by Hermione Lee
Five acres were usually broken the first year and the price charged was five dollars. Settlers did not have money to pay for more, nor were there enough teams in the neighbourhood to break more ground. Corn was planted by cutting cracks in the sod with an ax, dropping two or three kernels in each and closing the cracks by stepping on them. Fuel was lacking…[so] sunflowers growing along creeks and ravines were gathered and stacked for winter use – a pathetically poor protection against blasts and snow. Such were the beginnings of thousands of immigrants.
The story of the Shimerdas in My Ántonia is from the life: there is even a letter from Annie Pavelka, the model for Ántonia, written in 1955 at the age of 86 to a schoolgirl. It is worth quoting from this painstaking letter, since it touchingly corroborates what Annie Pavelka calls ‘the Book’, and sums up the hundred-year-old history of the Czech immigrants:
Thought I would please you and answer your quastions about our coming to this country from Bohemia 75 years ago last November 5. We started from our vilage Mzizovic 16th of October 1880 and got to Red Cloud in November 5 we were on the water 11 days, there was another Bohemia family came with us, rest on the ship were pollish, my father wanted to bring us to this country so we would have it better here as he used to hear how good it was hear as he had letters from here how wonderfull it was out here that there were beutifful houses lots of trees and so on, but how disapointed he was when he saw them pretty houses duged in the banks of the deep draws. You couldnt see them untill you came rite to the door just steel chimmeny in the roof. there were no roads just tracks from wagon wheels people cut across land to get anywhere at all well we came to Joe Polnickys by hiring a man at Red Cloud, and from there Mr Polnicky took us out to Charlie Kreick…and behold our surprise in sieng such beutifful building and our first meal there was corn meal mush and molasses that was what the people lived on and wild fowls and rabbits well my father boght 10060 [i.e. 160] acker farm, there was nothing on it except sod shack it had just a board bed and 4 lid stove, no well just 5 aikers of land broken that much the first homsteder had to on when he didnt live there all time just so many months so he could realy own it but the folks didnt live there they moved in with some German family and that was a bad winter lots of snow not much to cook nothing to burn no place to go nothing to read people had to burn corn stalk sunflowers and cow chips it was lucky mother brought feather beds as we had to sleep on the dirt floors with hay for mattres, that was hard on father in the old country he had weaved when it was cold and in the evening he would sit and make linens and any kind of wearing material allways and was all ways joking and happy he was a man in a milion allways had lots of friends I was allways with when there was anything to do allways called me maminka, and mother maminka he never swore or used dirty words like other men nor he niver drank or play cards he was a clean man in everyway. then one nice afternoon it was 15 of feb he told mother he was going to hunt rabbits he brought a shot gun from the old country he never used it there nobody dared to shoot there that was all rich peoples property when he didnt return by five oclock mother older brother and the man we lived with went to look for him it was dark when they found him halfsiting in that old house back of the bed shot in the head and allready cold nearly frozen. the sherif said it was a suiside there no cemetery or nothing one of the near neghbors had to make a wooden box and they had to make his grave in the corner of our farm but my brother had him moved and him and my mother and brothers are sleeping in Red Cloud cemetery and they have a tumbstone I hope they are restting sweetly. most all is true that you read in the Book thoug most of the names are changed.29
Pavelka’s insecurity with American spelling, and the movement of her remembering voice over pauses and punctuation, makes a vivid late link back to the women Cather would listen to as a child, whose stories, ‘even when they spoke very little English’, made her feel, as she would as a novelist, that ‘she had got inside another person’s skin’. Those story-telling voices, which Cather would faithfully use and utterly transform (Annie Pavelka is both like and quite unlike the Ántonia of ‘the Book’) would set the tone for a great deal of her writing. What took her imagination from the first in Nebraska was not the action-packed success stories of cow-punchers and buffalo-hunters – the West did not have to be written about with jovial brutality, she said in 1919.30 In remote history, it was not (as yet) the indigenous Indian folklore which interested her but the legend of the first European pioneer, the sixteenth-century Spanish adventurer Coronado, said to have passed by the Republican River in his search for the Seven Golden Cities (a local farmer did find a Spanish sword) and – as Jim Burden remembers from his schoolbooks – ‘to have died in the wilderness from a broken heart’. [MA, p.244] From Coronado to Annie Pavelka’s father, the stories Cather appropriated had the same theme: the painful, heroic, often defeated attempt of the immigrants to adapt their habits and culture to the unforgiving landscape, and the marks they left on it.
Charles Cather, though, was no pioneer, and Virginia Cather no Ántonia. In 1884 the family moved into a small white frame house in Red Cloud, where Cather opened a loans, insurance and mortgage office. It was never a very thriving business (Niel Herbert, whose father has the same job in A Lost Lady, ‘felt there was an air of failure and defeat about his family’ [ALL, p.25]); the comfortable but cluttered house was rented, not bought, and it filled up with three more children: James (born in 1886), Elsie (born in 1890) and John, known as Jack (born in 1892). Cather was extremely fond of her brothers (less so of her sisters, whom she seems not to have liked very much), particularly of her ‘three boys’, as she called them in a homesick letter from Pittsburgh.31 The older brothers, Roscoe and Douglass, would become travelling companions: her trips in the 1910s to Arizona with Douglass, who worked on the railroads in Winslow, and to the ‘wild west’ (Colorado, Wyoming) with Roscoe, were tough pioneering experiences she was proud of. (Both brothers later went to California to work in oil and banking; she took their deaths, Douglass’ in 1938 and Roscoe’s in 1945, very hard.)32 Her little brothers she would read to and look after (these family affections are indulgently invoked in ‘The Best Years’, written out of her last visit to Roscoe in 1941). When Jack was a raw twenty-year-old she helped him start at technical college in Pittsburgh, and introduced him to the great opera singer Fremstad, whom, like Claude Wheeler in One of Ours, he charmed.33
But like the small town after the prairie, the small house full of family was constricting, and in adolescence Willa Cather increasingly found her interests outside it. At school she had good teachers, and in the town she was drawn to all the exceptional figures – anyone who could offer her something: a French-German couple next door, the Wieners, with a house full of European books and paintings; an erudite store-clerk, Will Ducker, with a passion for the classics, who dropped dead one hot summer day with a copy of the Iliad beside him; the daughter of a Norwegian oboe player, Mrs Miner, with a household of lively girls (Carrie, Irene and Mary), all to be lifelong friends and correspondents; the old pioneering Governor Garber and his romantic wife; the impressive local doctors. Through the winter, travelling stock companies got off the train and played for a week at the Opera House: ‘The Corsican Brothers’ or ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, ‘The Mikado’ or ‘The Bohemian Girl’. Cather and her friends put on recitations and parades and home theatricals, and even a full-scale production of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ at the Opera House, with Cather as the merchant father. And all this time, sitting in her father’s office at night or hidden away upstairs in the attic, she was reading, reading, reading: Huckleberry Finn and Swiss Family Robinson, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Dumas and Stevenson, mixed up with Paradise Lost and the Iliad, Sartor Resartus and Anna Karenina.
Cather’s writing would always arbitrate between realism and romance; and her move from early childhood experiences (vivid encounters, strongly-felt landscapes, first-hand narratives) to adolescent fantasy, escapism and play-acting, looks forward to that negotiation. The teenage Willa Cathe
r, at this distance a sympathetic misfit full of potential, but who cannot have been easy to live with, was awkward, restless, passionate, arrogant, unconfident: an odd fish in what seemed to her an increasingly narrow pond. Her juvenile gestures of bravado – equipping herself for a surgeon’s career by dissecting frogs, signing herself ‘William Cather, M.D.’, cropping her hair and wearing a boy’s suit and cap, delivering an outstanding high school graduation speech on the conflict between ‘superstition’ and ‘investigation’ (‘the most sacred right of man’) – were the symptoms of a furious resistance to parochial narrowness and the genteel conventions dictated by her mother.
Had she known it, she was not alone: all the American writers growing up in the mid-West in the ’80s and ’90s – Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Center, Minnesota, Theodore Dreiser in Terre Haute, Indiana, Sherwood Anderson in Clyde, Ohio – went through the same sort of thing. Jim Burden, pacing the streets of Black Hawk after dark with nothing to do, ‘scowling at the little, sleeping houses’ ‘made up of evasions and negations’ [MA, p.219], is just like George Willard, Anderson’s alter ego, roaming around ‘Winesburg’, Ohio at night full of ‘ambitions and regrets’, feeling ‘set apart’, knowing he has to leave. The difference for Cather was that she was thwarted by her sex as much as by her surroundings.34 She had not only to get away, to find a vantage point in the ‘world’ from which to look back at the ‘parish’, but to transform her raw gestures of resentment into writing.
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Cather would not become a novelist for another twenty years, a long apprenticeship, of which the first stage was her five years as a student at Lincoln University. Like the girl in ‘Old Mrs Harris’, a late version of these events, she was ferociously determined to get there, and her parents recognized this and borrowed the money for her education. In 1890, when she arrived, the University, like the town, was only twenty years old, with about 400 students (by the time she left it was three times the size) in ‘a city of about 30,000 laid out on the open prairie in a straggling north and south rectangle a couple of miles long and a mile wide.’35 This ‘raw’ prairie town, however, had an extremely civilized ‘transplanted culture’ of East Coast and European settlers, an outstanding generation of students who would become ‘distinguished novelists, poets, editors, professors, jurists, governors’, five thriving newspapers, and two theatres, touring centres for all the big stars and companies of the day. Far from being a ‘wild west’ frontier town, Lincoln already had a reputation as a complacent, pious, conservative place, known as the ‘holy city’ for its surplus of churches, and, as the guidebook puts it, for being ‘avoided by criminals’. ‘Lincoln is strong in the belief that its destiny has always been a special concern of providence,’ an irritated Lincoln professor wrote in 1934. ‘Its God is, to be sure, of the republican faith and the Methodist persuasion. But it has served this God long and zealously, with the result, so it feels, that it has been the recipient of many divine favors.’36 Willa Cather was to make her mark in this rather smug cultural centre with great force and at high speed.
Students from rural high schools had to take two extra preparatory years; Cather was let off the first, and went in as ‘second prep’ to the ‘Latin School’. Here, there was a sudden, crucial change of direction. She went to university still intending to be a scientist, but she changed her mind when her class teacher, without warning her, published a remarkable paper she gave on Thomas Carlyle in the Nebraska State Journal. It wasn’t the last time she would switch direction under a benevolent, managerial male influence. For the next four years her courses were all in classics and literature. Here, Cather was lucky to have a talented Harvard graduate, Herbert Bates, teaching her, whose modesty and sensitivity she always admired (and who couldn’t wait to get out of Nebraska). Unfortunately, her other literature professor was a rigid ‘analyst’ whose mechanical counting exercises and pedestrian exam questions (as, on Browning, ‘Why did Porphyria’s lover use her hair to strangle her with? What was the purpose of the last ride together?’) could not have been more at odds with Cather’s passionate, greedy appetite for great writing. Professor Sherman and his Analytics must be partly responsible for Cather’s lifelong distrust of critics, writing courses, lectures, anthologies, and bibliographies. ‘She had no understanding whatever of what literary scholarship implies’, wrote one exasperated academic, who had tried to persuade her to publish her early work and been ‘threatened with the law’.37
But Cather was learning to be a writer, not a scholar. In her second year (when she had already made her mark on the campus for eccentric dressing and dramatic talents), she started to edit the university newspaper, the Hesperian, and to publish her poetry and articles and stories in it. ‘The truth is the Hesperian was Willa practically’, said a sophomore colleague. ‘The rest of us looked wise and did nothing.’ The next year she took a journalism course with Will Owen Jones, the young managing editor of the Nebraska State Journal, who hired her straight away to write a regular column (later to be called ‘The Passing Show’), at a dollar a time. The column covered the ‘local scene’ and contemporary writing, but it was mostly theatre reviewing, and Cather sank her teeth into this avidly. Bursting with high ideals and strong feelings, enormously well-read, very fresh to the work, furiously impatient with anything that looked parochial or second-rate, she very quickly acquired a reputation for zest, intelligence and ferocity. ‘She wrote dramatic criticisms of such biting frankness’, Jones recalled in 1921, ‘that she became famous among actors from coast to coast….Many an actor of national reputation wondered on coming to Lincoln what would appear the next morning from the pen of that meatax young girl of whom all of them had heard.’38
Cather reacted disdainfully to accusations that she ‘roasted every show that came to town’. ‘There is only one standard of criticism, and that is justice; to pay respectful tribute to what is great, to gladly acknowledge what is good…to be gentle to what is mediocre, to be absolutely uncompromising towards what is bad.’39 The tone ranged from the heartfelt and inspired (on great actresses like Duse and Bernhardt) to the derisory:
And how was it with the rural, robust queen, the royal Kleopawtra? Miss Lewis walks like a milkmaid and moves like a housemaid, not a movement or gesture was dignified, much less regal. She draped and heaved her ample form about over chairs and couches to imitate oriental luxury. She slapped her messenger upon the back, she tickled Mark Antony under the chin. She fainted slouchily upon every possible pretext and upon every part of the stage. And it was no ordinary faint either, it was a regular landslide. When the messenger brings the tidings of Antony’s marriage she treats him exactly as an irate housewife might treat a servant who has broken her best pickle dish. When she lavishes her affection upon Antony, she is only large and soft and spoony….And the queer little motions she made when she put that imaginary snake in her bosom, it was so suggestive of fleas. And her resounding faint when she saw a vision of Mark Antony in his cunning little pink wedding tunic being married to Octavia.40
By 1895, when she graduated, she was known as the Journal’s outstanding critic, and was also writing regularly for the Lincoln Courier. The job as assistant editor of a new Pittsburgh magazine, the Home Monthly, which she took up in the spring of ’96, was offered to a twenty-three-year-old with an exceptional, and growing, reputation; it was quite clear to everyone who knew and read her that, as one local (male) journalist put it, ‘she is unquestionably destined to be among the foremost of American literary women’.41
If Cather drove through her Lincoln years with extraordinary professional energy and confidence, personally she was much more confused and insecure. Living alone in a rather spartan boarding-house, she gravitated, as at Red Cloud, to ‘second homes’ which would educate and excite her. Mrs Westermann, a cultured German mother of six sons (one a promising classicist), with a remarkable brother, Julius Tyndale, who was a doctor and a drama critic, took up the seventeen-year-old Cather very much as Claude Wheeler is made at home by the Erlic
hs in One of Ours. She made another important friendship with the daughter of James Canfield, the University Chancellor, and his artist wife. In Vermont, where she went after her marriage, Dorothy Canfield Fisher would be known for some good novels, some notable war work, and for her advocacy of Montessori educational methods. At Lincoln she collaborated with, and looked up to, Cather, who was six years older, and who found her appealingly lovely. Cather quarrelled with her a few years later, but the breach was temporary, and they were to be lifelong correspondents. The best friend of the time, Mariel Gere (whom Cather was also still writing to forty years later) was a daughter of the editor of the Journal, whose whole family Cather fell in love with. Mrs Gere, one of her surrogate mothers, coaxed her out of her boy’s suit and haircut, residue of the teenage revolt against Red Cloud, which for a time made Cather a dramatically conspicuous figure among the other students.
Cather’s 1890s letters to Mariel Gere are self-obsessed and self-accusing, full of deadly serious rhetorical flourishes about her own impossible idiocies and deepest desires. These centre on Louise Pound, the girlfriend on whom she developed a passionate crush. Louise was clearly exceptional, a delicate-looking tennis, golfing and bicycling champion, brilliant daughter of a notable family, who would become a distinguished scholar of American linguistics and folklore at the University. ‘William’s’ letters to and about her, like most people’s school or undergraduate diaries and love letters, are, as O’Brien says, ‘infatuated, insecure, and melodramatic’. There is a great deal of self-conscious ‘Bohemian’ boasting about swopping copies of Daudet’s risqué decadent novel Sapho (the story of a young man from the country hopelessly infatuated with a beguiling, corrupt, artist’s mistress) and about how ‘blue’ she is for Louise, and how Louise won’t call her ‘love’ in public, and how she’s been driving her about the country with only one hand on the reins. Even if the whole Louise episode makes rather silly reading (it ended in a mess when Cather published – in revenge for neglect? – a snide satire on Louise’s brother in the Hesperian) it reveals to us, for the only time, a touching mixture of bravado and anxiety about her sexuality.
