Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  20. The ‘emergence’ of her ‘androgynous’ voice as a writer from her early years is the subject of Sharon O’Brien’s book.

  21. Brown, p.95.

  22. Woodress I, p.86.

  23. Philip Gerber, Willa Cather (Boston: Twayne, 1975), p.41, and Kathleen Byrne and Richard Snyder, Chrysalis: Willa Cather in Pittsburgh, 1896–1906 (Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennysylvania, 1980), pp.40–42.

  24. Letter from Virginia Faulkner to Helen Southwick, March 14 1980, UNeb.

  25. Robinson, p.276.

  26. Lillian Faderman, in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), writes interestingly on the change in self-consciousness about women living together, from the mid nineteenth century (as in the ‘Boston marriage’ of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields) to the 1890–1910 period, when Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis had introduced the concepts of inversion and degeneracy.

  27. KA, p.392.

  28. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, 1980, in Mary Eagleton, ed., Feminist Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p.23.

  29. Dorothy Lambert, ‘The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia’, American Literature, vol. 53. no. 4, January 1982, p.676.

  30. Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism’, in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism, (London: Virago, 1986), p.207.

  31. Lambert, op. cit.

  32. Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), pp.78–9, gives a discerning account of this essay.

  33. WP, pp.276–7.

  34. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance’, op. cit., p.111.

  35. WP, p.699.

  36. Ellen Moers, in Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1977), pp.153–60, points out that Cather belonged to the last generation for whom this was a popular children’s poem. See also O’Brien, pp.272–4, 278–9, Rosowski, pp.229–30, and Fryer, p.337, on Cather’s interest in ‘Goblin Market’. KA, pp. 346–9.

  37. NOF, p.87.

  38. WP, p.694.

  39. Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (Boston: Osgood & Co., 1877), p.41.

  40. Sarah Orne Jewett, Letter to Willa Cather, November 27 1908, in Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), pp.146–7.

  2. HOME

  The biographical information in Chapters 2–5 is drawn from Brown, Bennett, Lewis, O’Brien, Robinson, Woodress I and II, from letters, and from interviews collected in Bohlke.

  1. Letter to Henry Chester Tracy, June 22 1922, UVA.

  2. Interview, Webster County Argus, Sept 29, 1921; New York Times Book Review, Dec 21 1924. In Bohlke.

  3. Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, Jan 27 1934, RC.

  4. Interview, New York World, April 19 1925, reprinted Nebraska State Journal, April 25 1925. In Bohlke.

  5. Letter to Pendleton Hogan, Feb 5 1940, UVA.

  6. Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, June 28 1939, RC.

  7. Letter to Mr Winter, Nov 5 [n.d.], RC.

  8. Letter to Mrs Seibel, Jan 31 [1916], RC.

  9. Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, April 29 1945, RC.

  10. Lewis, p.6.

  11. Letter to John Phillipson, Nov 15 1943, RC.

  12. Interview, Lincoln Sunday Star, Nov 6 1921. In Bohlke.

  13. Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, Jan 27 1934, RC.

  14. Letter to Irene Miner Weisz, Jan 6 1945, Newberry.

  15. O’Brien, p.345.

  16. Sarah Orne Jewett to Willa Cather, Dec 13 1908, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p.249.

  17. ‘Katherine Mansfield’, 1925, NOF, pp.152–4.

  18. O’Brien, quoted p.60.

  19. O’Brien, p.12.

  20. Woodress I, p.23.

  21. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, April 3 1928, Vermont.

  22. Letter from Ann Cather to Franc Cather, July 18 1875, Cather Family Correspondence, NSHS.

  23. This detail is given to Thea’s mother, SL, p.22.

  24. Nebraska State Journal, Dec 27 1896.

  25. Interview, The Philadelphia Record, Aug 9 1913, KA, p.448.

  26. SL, p.69; ‘Nebraska: The First Cycle’, Nation, Sept 5 1923, vol. 117, No. 303, p.236.

  27. Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965), p.426.

  28. Letter to Witter Bynner, June 7 1905, Houghton.

  29. Letter, Annie Pavelka, Feb 24 1955, RC.

  30. Letter to H. W. Boynton, Dec 6 1919, UVA.

  31. Letter to Mariel Gere, Sept 18 1897, NSHS.

  32. Letter to Mariel Gere, Oct 19 1945, NSHS.

  33. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Sept 18 1914, Morgan.

  34. See O’Brien, p.93.

  35. Slote, pp.6, 9.

  36. ‘The Home Town’, Omaha World Herald, June 24 1934, p.8. For the University of Nebraska at this time, see MA, p.258.

  37. Edward Wagenknecht, Review of Brown and Lewis, Chicago Sunday Tribune Books, Mar 8 1953. Professor Sherman appears as Thea’s schoolteacher (SL, p.131) who ‘got out of real work by inventing useless activities for his pupils’.

  38. Slote, p.27.

  39. Nebraska State Journal, Nov 18 1894, KA, p.259.

  40. Nebraska State Journal, Oct 23 1895, Lincoln Courier, Oct 26 1895, KA, pp.293, 297.

  41. Slote, p.27.

  42. Letters to Louise Pound, June 15 1892, Aug 6 1892, Duke: to Mariel Gere, Aug 1 1893, NSHS; to Geres, Jan 2 1896, NSHS; to Mariel Gere, Mar 12 1896, NSHS; to Mariel Gere, Aug 1 1893, NSHS; to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, June 27 1911, Morgan; to Mariel Gere, May 2 1896, NSHS; to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, April 20 1912, Morgan.

  43. ‘Cather Family Letters’, ed. Paul D. Riley, Nebraska History, vol. 54, no. 4, p.596, Winter 1973. See Woodress II, p.68 for the Cather family’s financial situation in the early 1890s. We do not know if Cather contributed to the family’s income when she became a journalist, but she was probably self-supporting for the last two years of her university career.

  44. ‘The Personal Side of William Jennings Bryan’, The Library, July 14 1900, WP, p.789. For Bryan, see: ‘William Jennings Bryan: The Cross of Gold Speech’, ed. Richard Hofstadter in An American Primer, ed. Daniel Boorstin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); J. Leonard Bates, The United States 1898–1928 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp.11, 53; Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State, introduced by Tom Allan, compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Nebraska (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp.5, 184.

  3. WORKING HER WAY OUT

  For Cather in Pittsburgh, see Slote; WP; Kathleen D. Byrne and Richard C. Snyder, Chrysalis: Willa Cather in Pittsburgh, 1896–1906 (Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1980); Mildred Bennett, Introduction, CSF. For Europe, see George Kates, Willa Cather in Europe (New York: Knopf, 1956) and WP, pp.889–952.

  1. Nebraska State Journal, Jan 3, 1897, WP, p.393. (Hereafter NSJ.)

  2. Lincoln Courier, Dec 18 1897, WP, p.522. (Hereafter LC.)

  3. LC, Aug 24 1901, WP, p.857.

  4. Letter to Will Owen Jones, Jan 15 1897, NSHS.

  5. Letter to ‘Neddius’ (Ellen Gere), n.d. [1896], NSHS.

  6. NSJ, Mar 11 1891.

  7. LC, Sep 28 1895, KA, p.281.

  8. Frank Norris, ‘The Decline of the Magazine Short Story’, Wave, XVI, Jan 30 1897, p.3. In The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, p.28.

  9. Home Monthly, Jan 1897, WP, p.336.

  10. Letter to Louise Pound, Oct 13 1897, Duke.

  11. Mildred Bennett, ‘How Willa Cather Chose Her Names’, Names, vol. 10, no. 1, March 1962, p.29–37, suggests that ‘Helen Delay’ stood for Cather’s feelings about Pittsburgh – ‘Hell and Delay’.

  12. The Library, June 23 1900, WP, p.772.

&nbs
p; 13. NSJ, April 5 1896, KA, p.411.

  14. Letter to Mariel Gere, Aug 10 1896, NSHS. See Thea’s apprenticeship in Chicago, SL, Part III.

  15. NSJ, Mar 29 1896, WP, pp.288–9.

  16. LC, July 1 1899, WP, pp.474–6.

  17. Bennett, p.247.

  18. NSJ, Feb 7 1897, WP, pp.397–400.

  19. NSJ, May 23 1897, WP, pp.408–11.

  20. LC, Feb 5 1898, WP, p.376.

  21. LC, Dec 25 1897, WP, pp.413–14. Thea Kronborg has the same experience. SL, p.251.

  22. LC, Oct 30 1897, WP, p.388.

  23. LC, Dec 16 1899, WP, p.645.

  24. NSJ, Nov 1, Nov 8, 1891, KA, pp.426–36, describes Shakespeare’s ‘awful loneliness’.

  25. NSJ, Oct 14 1894, KA, p.188; LC, Oct 26 1895, KA, pp.294–5.

  26. NSJ, June 16 1895, KA, p.117; LC, Sept 21 1895, KA, p.119.

  27. New York Sun, Feb 11 1898, WP, p.458.

  28. LC, Jan 14 1899, WP, p.662.

  29. LC, Sept 28 1895, KA, p.282.

  30. Henry James, The Tragic Muse, 1890 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p.211.

  31. Cather warily admired Hedda Gabler (Index, Dec 29 1900, WP, pp.798–801); relished but was irritated by Shaw (Leader, Dec 2 1898, WP, p.597); loved Cyrano de Bergerac (LC, April 15 1899, WP, p.500) and Mrs Tanqueray (LC, July 22 1899, WP, pp.677–8); found Vesta Tilley ‘dull and proper’ (LC, Mar 19 1898, WP, pp.396–7) but liked Johnstone Bennett, another male impersonator, ‘the trimmest tailor-made New Woman of them all’ (LC, Feb 4 1899, WP, p.543).

  32. NSJ, Oct 21 1894, KA, p.253.

  33. LC, Sept 7 1895, KA, p.201.

  34. NSJ, Feb 23 1896, KA, pp.202–3, is a scathing review of Oscar Hammer-stein’s music-hall Faust.

  35. The Library, June 9 1900, WP, pp.769–71.

  36. LC, Dec 2 1899, WP, p.683.

  37. Hesperian, Mar 1 1891, KA, pp.421–5.

  38. NSJ, May 17 1896, WP, pp. 296–301.

  39. Home Monthly, Sept 1 1897, WP, p.355.

  40. NSJ, Aug 11 1895, KA, p.323.

  41. NSJ, May 24 1896, KA, p.342.

  42. NSJ, Jan 19 1896, KA, p.352.

  43. NSJ, May 24 1896, KA, p.344.

  44. LC, Mar 4 1899, WP, pp.554–61.

  45. LC, Dec 18 1897, WP, pp.523–5.

  46. See ‘The Troll Garden’, Ch.4, pp.73–8.

  47. Pittsburgh Gazette, Nov 17 1901, WP, pp.864–7.

  48. LC, Sept 16 1899, WP, p.723.

  49. NOF, p.138.

  50. NSJ, Feb 2 1896, WP, pp.282–6.

  51. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, April 8 1921, Vermont.

  52. O’Brien, pp.241, 244; Woodress II, p.141. The letters are published in Marion Marsh Browne and Ruth Crone, Only One Point of the Compass: Willa Cather in the Northeast (Danbury, Conn: Archer Editions Press, 1980), pp.66–9, 79–84. See O’Brien, p.236, on Isabelle’s character.

  53. NSJ, Jan 10 1897, WP, p.506.

  54. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, 1798 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), ed. Richard Holmes, p.210.

  55. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Oct 10 1899, Vermont.

  56. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, April 7, May 3, 1922, Vermont.

  57. April Twilights, 1903, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962); Revised Edition, Knopf, 1923. In the new edition she took out some poems and added more western material: native ballads (‘The Old West, the old times/The old wind singing through/The red, red grass a thousand miles,/And, Spanish Johnny, you!’) and a risible attempt at gritty urban realism in ‘Street in Packingtown’: ‘Twisting a shoestring noose, a Polack’s brat/ Joylessly torments a cat’.

  58. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972), pp.127, 174, 181–3.

  59. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, May 11 1903, Vermont.

  60. Letter to Will Owen Jones, May 7 1903, UVA.

  4. BURIED ALIVE

  1. For McClure, see David Mark Chalmers, The Muckrake Years (New York: D Van Nostrand, 1974), pp.13–25, 79–82.

  2. Letter to Will Owen Jones, May 29 1914, UVA.

  3. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, June 4 1911, Morgan.

  4. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, May 31 1910, Morgan.

  5. Letter to Mr Pinker, Feb 20 1909, UVA.

  6. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, April 5 1910, Morgan.

  7. Letter to Norman Foerster, July 29 1910, UNeb.

  8. Georgine Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (New York: Doubleday, 1909), pp.15, 21, 29, 31.

  9. Henry James, ‘Mr and Mrs James T. Fields’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 116, no. 1, July 1915, pp.21–31.

  10. NOF, p.78. See Ch. 9, p.190.

  11. Henry James, Preface, The Aspern Papers (1888).

  12. O’Brien (p.317) compares Cather’s description of Charles Street to a Mary Cassatt painting.

  13. NOF, pp.67, 69.

  14. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Nov 19 1913, Morgan.

  15. Sergeant, p.46.

  16. Lewis, p.154.

  17. Letter to Edith Lewis, Oct 5 1936, UNeb.

  18. Letters from Edith Lewis to Stephen Tennant, n.d. [1948]; Feb 3 [n.d.]; April 16 1948; June 3 [1952]; June 25 1952. Quoted by permission of Hugo Vickers.

  19. Letter to Will Owen Jones, May 29 1914, UVA; Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, June 27 1911, Morgan.

  20. David Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951; New York: Collier, 1964), p.14.

  21. See Ch. 1, pp.13–14, and see O’Brien, p.274.

  22. Charles Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton, vol. 10, The Works of Charles Kingsley (London: Macmillan, 1884), p.12.

  23. Interview, Nebraska State Journal, 25 April 1925. In Bohlke.

  24. Aunt Georgiana sounds like Cather’s Aunt Franc, but she denied this. See James Woodress, Introduction, The Troll Garden (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p.xxv; Woodress II, pp.178, 181. In revisions of 1920 and 1937 she softened the character.

  25. Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts’, Selected Poems (Faber, 1959).

  26. O’Brien, p.277.

  27. The thwarted artist returns in ‘Uncle Valentine’ (1925) and ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’ (1920); the artist who succeeds in escaping from, and making use of her environment is Thea Kronborg.

  28. Woodress II, p.179.

  29. Letter to Will Owen Jones, Mar 6, 1904, UVA.

  30. See Ch. 5, pp.97–101.

  31. Sarah Orne Jewett to Willa Cather, Dec 13 1908. See Ch. 2, p.22.

  32. Letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, Dec 17 1908, Houghton.

  33. Godwin, op. cit., pp.226–7.

  34. O’Brien, pp.293–4.

  35. Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), p.45.

  36. Sarah Orne Jewett to Willa Cather, Dec 13 1908.

  37. Letter to Will Owen Jones, May 20 1919, UVA.

  38. ‘My First Novels: There Were Two’, Colophon, Part 6, 1931, WCOW; Letter to H. L. Mencken, Feb 6 [1922?]; Preface to Alexander’s Bridge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922).

  39. Title as serialized in McClure’s, Feb-April 1912.

  40. See Fryer, p.215.

  41. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925; New York: New Directions paperback, 1956), p.157. The idea of the split self would recur, rather mechanically, in some later stories much indebted to Hawthorne as well as James: ‘The Profile’ (1907), about an artist obsessed by his wife’s half-scarred, half-perfect face (a disfigurement repeated, as though he’s willed it, on his second wife) and ‘Consequences’ (1915), about a spoilt New Yorker who kills himself after being haunted by an old man who knows all about him and his dead brother, the unspoilt self he might have been.

  5. A WIDE, UNTRIED DOMAIN

  1. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, April 20 1912, Morgan. See Thea, SL, p.309.

  2. Letters to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, April 26, Sept 12 1912, Morgan.

  3. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, May
21 1912, Morgan.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Letters to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, June 15, May 21 1912, Morgan.

  6. O’Brien, p.413.

  7. O’Brien (pp.418–19) is illuminating on her references to Balzac’s line on the desert: ‘Dans le desert, voyez-vous, il y a tout et il n’y a rien – Dieu, sans les hommes’.

  8. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Sept 12 1912, Morgan. See also Brown, pp.173–4, on the probable order of composition and expansion of the parts of OP.

  9. Letter to Zoë Akins, Oct 31 1912, UVA; Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Feb 2 1913, Morgan.

  10. Quoted by Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975), p.157

  11. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935, Peregrine, 1966), p.13.

  12. Empson, p.19.

  13. Harry Levin, in The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp.6–7, makes this point

  14. See Erwin Panofsky, Meaning and the Visual Arts (1955; London; Peregrine, 1970), pp. 340–67, for his brilliant analysis of ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’.

  15. Levin, pp.7, 46.

  16. Levin, p.164: ‘It is debilitating to believe too rigidly, with Charles Péguy, that the modern world debases (“le monde moderne avilit”).’

  17. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (Oxford: OUP, 1964, reprinted 1978), p.7.

  18. Panofsky, p.343.

  19. See Panofsky, Poggioli, Levin. Also Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935); John Chalker, The English Georgic (London: Routledge, 1969), pp.100–6.

  20. The Georgics of Virgil, Book IV, Translated by C. Day Lewis (London: Cape, 1940), p.81.

  21. Panofsky, p.346, speaks of Virgil’s ‘verspertinal mixture of sadness and tranquillity’, Leo Marx of his ‘unruffled, contemplative, Augustan tone’, op. cit., p.31.

  22. Rosowski (pp.60–61) describes this as the dominant tone of OP. For Cather and Virgil see also Donald Sutherland, ‘Willa Cather: The Classic Voice’ in The Art of Willa Cather, ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), pp.156–79. See further, Ch. 6, p.118.

  23. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, VII, ‘On Burns and the Old English Ballads’, Complete Works, vol. V (London: Dent, 1930), p.141.