Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Cather’s projection via Fremstad into Thea is a mixture of self-exposure, wish-fulfilment and hero worship, and is thus an extremely revealing description of her idea of the woman as artist. When Thea refuses the ‘Lily Fisher’ style of femininity, or distances herself from Bowers’s facile lady artistes, or tells her lover that she needs to be ‘ “waking up every morning with the feeling that your life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag in you” ’, [SL, p.394] she is speaking as Cather. But the narrative is a love song as well as an autobiography; Thea is both ‘intimate’ and ‘remote’. What is carefully avoided is an erotic presentation of Thea as an object of desire. She is the cynosure of all eyes who nevertheless transcends personal sexuality.

  Almost all Thea’s watchers are male, but they are all carefully disqualified from being sexual partners. Instead, they prepare the way for the voice that is going to outsoar them like an eagle. In Moonstone, she is started on her journey by the derelict old German piano teacher, Fritz Wunsch, who teaches her Lieder and Gluck’s Orpheus and gives her her first whiff of the great musical world: by the sensitive, unhappily married Dr Archie, her friend and lifelong admirer (rather a pale character, in spite of his later jump from small-town doctoring to wealthy, politically influential mining interests) and by Ray Kennedy, the self-educated railroad man, touchingly manly and simple, who has a dream of Thea’s growing up to be his wife, but knows at heart that ‘she was bound for the big terminals of the world; no way stations for her’. [SL, p.187] Ray is given a tragic death on the line, so that he can leave Thea his savings instead of becoming an obstruction. A native philosopher, he recognizes his role as part of an ordained pattern: ‘ “There are a lot of halfway people in this world who help the winners win and the failers fail….It’s a natural law, like what keeps the big clock up there going, little wheels and big, and no mix-up.” ’ [SL, p.156] In Chicago, Harsanyi is stirred – ‘her eagerness aroused all the young Hungarian’s chivalry’ [SL, p.220] – but he is usually made to seem, not young, but exhausted by her. Cather even gives him one eye, so that he can be like Wotan in The Valkyrie, paternal adviser to Sieglinde.

  Finally there is Thea’s ‘sweetheart’, Fred Ottenburg, a wondrously cultured, rich, generous, affable, music-loving brewer’s son, whose only disqualification is his secret marriage to an ‘insufferable’ woman he can’t divorce. So he too becomes one of the chivalric spectators, like Dr Archie ‘watching her contemplatively, as if she were a beaker full of chemicals working’. [SL, p.305]

  In their love scenes in Panther Canyon, Fred and Thea are seen as ‘two boys’ playing together, throwing stones and making camp in a cave and climbing perilously down the rocks in a thunderstorm. (Similarly, the only offstage detail of her later romance with the Teutonic singer Nordquist is an adventure story of their rowing for their lives through a storm on an icy lake.) Close up, Fred treats Thea like a savage young Amazon: ‘ “I’d like to have you come at me with foils; you’d look so fierce!” he chuckled.’ [SL, p.386] But she gets away from him, climbing to the horizon:

  Even at this distance one got the impression of muscular energy and audacity – a kind of brilliancy of motion – of a personality that carried across big spaces and expanded among big things. [SL, p.397]

  The erotic element in his admiration is displaced onto his recollection of the elderly Jewish music lover who played host to Thea’s first concert: ‘ “Old Nathanmeyer,” [Fred] mused, “would like a peep at her now. Knowing old fellow. Always buying those Zorn etchings of peasant girls bathing. No sag in them either. Must be the cold climate.” ’ This brief touch of voyeurism is hastily brushed away by Fred’s next thoughts, which reinstate Thea as tomboy-goddess: ‘ “She’ll begin to pitch rocks on me if I don’t move.” ’

  Changes in the later edition suggest that Cather had some difficulties with this relationship. Fred’s parting with Thea after she has learned about his marriage is toned down (he no longer caresses her hands or lifts her up or kisses her) and, in the much-curtailed epilogue, their offstage marriage is wisely omitted. At the same time, she moderated Thea’s masculine qualities: Fred’s description of her voice as ‘virile’ [SL, 1915, p.420] is changed to ‘warm’, and in her account to him of her debt to the cliff-dwelling civilization, the words ‘heroic’ and ‘muscular’ are cut out. [SL, 1915, p.463, SL, p.554]

  As these changes show, a delicate balance is being maintained. Thea is deliberately associated with images of domineering male heroes: the Napoleon of the piece-picture, or Julius Caesar, a photograph of whose bust hangs in her room, or the statues of the Dying Gladiator and an ‘evil, cruel-looking general’ she admires in the Chicago Art Institute. (These images are in contrast to Breton’s painting of the barefoot peasant girl with reaping-hook, listening to ‘the song of the lark’, which associates Thea with pastoral virtues, not with art and conquest.) She is, also, intensely physical and female, but it is her mother, not a lover, who perceives this most closely:

  Mrs Kronborg noticed how white her arms and shoulders were, as if they had been dipped in new milk….Her body had the elasticity that comes of being highly charged with the desire to live. [SL, p.282]

  The most sensual scene in the novel is the moonlit Mexican ball at Moonstone, where Thea is surrounded by Julio-like indolent, admiring youths, sexy Mexican love songs float on the summer night, and she feels ‘as if all these warm-blooded people débouched into her’. [SL, p.292] Cather said she wanted the scene to mark the flowering of whatever was feminine in Thea. Nevertheless, eroticism is transcended: to her Mexican admirers she is untouchable (‘Silvo dropped on his back and lay looking at the moon, under the impression that he was still looking at Thea’ [SL, p.292]), and the sexuality is all poured into her voice, with the male spectators providing, not an active challenge, but a ground-bass:

  …the guitar sounded fiercely, and several male voices began the sextette from ‘Lucia’….Then…the soprano voice, like a fountain jet, shot up into the light….How it leaped from among those dusky male voices! [SL, p.296]

  Thea as a leaping voice, intensely and sensuously female, but escaping from sexual confinements into the impersonal power of the artist, has her destiny confirmed, after long drudgery, by her vision of an ‘ancient’ native artistry in the cliff-dwellings of ‘Panther Canyon’, Arizona. Cather would return to the cliff-dwellings in her life and in her writing; they would play a rather different, more complex part in The Professor’s House. Here, in a short section of wonderfully bold and passionate writing that leaps up, like Thea’s voice, from this big heavily-furnished novel, they provide an extraordinary but convincing context for the making of an androgynous American artist.

  The landscape itself – the pine forests of Northern Arizona with their lonely trees, places of ‘inexorable reserve’; the deep fissures of the canyons cutting down through the flat table-land; the blue air of the gulfs between the two sides of the canyons, full of swallows; the trees and streams right down in the gorge between the cliffs – all this strikes Thea with a sense of alien ‘resistance’ to human beings. All Cather’s characters have this emotion – Jim Burden arriving in Nebraska, the Bishop riding through the mesa country, the seventeenth-century French apothecary ‘on a gray rock in the Canadian wilderness’ – for great undomesticated landscapes. In the cold early morning the canyon wakes ‘like an old man…with a dull, malignant mind’. [SL, p.389]

  The sullenness of the place seemed to say that the world could get on very well without people, red or white, that under the human world there was a geological world, conducting its silent, immense operations which were indifferent to man. [SL, p.388]

  That people have succeeded in domesticating such a place by building their homes into the shape of the cliffs, is felt (like the more recent struggles of the pioneers) as an almost incredible human victory over inimical matter. So the Indian relics give off a sense of tribulation and melancholy: ‘Fr
om the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified, unobtrusive sadness’. [SL, p.375] The ‘simple, insistent and monotonous’ feelings Thea recognizes in the place are all to do with survival. These feelings ‘translate themselves’ to Thea not as words, but as bodily sensations. Cather, in turn translating into words which will be as close as possible to these sensations, uses a language which negotiates very deliberately between male and female struggles and effort.

  Ellen Moers and Sharon O’Brien call Panther Canyon ‘the most thoroughly elaborated female landscape in literature’,26 with its fissures, its womblike nest/cave where Thea spends her days, and its concealed ‘cleft in the heart of the world’ from which she watches the flight of the eagle. The relics of the ancient peoples’ culture to which she responds, the fragments of decorated pots once used by the women for water-carrying, are, as O’Brien says, the work of women artists ‘whose art was profoundly female, integrating pro-creative and creative powers’. Thea identifies physically with these creators, and finds herself trying to walk as they must have walked. She understands that their water vessels, functional ‘moulds’ for catching the stream of life, essential shapes made for survival but decorated for pleasure, can be symbols for her of what her own voice can do. Like them, she can make shapes in which to catch life. By implication the process is a negation of and a triumph over that grudging, malevolent spirit of the forbidding landscape, which Thea imagined as a sullen patriarch.

  But Thea’s response to the female elements of the cliff-dwellings is only half the story. She is as much in touch with the ‘muscular tension’ and ‘naked strength’ of the young men she imagines snaring the eagles in their nets, and with the eagles themselves in their ‘strong, tawny flight’. [SL, p.399] The language of the whole section is as valiant and heroic as it is maternal and creative. Thea’s time in the cliff-dwellings fills her with ‘driving power’ and ‘vitality’, as she moves rapidly through a process of ‘persistent affirmation – or denial’27 to the concluding epiphany that brings together the flight of the eagle and the relics of the Indians, in a celebration of ‘Endeavour, achievement, desire, glorious striving of human art!’ [SL, p.399] Bounding up from her ‘cleft’ in the rock, ‘as if she had been thrown up…by volcanic action’, to strain her eyes after the eagle, she is poised to take flight as a heroic artist who fuses together ‘gendered’ characteristics – female nurturing, male strenuousness – so as to transcend them.

  She also looks as if she is in training to play one of the Valkyrie, those fierce daughters of Wotan who ride about the mountains making their unforgettable yodelling noises as they collect up the dead heroes and carry them off to Valhalla. This is how Gertrude Hall describes the Ride of the Valkyrie in her book on The Wagnerian Romances, much admired by Cather for its ability ‘to reproduce the emotional effect of one art through the medium of another art’.28

  The eight are at last arrived; their war-cries, their hard laughter, and the shrill neighing of the battle-steeds mingle in harsh harmony. The shrieks of an autumn gale, exulting in its freedom to drive the waves mountain-high and scatter all the leaves of the forest, have the same quality of wildness and force and glee.29

  Thea’s Nordic vigour will serve her well. But Cather also gives her the transcendent, spiritual parts in Wagner. For the rest of the novel, which describes Thea’s success through a succession of Wagner performances, Cather uses the operas – ‘these noble, mysterious, significant dramas in roughly made verse’30 – to raise Thea to mythic status and to express her own feelings about art.

  Thea’s Wagner performances are the culmination, the re-enactment, of her American life. When she plays Elizabeth (the saintly Princess who saves Tannhäuser’s soul by dying for him) she puts her grief for her mother’s death into the part. Fred reports: ‘ “It’s as homely as a country prayer-meeting: might be any lonely woman getting ready to die” ’. [SL, p.540] As Wotan’s ‘nagging’ wife, usually played unsympathetically, she does her hair like her mother’s and makes Fricka ‘clear and sunny’. [SL, p.539] As Elsa, the unjustly accused maiden who is rescued by Lohengrin on condition she doesn’t ask his name, she is ‘supernatural’ and visionary. But as Sieglinde in The Valkyrie, in the love scene with her brother Siegmund, the climax of Thea’s career in the novel, she is fervent, blossoming, impassioned, and full of ‘pride in hero-strength and hero-blood’.31 [SL, p.568] It seems as if the whole book is building up towards a performance of Brünnhilde, Wotan’s passionate and heroic ‘wish-maiden’, the Valkyrie who defies her father, is released from the circle of fire by the hero Siegfried, and, after his betrayal, immolates herself on his pyre. In the earlier edition Fred anticipates this performance: ‘ “It takes a great many people to make one – Brünnhilde.” ’ [SL, 1915, p.465] But this is cut, and Thea never does play Wagner’s greatest soprano part, perhaps because Cather wanted us to feel that Thea is Brünnhilde, so doesn’t need to play her.

  Otherwise, Cather’s appropriation of Wagner is very explicit. It may even be that the shape of the novel, with its detailed, prolonged, scenic story of aspiration erupting into triumph, was meant to replicate Wagner’s methods, which Cather later described as ‘trying out to the uttermost’ ‘the value of scenic literalness’.32 (She compares this to Balzac, who, in the novel, is Dr Archie’s favourite writer.) All the discussions of music33 apply directly to Cather’s own work. Fremstad and Wagner brought together the two great questions of Cather’s life: how was the artist made, and what should art be for? Fred comments: ‘ “She simplifies a character down to the musical idea it’s built on, and makes everything conform to that.” ’ [SL, p.511] That apparent simplicity requires dedicated training. The artist needs a ‘big personality’ to start with. [SL, 1915, p.448] But ‘every artist makes himself born’, as Harsanyi, sounding rather Conradian, tells Thea. [SL, p.221] And this can’t be done without the kind of ‘desire’ that took Columbus to the New World [SL, p.95] or the Flying Dutchman across the wild seas. [SL, p.338] That ‘fierce, stubborn self-assertion’ [SL, p.274] may take ruthless form: Thea doesn’t go to her mother’s death-bed when it means she would lose the chance of singing Elizabeth; instead she puts her grief into the performance.34 The great artist turns something secret and concealed into something public and impersonal.

  All this exactly describes Cather’s own career and practice as a writer. Furthermore, she felt a strong sympathy for the Wagnerian programme, as her earlier reviews demonstrate (for instance on Lohengrin as an affirmation of faith over the destructive power of analysis).35 She warmed to the battle between the pagan and the Christian in Wagner. She learned from his use of the Nibelungen story for the Ring cycle; like him she wanted to connect human characters to ancient mythologies, so as to give heroic stature and a long perspective to their quests for their particular Grail or dragon. Like Wagner she believed that ‘art is only a way of remembering youth’. [SL, 1915, p.460] And her fundamental theme is the one described by Shaw in The Perfect Wagnerite (which Cather had reviewed as, in parts, ‘interesting and brilliant’):

  The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring is not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually driving onward and upward…growing from within, by its own inexplicable energy.36

  Shaw’s Wagner is a revolutionary socialist and a great popular writer. Cather said that she made Thea a singer so that she could be intelligible to Moonstone, the point of the novel being what she took from Moonstone and what she gave back to it.37 In the last part of the novel, Thea often refers to her childhood as the source of her art, and the epilogue returns us, as so many of the novels return, to Aunt Tillie in Moonstone, fondly dwelling on her memories and her news of Thea, now singing Isolde in London for the King. It is an awkward coda (much reworked later) which exposes an old, unsolved problem. If to be a Wagnerian singer was to be a great democratic artist, what of the scornful emphasis on the ‘stupid faces’ and ‘natural enemies’ inimical to an ‘uncommon’ figure in ‘
a common, common world’?38 [SL, p.268] Loathing of ‘Philistia’ sits uneasily with the artist’s duty to ‘ “get it across to the people who aren’t judges” ’. [SL, p.482] The Song of the Lark is Cather’s most revealing and explanatory book about her own writing, a kind of commentary on everything else she would do. Yet it quite fails to resolve this very American contradiction. But though the failure makes for some awkwardness here, it is the reverse of disabling. In the rest of her work, it persists as the difficult and enriching tension between escape and return.

  7

  THE ROAD OF DESTINY

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, 1942

  AT THE end of My Ántonia, the story-teller Jim Burden says that he has retraced his ‘road of Destiny’ and come back full circle to take possession of his past (in the ‘figure’ of Ántonia), recognizing as he does so that this circular journey has been a predetermined one. Back at the beginning of the book, there is a double entrance to this ‘road of Destiny’. The novel begins, not with Jim’s story, but with an Introduction, a conversation on a train journey. The speaker of this Introduction, a neutral and asexual voice standing for Cather, travelling either towards or away from Nebraska (it’s not clear which), with Jim, an old childhood friend, says: ‘During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago’. Jim’s subsequent narrative reduplicates this entrance: it too begins on a train journey, with Jim arriving as a child in Nebraska. ‘I first heard of Ántonia’, he starts, ‘on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America’.