Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  —

  Cather’s reservations towards other women writers made her a solitary figure. Though some of her few close friends, such as Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Zoë Akins, were writers, she did not meet, or admit much interest in, the other great women writers of her time, Edith Wharton or Ellen Glasgow or Gertrude Stein, and was dismissive about the only other well-known Nebraskan woman writer, Mari Sandoz. The one exception to this isolation was her brief friendship, of great formative importance for Cather’s life and writing, with the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett, which came when Jewett was in her late fifties and Cather had not yet begun to write novels. Jewett gave Cather crucial advice about the concentration and single-mindedness needed to become a good writer. But it was her example, as well as her advice, which was important for Cather. In an essay she wrote about Jewett, she tried to define that indefinable effect – ‘a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own’ – which she got from her New England stories. What she liked was Jewett’s instinctive preference for ‘everyday people who grow out of the soil’, her ear for her ‘native tongue’, and the way the sketches in The Country of the Pointed Firs ‘melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself’.37 She was able to make her ‘local’ materials repay observation in a way which greatly appealed to the younger writer. And these materials were not just quietly and tenderly domestic. Cather appreciated the ‘austere and unsentimental’38 qualities of a book like A Country Doctor, with its feminist heroine aspiring to a medical career like her guardian’s. Above all, she warmed to Jewett’s unselfconscious, matter-of-fact love stories between women, in the sad and beautiful story ‘Martha’s Lady’, or in the novel Deephaven. ‘ “I think I should be happy in any town” ’, says the girl narrator of Deephaven simply, about her friend, ‘ “if I were living there with Kate Lanchester.” ’39 That innocent, idealized intimacy between women, which enabled Jewett to tell Cather that she did not need to use a male narrator to describe feelings of love for a woman,40 was not open to the more self-conscious and self-concealing Cather. But the example Jewett gave her, at the time when she most needed it, was of a woman’s writing that was strong, truthful, and authentic, and could not be dismissed as ‘merely’ feminine.

  —

  Cather’s writing about women in her fiction is complex and rich, and it will be one of the main subjects of this book. Though she is best known, I suppose, for the strong immigrant women heroes of her earlier novels, these semimythical figures are in sharp contrast to her dangerously seductive, theatrical ‘ladies’, and to the obstructive matriarchs who play such persistent and alarming roles in her writing. (At the same time that she gives her female characters such various power, allure and force, she invents male ‘heroes’ who are contemplative, passive, sensitive and withdrawn.) From the first, too, Cather is interested in groups of women whose stoical domestic labour is a form of narration, and who provide inspiration for an American writing which can be at once heroic and female. This female epic is eloquently established in an early story called ‘The Bohemian Girl’:

  The older women, having assured themselves that there were twenty kinds of cake, not counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies, repaired to the corner behind the pile of water-melons, put on their white aprons, and fell to their knitting and fancywork. They were a fine company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands; and several of almost heroic frame….Nils…watched them as they sat chattering in four languages, their fingers never lagging behind their tongues.

  ‘Look at them over there,’ he whispered, detaining Clara as she passed him. ‘Aren’t they the Old Guard? I’ve just counted thirty hands. I guess they’ve wrung many a chicken’s neck and warmed many a boy’s jacket for him in their time.’

  In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the Herculean labours those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted, the children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had worn out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy. [CSF, pp.28–9]

  The description is not only a celebration of a particular culture, but also a programme for a writing that will be appropriate to it (like classical pastoral or Dutch painting), and which Cather then goes on to invent.

  But this is not her only kind of writing, nor her only subject matter. Cather’s work gets its energy from contraries. She is pulled between the natural and the artificial, the native and the European. She is a democrat and an élitist. She relishes troll-like energy and primitivism as much as delicacy and culture. She is religious, and fatalistic. She is equally interested in renunciation and possessiveness, in impersonality and obsession. Her fictions are of split selves and doublings. Above all, there is a paradox for Cather in the act of writing itself.

  Cather uses language with extreme deliberation, and is very interested in linguistic processes: translation, sign-reading, orderings. At the same time, she is trying to invent a fictional language which will be invisible, transparent and as close as possible to what it speaks of. To this end, she excises and eliminates as much as she can, and depends (in her own words) on the force of ‘the thing not said’ for her effect. This isn’t just a matter of making a sophisticated narrative read like the story-tellings of an oral culture. It is a communication (more ‘modernist’, ambiguous and strange than it looks at first sight) which can find a way into the incommunicable; the silent; the obscure. And so it makes a new – and, perhaps, androgynous – version of the old American desire to master the ‘undiscovered continent’.

  My approach to this writing is not a biographical tour of ‘Catherland’. When, in the middle of her life, she at last begins to write novels, I turn away, to a great extent, from what happens in her life to what happens in her language. So I make the journey she invited her readers to take, into the fictional life stories, which she wanted to seem ‘not stories at all, but life itself’.

  2

  HOME

  Back out of all this now too much for us,

  Back in a time made simple by the loss

  Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

  Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

  There is a house that is no more a house

  Upon a farm that is no more a farm

  And in a town that is no more a town.

  Robert Frost, ‘Directive’, 1946

  WILLA CATHER’S fiction is full of life stories, the recounting of autobiographies and biographies. Her characters review their own ‘destinies’, or that of the person who has most influenced their own lives. As in classical narratives, with their competing pastoral song-makers, or figures encountered on epic voyages with a crucial tale to tell, the stories are set inside one another, pieces sewn into the larger pattern. Sewing is repeatedly used as an analogy for this female appropriation of a male story-telling tradition. There is a late story, ‘Neighbour Rosicky’, in which the Czech immigrant, a New York tailor turned Nebraskan farmer, still tailors and patches his own clothes and his children’s. ‘While he sewed, he let his mind run back over his life.’ [OD, p.27] Thea Kronborg, the opera singer heroine of The Song of the Lark, first learns music – her kind of story-telling – in a Colorado German household which has on the wall a wonderful ‘piece-picture’ made of different stuffs, ‘a kind of mosaic’, representing Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Old Mrs Lee with Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, patching and piecing and quilting while she meshes together the stories she’s read in the Swedish papers and the stories of her youth, sometimes forgetting ‘which were the printed stories and which were the real stories’, is like the narrator, translating t
he immigrant voices into her own language, piecing the ‘many little rolls’ of story patterns into her own narrative form, interpenetrating ‘real stories’ and ‘printed stories’ in ‘a kind of mosaic’.

  All Cather’s writing is a kind of memorizing and memorializing; her subject matter is ‘learned by heart’. There is a scene in a 1925 story, ‘Uncle Valentine’, in which a gifted American composer, predestined to die young, returns to his childhood landscape. The narrator of the story is herself evoking her own childhood, in which her ‘Uncle Valentine’ was a glamorous occasional revenant. So a double memory is pieced together: the adult narrator’s recollection of her past youth centres on the composer-hero’s memory of his lost innocence. Here she remembers him, with her family, watching the sun set: ‘We sat hushed and still, living in some strong wave of feeling or memory that came up in our visitor.’ [UV, p.14] Feeling and memory are indistinguishable: they are the identical source of the story, which takes its inspiration, like almost all her writing, from someone Cather knew.

  But the story of ‘Uncle Valentine’ is not literal autobiography, or biography, and the relation between ‘feeling and memory’ in her work has to be treated with care. Cather is a writer who draws very intensely and minutely on her life, on people and places she knew and stories she had been told, most especially on the material accumulated in childhood. Even when her subject is based on historical research – the life of Father Machebeuf for Death Comes for the Archbishop, or Parkman’s history of Canada for Shadows on the Rock – her own experiences in New Mexico and Quebec are given to the historical characters.

  In her letters and interviews she is always insisting on the relation of her writing to memory – her own and other people’s. Her writing ‘spontaneously’ recreates the people and places she has known; the story is essentially ‘simple’1 and personal. Whenever she is asked about a particular book she gives it some personal identification. My Ántonia is a ‘faithful picture’2 of people she knew in and around Red Cloud in the 1880s. She was ‘destined’ to write it, she says, from the moment she came to Nebraska at the age of eight, and kept hearing details of an old Czech immigrant’s recent suicide.3 Marian Forrester, the ‘lost lady’, ‘is’ Lydia Garber, ‘a woman I loved very much in my childhood’.4 The model for the not-so-lovable Myra Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy is somebody Cather knew well and whose friends all recognized her when the novella was published.5 Claude Wheeler, the young Nebraskan soldier in One of Ours, is based on her cousin G.P. Cather, a farmboy who died in the war in 1918. Lucy Gayheart ‘is’ Sadie Becker, a girl she remembers vividly from childhood – but by 1939 she can’t be sure if her eyes were grey or golden-brown.6 When an American artist writes wanting to know if the ‘piece-picture’ in the Kohlers’ house is an invention, she takes particular pleasure in explaining that it was an exact description of something she ‘cared about’ long ago – though she also notes that she had moved it from its real setting. Her writing thus makes a ‘piece-picture’ of her past, taking bits of stuff from different places for its heroic histories.

  As she gets older, she likes to feel that she is confirming or reactivating others’ memories, and many of her letters are written in response to these recognitions, as though the readers with the same fund of recollections are her true audience,7 for whom the books are ‘meant’. She insists increasingly on the personal, non-literary nature of her work, in such formulations as these: All she is doing is coming into a room to tell you about some people she used to know and love8…She doesn’t invent so much as rearrange her memories, and the memories come to her unconsciously, as though written in her mind9…By the time she is writing her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, about her family’s Virginian history and her first childhood recollections, she is drawing so heavily on tales she has been told that she can hardly distinguish between history, legend, early memories and invention.

  This myth, which she does her best to encourage in later years, of Cather as the simple vehicle of spontaneous recollection (and which Edith Lewis perpetuated in her memoir, saying for instance that ‘Old Mrs Harris’ might as well have been called ‘Family Portraits’)10 is counteracted elsewhere by frequent warnings against literal or autobiographical readings. Writing to a student admirer in 1943 about ‘Paul’s Case’,11 her marvellous 1905 story of the dissatisfied, pretentious, sensitive provincial boy who becomes besotted with the theatre, steals from the firm’s till and runs away for a few ecstatic days in the Waldorf Astoria before committing suicide, she says that she drew the character from a boy she once had in a Latin class in her Pittsburgh teaching days, a restive, nervous show-off, always trying to attract attention. But the story also reflected her own early emotions about New York City. (Of course, she adds, she never did jump under a train, and nor did the original Paul.) That is how stories are made, by the ‘grafting’ of some other ‘outside’ person onto the writer’s own life. Her characters are ‘composites’,12 not individual portraits; their models ‘coalesce’ as she works on the story.

  In a letter about the late story ‘Two Friends’,13 she complains that her acquaintances are always looking for the legs and arms and faces of people they know in her fiction. But this story, of a Red Cloud banker and a cattleman from Buffalo whose friendship breaks up over Populist politics, is not a picture of the two men, she says, but of the memory of the two men. As so often it is told in the first person, retrospectively, by a narrator remembering herself as a child observer. Their ‘feeling’ and her ‘memory’ coalesce in the story.

  In spite of such explanations, the search for ‘legs and arms and faces’ proved irresistible. Cather may have repudiated biographical readings in the interests of privacy, with which she became increasingly obsessed. But her writing invites such readings, since it gives the effect of simple, true memorializing, and since she insists on that as the essence of her art. Of course the literal-minded approach can lead to pitfalls. A Lost Lady was serialized before publication, and, in a late letter to an old friend,14 Cather recalls with glee that Lydia Garber’s daughter-in-law had gone round boasting of her relationship to the ‘model’ for Marian Forrester, until, in later episodes of the serialization, Marian’s adultery began to emerge. At this point Mrs Fred Garber became very indignant, and told Cather’s brother Douglass that the book should have been stopped. Cather sets this anecdote against a conversation she once had with her father about My Ántonia. He had reminded her that several of the episodes in the book were things that they had seen or done together. Until then, Cather believed she had invented them: the scenes had come to her ‘unsought’.

  The two juxtaposed anecdotes, absurd and serious versions of the same theme, point to the challenge for Cather’s interpreters. Her life is in every page of her writing, but she makes of the material ‘a fiction so realistic that it would not seem like art’.15 The key to this process is in the advice from Sarah Orne Jewett which Cather took so much to heart:

  I want you to be sure of your backgrounds…you don’t see them yet quite enough from the outside, – you stand right in the middle of each of them when you write, without having the standpoint of the looker-on who takes them each in their relation to letters, to the world….You must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world.16

  This negotiation between a centred self rich in ‘backgrounds’ and an objective onlooker in touch with a wider world of reading, culture and history is what produces Cather’s extraordinary literary assurance and power. Indeed, it is the subject of much of her writing, as the distanced traveller, acculturated into a world elsewhere, finds his or her ‘destination’ and ‘destiny’ in a return home.

  Home itself was, for Cather, the central stage for that tension – which was to be so fruitful for the writer – between belonging and separateness, involvement and individualism. She describes the struggle in a very beautiful, perceptive and famous passage about Katherine Mansfield’s family stories, ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, a wonderful example of one
woman writer recognizing her own experience in the work of another:

  I doubt whether any contemporary writer has made one feel more keenly the many kinds of personal relations which exist in an everyday ‘happy family’ who are merely going on living their daily lives, with no crises or shocks or bewildering complications to try them. Yet every individual in that household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavour. As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain which keeps everybody almost at the breaking-point.

  One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.17

  In Cather’s lifelong fictions of the family, that ‘double life’ is always felt. It is summed up by an image drawn from her own life, of a talented girl, ruthlessly committed to her own ambitions, shutting out the family from her own room. When Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark makes herself a bedroom, like the young Cather in Red Cloud, out of a tiny unheated attic, she evolves ‘a double life’ for herself: daytimes full of ‘tasks’ and ‘clamour’ as ‘one of the Kronborg children’, nights of reading and solitude when ‘she thought things out more clearly’. [SL, p.73]