Willa Cather Read online

  Hermione Lee

  WILLA CATHER

  Hermione Lee is a biographer and critic whose other books include biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. Her biography of Penelope Fitzgerald won the Plutarch Award for Biography and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and was one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2014. She is the president of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford.

  www.hermionelee.com

  Also by Hermione Lee

  The Novels of Virginia Woolf

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Philip Roth

  Virginia Woolf

  Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing

  Edith Wharton

  Biography: A Very Short Introduction

  Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

  As Editor

  Stevie Smith: A Selection

  The Hogarth Letters

  The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen

  The Secret Self: Short Stories by Women

  Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Years, On Being Ill

  SECOND VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2017

  Copyright © 1989 by Hermione Lee

  Preface copyright © 2017 by Hermione Lee

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Virago Press Limited, London, in 1989, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1990. Previously published in paperback by Vintage Books in 1991.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Lee, Hermione.

  Willa Cather : double lives / Hermione Lee.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Cather, Willa, 1873–1947. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3505.A87Z717 1991 813′.52—dc20 [B] 91-50018

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101973936

  Ebook ISBN 9781101973943

  Cover design by Megan Wilson

  Cover images: Willa Cather © The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division/The New York Public Library; pattern © Art and Picture Collection/The New York Public Library

  Author photograph © Greg Smolonski

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1

  a

  To John Barnard

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Hermione Lee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. Journeys

  2. Home

  3. Working Her Way Out

  4. Buried Alive

  5. A Wide, Untried Domain

  6. Women Heroes

  7. The Road of Destiny

  8. The Lost American

  9. The Thing Not Named

  10. Lost Ladies

  11. Taking Possession

  12. The Golden Legend

  13. Twilight and Miracles

  14. Obscure Destinies

  15. The Immense Design of Things

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Permissions

  Illustrations

  PREFACE

  TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS ago, I wrote this book for Virago, the British feminist publishing house founded in 1973 and dedicated to the revival of classic, neglected, or forgotten women writers. As the novelist A. S. Byatt observed in her review of my book when it came out in 1989: ‘Willa Cather’s work is not well known in this country. It is to be hoped that this book will change that.’ And it was true that like other notable early to mid-twentieth-century American women writers (Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, Grace Paley), Cather did not have the status she deserved in Britain. This book was written from an English perspective, with the aim of attracting more readers in my country to her work.

  The contrast with Cather’s reputation in the States is obvious. In America, Cather is a much-loved, much-read, and much-contested figure. In the decades since I wrote this book, there have been dramatic shifts in her reputation. Fierce Cather wars have raged in the American literary and scholarly world, something like the academic conflicts over Jane Austen’s legacy. The celebration of Cather as an American pastoralist, a kind of Nebraskan Robert Frost, the focus for sentimental nostalgia over a vanished way of life, still persists. Cather is powerfully established as a regional writer of home and country in her home state of Nebraska. The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, founded in 1955 in Red Cloud, was awarded a large National Endowment for the Humanities Fund in 2006 to develop its work, which includes maintaining a slice of Nebraskan prairie as ‘Catherland’, curating the Cather childhood home, holding Cather conferences, and publishing a Cather newsletter. These activities sustain the sanctified legend of an essentially Nebraskan Cather, rather than a Cather who belongs to the world. Pitched against that Cather legacy industry has been a feminist critical approach to Cather that began with Sharon O’Brien’s 1987 biography of her early years, identifying Cather as a lesbian artist writing coded, covert fictional narratives of desire. That ‘outing’ of a queer Cather in the late 1980s was followed, later, by an interest in Cather as a writer more concerned with politics, economics, race, modernity, and multiculturalism than her traditional admirers have allowed.

  It felt for a time as if Cather’s fate was to embody the rifts in the American academy between theory, or ‘political correctness’, and humanist aestheticism, or ‘conservatism’. Joan Acocella wrote a spirited account of these culture wars, Willa Cather & the Politics of Criticism, in 2000. But if these academic debates exclude and bewilder Cather’s many general readers and admirers, they are also a mark of her status. Seventy years after her death, she is a central figure in the American literary pantheon. There are two Cather volumes in the Library of America series. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the powerhouse for Cather scholarship, has been producing the Willa Cather Scholarly Editions of all the main works since 1992 and has an extensive Willa Cather Archive online. In 2013, Knopf published a large selection of Cather’s letters, edited by Janis Stout and Andrew Jewell, a very welcome and very long-awaited publication. Cather made great efforts to have her letters returned to her or destroyed, and she embargoed their publication in her will. So for many years Cather critics and biographers had been able only to paraphrase. Her story was told, her secrets were known, but the voice of her letters was not heard. After the death of the last-surviving Cather relative in 2011, an agreement was made by the Willa Cather Foundation, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the Willa Cather Trust, which controls the intellectual property rights to Cather’s work, to publish the letters. Her letters do not give away any hidden scandals or secrets. But they are eloquent and revealing about her family life, her career, and her work methods, and particularly about the tension, so important in her fiction, between traveling away from home and returning, between family life and the life of the individual, between the pull of change and the powerful presence of figures from the past. They are charged with memory and what memory brings back to her.

  —

  When I make my own return to this book about her, written long ago in my own life, I know there are things I would change if I were writing it now. I was evasive about Cat
her’s sexuality, because, at the time, I found the claims for Cather as a gay icon, combined with attacks on her for not being bolder or more explicit, a distorting lens through which to read fiction that takes so much of its power from containment, selection, and evocation. I did not come to grips with the disconcerting paradox that a writer who celebrated immigrant cultures and is an inspiring advocate for an inclusive, mixed, tolerant America also had her areas of racial bigotry. I wish now that I had given myself more space to write biographically about her relationship with her siblings, her journalism, and her dealings with her publishers and her finances.

  But this was essentially a book about her as a writer, and I put most of its energies into thinking about her use of language, her attention to form, and the way she gave each of her stories and novels its own color and atmosphere. I was very interested in the literary movements of her time and in her passion for Europe and for other art forms—music, painting, and drama. I wanted to work out how she made her solid, vivid historical figures inhabit their landscapes and seem so true. I was fascinated by the harshness, violence, and cold, brutal realism that run like dark steel through the calm, lyric plainness of her writing. I wanted to pursue her concern for authenticity, classical austerity, and transparency and simplicity. I loved the energy and joy and excitement that keep rushing up through her words. And, then as now, I couldn’t find anything to compare with her gift for creating lives and histories with depth and space around them, as though the novels and stories reach out to a horizon of air, something beyond the story itself, or, in her words, something ‘incommunicable’, ‘the inexplicable presence of the thing not named’.

  1

  JOURNEYS

  Soto! Explore thyself!

  Therein thyself shalt find

  The ‘Undiscovered Continent’ –

  No Settler had the Mind.1

  Emily Dickinson, c. 1864

  WILLA CATHER said, late in life, that she seemed fated to send people on journeys.2 She was always getting letters from readers who had set off for Nebraska or the Mesa Verde, New Mexico or Quebec, in the footprints of her characters. In fact the managers of the Bishop’s Lodge Hotel at Santa Fé had done so well out of the Archbishop that they had offered her unlimited free accommodation. But, she added, she did not want to go back to the places she had written about; they had all changed. This suggests one of the paradoxes of Cather’s writing. In her life, her journeys, and her writing, she is an original, adventurous explorer, like the pioneers in the title of her early novel, energetically making her mark on an ‘undiscovered continent’. But she is also a historian; her imagination works through memory, distance, and loss. She translates her landscapes, and the figures in them, into landscapes of the mind.

  This makes the journey in pursuit of Cather a complicated one. Since she died in 1947, her admirers have continued to retrace her tracks, westward from Virginia to Red Cloud, east from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Pittsburgh and New York, down through the Southwest, across the ocean to Paris and Provence, and up to Canada and Maine and New Hampshire. They find recognizably impressive landscapes, but utterly transformed environments. Anyone writing on Cather also has to make journeys to numerous American libraries, to read the letters which survived her attempts to reclaim and destroy all her correspondence, and which her will ensured could not be quoted or published. Just as she wanted no visitors spoiling the places she had loved, so she wanted no tourists inspecting her life. Cather resists her pursuers: she would prefer to be an ‘undiscovered continent’.

  A Cather pilgrimage – to her home town, for instance – can be interesting, but, like most literary pilgrimages, has ultimately not much to do with a reading of her novels. It is an inner, not an outer, journey that’s required. Certainly I found my own visit (my first to the mid-West) to the small, subdued crossroads town of Red Cloud, 130 miles west of Lincoln, a curious experience, full of vivid impressions. Summoned by the noon-time siren to the beef and noodles diet of the Corral Café, I listen to an unflagging stream of local jocularity (very old lady with no teeth: ‘I’d have given him a piece a my mind cepn I wouldn have had none left’, and so on). On a wet Sunday evening, I watch well-behaved, overweight families consuming huge pizzas and cokes in the non-alcoholic Prairie Pizza, a large brown-carpeted room with wooden benches and tables down the sides and a big space in the centre. It has gold-framed paintings of Indian pow-wows, two pianos covered in wicker baskets of plastic flowers, a (real) old black Ford without wheels on a platform above the door; and on the end wall a large American flag surrounded by models of a plane, a car, a cross, and an Indian head-dress, captioned ‘First Americans’ Right to Worship – Right to be Free’. Driving out on mud roads to the little fenced-in French and Czech graveyards on the high farmland of the ‘Divide’, or to the 600 acres reclaimed by the Nebraska State Nature Conservancy to revert to ‘Willa Cather Memorial Prairie’, I can hear woodlarks calling over miles of space on a warm April evening (two weeks after a blizzard, with snow still on the low slopes). Crossing the Kansas–Nebraska border, I see two wooden signs on the long empty road (one reading ‘Leaving Kansas – Come Again’, the other ‘Nebraska – The Good Life’). I am shown the large ugly bungalow built by ‘Ántonia’s’ grand-daughter, and the neatly reconstructed ‘depot’ building where no more trains come in. I hear from the waitress in the Palace Bar about the alcoholism and hard times of the local farmers, the merits of the death penalty and the lack of anything to do in Red Cloud since the ‘show building’ closed down. I am told that an aged local used to refer to Cather as ‘that morpheedite’, or that when the Czech descendants promised to lay on a Czech picnic for the ‘Cather Spring Conference’ they offered to dress in national costume and provide Kentucky Fried Chicken. And then I go into the back of the red-brick Garber Bank, a tall incongruity in a street of one-story food marts, now the ‘Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Museum’, to read, in the wake of European and Chinese and American researchers, letters that Cather didn’t want read. I couldn’t help feeling the extraordinary contrast between the immense landscape and the little town, or noticing, even at a glance, the signs of cultural assimilation and stagnation Cather had anticipated. But being led by kindly guides around the ‘Cather Childhood Home’ or the ‘Cather Memorial Prairie’ did not unlock, though it might illustrate, ‘Old Mrs Harris’ or My Ántonia, any more than a trip to the Mesa Verde could explain The Professor’s House.

  It is another of the contradictions of Cather’s work that although she draws intensely on her personal experience, her fiction is not satisfactorily accounted for in biographical terms. Like the image of the rock which she places at the centre of many of her books, she is a resistant subject, even an obstructive one. When you set out to write about her, you feel she would not have liked what you are doing, and would not have liked you either. At times, reading yet more of her grumpy repudiations of the modern world, the dislike is reciprocated. And she does not invite interpretation. Her apparent simplicity, her authenticity and authority, her deep connection to places, her specific cultural histories, make her look straightforward and available. But she is no public monument, no laureate of rural America. The journey for Cather must be through her language, her obsessions, and her evasions; like the title of one of her best books of stories, Obscure Destinies, she makes an ‘obscure’ destination. The memorial signposts helpfully put up all over ‘Catherland’ by the State of Nebraska are misleading markers.

  The Cather trail, forty years on, is well trodden, though not noticeably by British readers: like other great women American writers of the twentieth century such as Ellen Glasgow, Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty, Cather has never been widely read or much studied in the UK.3 In America, since One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize and made her famous in 1922, she is high-school reading, alongside Twain, Hemingway and Thoreau. Like Robert Frost (whom she greatly admired and was influenced by) her fame centres on her celebration of rural America and her nostalgia for pioneering values. Scott Fitzger
ald, for instance, who wrote The Great Gatsby under the spell of A Lost Lady, could nevertheless joke about her ‘History of the Simple Inarticulate Farmer Turned Swede’.4 Though she fell out of favour with the New Critics of the 1930s, who found her reactionary and escapist, and though she is regarded as old-fashioned and unexciting by a contemporary American novelist such as Philip Roth, she still, like Frost, has a devoted popular following. Cather hagiography is thriving in Lincoln, Nebraska, culminating last year in James Woodress’s huge, adulatory biography. And, within the last ten years, feminist criticism has launched some vigorous raids on Cather territory, resulting in inspired new readings (notably by Sharon O’Brien and Judith Fryer). Less subtle attempts than theirs, however, to appropriate Cather as a spokesperson for feminism, in particular for lesbian feminism, run into as many difficulties as readings which identify her as a Catholic, an agrarian, or a romantic. She evades identification, and resembles no one else.

  —

  Cather is unique, first of all, in being the only woman of her time to have appropriated a ‘great tradition’ of male American writing. When she turns herself into male narrators and gives them Virgil to read, when she calls her first Nebraskan novel after Whitman’s poem of pioneers, she is not only acting out a desire to transcend, imaginatively, expected sexual roles (though she is doing that); more impersonally, she is intervening in a masculine language of epic pastoral. The western frontier was a man’s world, subjected to masculine pioneering and male speech. In the Whitman poem of 1865, the penetration of the West is erotically apotheosized as an all-male Olympiad:

  O you youths, Western youths,

  So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,

  Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the

  foremost,

  Pioneers! O pioneers!