by Jane Rule
Gertrude Stein wanted to be a middle-class, ordinary, honest genius, and at her very best she probably was, teaching, through her own extremes, generations of writers after her what the limits of language are. Whether her whole body of work would have been greater or less interesting if she had lived either in a climate of more acceptance or in a personal style more continuously open is impossible to say. Not even at her most obscure did she ever give up the temptation to be “selfishly honest,” nor did she at the height of her popular fame. Twice in the third lecture in Narration, about journalism, one of the last of her lecture series in America, the exposition is interrupted with the non sequitur, “I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.”48 But her audience had to wait until long after her death to understand the power of that need, not in her greatest work but in a book important for those who would follow. “As Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everyone can like it when the others make it.”49 No one will ever write a “pretty” Q.E.D., but the courage to write with such selfish honesty comes from a woman who did not want to be a hero but could not finally accept cowardice either.
Willa Cather 1876–1947
FOR WILLA CATHER, AN almost exact contemporary of Gertrude Stein, the question of being publicly identified as a lesbian never surfaced. She called those biographers who try to reduce great artists to psychological cripples, explaining away their gifts and visions in neuroses and childhood traumas, “tomb breakers.” In her will she ordered that none of her letters be quoted. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, her friend and one of her biographers, explains, “The prose she used in friendly correspondence was colloquial, vivid, frank, at times emotional, more like her casual talk than the subtle, equable prose she developed in her finest novels and stories. She feared the betrayal, in print, of that heat and abundance that surged up in her. In her art she transformed heat to a plasticity. …”1 Perhaps the most intimate and important letters Willa Cather wrote were those to Isabelle McClung, with whom she had lived sporadically from 1901 to 1915, when Isabelle McClung married. At her death in 1938 those letters were returned to Willa Cather, who week by week burned bundles of them until they were all destroyed. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather’s most intimate friend, in her modest and perceptive biography, originally undertaken only as notes for an official biographer, says, “I have written about Willa Cather as I knew her; but with the feeling it is not in any form of biographical writing, but in art alone, that the deepest truth about human beings is to be found.”2 In this account, Willa Cather’s relationships with other people are mentioned only when they fire her imagination for a book, as her friendship with the singer Olive Fremstad provided material for The Song of the Lark; or when they take her away from her writing, as happened in both her mother’s and Isabelle McClung Hambourg’s long dying.
Later critics and biographers are restive about a lack of frankness in these dealings with Willa Cather’s life. James Schroeter, in a discussion of Willa Cather’s supposed anti-Semitism, suggests that, since Isabelle McClung’s husband was Jewish, “the hatred, I believe, has two separate roots. The deepest was a psychological root, which so far has resisted efforts people have made to drag it into light—although some day, if the picture of Willa Cather as a frank, hearty westerner with a taste for French cooking is ever going to be replaced by a picture of more complex reality, it will have to be.”3 Lionel Trilling diagnoses what he sees as her failing creative power in her last novels with a similar suggestiveness. “It has always been a personal failure of her talent that prevented her from involving her people in truly dramatic relations with each other. (Her women, for example, always stand in the mother or daughter relation to men; they are never truly lovers.) But at least once upon a time her people were involved in a dramatic relationship with themselves or with their environments.”4 John H. Randall III warns, “But I believe she is dangerously idiosyncratic in seeing spontaneous relations between the sexes as being uniformly dangerous and unrewarding as she makes them out to be. This view reflects her own particular upbringing and temperament—particularly the latter—and it severely limits her art.”5
None of these critical observations is true. Willa Cather hated neither the Jewish character, Louie Marsellus, in The Professor’s House, as any careful reading of the book would make clear, nor Isabelle McClung’s husband, to whom the book is dedicated. The women in her novels are often essentially lovers, and in My Antonia, the book Willa Cather herself liked most, Antonia’s marriage is as fine and unsentimental a portrait of domestic happiness as there is in fiction. These grossly inaccurate critical generalizations can only be explained by a desire of each of these men to imply that Willa Cather’s “basic psychology,” “personal failure,” or “temperament” negatively influenced her vision. What they want out in the light of day is her emotional and erotic preference for women, and, if they cannot have irrefutable biographical facts or cannot use them in print, they will distort their reading of her fiction to make their discrediting point. No lesbian can write about heterosexual experience without “dangerous idiosyncrasy” which must therefore be found in Willa Cather’s work whether it is there or not.
There is enough evidence, even in the most circumspect of the earliest biographical material, to indicate that for Willa Cather men were great friends and companions but of no interest to her erotically. She excused herself from marriage on the grounds that she was married to her art, but that did not prevent her from living with the McClung family in Pittsburgh for nine years, sharing a bedroom with Isabelle, using an attic room as a study. When she moved to New York finally to take a better job, she lived with Edith Lewis, a relationship which lasted until Willa Cather’s death in 1947. James Woodress, her most recent biographer, describes Isabelle McClung as “the one great romance of her life”6 and Edith Lewis as “a rival for Willa Cather’s affection”7 because Willa Cather was dividing her time between her household with Edith Lewis in New York and the McClung household in Pittsburgh long before Judge McClung died and Isabelle married.
Whatever the erotic content of these relationships, they were practically very different. Isabelle was a beautiful young woman from a wealthy Pittsburgh family with a connoisseur’s interest in the arts. She and Willa Cather met in the dressing room of an actress they both admired. Willa Cather’s position in the McClung household was obviously a compromise, for Isabelle put it to her father that either Willa Cather stayed there or Isabelle left home. Willa Cather was not making enough money during those years in journalism and schoolteaching to support herself very comfortably, and she and Isabelle could not have taken holidays in New England and Europe without Judge McClung’s approval and subsidy.
In 1915, when Willa Cather was living in New York, she was offered an opportunity to go to Germany to write articles there, and she wanted Isabelle to go with her. Judge McClung vetoed the trip, and Willa Cather finally went instead to the Southwest with Edith Lewis. That fall, when Judge McClung died, leaving Isabelle rich and independent, she chose to marry Jan Hambourg, a violinist. Elizabeth Sergeant suggests that the loss of both the sanctuary of the McClung household, where Willa Cather had been able to write, and of Isabelle were emotionally devastating. Still it was not long after these events that Willa Cather was writing My Antonia, her most serene and loving book. She visited with the Hambourgs, and, though she never went to stay for months at a time as they suggested she might, even setting up special rooms in their house for her, she was with Isabelle, tending her for some time during her final illness. Isabelle’s death was a great grief, for it seemed to Willa Cather that Isabelle was the one person for whom all her books were written.
Friends and biographers have much less to say about Edith Lewis. Her own book makes it clear that she shared not only a domestic life with Willa Cather for nearly forty years but also was her companion in many of her tra
vels and was often with her in late years at the island retreat they built. She worked with Willa Cather, proofreading manuscripts, a task she describes as one of their greatest pleasures. But Edith Lewis doesn’t intrude on the scene she describes. She had work of her own to do. When Willa Cather was making an excellent living from her writing and would have much preferred to live away from New York, she did not move because Edith Lewis enjoyed her job in the city. The only direct comment Elizabeth Sergeant makes about their relationship is: “Though they had gone their own ways and lived their own lives, their companionship was deeply founded and delightful.”8 If Edith Lewis did not cut the romantic figure in Willa Cather’s life assigned to Isabelle McClung, neither did she become a secretary-companion like Amy Lowell’s actress or a colorful wife like Alice B. Toklas. She has no public image at all.
Willa Cather’s burning of her letters to Isabelle and her refusal to have any of her letters quoted were minor gestures in a whole pattern of protecting her personal life so that she and those she loved could live without the invasions and distortions of fame.
The choice of privacy does not seem surprising under the circumstances until one looks at Willa Cather as an adolescent and very young woman. The oldest child of a large family, growing up in a small town in Nebraska, she was not averse to being different and making that difference obvious. At fifteen, she cut her hair like a boy’s, wore masculine clothes, took male parts in plays, and signed her name “William Cather, M.D.” In a friend’s album she answered stock questions with good-humored lack of self-protection.
The trait I admire most in a woman: flirting
The trait I admire most in a man: an original mind
The fault for which I have the most toleration in another person: passion
The fault for which I have the least toleration in another person: lack of nerve
The qualification or accomplishments I most desire in a matrimonial partner: lamblike meekness
As a traveling companion, I would most highly appreciate: a cultured gentleman
The greatest wonder according to my estimation is: a good looking woman.9
Her college classmates and some of her early students remember her as masculine in dress, voice, and manner.
After her second year in college, she was persuaded to let her hair grow and modify her dress. She did not modify her aggressive manner of mind, her hard judgments of anything second rate in the arts. Edith Lewis describes her when she first met her in Lincoln as “a young, rebellious mind, impatient of all camouflage.”10 “She was naturally a very fearless person, fearless in matters of thought, of social convention.”11 Even as late as in her thirties, when Elizabeth Sergeant first met her, Willa Cather gave the impression of “a powerful, almost masculine personality.”12 “This Miss Cather filled the whole space between door and window to brimming, as a man might do.”13 Yet those who had expected her to become what was then called “bohemian” did not reckon with her economically conservative needs or her desire to be admired and respected by those she cared about. Her habitual attachments to women of accomplishment and refinement transformed her from a brash, self-advertising adolescent from a raw Nebraska town into a cultured woman who commanded great respect for her integrity of mind and literary gifts. She not only no longer needed to attract attention to herself, she needed to protect her privacy for her work and those close to her.
Most interpreters of Willa Cather’s work sooner or later remark on her “masculine sensibility” either in noting her preference for male narrators or her realistic and therefore not flattering explorations of heterosexual relationships. For some it is a virtue which places her above the more delicate and limited talents of other women writers. Others, like John H. Randall III, make personal accusations: “she could accept fertility in crops more easily than in human beings, the reason being her fear of physical passion and the dependence on others which it entails.”14 In an introduction to My Mortal Enemy, Marcus Klein quotes from an essay on Katherine Mansfield by Willa Cather: “Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”15 He goes on to suggest a thesis for examining all Willa Cather’s fiction: “it is the struggle to get beyond the necessity of human relationships that is the secret history of all Willa Cather’s novels, only as time went on, as the struggle turned, one supposes, more desperate, its nature becomes more apparent.”16 Elizabeth Sergeant sees this theme in Willa Cather as sourced in “the passion which takes a woman of exceptional gifts away from the usual instinctive woman’s lot of marriage and children to fulfill a directive that is altogether impersonal.”17
What actually characterizes Willa Cather’s mind is not a masculine sensibility at all but a capacity to transcend the conventions of what is masculine and what is feminine to see the more complex humanity of her characters. Antonia, the character who so richly fulfills “the usual instinctive woman’s lot” in a remarkably happy marriage and fine, loving sons, has physical strength and vitality as well as warmth, tenderness, and compassion. “Oh, better I like to work out of doors than in the house … I not care that your grandmother says it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.”18 In the frontier of Nebraska only those with such strength and pleasure in it can survive. Antonia’s father, a frail, gentle artist, commits suicide in despair at crop failures and harsh winters. Willa Cather does not judge him. And she understands, too, Lena Lingard, who chooses to go to Lincoln and run a dress shop rather than marry. “She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man, and work piling up around a sick woman.”19
Willa Cather’s method of creating character is to submerge herself in that character, to achieve a total sympathy which will render the character authentically, inevitably, past judgment. Even the morally most objectionable of her characters, by this method, commands compassion and even at times admiration. Myra, the main character in My Mortal Enemy, has married against her rich uncle’s wishes, been disowned, and created a myth about herself because she has lived “for love.” The destruction of that myth is the intention of the novel in which Myra’s cynicism and misery become more and more apparent. Early in the story, she is making remarks like “Love itself draws a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world; why, for mercy’s sake, add opals?”20 She speculates about a developing love affair: “very likely hell will come of it.”21 Much later she diagnoses her own failure. “We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman; I wanted success and a place in the world.”22 Her husband is gallant and gentle with her through illness, preserving the illusion of their relationship through all her denials of it. He even survives her final question: “Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?”23 Though her own evaluation of herself is accurate, the ruthless honesty of her judgment and the pure energy of her anger are somehow admirable. The book is not a condemnation of marriage any more than My Antonia is propaganda for marriage. It is an accurate portrait of a woman who exchanged self-knowledge for illusion and consciously suffered the consequences.
