As I listed in detail at the start of my post for Youth and the Bright Medusa, Cather published a total of 17 stories in five such collections, with several of them republished in multiple volumes. By that tally, I have only one more collection to go -- Obscure Destinies, published in 1932, and containing one story I have already read and two I have not.
And although I had already read four of the seven stories in The Troll Garden, the experience brought something else to my attention. Although her popular stories were republished multiple times, they were not always the same versions of the same stories. In fact, the edition of The Troll Garden I read was, in part, an attempt to harmonize some of those changes.
The aim of this edition is twofold: to produce an authoritative text of The Troll Garden (TG) as Willa Cather intended it to appear when it was published in 1905 and to record all the revisions that took place in four of the seven stories in successive versions over a span of thirty-four years. Three of the stories (“Flavia and Her Artists,” “The Garden Lodge,” and “The Marriage of Phaedra”) were neither published in magazines before book publication nor ever reprinted in Cather’s lifetime. Thus they exist in a unique printing in TG. On the other hand, “The Sculptor's Funeral,” “A Death in the Desert,” “A Wagner Matinee,” and “Paul’s Case” were all first published in magazines (MV), revised for TG, further revised for inclusion in Youth and the Bright Medusa (YBM) in 1920, and all but one reworked for Cather’s collected writings, The Novels and Stories of Willa Cather (NS) brought out between 1937 and 1941. The fourth story, “A Death in the Desert,” was omitted from NS. Thus there are four versions of three stories and three versions of one.
Did you follow all of that? Cather was evidently not quite finished with these stories, working and re-working them as demanded by her bright and elusive muse.
But what kind of changes are we talking about? Well, here’s a taste from the different versions of “A Wagner Matinee.”
Between the appearance of TG in 1905 and YBM in 1920 Cather changed greatly in her attitude toward Nebraska. The affirmation in O Pioneers! and My Antonia are reflected in a much-modified portrait of Aunt Georgiana. Missing in YBM are more than four hundred words from what is the shortest tale in TG. Gone now are seven passages, including the yellow skin and false teeth, that made the original character a grotesque figure, and in additional places the “absurdities” of Aunt Georgiana’s attire give way to “her queer, country clothes”; her “misshapen figure” becomes her “battered” figure. One would have to say that the result of all this plastic surgery is to transform Aunt Georgiana from a cruelly used, worn-out farm wife from a harsh, isolated prairie farm into a quaint little old lady from the boondocks. By the time Cather revised the story once again for NS in the mid-thirties, there was not much left to change in the portrait, but still she managed three more small cuts that modify Aunt Georgiana’s emotional display during the concert, and the powerful ending of the story that survived three versions is emasculated in the final one. From “she burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. ‘I don’t want to go, Clark, I don’t want to go!’” in MV, TG, and YBM, the final speech of Aunt Georgiana becomes in the penultimate paragraph: “She turned to me with a sad little smile. ‘I don’t want to go, Clark. I suppose we must.’”
They are, in fact, three different stories, told at different times in the author’s life. For that reason, if none other, each deserves its own read and preservation.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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