Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  24. Marx, p.141, referring to Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).

  25. Marx, p.226.

  26. Quoted by Marx, p.254.

  27. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: OUP, 1966), p.39. See further Ch. 8, p.179.

  28. The Georgics of Virgil, p.37.

  29. Marx, p.245.

  30. Levin, p.14 ff., Poggioli, p.49 ff.

  31. Poggioli, p.9.

  32. Poggioli, p.161.

  33. Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance (London: D. S. Brewer, 1977), pp.2–3.

  34. Empson, p.25. For the grafting of trees in Cather’s pastoral, see MA, p.340.

  35. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 7.

  36. Eudora Welty, ‘The House of Willa Cather’, The Eye of the Storm: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Vintage, 1979; London: Virago, 1987), p.44.

  37. Turgenev, ‘Behzin Lea’, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, translated by Richard Freeborn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp.73–4.

  38. Cather was unsure about the merits of ‘The Bohemian Girl’, but Elsie Sergeant persuaded her that ‘this was it’ (Sergeant, p.76) and that she should offer it to McClure’s for publication. Its enthusiastic reception surprised her. See O’Brien, pp.399–400.

  39. Cather wrote an exasperated review of The Devil’s Disciple in 1898 (WP, pp.489–90).

  6. WOMEN HEROES

  1. O’Brien (p.441) finds more continuity between Mrs Bergson’s preserving and Alexandra’s orchard and garden.

  2. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, April 22 1913, Morgan.

  3. Rosowski (p.50) points out that Alexandra is always looking beyond the landscape.

  4. See Empson, p.100 for the idea that man controls Nature by delighting in it.

  5. Rosowski, (p.47) compares him to Virgil’s Silenus.

  6. Rosowski (p.54) shows Cather’s debt to Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ here. For ‘eclogue’ and ‘georgic’ in O Pioneers! see John H. Randall, ‘Willa Cather and the Pastoral Tradition’, Five Essays on Willa Cather: The Merrimack Symposium, ed. John J. Murphy (North Andover, Mass: Merrimack College, 1974), pp.60–83.

  7. See O’Brien (p.439) on the parallel between Alexandra’s take-over of the land and Cather’s take-over of the American Adamic myth.

  8. Rosowski, p.57.

  9. Letter to E. K. Brown, Oct 7 1946, UNeb.

  10. O’Brien, p.447.

  11. Woodress I, pp.168–9, Woodress II, p.273.

  12. ‘My First Novels: There Were Two’, 1931, WCOW, p.96.

  13. Preface, SL, Jonathan Cape Traveller’s Library, 1932.

  14. A. S. Byatt, Introduction, SL (Virago 1986), p.xvi.

  15. ‘My First Novels: There Were Two’, WCOW, pp.96–7.

  16. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Dec 7 1915, Morgan.

  17. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 15 1930, Vermont.

  18. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Dec 1 1930, Vermont.

  19. For Cather’s meetings with Fremstad, see Lewis, pp.91–3; Brown, pp.184–5; Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, April 22 1913, Morgan.

  20. ‘Three American Singers’, McClure’s, Dec 1913, pp.33–48. Quoted Brown, p.186.

  21. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, April 22 1913, Morgan.

  22. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Feb 24 1914, Morgan.

  23. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Mar 2 1914, Morgan.

  24. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Sep 22 1913, Morgan.

  25. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, June 23 1914, Morgan.

  26. O’Brien (p.410) quoting Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp.259–60. O’Brien makes an interesting comparison with other American women artists whose work is inspired by the Southwest, the writer Mary Austin, the photographer Laura Gilpin, and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. For Mary Austin’s comparable story-making out of an ‘unstoried’ landscape, and her use of pots and vessels as an image for narrative, see David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp.81–91.

  27. Rosowski (pp.64–6) compares Thea’s ‘conversion’ process very acutely to Carlyle’s.

  28. Preface, The Wagnerian Romances, 1925, WCOW, p.62. Cather follows Hall closely in her account of Act I of The Valkyrie.

  29. Gertrude Hall, The Wagnerian Romances (London: John Lane, 1907), p.94.

  30. Preface, The Wagnerian Romances, WCOW, pp.65–6.

  31. See O’Brien (pp.108, 275) on Sieglinde/Siegmund as expressive of Cather’s ‘repressed’ self.

  32. NOF, p.50.

  33. A letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, June 27 1915, Morgan, shows how proud she was of getting her music right.

  34. See Byatt, Introduction, SL (Virago, 1982), p.xvi.

  35. Lincoln Courier, June 10 1899, WP, pp.622–3.

  36. George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 1898 (London: Constable, 1923), p.90.

  37. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 15 1916, Vermont.

  38. Lionel Trilling in ‘Willa Cather’, After the Genteel Tradition (New York: Viking, 1937) is scathing on this contradiction. The same gap between an American opera singer and a philistine American audience is described in the story ‘A Gold Slipper’, 1917, YBM.

  7. THE ROAD OF DESTINY

  1. Crane, pp.66–7.

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

  3. Letter to H. L. Mencken, n.d. [1922], Maryland.

  4. In a letter to Viola Roseboro, Feb 20 1941, UVA, Cather said people had accused it of formlessness.

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

  6. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Aug 10 1914, Morgan.

  7. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Aug 3 1916, Morgan, and to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 15 1916, Vermont.

  8. NOF, p.54.

  9. WCOW, p.96.

  10. Sergeant, p.121, quoted O’Brien, p.417.

  11. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, 1923.

  12. Rosowski (p.81) draws attention to this.

  13. Eudora Welty, ‘The House of Willa Cather’, op. cit.

  14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, Ch. 1, 1836.

  15. Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 1855.

  16. Tillie Olsen in Silences (Virago, 1980) makes a comparison between Blind d’Arnault and Blind Tom in Rebecca Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861).

  17. Rosowski, pp.89–91, is more distrustful of Jim.

  18. Sarah Orne Jewett to Willa Cather, Nov 27 1908, in Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p.246.

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

  20. Deborah Lambert, in ‘The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia’, American Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, January 1982, pp.676–90, makes a simplistic decoding of Cather in terms of her lesbianism. O’Brien writes more subtly on the same theme in ‘The Thing Not Named: Willa Cather as Lesbian Writer’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1984, vol. 9, no. 4, pp.576–99.

  21. A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Part Two of A la Recherche du temps perdu, was published the year after MA, in 1919. Cather later makes occasional reference to Proust in letters and speeches (e.g. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1 Dec 1930, Vermont).

  22. Letter to Helen Seibel, Feb 2 1919, NSHS.

  23. Blanche Gelfant, ‘The Forgotten Reaping Hook: Sex in My Ántonia’, American Literature, vol. 43, March 1971, pp.60–72, reads the novel in terms of Jim’s fear of sex and his inability to accept ‘the nexus of love and death’.

  8. THE LOST AMERICAN

  1. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, March 15 1915, Vermont.

  2. Edith Lewis, Letter to Stephen Tennant, n.d. [1948?], Hugo Vickers.

  3. Letters to Carrie Miner Sherwood, July 25 [1929], RC; to Charlotte
Stanfield, Sept 4 [1924], UVA; to Helen Macfee, June 24 [1932?], RC.

  4. Brown, pp.213–14.

  5. See Ch. 4, p.66. The story was first published in censored magazine form, as ‘Coming, Eden Bower’. For the changes between magazine and book publication see Marilyn Arnold, Willa Cather’s Short Fiction (Athens and London: Ohio University Press, 1984), pp.112–19, and Slote, ed., Uncle Valentine and other Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 1973, Appendix, pp.177–81.

  6. See Ch. 5, pp.88–9.

  7. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Jan 26 1922, Vermont.

  8. Letters to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 8, Mar 22 1922.

  9. Sergeant, p.163; O’Brien, p.359. See Ch. 4, p.70.

  10. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Dec 3 1918, Morgan. See Ch. 4, p.70.

  11. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 8 1922, Vermont. For Aunt Franc, see Ch. 4, note 24.

  12. Interview, New York Herald, Dec 24 1922.

  13. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 1922, Vermont.

  14. Brown, p.216.

  15. Robinson, p.224.

  16. Letter to Viola Roseboro, June 5 1920, UVA.

  17. Lewis, p.119.

  18. Woodress I, p.195, and II, p.334: ‘For the rest of her life [she] had no money problems’. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Nov 28 1922, Vermont.

  19. Hemingway to Edmund Wilson, Nov 25 1923, in Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (New York: Scribners, 1981), p.105.

  20. H. L. Mencken, review of One of Ours, Smart Set, October 1922, reprinted in James Schroeter, ed., Willa Cather and Her Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp.10–12.

  21. Coningsby Dawson, Out to Win (London: Bodley Head, 1918), pp.50–52.

  22. John Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, 1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp.50, 157–8.

  23. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, May 8 [?], 1922, Vermont.

  24. Wendel Beiser, Letter to Willa Cather, Oct 17 1922, RC.

  25. Brown, p.214. Letter to Elizabeth Vermocken, Sept 19 1922, Morgan.

  26. Letters to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Oct 4 1922, Morgan; to Carrie Miner Sherwood, Sept 1 1922, RC.

  27. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, [1923], Vermont.

  28. Letters to Elizabeth Vermocken, Sept 18 and 19 1922, Morgan.

  29. John Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, p.45.

  30. Ibid., p.81.

  31. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 21 1922, Vermont; O’Brien, p.214.

  32. David Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951; New York: Collier Books, 1964), p.54.

  33. Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, Nov 16 1924, RC.

  34. Willa Cather, ‘Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle’, The Nation, vol. 117, no. 3035, Sept 5 1923, pp.236, 238, quoted in Ch. 1, p.8.

  35. Letters to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1922 and 1923, Vermont; Bennett, pp.120–21; F. T. Griffiths, ‘The Woman Warrior: Willa Cather and One of Ours’, Women’s Studies, 1984, vol. 11, p.269.

  36. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mar 8 1922, Vermont.

  37. For the Parsifal theme in One of Ours see Rosowski, p.106; Griffiths, op. cit., p.270; Woodress I, p.196.

  38. In a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, April 7 1922, Vermont, Cather said she had Siegmund in mind.

  39. Woodress I, p.196, II, p.328. Letter to Mr Johns, Nov 17 1922, UVA.

  40. See Griffiths, op. cit., pp.271–4, on the Edenic theme of One of Ours: ‘an unmistakeable parable about losing paradise in the Nebraska narrative, and of revisiting it in France.’

  41. Rosowski (p. 106) describes the unheroic quality of Claude’s death.

  42. Stanley Cooperman, ‘The War Lover: Claude (Willa Cather)’, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1967), pp.129–37.

  43. For a brilliant analysis of the ‘image’ of St Joan see Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (London: Weidenfeld, 1981). For the Statue of Liberty see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London, Weidenfeld, 1985), Ch. 1.

  44. For the ‘homoerotic’ content in the German officer scene, see Griffiths, op. cit., pp.266–7.

  9. THE THING NOT NAMED

  1. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, June 17 [1927], Vermont.

  2. See Leon Edel, Literary Biography (London: Hart Davis, 1957), pp.61–80 for his theory of a breakdown behind PH. Woodress I attributes her state of mind to the menopause (p. 197); Woodress II changes this to ‘a midlife crisis’ (p.368).

  3. Letter to Charlotte Stanfield, June 19 1922, UVA.

  4. O’Brien, p.240.

  5. Lewis, p.131.

  6. Letter to Zoë Akins, Sept 14 1923, UVA.

  7. O’Brien, pp.240, 384.

  8. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, April 8[?] 1923, Vermont.

  9. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Feb 27 1924, Vermont.

  10. See James Miller, ‘Willa Cather and the Art of Fiction’ in The Art of Willa Cather, ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), pp.127–37, on Cather’s debt to James’s aesthetic theories, and pp.149–52 for the ensuing discussion on her ‘theory of fiction’.

  11. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’, 1927, Collected Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), vol. II, p.219.

  12. Letter to Henry Tracy, June 22 1922, UVA.

  13. Letter to Mr Graff, July 19 1925, RC.

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

  15. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Oct 23 [?], 1922.

  16. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Oct 2 1929, Morgan.

  17. Letter to Viola Roseboro, June 5 1920, UVA.

  18. Interview, May 14 1925, Christian Science Monitor. In Bohlke.

  19. ‘On the Art of Fiction’, 1920, WCOW, pp.101–3.

  20. ‘Stephen Crane’s Wounds in the Rain’, 1926, WCOW, p.70.

  21. NOF, pp.47–56.

  22. This is very like James’s description in his book on Hawthorne (1879).

  23. NOF, p.152.

  24. NOF, p.54.

  25. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, 1919, Collected Essays vol. II, p.106.

  26. See Bradbury’s exclusion of her (Ch. I, note 3). Julian Symons in ‘The American Way of Modernism’ in Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912–1939 (London: Deutsch, 1987), p.189. mentions her, with Ellen Glasgow and Scott Fitzgerald, as one of those who ‘stay on the sidelines’ of the modernist movement.

  27. O’Brien, p.127, and Phyllis Rose, ‘Modernism: The Case of Willa Cather’, Modernism Reconsidered, ed. Robert Kiely and John Hildebidle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p.124. See further, on Cather’s repudiation of modernism, Ch. 14, pp. 328–9.

  28. NOF, p.78. See Ch. 4, p.69, and Ch. 15, p.349.

  29. NOF, p.150.

  30. See Ch. 2, p.23.

  31. NOF, p.165.

  32. NOF, p.155.

  33. O’Brien, pp.127, 218.

  10. LOST LADIES

  1. Quoted Bennett, p.69.

  2. Letter to Mariel Gere, Sept 30 1905, NSHS.

  3. Letter to Mrs Gere [1901?], RC.

  4. Letter to Irene Miner, Jan 6 1945, Newberry.

  5. Letter to Pendleton Hogan, Feb 5 1940, UVA. E. K. Brown (p.248) was told she was a woman Cather had known through Lincoln connections. Woodress II, p.380, tentatively identifies her as Myra Tyndale, sister-in-law of Julius Tyndale, who died of cancer in Seattle in 1903.

  6. See Ch. 2, p.21.

  7. Interview, Nebraska State Journal, 22 April 1925. Brown, p.229.

  8. Cf. Mother Cuxsom, in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. XVIII, reporting on the dead Mrs Henchard: ‘ “And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a’didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will be as nothing!” ’

  9. Interview, Nebr
aska State Journal, 22 April 1925.

  10. Sonnet 94.

  11. I was alerted to this connection by an inspired unpublished lecture on Cather by Alistair Stead.

  12. Tennyson, The Forresters (1892), Act II, scene i. Cather may not have known Tennyson’s play, but she was extremely fond of Ivanhoe, where Scott makes use of Robin Hood, and she admired Maurice Hewlett’s ‘bucolic and pastoral’ medieval romance, The Forest Lovers (1898), which she compared to Ivanhoe and described as ‘somewhere between Arcady and Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden’. [WP, p.270] She also liked the American Howard Pyle’s stories for children, which included a version of Robin Hood.

  13. As You Like It, Act I, scene i, 115–18.

  14. Rosowski, p.14.

  15. John Keats, ‘Robin Hood’, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p.224; note, p.591.

  16. Mary Ellmann, Thinking About Women (Virago, 1979), pp.113–14.

  17. Rosowski, pp.128–9.

  18. A. S. Byatt, Introduction, A Lost Lady (Virago, 1980), p.xiii. See also Diane Cousineau, ‘Division and Difference in A Lost Lady’, Women’s Studies, vol. 11, 1984, pp.305–22, and Nancy Morrow, ‘A Lost Lady and the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Adultery’, Women’s Studies, vol. 11, 1984, pp.287–303.

  19. I owe this idea to a fine unpublished essay on A Lost Lady by Portia Dadley.

  20. A. S. Byatt, op. cit., p.xiv.

  21. Letter to Seibel, Jan 24 [1927], RC. Letter to Elizabeth Vermocken, Oct 27 1926, Morgan. Letter to Pendelton Hogan, Feb 5 1940, UVA.

  22. Letter to E. K. Brown, Oct 7 1946, Newberry.

  23. David Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction, p.72; Dorothy Van Ghent, Willa Cather, Pamphlets on American Writers no. 36 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964), p.35.

  24. Carl Van Doren in Willa Cather and her Critics, ed. James Schroeter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p.23. Cather told Dorothy Canfield Fisher (Letter, October 14 1926, Vermont) that she couldn’t like her grim story of blood-ties and inheritance, My Son’s Wife, any more than she could like Ethan Frome. Though she disliked it, she discussed it with Elsie (Sergeant, p.72) as ‘a story of stark frustration’, and it evidently affected her.

  25. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, Ch. XVIII.

  26. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall Powers (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1987), p.115, Feb 14 1895.