Welcome to our first story of 2024!
Our first story of 2024 for the Willa Cather Short Story Project is “Behind the Singer Tower.” If you haven’t read it yet, the full text is free over on the Willa Cather Archive (https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss045) and includes the original magazine illustrations by George Harding (one is used in the featured image above).
Several new social media friends expressed interest in joining the Project this year. Now is a good time to note that the only consistent thing about this project has been reading one short story a month. The responses that others and I have to a story vary from month to month. Some may focus strictly on the story and style, others on the people and places mentioned or on connections to other works by Cather or other writers.
Simply reading the stories has been the point for me, not a systematic summary or critique, although if that is what you’ve been doing or intend to do, that’s great! I admit, sometimes I wish I had created a response template, but then I don’t think I would have kept going all these years.
A story of exploitation
If you haven’t read “Behind the Singer Tower,” it is a brutal story of how ruthless businessmen use the lower classes, particularly impoverished immigrants, as fodder to keep their machinery going and then complain that the “steerage class” is infecting their world. The villain in the story, Stanley Merryweather, is a corrupt engineer/business owner who gets away with cutting corners and leaves a trail of broken bodies behind him, seemingly without consequence. As other scholars have pointed out, this story is Cather’s most direct social commentary. Her social criticism tends to be more subtle and suggestive; she rarely hands it to the reader on a platter.
This is one reason readers often do not register or tend to forget the violence in her novels, like My Antonia. We are dazzled by the landscape descriptions and lovely characters of her rural and small town 19th century Nebraska setting and gloss over the suicides, murder, and attempted rape, perhaps much like early 20th century visitors approaching New York City by ship would see the twinkling lights of the shoreline buildings and not the horrors behind them, the deaths involved in their construction and maintenance, which is the plot of this story.
In fiction, as in life, we mostly see what we want to see, what we are allowed to see, and what is presented to us. We are often shocked when the hidden cruelties or corruption of an industry is exposed. Magazines like McClures’s, where Cather was editor from 1906 to 1912, played a crucial role in supporting journalists who uncovered corruption, exploitation, and dangerous working conditions. When I first learned about what was then called “muckraking” journalism, it was presented to me as a negative practice. (I wish I could remember that professor’s name.) I think most people now think of it as investigative journalism.
Document, document, document
It was relatively easy for corrupt businessmen like Stanley Merryweather to hide the horrific consequences of their cost-cutting decisions when immigrants and the poor were harmed. Merryweather “always got an out under the fellow-servant act.” This was a common law doctrine that deemed an employer was not responsible for an employee’s injury or death if it was caused by the negligence of another employee. After the accident that killed Caesaro and other men working in the hole, Fred Hallet could prove that Merryweather was at fault for not replacing worn cables rather than him getting away with blaming a crane operator for incompetence.
Hallet can take the issue to court because he has documentation upon which to build a case. The vast majority of immigrants obviously did not have an educated upper class white male advocate like Hallet who had taken an interest in Caesaro’s life. The two men became not exactly friends, but friendly. Hallet romanticizes Caesaro’s life in Italy through a colonial lens, describes him in animalistic terms, and refers to him and others using an ethnic slur.
Cather uses stereotypes and slurs throughout the story to show elitist, Christian white supremest attitudes. In the end, when Hallet finishes his story about the death of Caesaro, there is no kumbaya moment. I didn’t exactly expect one, but I had hoped that Hallet was a changed man from his encounter with Caesaro. I don’t think he was. He is certainly more ethical than Merryweather, but that does not make him a champion of the downtrodden. The point of Hallet’s story was more about why he and Merryweather were enemies rather than challenging the system.
Gaslighting
When Hallet starts speculating that about “something wonderful coming” after the “frenzy” of building Manhattan “has cooled,” he ignores Zablowski’s comment about what was left in India (apparently due to colonization). He then goes on to talk about a new idea that’s coming, the next big thing, and says, “That’s what we are all the slaves of, though we don’t know it. It’s the whip that cracks over us till we drop.” What? By “we” he clearly means the movers and shakers, not the immigrants or Jews. It is a gross statement and a false equation to place the businessmen and engineers in the position of “slaves.”
I was surprised about that and how the story ends with victim-blaming Zablowski. Egged on by Hallet’s comment, “Don’t call anything ours, Johnson, while Zablowski is around.” Johnson then snaps at Zablowski, “why don’t you ever hit back?” Instead of looking at his own culpability in the system, or perhaps he had a searing flash of insight while looking out to sea, Johnson blames the victim, making Zablowski, a young Jewish doctor, responsible for not hitting back.
It is so twisted. We’ve seen a lot of that sort of gaslighting in our present time
There is no hope in this story for systemic change, but the point is made that taking an interest in another person can help create change on the individual level. Still, such human connections need to be supported by hard documentation to hold those in power accountable.
Influences
“Behind the Singer Tower” may have been inspired by the Windsor Hotel fire of March 17, 1899. Sheryl L. Meyering also identifies stories of other fires in that Cather would have known about, and she discusses the influence of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babble.
There are two literary stories that probably influenced Cather: Flaubert’s novel Salammbô and Conrad’s story “Heart of Darkness.” A poem by Allan Updegraff may have also been an influnce. Meyering quotes O’Brien’s brief description of the poem: “four people are ‘reading’ the New York skyline, the first three seeing fame, wealth, and power, while the fourth sees ‘shame'” (O’Brien, 400n).
What did you think about “Behind the Singer Tower”? Did you make connections to other Cather stories? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Works Cited
Behind the Singer Tower | Willa Cather Archive. https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss045. Accessed 24 Jan. 2024.
Meyering Sheryl L. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather. G.K. Hall ; Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; Maxwell Macmillan International 1994.
O’Brien Sharon. Willa Cather : The Emerging Voice : With a New Preface. 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed. Harvard University Press 1997.
New to this blog? Learn more about the Willa Cather Short Story Project here. In a nutshell, we read one Cather short story a month. I remind everyone of what story we’re reading on the second Wednesday of the month and then share a response on the fourth Wednesday of the month. Jump in anytime!