Paul’s Case by Willa Cather

New York has certainly inspired its share of coming-to-the-city adventures. One of the most striking is a short story by Willa Cather called “Paul’s Case,” which first appeared in The Troll Garden in 1905. Paul, a high school student in Pittsburgh, is gawky and awkward, with a “certain hysterical brilliancy” in his eyes. A fantasist and a dreamer, he is hopelessly out of sync with the life around him—but he has neither the graces nor the gifts that might enable him to escape from the constricting middle class life on suburban Cordelia Street, where he lives with his father, a widower, and there is nothing but “the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a home permeated by kitchen odours.” Paul comes alive only in the evenings, when he works as an usher at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall, wears a uniform that makes him feel handsome, guides elegant people to their seats, and listens to the music and experiences a “zest for life.” Paul is not exactly a music lover; it’s the enveloping glamour of the theater that holds him. He loves to visit backstage with the artists; “the stage entrance of the theater was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.”

But Paul’s father, a dim figure constantly urging on his son the example of more enterprising young men, becomes increasingly enraged by his son’s behavior. He pulls him out of the school he barely seems to be attending, forbids the theater to employ him or to let him through the door, and puts him to work at the offices of Denny & Carson. And suddenly Cather jumps forward, to Paul sitting on a train. He has stolen a thousand dollars in cash that he was supposed to deposit in the bank for his employer, and he is on his way to New York.

Arriving in the city, Paul buys expensive clothes, fine luggage, “silver mounted brushes and a scarf-pin” at Tiffany’s. He takes a luxurious suite at the Waldorf, and for a few days he exults in his sitting room, which he fills with flowers, in the perfectly appointed bathroom, in the elegance of the hotel dining room, in carriage rides up Fifth Avenue. He knows that it will only be a matter of days before his crime is discovered and he is tracked down. All over New York, the snow is falling. Paul’s “chief greediness,” Cather writes, “lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense of power.” As soon as he “entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music,” he was “lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient.” He exults in “the glare and glitter about him.” He is cosseted in a magical world. And when he is down to his last hundred dollars, he knows the game is up. He leaves New York, lies down on a train track in New Jersey, and lets the end come.

In Cather’s story, New York is less a place that a person can actually inhabit than a kind of luxurious illusionist’s trick, centering on the Waldorf and the city avenues, and united by the snow that softens the views out the windows and carpets everything. In “Paul’s Case” New York is not a living city so much as it is a fantasy, a stage set.

from this great 2001 essay, “The Adolescent City,” by Jed Perl.

The pages in Balzac’s Lost Illusions in which the young writer Lucien Chardon comes to Paris and wanders through the overwhelming elegance of the city constitute one of the greatest descriptions in all of literature of the tidal pull of urban life, with its intoxicating strangeness. Visual artists have generally shied away from such a theme, which necessitates unfolding, multiplying revelations, though there are a few exceptions, the greatest of which is probably Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s vast City of Good Government, painted on a wall in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338-1339. Here relations between the city and the country center around the gate of Siena, where elegant aristocrats going out for a day of hunting pass country yokels coming into town with their livestock.