack everywhere fluttered and tugged in the wind. A blind man with a concertina played national airs at the foot of a colossal statue of the Duke of Wellington, that stands on a column 115 feet high. The bobbies were lined up on the steps of St. George’s Hall, and a few redcoats, with their caps perched at their favourite jaunty angle, and short canes under their arms, came and went among the groups of people who thronged the square. A group of girls with their hair hanging loose over their shoulders, and the most strident voices imaginable, sold flowers at the foot of an equestrian statue, done in bronze by Thornycroft when the Empress was a young woman.

Although the whole effect was remarkably gay, there was nothing of the smartness and neatness and trimness of an American crowd. The square as a whole presented a beautiful variation of line and colour, but the majority of the individuals who made up these dark splotches on the yellow plane were far from lovely. The dress of English women, and of English men of the working class, is frankly a shock at first, no matter how catholic one may be in such matters. I have been in England a week now, and I have not seen one English girl or woman of the middle class who is not stoop-shouldered to a painful degree, or who does not stand with her chest sunk in and the lower part of the torso thrust forward. Even in the little, little girls one sees the beginning of it—the topping of the shoulders and contraction of the chest. This unfortunate carriage is so universal that it amounts to a national disfigurement among the women. Girls with the skin of a rose, and well-featured enough, have the figures of riddled old dames. Their dress is almost as remarkable. The American idea of neatness, of being genuine as far as you go, of having little and having it good, which at home even the shop girls imbibe more or less of, prevails not at all here. The streets are always full of badly made, home-concocted silks and satins and lawns and dimities. No shirtwaist is complete without a daub of penny lace on it, no skirt is correct unless it trails in the back, is too short in front, and is a cascade of draggled ruffles and flounces. The railway trains are full of young women travelling in white muslin, white stockings, and white shoes. Their hats are something beyond belief. Hats have never at all been one of the vexing problems of my life, but, indifferent as I am, these render me speechless. I should think a well-taught and tasteful American milliner would go mad in England, and eventually hang herself with bolts of green and scarlet ribbon—the favourite colour combination in Liverpool. The flower girls have nothing in their trays half as brilliant as the blossoms on their bonnets. The English working girl, and especially the country girl, has a passion for cheap jewellery. She wears the most unblushing frauds of the sort, even to the extent of half a dozen breastpins at once. However, I am not at all sure that I would be willing to exchange the pretty voice. After hearing only English voices for a few days, the first American voice you hear in a boarding-house is very apt to suggest something of the nature of burrs or sandpaper.

On the afternoon of the 26th we went to see the poor of Liverpool fed at St. George’s Hall, just across the street. The lord mayor and lord mayoress had arranged to dine all the worthy aged poor there, in honour of the new King’s ascent to the throne; and in accordance to the King’s wish that all the coronation festivities in which the poor were to receive gratuities should be carried out, the great dinner was given on the day set for it. There were over five hundred guests entertained in all, each of the guests being over sixty years old, and some upwards of ninety. The dinner consisted of roast beef, vegetables, plum pudding, beer. As the guests left the hall, they were each presented with packages of tea and sugar, and the men with plugs of tobacco. While the old folks were eating, Mr. Roberts, organist of St. Paul’s, played the coronation march written by Mackenzie for the coronation of Edward VII, and afterward Zadock, the Priest, one of the suite of four numbers written by Handel for the coronation of George II and Queen Caroline.

Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into the terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them. There are so many thoroughly engaging and attractive things about English life and people that it is not a little satisfaction to be able to say to oneself that in no American city could be nurtured such an array of poverty and decrepitude as filed into St. George’s Hall on that holiday. They seemed worn to the bone, some of them, and all of them had had a sixty years’ tussle with poverty in a land where the competition is exceedingly close. There was very little sullenness, however; they seemed as eager and pleased as children; and as the caterer’s men, all in white duck, carried huge cauldrons up the street and into the side door, the long file of poor inhaled the savoury odour from the kettles with smiling satisfaction.

Every old dame who had a red rag of a flower in her black bonnet was happy. The tickets which admitted guests to the hall had been distributed by the vestrymen and the guardians of the poor. Of course a great number of people arrived who had no tickets, hulks of drunken old sailors, whom you see everywhere in Liverpool, poor old women, who had, every one, an excuse, but never a ticket when the cooks and the cauldrons arrived, and the odour of the food whetted their appetites. Some of them became quite desperate, and tried by every means to smuggle themselves into the happy ticket line, fairly clawing at the bobbies, who gently put them back. Some sat down on the steps and cried bitterly into their aprons; some railed upon the falseness and futility of human institutions in general. When we came out from the hall half an hour later, they were still there, held by the tantalizing odour; scolding, crying, sulking, so old and tired and poor that one’s heart went out to them who had not on the wedding garment. The cause of their misfortune was not apparent; perhaps they were professional beggars; perhaps they had bad records behind them; but their age was evident enough, and their hunger, and when at last the bobbies drove them even from the steps, one could not help regretting their defeat.

The feeling of sympathy for the King seems to be a very genuine one. Most English people think he has not been altogether justly used. They believe Queen Victoria should have abdicated twenty years ago, when she retired to nurse her private sorrow. These twenty years, they say, Edward has been doing the sovereign’s work, with none of the sovereign’s perquisites. The evidence seems to be very much against the American notion that the King’s life has been one rosy path of wine and song. A detailed account of the daily routine the King has gone through for the last twenty years rather staggers one. He embodies many of those qualities which the English people esteem most highly. He is a good sportsman, he can do a great deal of work without making any display, his personal courage is as unquestioned as his generosity. Even his extravagant taste for boxing and the turf endears him, not only to the smart world, but to the common people as well. His son, the present Prince of Wales, is the antithesis of his father, and is exceedingly unpopular. He is said to be foppish and effeminate to the last degree.

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Chester and Its Cathedral

This second article, sent back to Nebraska from more rural England, shows Willa Cather still at