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Willa Cather |
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"No art can do anything at all with great natural forces or great elemental emotions. No poet can write of love, hate, jealousy. He can only touch these things as they affect the people in his drama and his story, and unless he is more interested in his own little story and his foolish little people than in the Preservation of the Indian or Sex or Tuberculosis, then he ought to be working in a laboratory or a bureau." In this comment, Willa Cather argued for the purity of art, the need for the artist to remain uncorrupted by demands and purposes that interfere with the aesthetic intent. Guided by such principles, she combined precise descriptive skill and insight into the subtleties of human character with a disciplined and beautiful prose style to fashion a group of novels and short stories that have earned her a permanent place among the great writers of America.
In her life and work, Willa Cather was associated with a number of places in North America—New York, Pittsburgh, Quebec, New Mexico, and especially Nebraska—but it was in Virginia that she was born, on December 7, 1873, and where she spent her first decade. She was the first child of Charles and Mary (Boak) Cather. During the Virginia years, her father made his living raising sheep on his father's farm, but after its barn burned in 1883, the property was sold and the family relocated to Nebraska, where Charles's parents had established a farm some years earlier. In 1884, her father opened a real estate and loan office in the prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Willa was to grow up. Some sense of the town's size can be gauged from the fact that her graduating class at Red Cloud High School in 1890 contained a total of three students.
In September of that year she moved to Lincoln. After a year in its prep school, she entered the University of Nebraska, where she studied Greek and Latin, French and English literature, and a wide array of other subjects, including journalism and chemistry. She also published a number of short stories in the Hesperian, the university's literary magazine, of which she became editor in her junior year. She graduated in 1895, and in the following year, after being turned down for a teaching position at the university, she moved to Pittsburgh, where she had obtained a job as editor of a women's magazine, the Home Monthly.
Cather lived in Pittsburgh for the next ten years. She left the Home Monthly when it was sold in 1897 and went to work for the Pittsburgh Leader, a newspaper. Toward the end of her time in Pittsburgh, she taught Latin and English at Central High School. During these years she was also contributing play and book reviews, as well as poems and short stories, to a number of journals. Her first book, April Twilights, a collection of poems, was published in 1903, and in 1905 appeared The Troll Garden. This was her first book of fiction, containing seven short stories, including "Paul's Case."
In 1906 she accepted an editorial position at McClure's Magazine in New York, which—despite frequent travels and extended stays in the Midwest, New England, and Europe—was to remain her home for the rest of her life. Her early years in New York saw the publication of her first novels, Alexander's Bridge (1912), an interesting study of a troubled architect (a book that is perhaps more intellectually stimulating than it is artistically satisfying), and the extremely popular O Pioneers! (1913). By 1913 she was able to cut back her editorial work to a part-time position, and later was able to support herself through magazine publication of her stories and serialization of her novels, through the sales of her books, and in one instance through the sale of movie rights—but she was so appalled by the 1925 film (and 1934 remake) of one of her finest novels, A Lost Lady (1923), that she forbade any further sale of her work for film adaptation.
Her major novels can be divided into several chronologically based groupings. In the first phase are the books—and subject matter—for which she is probably best known, those that chronicle the lives of Midwestern farmers and immigrants, including O Pioneers! and My Ántonia (1918). Novels such as A Lost Lady and The Professor's House (1925) present sensitive souls in the process of being ground down by what Cather increasingly regarded as the crassness of modern life. As a further demonstration of her search for enduring values in the midst of her growing alienation from the modern world, in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), perhaps her most admired work, and Shadows on the Rock (1931), she admiringly portrays early Catholic pioneers and proselytizers, in New Mexico and Quebec respectively. Throughout her career, there is a gradual de-emphasis of plot and stress upon description and characterization, to the point where parts of the latest of these works seem more like tableaux, often of profound beauty, than narratives.
Cather was quite close to her family, and even though she was in her mid-to-late fifties when her parents died (her father in 1928, her mother in 1931), she was grief-stricken at their deaths. She also enjoyed a number of close friendships throughout her life with sophisticated men and women who shared her interests in travel and in the arts. She never married; her longest and most intense relationships were with other women. In her youth she had worn masculine clothing and sometimes called herself "William Cather, M.D."; one of her poems is written from the point of view of the Greek poet Sappho. Unsurprisingly, facts such as these have led a number of commentators to the not unlikely conclusion that Cather was a lesbian. But it should be borne in mind that this remains pure conjecture. Cather was by nature a private and reserved person, and she lived in a very different time from our own. There is no evidence upon which to draw absolute conclusions about her sexuality or even to determine whether she had any sexual experience at all. Beyond any interest, whether prurient or political, in her private relationships, what should be emphasized is that Cather, in her own unassertive but unyielding way, simply ignored societal assumptions about a woman's place. She lived (as well as presenting similar characters in the protagonists of such novels as O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark) a strong and independent life, following a career of her own choosing, writing in strict adherence to her own standards and vision, and finding her self-worth in her own achievements.
Despite her continuing success with popular reviewers and the general reading public, Cather's last years were far from serene. In addition to the deaths of loved ones, she suffered from ever worsening health, until her own death in New York on April 24, 1947, from a cerebral hemorrhage. And during the great Depression of the 1930s, when many critics judged works of art more by their politics than by their artistry (a time, in this respect, not so very different from our own), Cather was viewed as an irrelevant aesthete, unconcerned with the class struggle.
Given her austere views on the purposes of art and the role of the artist, Cather in all likelihood would be no more pleased at being exalted in the name of current political agendas than she was at being maligned in the name of the political agendas of sixty years ago. In a recent essay, Joan Acocella concludes a detailed examination of Cather's work and the permutations of her reputation with these words: "But writers were also in a position to understand the rarity of her gift. All novelists, all poets want to imagine hugely and then find the perfect, discrete form that will both capture the thought and suggest what was uncapturable in it—glimpse its escaping wings. Few succeed; Cather was one who did.
"The other group that has consistently admired Cather is the public. Death Comes for the Archbishop sells more than twenty thousand copies a year. Perhaps it is time for Cather to become a non-topic again, for the professional critics to give up and leave her books to those who care about them—her readers."
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