“If you are interested in historical fiction, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, or Willa Cather, this book is not for you…”—Book Review
Tracy Daugherty, 148 Charles Street: A Novel. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 144 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $19.95.
Tracy Daugherty fictionalizes the friendship between well-known historical literary figures Willa Cather and Elizabeth “Elsie” Shepley Sergeant in 148 Charles Street, a title lifted from Barbara Rotundo’s 1971 article in American Heritage by the same name. An author with an impressive background in writing biographies and novels, surprisingly Daugherty seems to miss the mark in his characterization of these two women and offers sloppy use of real-life content to create his fictional narrative that flounders in its search for a higher purpose.
Daugherty opens with Acknowledgements that first thank Roger Angell “who was always very kind to me, if (I think) a little irritated at my callowness” (ix). He adds “we never spoke of his aunt, Elsie Sergeant” and yet Daugherty claims “I felt I got to know a bit of her through him” (ix). Maybe that bit of knowledge actually came from Angell’s memoir, Let Me Finish, and the brief mention of Cather there. Knowing this scene is important to understanding 148 Charles Street. On an afternoon in 1921, Cather, Sergeant, and Angell’s mother, Katharine Sergent Angell, gather for a small party where the two women offer differing perspectives on Cather. Angell quotes from Sergeant’s memoir to characterize that Sergeant found that Cather made “a friend feel welcomed [and] was most charming.” Katharine Angell insists in a letter the author found that the two women only wanted to talk about their own works, but Cather won out over Sergeant. Angell’s mother adds “it soon became evident to me that Miss Cather was there for another reason—to get factual detail and background for her own novel in progress [. . . ] One of Ours” (106). Roger Angell’s mother resented the possibility that Cather might be using Sergeant’s tragic experience wounded by unexploded ordinance when visiting a former WWI battlefield, and apparently Tracy Daugherty resents the idea as well. Roger Angell does not offer a position. For whatever the reason, the novel is particularly unflattering about Cather.
One redeeming quality in 148 Charles Street is how Daugherty renders physical setting, especially in the New Mexico southwest, in ways reminiscent of Cather’s own skill. Beyond this skill in landscape, other details make the novel nearly unbearable. Writing with the bias gained from Angell’s memoir and possibly a dislike of Cather’s novels beginning in his college days, Daugherty tips the scales to present Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant as a singular heroine, flat as a character in her enthusiasm as a political reformer, journalist, and the butt of Cather’s disappointment. On the other hand, he takes the Willa Cather figure scholars know to have been vibrant and engaging, narrowing in on a grim and painful part of her life to characterize her as dull and inflexible. He at least opens the possibility that she could have been more in her refrain, “Which Willa am I?” (116).
The work has inaccuracies such as omitting the presence of a Bryn Mawr friend in her home for at least part of Sergeant’s New Mexico time and the timing of Cather’s injury to her hand. Daugherty excuses inaccurate plot points under the guise of fiction with his flippant disclaimer that “facts, chronologies, or biographies” are “tweaked and violated freely [ . . ] in service to the novel’s narrative and themes” (143). One has to question why he needs real historical figures to service the narrative and themes which might arguably boil down to the bickering between two strong women. The prejudice in the writing can only serve Daugherty’s desire to portray a maudlin, one-sided Cather which then calls into question the reliability of Sergeant portrait.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this novel is the many references to accurate, yet cherrypicked, material from Cather’s work which lends a sheen of verisimilitude to the narrative. The content required Daugherty’s close engagement with Cather’s work and life which makes his skewed perspective even more egregious. Daugherty sprinkles words like “splendid” and quotes such as “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” to show knowledge of Cather’s most popular writing. With easy access to the Selected Letters of Willa Cather and other references he lists at the end of the book, Daugherty finds the material that suits his purpose and creates a narrative seemingly focused on an unflattering view of Cather. One must assume he had a negative experience reading Cather’s work in his early college days where the “seeds of” writing this novel were “planted” in a University of Houston classroom nearly 40 years ago (ix). This narrative brings a bad perception of Cather as an artist to its logical if unpleasant conclusion.
Then Daugherty has Sergeant thank Cather for a Gauguin book, he produces a prudish Cather response: “Gauguin? Surely not! Willa would never have championed such a pagan. The naked brown women” (105). Such a perspective overlooks Cather’s own naked Thea Kronberg from The Song of the Lark bathing in Panther Canyon, emulating the “brown women” who lived there in ancient times.
Daugherty depends on the idea that Cather’s interest in her past is as limited as her own memories; that she leans on it like a “well-worn cushion” (111). A careful reader and scholar of Cather knows her long history of connecting her personal past to ancient narratives such as the Aeneid or even a conception of First Nation narratives that exist in a universal subconsciousness or memory. Far from a comfortable pillow, it’s a place of inquiry and discovery about the complete scale of human existence.
At the simplest level, perhaps Daugherty’s gender as a male author interferes with his interpretation of these women artists. While a small detail, towards the end of the novel, he has Cather transition from an “eiderdown bathrobe” to “a flannel shirt and leather coat” to go for a walk at Grand Manan (122). Because the year was 1940, the next question is to ask if she walked in a skirt or pants, a detail Daugherty omits. Whatever the reason for his heavy-handed approach to Willa Cather and Elsie Sergeant, the effect recalls possibilities why Roger Angell found him callow.
The structure of the novel perhaps offers a glimpse into the so-called “narrative and themes” Daugherty intends to address (143). Bookended by Cather and Sergeant visiting the famous literary home of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, Daugherty starts with immediately after their visit in the “Prologue” (1). Next he introduces a young and engaging Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant in “Book One Tesque, 1922” (7). Passing over the similar youth and vitality Cather would have had in 1922, Daugherty makes “Book Two New York, 1940” (81) about a late-life Cather who mopes about her environment, holding back tears and bemoaning her painful, braced writing hand. She is another flat character who is remarkably miserable. “Book Three Boston, 1908,” shows the two women preparing to enter the Jewett-Field home. The “Epilogue” details the Jewett-Field home as a literary site and its rapid destruction after Fields’s death.
One can’t help but suspect Daugherty is offering commentary on literature’s role in the “ratcheting of human activity” that appreciates or laments “the profundity of change” (140). Setting up Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and Willa Cather as the opposing ends of ways to examine human experience, through literature and through journalism, Daugherty sacrifices them on the altar of his own ideas about the topic. This version of their lives is puppeteered in service of his own argument with little regard to the richly complex intention each woman lived by. The real, historical women we know through scholarly study disappear behind his intent.
If you are interested in historical fiction, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, or Willa Cather, this book is not for you.
Max Frazier
U.S. Air Force Academy (retired)