Paul's Case

By Willa Cather

Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather's career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 28, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061917462

Willa Cather

WILLA CATHER (1873–1947), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than fifteen books, was one of the most distinguished American writers of the early twentieth century.

Reviews for Paul's Case

[cj82487 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A young man more interested in daydreams and theater than his high school finds himself living the life he always wanted to have. He escapes the life he dreads to live for a week the life he always wanted. He runs from his depression only to find it return when his money runs out. He is left with the choice of whether or not to return to his father's home and the life he hates, or change his fate.

[ionas_7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a sad tale and thus it took me some time to be able to write this review. Paul was a neglected child; we see this from the first paragraph which tells how his clothes were out-grown. He was hysterically defiant and impertinent, and lied constantly. When a female teacher attempted to guide his hand when he was writing on the blackboard, he involuntarily and violently removed his hand from her touch. His lips were continually twitching and he had a habit of contemptuouslu raising his eyebrows. He was always smiling and glancing about him. Paul’s teachers feel he’s not strong and there’s something wrong about him. He had a job as an usher at Carnegie Hall which he loved. ”He was a model usher.” Nothing was too much trouble for him, and everyone thought him a charming boy.” When the symphony began, Paul felt a “zest for life” and a “delicious excitement”, “which was the only thing that could be called living at all”. He loved the Schenley, apparently a hotel, and stood outside, watching the people, the actors and singers, go in and out. Paul’s mother was dead, and he lived with his father. They lived in a respectable area, Cordelia Street, where all the children were exactly alike. “It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived ;”the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting”. This was Paul’s fairy tale. He had no desire to become an actor or a musician. He just wanted to see, to “be in the atmosphere”. Things went worse at school and Paul was taken out of it and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher and the doorkeeper at the theatre was warned not to let him in. Paul had always been tormented by fear, but now he had courage. When sent to the bank by the firm where he worked, he pocketed a thousand dollars in bank notes and thus had the money for the trip to New York he had dreamt of making many times. He takes a train to New York and buys a frock coat and “dress clothes”, a hat and shoes. He then books rooms at the Waldorf, a sleeping-room, sitting room and bath. He enjoys the luxury of his hotel, drinking champagne in the dining-room. “Had he ever known a place called Cordelis Street – Had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night --- looking pensively over such shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one --- He rather thought he had.” He only desired to watch the pageant. “He felt now that his surroundings explained him.” “He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.” But on the eighth day Paul could read the whole affair of the theft in the Pittsburgh paper. He had been seen at a New York hotel and his father was hastening to find him and bring him home. He had “”the old feeling that the play was over””. “ --- the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever.” Paul had no sense of spirituality, for him the outer was everything, money was everything, and he had only a hundred dollars left. His father was in New York. It was all over, “all the world had become Cordelia Street”. He sat staring at the revolver he had taken with him, but “that was not the way”. He had made the best of it, had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, if only for a week. He took the train to Newark, and took a cab out of town. There was deep snow. The carnation in his coat was drooping with cold, and he realized that all the flowers he had seen in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way. They were all dying or dead. He was on a hillside where the train tracks ran some twenty feet below him. He watched an approaching train and when the right moment came, he jumped. He felt something strike his chest, and “Paul dropped back into the immense design of things”. The story is brilliantly expressed with much symbolism, and shows us how many a child who is not accepted for himself/herself but is attempted pressed into a mould that the school and society want, could end. For me, the moral of the story is that the purpose of school should not be to press irrelevant knowledge into children but rather to draw them out so they can find what really interests them, be permitted to show the world who they are and to find their purpose in life. Then they will be who they were meant to be and not be drawn to the same fate as Paul.