A visit to a bookshop today could leave you with the impression that ‘great’ novels are commonplace, so readily is the accolade volleyed from cover to cover by amenable blurbers. In truth, most novels hurry towards oblivion; few are of such magnitude that they stand still in time. Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House — which, like Mrs Dalloway and The Great Gatsby, marks its centenary year — is of this rarer kind, and though eclipsed in fame by those other works, it should be held in equally high esteem. The Professor’s House is a book in which Cather reckons with the cost of progress and with the enervating consequences of modernity. At just over two hundred pages, it is a triumph of concision, and a powerful distillation of a great American mind.

Cather first conceived the idea for The Professor’s House at an exhibition of Dutch masters in Paris. Standing in front of what were likely Vermeers, she noticed that in most of his ‘warmly furnished’ interiors, the kitchens ‘full of food and coppers’, there was ‘a square window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships, or a stretch of grey sea’. These glimpses of something beyond rooms cluttered with material possessions – something that not only provided painterly perspective but a moral one too – came to Cather shortly after the world, according to her, ‘broke in two’. Like many other writers and artists, she identified 1922 as the year when we lost all sense of continuity with the past — when we became, in T.S. Eliot’s words, ‘hollow men’. It was Cather’s perception of this break that inspired a novel in which characters are eroded by consumerism, time is stalled ‘like a paralysed boat’, and yet, amid it all, an open window beckons to something beyond.

The Professor’s House begins with the professor, Godfrey St Peter, sitting alone in his old ‘dismantled house’. The move to a new house ‘is over and done’, but he cannot leave. Though ugly, cramped and awkward, with stairs too steep and taps that drip, it is home. It is also the place where, in his cave-like study on the third floor, he wrote his life’s work – a history of the first Spanish explorers in the American Southwest. Like those explorers, St Peter has ‘created something new’; he is an artist of sorts. And with his head ‘hard as bronze’, more ‘like a statue’s head than a man’s’, he lingers among the fragments of his old life – a hero in a world that no longer recognises such men.

In The Theory of the Novel, the Marxist critic György Lukács argues that what we call heroic in the modern novel is not action (as it was in the epic), but a struggle of consciousness. The modern hero, Lukács contends, is the alienated man who faces his loneliness without illusion. An exile even among his wife and daughters – all of whom embrace the tidings of modernity – St Peter, in this heroic sense, is the less deceived. Unlike his colleagues, he notices that the ‘quality’ of his students diminishes year on year, that the ‘cheap execution’ of university buildings leads to endless repairs. Unlike his family, he knows that the ‘glittering’ new house, bought with the prize money awarded to his book, is no compensation for work that gave him such ‘priceless’ joy. It is no wonder, then, that he feels ‘a diminution of ardour’, an ‘ever-increasing fatigue’. He is a hero without recourse to action, a man who must endure estrangement alone.

Set against this ‘sham’ world is the character of Tom Outland. Like St Peter, Tom (as his surname suggests) is an outsider. Orphaned as a child, he later takes a job as a messenger boy in New Mexico where he meets the drifter, Rodney Blake. Together they are commissioned to ‘ride a bunch of cattle’ to their summer pastures on the Blue Mesa. It is after this trip that Tom arrives in the town of Hamilton. A ‘fresh thing’ in that stale world of ‘social anxiety’, he walks through the green door of the professor’s garden to seek his advice on how to enter the university. When St Peter, with his weakness for youth, learns that Tom has read Caesar and the Aeneid despite having no formal education, he becomes his ‘servant’, his devoted friend.

In her manifesto-like essay ‘The Novel Démeublé’, Cather – though a critic of modernity – advances what can only be called a modernist argument: that art should proceed ‘by suggestion rather than enumeration’. In practice, she argues, this means the novelist must be selective with details, choosing only those that are ‘a part of the emotions of the people’ they describe. So, when Cather presents Outland’s hand, with its ‘beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the rest of the hand as if it were it its own master’, she means it to stand for his whole character. A man with a thumb like this, we feel, will achieve great things; and so he does.

After completing his degree, Tom discovers the principle of the ‘Outland Vacuum’, which will later revolutionise the aviation industry. With no sense of its commercial value, however, he goes off to the First World War, only to be killed by the forces his invention inevitably accelerates. It is left to his fiancée, St Peter’s eldest daughter, Rosamond – and the man she later marries, the entrepreneurial Louie Marsellus – to ‘convert’ Tom’s idea, which feels to St Peter like his ‘very bones’, into a ‘personal asset’. Like Mark Anthony, as St Peter reflects, Tom is a man whose ‘fortunes’ go on to ‘corrupt honest men’.

The Professor’s House is a book in three parts. The key to understanding its structure, and therefore its meaning, is given in the epigraph: ‘a turquoise set in dull silver’. It is a fittingly suggestive image that refers to a bracelet given by Outland to Rosamond during their courtship, but it also describes the form of the novel. Like setting a bright blue stone within grey metal, Cather’s structural experiment in The Professor’s House is the insertion of the Nouvelle (the short story) into the Roman (the novel). If parts one and three are the Roman and, in their depictions of the ‘dull’ present, correspond to the silver – then part two, where we receive Outland’s story, is the turquoise. As fresh air revives a stale room, Tom’s account of his summer on the Blue Mesa takes us out of the grey paralysis of modernity – a world that, in the manner of those Dutch interiors, is ‘overcrowded and stuffy with things’, and with people whose only concerns are acquisitive.

The story is presented as a diary, which St Peter is editing for publication. It is the first time we hear Tom speak for himself, and the style of Cather’s prose changes accordingly. Unlike the ‘florid’ register of Marsellus, and even St Peter himself, Outland’s words sound like ‘a hammer striking an anvil’. As Cather’s biographer Hermione Lee has written, it is essential that Tom’s ‘simple eloquence… ring[s] true… so that it can stand against shams and disintegrations’. What follows is an account of his trip to the Mesa, a ‘naked blue rock’ on the border of New Mexico, which, like Tom and St Peter, stands ‘alone’. The descriptions of the Mesa are some of the most beautiful in all of Cather’s oeuvre. Informed by a real trip she made to the Mesa Verde, Cather has Tom describe how, at daybreak, the ‘top would be red with sunrise, and all the cedars along the rocks would be gold’, and how, during the sunset, it ‘was like one great ink-black rock against a sky on fire.’ Like Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, the mesa is a symbol of the ever-changing, and therefore unknowable, sublime.

But Outland, as the description of his thumb foreshadows, has the pioneer’s thirst for discovery, so when a cow makes a bolt for freedom, he follows it. Ascending the corkscrew trail up towards the granite top, he emerges in front of an ancient Indian cliff-city carved into the stone. Preserved ‘like a fly in amber’, it looks ‘down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity’. This city represents everything that Cather most valued. It is a place where – like the house of her great friend, Mrs Field – the ‘past lived on’. With its tower ‘that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something’, it speaks to a talent for selection which Cather felt belonged to the highest art. But most importantly – and unlike the modern world – it is a place of human proportions, where rituals gave life meaning, and where science, however primitive, was practised only in the service of peace.

In the past, as St Peter argues in one of his lectures, these values were enshrined in art and religion, both of which made life feel like ‘a rich thing’, and our part in it of great ‘importance’. But for St Peter, and, by extension, Cather, science and the modernity it brings has left the world spiritually barren; its ‘ingenious toys’ no more than a ‘distraction’ from the ‘real problems’. Here, then, we come to the central provocation of Cather’s novel. If, as she writes, the Indians in their ‘humanized’ cliff-city were ‘too advanced’ for their time, then what does that say about us? Is modernity really progress, or is it, in fact, a regression towards barbarism? When Tom’s attempts to preserve the Cliff City are thwarted by bureaucracy and greed, Cather gives us her answer.

Part three returns us to the greyness of modernity, where St Peter’s mental fatigue hardens into physical paralysis. Without his notice, the window in his study is blown shut, and as he is nearly asphyxiated by gas from the stove. It is Augusta, the sewing woman – a minor character in the novel who ends up becoming its most important figure – who opens one of the novel’s many windows and rescues him. She is no Outland, has none of the grandeur of his Blue Mesa, but unlike so many people in the modern world, she is ‘real’, ‘solid’, a teller of truths. ‘Like the taste of bitter herbs’, she restores him to life. In the end, then, Cather does not propose a return to the prelapsarian idyll of the Cliff City as a cure for our ills, but instead reminds us that there is ‘still Augusta’, ‘a world full of Augustas with whom one [is] outward bound’.

It is hard to read The Professor’s House today without feeling that all is now dull silver – that if it were possible to become more than hollow, we have become so. But like Augusta, Tom and his Blue Mesa, Cather is restorative; we have only to open her books and breathe in the clean air of her sagacity, which, unpolluted by the passage of time, awaits us in expectation.