Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  The privileged, humane narrator moves through these confining walls into the secret interiors, and brings out of obscurity the private language that people speak to themselves. At the heart of this is the silent voice of the grandmother, which makes a moral centre in relation to which the other characters are placed. Mrs Harris may be neglected, but she has strong beliefs, high standards for herself and her daughter. She can be fiercely outraged: by the family’s inability to accommodate a visiting preacher, or by Victoria’s offhand treatment of the death of the cat, or by the lack of money for Vickie’s education. She is not taken in; she knows exactly why the neighbours respond to Victoria as they do, and what her son-in-law has done with her money: ‘Invested; that was a word men always held over women, Mrs Harris thought, and it always meant they could have none of their own money’. [OD, p.165] That sharp irony goes with an intense pride, recognized only by Mrs Rosen, and, going with that pride, an intense desire not to be of any trouble, recognized only by Mandy. Unlike ‘Neighbour Rosicky’, this is a stern story, dominated by the old lady’s ironic stoicism:

  On winter nights, and even on summer nights after the cocks began to crow, Mrs Harris often felt cold and lonely about the chest. Sometimes her cat, Blue Boy, would creep in beside her and warm that aching spot. But on spring and summer nights he was likely to be abroad skylarking, and this little sweater had become the dearest of Grandmother’s few possessions. It was kinder to her, she used to think, as she wrapped it about her middle, than any of her own children had been. She had married at eighteen and had had eight children; but some died, and some were, as she said, scattered.

  After she was warm in that tender spot under the ribs, the old woman could lie patiently on the slats, waiting for daybreak; thinking about the comfortable rambling old house in Tennessee, its feather beds and hand-woven rag carpets and splint-bottom chairs, the mahogany sideboard, and the marble-top parlour table; all that she had left behind to follow Victoria’s fortunes.

  She did not regret her decision; indeed, there had been no decision. Victoria had never once thought it possible that Ma should not go wherever she and the children went, and Mrs Harris had never thought it possible. Of course she regretted Tennessee, though she would never admit it to Mrs Rosen: – the old neighbours, the yard and garden she had worked in all her life, the apple trees she had planted, the lilac arbour, tall enough to walk in, which she had clipped and shaped so many years. Especially she missed her lemon tree, in a tub on the front porch, which bore little lemons almost every summer, and folks would come for miles to see it.

  But the road had led westward, and Mrs Harris didn’t believe that women, especially old women, could say when or where they would stop. [OD, pp.95–7]

  This measured, humane, unflinching voice invests the fragile domestic details – the torn ‘comforter’, the undependable cat, the lost lemon tree – with gravitas. Mrs Harris, unlike Archbishop Latour, has a meagre life to look back on from her deathbed. But the materials are transformed (like the child improvising a sick-room) into dignified matters. The Christian moral, which makes Mrs Harris after all not so unlike the Archbishop (‘Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven’)17 is, fortunately, not explicit. Instead it is invoked entirely through domestic pictures. When Mrs Harris is seen, framed like a figure in a painting by Courbet or Millet, as ‘an old woman in a brown calico dress, washing her hot face and neck at a tin basin…in an attitude of profound weariness’, [OD, p.77] or having her legs rubbed by the servant girl, who kneels in front of her, the shadowy light of the kitchen lantern falling on the two women engaged in this ‘oldest rite of compassion’, [OD, p.93] the penury of her life is turned into valuable images. Memory (as the narrator concludes, with mournful insistence) pays the debt.

  —

  The stability and control of Obscure Destinies are the work of a settled personality. In her sixties, Cather had grown somewhat monumental, both in her character and in her literary reputation. Views of her before she became weakened by illness and bereavements and deeply depressed by the war, all emphasize her solidity. Even her weaknesses, her depressions and uncertainties, had settled into negative aspects of strength – truculence, refusals, dismissiveness. She seemed like the rock of her own fictions.

  Louise Bogan, sent to do a ‘profile’ for the New Yorker in 1931, gave a vivid, if awe-struck, picture.

  One can see at a glance that she herself has always been that rare accident of Nature, a perfectly natural person. She speaks, without the shadow of a doubt, in the accent she acquired as a child. Her voice is deep and resonant. Her dresses are bright in color; she likes brilliant embroidery, boldly designed materials, and exotic strings of beads. She is of medium height, and of the build best described as stocky. She stands and moves solidly. She sits with an air of permanence….She smokes a cigarette as though she really liked the taste of ignited tobacco and rice paper. Her eyes are fine; gray-blue and set well apart. She has a thorough smile. Her face, when she detects some affectation in another’s words or actions, can lose every atom of warmth and become hostile and set. It is impossible to imagine her strong hands in a deprecatory gesture. The remarks ‘Oh well’ and, ‘What does it matter?’ have never, in all probability, passed her lips.18

  The same sense of strong freshness comes out of a striking recollection of Truman Capote’s, who as a young man working in the Society Library in New York in the early ’40s kept seeing ‘this absolutely marvellous-looking woman’ with ‘a wonderful open, extraordinary face, and hair combed back in a bun’, wearing ‘soft’ but ‘rather severe’ suits, ‘distinguished-looking’, with ‘amazingly pale blue’ eyes. One day, when they were both stuck on the steps in the snow, she asked him to have a hot chocolate with her in a nearby restaurant. Capote, talking about writers and writing, told her that his favourite American writer was Willa Cather. She led him on for a bit (‘Which of her books did I like best?’). ‘ “Well”, she said finally, “I’m Willa Cather.” ’19

  The anecdote suggests good humour, the affable side of Cather which Yehudi Menuhin brings out in his recollections of his friendship, begun in childhood, with his mother’s friend ‘Aunt Willa’. Menuhin calls her ‘a rock of strength and sweetness’, the ‘embodiment’ of an older, vanished America, utterly to be trusted and (so it seemed to him) without ‘self doubt’. But even his affectionate memoir contains a warning note.

  Her strength had a patience and evenness which did not preclude a certain severity. There were abuses and vulgarities she refused to tolerate, such as exposure in newspapers or on radio. She had a contempt for anything too much owned or determined by mobs, reserving admiration for high individual endeavour, withdrawing more and more from society even as she drew closer to us.20

  That withdrawal is less gently recalled by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, still maintaining an intermittent friendship with Cather after the war years had estranged them. Elsie found her famous old friend, in her maturity, taciturn, intolerant, and increasingly difficult to approach (‘She never had the least little bit of small talk, not an iota of ease and friendliness with a stranger who seemed intrusive’),21 though she still retained, deep down, her enthusiasm and intimate warmth for old friends.

  Cather was returning on herself, in her life as in her late writing. Though she never went back to Red Cloud after a final family reunion when her mother had died in 1931, she wrote more than ever to her few remaining friends there, and, during the Depression years, sent money and gifts to Annie Pavelka and the other country families of her past.22 (One of her complaints at the end of her life was that she felt almost entirely estranged from Red Cloud; she had always had enemies there, the town sounded to her changed beyond recognition, and she deeply resented her sister Elsie’s having sold the family house.)23 In the 1930s and 1940s her long intimacies with friends such as Zoë Akins and Dorothy Canfield Fisher were revivified through letters. Professionally, she made another recapitulation, supervising the definitive ‘Autograph
Edition’ of her books for publication in the late 1930s.24

  Meanwhile the modern world was being held at bay. Cather’s politics in the 1930s consisted of an antipathy for Roosevelt and the New Deal, an indignant sympathy for the Lindberghs, hounded by the press after their baby’s kidnapping,25 an admiration for Edward VIII’s abdication speech (one of the few events that made her listen to the radio),26 and a deliberate detachment from the ‘progressive’ movements of the day – economic and social reform, psychoanalysis and Marxism – as ultimately irrelevant to real life.27 Clearly, the destruction of equilibrium and friendship through politics in ‘Two Friends’ was not just a childhood memory.

  Cather’s position in the 1930s was not unlike that of Virginia Woolf, struggling in The Years to detach fiction from polemics. But in Cather’s case this was joined to an increasing impatience with ‘the new’. Obscure Destinies, Lucy Gayheart and Not Under Forty did look markedly anomalous in the period of Dos Passos’s 1919, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. In counterpoint to the usual tributes of praise and awards (the Howells medal for fiction in 1930, the Prix Femina Américaine in 1933, finally the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944), Cather was beginning to be seen by the New Critics (in particular Granville Hicks and Lionel Trilling)28 as snobbish, escapist, narrowly provincial and irrelevant. Of course Cather very much objected to these judgements.29 But they swayed her enough to make her change the title of Not Under Forty to Literary Encounters, and to dispense with the essays’ grumpily disaffected preface (‘the world broke in two in 1922’) in the Autograph Edition. And though the attacks on her for narrowness and intolerance were themselves narrow and intolerant, it is impossible not to feel disappointed and impatient with the rock-solid old Cather for writing off most of her contemporaries, as when we find her dismissing Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave for hopelessness and decadence, or lambasting Elizabeth Bowen’s stories Look At All Those Roses (1941) for their coldly calculating tricks, and their pathological air of a dissecting room without human beings.30 Elsie Sergeant, herself closely involved with Jungian analysis and O’Neill’s theatre, was exasperated with Cather’s rejection of Freud, O’Neill, Cubism, Pound and Stein (‘whom she could not take seriously’), and kept trying to remind her that she had cared for Proust and seen Ulysses as a landmark, that she read Bergson and liked Virginia Woolf.31 Sergeant even notes that Cather asked her, after her father’s death, whether Elsie thought that psychoanalysis would help her. (She didn’t.)32 But such forays into contemporaneity had become the exception to the rule.

  Cather simply did not want to participate. When it came to overtures from academics and publishers, journalists and media people, the responses were ferociously self-protective. Inquiries from importunate researchers on her long-ago meeting with Housman,33 or her friendship with Sarah Orne Jewett, met with short shrift: she told the abrupt and modern young man wanting information on Jewett that he could call on January 1, 1990.34 Her response was the same to requests for help with creative writing courses (sheer nonsense),35 for ‘Portable Cather’ anthologies (since the war everyone wanted to get by easily),36 for a bibliography of her writings (she didn’t see why she should give her attention to something so foreign to her interests)37 or for reprints of her early stories.38 The media was the most distasteful: in 1935 she told Carrie Miner Sherwood of a legal action she had brought against someone who wanted to give biographical details about her on the radio, as a lead into an advertisement for electric refrigerators.39 She was gleeful at having kept at bay the Hollywood people, who wanted to make her rich by filming My Ántonia.40 The second, 1934, Warner Brothers adaptation of A Lost Lady,41 with Barbara Stanwyck as Marian, and Frank Ellinger as a heroic World War I pilot, so outraged her that she would write a clause into her will in 1943 forbidding

  dramatization, whether for the purpose of spoken stage presentation or otherwise, motion picture, radio broadcasting, television and rights of mechanical reproduction, whether by means now in existence or which may hereafter be discovered or perfected.42

  No Cather videos, in perpetuity.

  Towards the end of her life, her obsession over privacy showed up in continuous warnings to her friends not to show her letters to anyone,43 and in the burning of as many letters as she could recall (the will, of course, attempting to put the lid on the rest); a ‘cremation’ which, in the case of Isabelle’s letters, returned by Jan Hambourg, caused Elsie Sergeant ‘a chill of regret and dismay’.44 Manuscripts, too, had been regularly destroyed. In 1944 she told Sinclair Lewis (whose praise of her in 1921 had led to an intermittent, respectful correspondence) that she had nothing to offer a manuscript collector. When she was working, she wrote a first draft in longhand, then typed it up, then gave it to a professional typist (who used a different colour ribbon to make stupidities easier to spot). The original longhand drafts, she said casually, were usually lost. She had sold three handwritten manuscripts to collectors, two to England and one to France, but she didn’t know what had happened to them. And she had always told Knopf to destroy the final typed versions. With all her travelling, she had never had room for old manuscripts.45 The letter – sad reading for scholars – is all part of the same process: Cather wanted to obscure her destiny from the wide-open world. It almost seems possible to believe in Mildred Bennett’s apocryphal story of Cather and Edith Lewis, that when the two old ladies went out together in New York, Lewis would walk in front to fend off possible autograph-hunters.46

  The policy of retreat did not lead to an altogether enjoyable old age. There is a great deal of unmitigated sadness in the late letters, which in the writing is more controlled and negotiated. And there were, inevitably, bereavements and deprivations. Though Cather moved into a stuffily palatial apartment in Park Avenue in 1932 (with Josephine Bourda returning as faithful cook, until her much-lamented final departure for her Pyrenean village in 1935), the Depression affected Cather’s finances (as well as those of old friends such as McClure). She wasted some of her time in the 1930s sorting out losses from bad investments.47 The writing of Lucy Gayheart began in the spring of 1933 with feelings of ‘deadly tiredness’, and was interrupted by a sprain to the tendon of her left wrist.48 As a result, she over-used her right hand and had to stop writing. This was the beginning of hand trouble which would plague her for the rest of her life. In 1940, after signing 500 copies of a first printing of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, she sprained her right hand, and thereafter had to wear it in a brace more or less continuously. As she could not bear to dictate fiction, the injury meant a drastic curtailment of her writing. With these hand injuries came, in 1935, two bad attacks of appendicitis, and, in 1942, at nearly seventy years old, a major operation to remove her gall bladder and her appendix, which left her extremely weak.49 (She went into hospital under the name ‘Miss Lewis’, an odd detail in the story of Edith’s perpetual usefulness.)

  These debilitating ailments were not as destructive to her spirit, though, as the losses she sustained. In the spring of 1935, Isabelle Hambourg came to America to consult doctors, very ill with chronic nephritis (for which at that time there was very little treatment except nursing). Cather went back to Europe with her that summer for the last time; it was both a reunion, and a parting from the person for whom she felt she had written all her books.50 Isabelle died in 1938, within a few months of Cather’s favourite brother Douglass, whose death at fifty-eight was unexpected. Cather never fully recovered from the double blow. Then, in 1941, Roscoe Cather fell ill, and Cather made an arduous westward journey to say goodbye to him. He died of a heart attack in 1945. In this period, Cather was also deprived of her refuges: the woods at Jaffrey were wrecked by a hurricane in 1938, and the cottage at Grand Manan became impractical in the war years. (In her last few summers, she found a satisfactory substitute, further down the wild coast of Maine, in a cottage attached to the Asticou Inn, on the appropriately named Mount Desert Island.)51 But, above all these personal
matters, the darkening of Europe and the onset of the war profoundly affected Cather’s imagination. Americans, she wrote to Sinclair Lewis in 1938, have been too gullible and innocent; they have lacked the necessary vision of evil.52 ‘When the French army surrendered, she wrote in her line-a-day’ diary, Edith recorded, ‘ “There seems to be no future at all for people of my generation.” ’53

  There were some consolations. Though the friendships of Cather’s late life were mostly saved up, like her writing, from the past, she entered into a few important new relationships which make a welcome dent in the image of Cather as a fixed, backward-facing monument. Her correspondence with Stephen Tennant (whose gushing adulation, decoratively arty life-style and flamboyant pedigree rather unexpectedly attracted Cather)54 allowed her to give a lot of matronly literary advice as to what Stephen should and should not read, and what he should do about his perpetually unfinished book of drawings and writings on Marseilles, Lascar. She drew the line at finding an American publisher for his bawdy drawings, which she had to keep in a locked drawer away from her (post-Josephine) New Orleans Catholic cook.