Paul's Case

Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case” was published in 1905 in McClure's Magazine. In its original iteration, the story was titled “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament,” but it was later shortened to the current title. The story became a popular one of Cather’s, in part because it was one of the only few that she allowed to be anthologized, but also for the debates over its interpretation. “Paul’s Case” was turned into a TV movie for PBS’s The American Short Story anthology series and into an opera.

This study guide cites Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings from the Library of America 1992 edition.

Although it has been removed in subsequent publications, the story’s original subtitle—“A Study in Temperament”—aptly encapsulates the trajectory and literary goals of Cather’s work. The story centers on the titular Paul, a young man from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. At the beginning, Paul is facing a disciplinary tribunal at his school. School administrators and various teachers are present, as is Paul’s father (Paul’s mother is deceased). Immediately, Cather describes Paul’s physical appearance as being at odds with the banal surroundings: “[T]here was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole” (468). The red carnation is taken by the teachers to indicate a lack of remorse for his behaviors, which include classroom disruptions, daydreaming, and his general demeanor.

Paul stands before this council and lies that he hopes to return to school. The whole proceeding, which has brought many other students to tears, has little or no effect on Paul. At the end of the assembly, in another action that is interpreted as insolent, Paul bows: “[H]is bow was like a repetition of the scandalous red carnation” (469).

As the educators convene after Paul’s departure, they all agree that something was off about him. They speak about his odd behavior and attributes. They leave the building feeling shameful of their dismissal of the young man. The whole event called to mind for one member “a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors” (470).

Meanwhile, Paul exits the meeting in joyous spirits, whistling a tune from the opera Faust. From this meeting, Paul travels to his job at Carnegie Hall, where he is an usher. There is a concert tonight, and he goes to get ready. The job gives him untold joy for myriad reasons. It offers him the opportunity to look at the art replicas in the building (a bust of Augustus Caesar and a Venus de Milo); he feels comfortable and proud in his usher’s uniform; he can hobnob with the cultural elite who attended the events—“all the people in his section thought him a charming boy” (471); but most importantly, Paul can listen to the music. Cather anoints this occurrence with a flurry of life-affirming clauses. When the music is playing, Paul “felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendour” (471-72). The only unpleasant aspect of the night’s experience is that Paul sees his English teacher in attendance and must put down a seat for her.

After the concert, Paul waits for the German soloist from the concert by her carriage. She exits the hall with the conductor and bids auf wiedersehen to Paul, who then follows their carriage to the hotel. As he sees the singer enter the hotel, he imagines himself in there as well, eating rich dishes and drinking lavishly at a party.

While Paul is outside the hotel, there is a storm, so he returns home. He imagines his drab room in his father’s house on Cordelia Street, with its pictures of George Washington and John Calvin. He approaches his home feeling dejected after a night of dazzling events. A depression sets in, primarily for his current “repulsion for the flavourless, colourless mass of every-day existence” (474). Upon the threshold of his home, he decides not to enter through the front door for fear that he might be “accosted” by his father for returning late. He creeps to the back of the house and sneaks in through a basement window, feeling miserable.

The following Sunday, Paul observes his neighborhood: the citizens sitting on their front porches, women dressed in their Sunday best, men sitting on cushions on the sidewalk, telling stories and talking, children fighting. Paul’s sisters talk with the minister’s daughter’s next door. Paul’s father is talking with a young man who he hoped would serve as a model to Paul. This man is a clerk at one of the steel corporations, he is married to a schoolteacher, and has four children. Paul likes to hear this young man tell his stories of his boss traveling to Venice, Monte Carlo, and Cairo for business.

Paul garners the favor of a performer, Charley Edwards, who allows him to hang around his dressing room. Being around Edwards and Carnegie Hall in general provides great meaning to Paul’s life: “It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting” (477). The theater, music, performance—these become Paul’s sanctuary and his connection to the world. Cather makes this very explicit when she writes, “[I]t would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance” (477). It offers him the chance to imagine another life.

As much as the theater offers him a richer interior life, it provides no pathway for him. Paul expresses no desire to become an actor or musician. He wants only to experience their performances and to be in their intimate company, trading stories of the world.

In the meantime, Paul’s status at school worsens. He declines to do his work and is eventually expelled. However, the school, aware of his commitment to the Hall, contacts the theater with reports of Paul’s behavior. As a punishment, the school gets the theater to replace him with another usher and have him banned from the premises.

During a January snowstorm, Paul takes a train to New Jersey, escaping Pittsburg secretly in an uncomfortable Pullman train car. After long planning sessions with Charley Edwards, Paul heads for New York City. On his stopover at the Jersey City train station, he keeps an eye out for people who might recognize him while he eats breakfast. Later, finally in New York, he goes to a men’s clothing store, where he spends ample time and money on a plethora of new outfits.

That afternoon, he arrives at the Waldorf hotel, which will be his home for the foreseeable future. He lies to the staff about his identity, fashioning a story about how his parents are abroad and he is in the city awaiting their return. Because he offers to pay for the room in advance, the staff easily buys this fiction.

Entering his new hotel room abode, Paul feels at ease as the room matches the image he had in his head in nearly every way. He does, however, ring for the bellboy to bring flowers up to the room. After the flowers arrive, Paul bathes and then dresses in new silk undergarments and a new red robe. He surveys the city from his eighth floor window before falling into a deep, peaceful sleep under the aroma of the flowers.

The following day, Paul reflects on his decision of leaving: “It had been wonderfully simple when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined” (481). Paul is only surprised by his own courage and assiduity to execute his plan. Having done so, he feels relief, his mind eased of the dread that constantly plagued him in his life on Cordelia Street.

Cather reveals that Paul, before leaving, stole a considerable sum of money from the Hall before leaving Pittsburgh; with this money, he can finally live the type of life he’s always imagined. For example, one day early on in his stay, he sleeps late and spends his first waking hour dressing slowly, feeling that “[e]verything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be” (482).

On a snowy day, Paul is awash in the splendor of the city: flower’s all around and snowflakes spiraling to the city streets. His hotel is filled with music, chatter of its guests, various perfumes, and expressive colors. He sits down to dinner and thinks about his past:

Cordelia Street—Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had (483-84).

One afternoon, Paul meets a student from Yale who has come down to the city. The young men have dinner and stay out all night together. Paul doesn’t return to his hotel until seven o’clock the next morning as his friend takes the train back to Connecticut. Despite their night together, they leave on tense terms.

In the succeeding days, Paul tries to not arouse the hotel staff’s suspicions about his fabricated life, and because he so seamlessly acts and carries himself in a worldly manner, they don’t catch on. Paul himself feels perfectly at ease in this world. Everything is going as planned until he reads about his wrongdoings in the Pittsburgh paper: The paper details his disappearance and the robbery, along with rumors that he’s been seen in a New York hotel and that his father is searching for him. Paul also reads that his father has fully refunded the amount of the theft and that there will be no prosecution—but even without fear of legal repercussions, Paul is dismayed at the mere thought that his father will soon find him. The “gray monotony” of Cordelia Street, he feels, is an even worse fate than jail.

Paul is crestfallen and worried that his new lifestyle is over, and he has “the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over” (485). That day, Paul is overcome with anguish as he carries out his usual daily routines. The next morning, he awakes to pains in his head and feet, his throat is dry, and he worries that his father is nearby to pick him up. On top of all these anxieties, his money is running low. The narration reveals that on his first day in New York, Paul bought a revolver, which he now has placed on his hotel room dressing table; he spends an hour staring at the revolver but decides against shooting himself. He feels nauseated. His new life is under threat: “It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street” (487).

Paul takes the train back to Newark and a carriage back to Pennsylvania. On the way, he gets out to walk along the railway tracks and reflect on his situation. In his coat is a red flower, which is wilting in the cold:

The carnations in his coat were dropping with the cold, he noticed; all their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the show windows that first night must have gone the same, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run (487-88).

Paul looks at the languishing flowers as a train approaches. As it zips by, he jumps out in front of it. As the train strikes him, he feels relaxed, and with that fatal blow, “Paul dropped back into the immense design of things” (488).