Becoming Willa Cather: Creation and Career

Author

Introduction

Next to writing I love to prowl around the Western country, seeing little towns and how people live in them. To me the real West begins with the Missouri [River].¹

—Willa Cather

Still, if I had my choice, I would rather be mayor of Sandy Point than Doge of Venice.²

—Willa Cather

Mention Willa Cather and Nebraska, and most people will think of pioneers and prairies. Many will have read at least one book in the so-called Prairie Trilogy of O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. Readers familiar with the latter novel will conjure up Cather’s image of the plow against the setting sun. Loyal fans will summon pictures of Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud along the Republican River. I see a woman on a wheel.

Envision, for a moment, a dusty road on a summer day in Nebraska. Contrary to popular opinion, the country in this part of the state is anything but flat. In fact, one might call it downright hilly as it climbs from the river bottoms up to the Big Divide by a steady up grade, running white and hot through the scorched corn fields and grazing lands where the long-horned Texan cattle browse about in the old buffalo wallows.³

The year is 1895. Grover Cleveland is president. In England, Oscar Wilde has been convicted of gross indecency. The penny-farthing, or high-bicycle, has been replaced by the safety bicycle, and women all across the United States have begun to ride, many identifying with the ideals of the New Woman.⁴ Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, has published How I Learned to Ride a Bicycle. She describes her relationship with Gladys, her bicycle, and affirms her commitment to momentum.⁵ Back in Nebraska, after years of little rainfall and scorching heat, the country has nearly dried up, but motion is in the air.

Now envision a grizzled old man with a long lean neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat’s heading downhill on this hot and dusty road in his rattling farm-wagon.⁶ The pace is slow, and the dust makes him sneeze. Wiping his eyes, he looks up and blinks. For a moment, he thinks he sees a rider on a miniature pony. He rubs his eyes again and realizes it is no pony. It is some silly young fellow on a whatchamacallit. Then, as the figure comes up faster than the old man could have imagined, he recognizes the rider. It is Willa Cather, and the old man does not know what to think.

The young woman with the strong jaw pedals past without a glance. She knows what to think as she steers the device she calls her wheel. The open spaces of Nebraska can intimidate her and the confines of the prairie town can make her feel claustrophobic, but now she remains intent on her own momentum, her own locomotion through a world that rarely comprehends her.

Moving forward under her own power, aware of her youth and of a certain masculine prowess, she hums the famous Anvil Chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore, recalling the performance of the Tavary Opera Company in Lincoln the previous December. In the afternoon sunshine, she notices golden coreopsis and remembers a lecture given by botanist Charles E. Bessey at the university in Lincoln.⁷ The sight of a winding draw leaves her feeling sentimental. She remembers a line from Virgil . . . Optima dies . . . that she once translated with William Ducker back in Red Cloud.

She sorts ideas for future contributions to the Lincoln newspapers. All our makers of literature are asleep or playful, she muses (WP Vol.1, 274). Woman may be man’s inferior but she makes him pay for it, she says aloud in order to hear how it sounds (WP Vol.1, 127).

Heading north toward the territory where the French Canadians settled, she recites passages from French literature. She recalls the words of Michelet that she learned while studying in her neighbors’ library: Le but n’est rien; le chemin, c’est tout (The end is nothing; the road is all). Exertion. Momentum. A cascade of ideas and experiments unrolling along a dusty road through the prairie landscape in which they first took root. The uncomprehending gaze of casual observers. And, most of all, youth striving, with each passing moment, to discover a remarkable destiny.

In this moment of frozen time, Willa Cather is not a famous author, but she is a rather well-known newspaper columnist, in Nebraska at least. Too old to be jejune and too young to be completely convincing, she is confused, confident, childlike, wired for self-preservation, skeptical, prone to fits of exertion and bouts of exhaustion, pragmatic, sarcastic, hyperbolic, and romantic. She holds on to her childhood friends and her fascination with various forms of bloodletting, particularly vivisection. She can be alternately charming and distant, faithful and vengeful. Both male and female admirers can capture her imagination. And it is imagination, above all else, that flows through her interior life like electricity. In this reverie, Cather is twenty-one years old, eighteen years away from the publication of O Pioneers!.

Nebraska is twenty-eight years old. In Cather’s mind, the name refers to a territory, a people, a period in Western civilization, and much more. In her evolving imagination, Nebraska is flora, fauna, counties, churches, schools, banks, newspapers, drugstores, farms, and ranches. It is rivers, creeks, streams, bluffs, sandbars, roads, sidewalks, electric lights, ravines, railroad tracks, and bridges. It is wind, blizzards, thunderstorms, dust storms, droughts, floods and fires. It is weddings, funerals, elections, government scandals, opera house performances, recitals, fancy dances, murders, picnics, and ice-cream socials. It is, over and over again, the Divide, that real and symbolic boundary line between two watersheds, the southern flowing into the Republican River, the northern flowing into the Little Blue River.

For me, the story of how Willa Cather became a great American writer must begin with this woman on the wheel, riding through Nebraska, ready for trial and error, large and small, intent on being recognized for her work. Simpler, less-evocative images have filled the popular imagination. In 1920, Sinclair Lewis told an audience in Omaha that ‘Miss Cather is Nebraska’s foremost citizen. The United States knows Nebraska because of Willa Cather’s books’ (qtd. in WCLL, 319). A year later, a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald explained that Cather’s pen has given Nebraska prairies a place in literature along with the far west of Bret Harte and the New England of a dozen writers of that region (WCP, 28–29). In 1962, a reporter in the July 1 Beatrice Sun explained that Cather, having lived in Nebraska for only a few years, was both the product of her Nebraska experience and the great literary interpreter of the state and region (6). It is safe to say that, in the American imagination, Cather and Nebraska go together like Shakespeare and Stratford or Hemingway and Key West. All this sounds triumphant, but it means that it has become increasingly easy to use shorthand while talking about Cather and Nebraska. With the best intentions, we can slip into the language of commemoration.

By starting with the woman on the wheel, I remind myself that nothing in Cather’s career was certain, especially her relationship with Nebraska, even though it has often seemed so in retrospect. I remember to look for Cather in motion on her road, in moments of creation and desperation, assaying options and taking chances. As Cather herself observed, this sort of approach makes for a better sort of story. In her preface to the 1937 edition of The Song of the Lark, she declared, The life of a successful artist in the full tide of achievement is not so interesting as the life of a talented girl ‘fighting her way,’ as we say. Success is never so interesting as struggle—not even to the successful.

Some years ago, Sharon O’Brien described this struggle as emergence in a groundbreaking book that continues to influence discussions of Cather. With unprecedented frankness, O’Brien appealed to contemporary psychoanalytic theory in order to offer compelling insights into the author’s maturation. In many ways, my own thinking in this book is an extension of O’Brien’s work, and I shared the scholar’s realization that the story of her [Cather’s] artistic emergence was important enough to merit a volume of its own (WCEV, 3). Call it growth, maturation, or becoming. In a metaphorical mood, call it germination and flowering. Invoke Aristotle’s four causes and his notions of energeia and entelechy. Follow Henri Bergson, as Cather did, and talk about creative evolution. Tell it as a Bildungsroman or a Künstlerroman.

I think we should return to the creator of O’Brien’s term. Two years after Cather was born, G. H. Lewes (partner of the novelist George Eliot) described the existence of emergents, which occur when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.⁸ Lewes had identified one of the great paradoxes in the cosmos. Somehow the combination of incommensurable ingredients could, on occasion, transcend the predictable outcome. A so-called theory of emergence was born, and no other notion I know of so perfectly names the magic of Cather’s life, career, and craft. In fact, no other theory points, so precisely, to the author’s mercurial and alchemical relationship to the American West.

When Cather’s first critics began to ponder this emergence, they got stuck on the incommensurable components of her Nebraska roots.⁹ An oft-quoted anonymous review in the Nation from 1920 declared: Miss Willa Cather has worked at herself and her art. Today the product is finished and represents the triumph of mind over Nebraska.¹⁰ Echoing this view, Carl Van Doren announced that Cather was part of a larger revolt from the village.¹¹ In 1928, T. K. Whipple attempted to justify this revolt, arguing that Cather shows us communities of people who are little and petty but withal complacent and self-satisfied, who are intolerant and contemptuous of what differs from themselves.¹² Invoking the language of the reviewer in the Nation, the critic concluded, Her triumph over Nebraska implies that Miss Cather has also conquered the Nebraska in herself.¹³ Nebraska, in this vision, was a kind of geographical malady.

We need not follow these early critics in order to discover the reasonable question behind their condemnations of Nebraska. How, we ought to ask, does a girl raised on the Great Plains at the end of the nineteenth century become a major author in the canon of American literature? Scholars have often asked these kinds of questions about artists. How did a man with William Shakespeare’s background write Hamlet and King Lear? How did Mozart write The Magic Flute? In the case of Willa Cather, the questioning must center on her mercurial and experimental relationship with Nebraska. In ways Cather never stopped probing and in ways we have only begun to appreciate fully, author and state emerged together.

In the chapters that follow, I explore this symbiosis by focusing on Cather’s experimental approach to life and art. When the Pittsburgh Leader offered her a position as telegraph editor in 1897, she embraced the experiment.¹⁴ When she looked back at her reading during the first decade of her career, she recalled favoring French writers over English writers because they experimented more often and had a wider range of variety.¹⁵ Cather preferred to follow suit. In fact, as Jo Ann Middleton and Merrill Skaggs have pointed out, Cather was experimenting with every book she wrote.¹⁶ The same thing could be said about every decade of her early life.

Three crucial elements—memory, imagination, and craft—were at the heart of all this experimentation. Over and over again, in much of what she wrote, the author returned to memories. She recalled arriving in Nebraska, the color of the tall grass, scandals, and long days exploring the sandbars of the Republican River. But recollection alone would never have been enough to drive the kind of emergence I trace in this book: memory had to be transformed by imagination and craft.

From the first, the woman on the wheel in the 1890s understood intuitively that the past held keys to her emergence as an artist. Her first stories announce her commitment to Western memories, some quite personal, the kind of recollections that biographers trace to letters, some the result of a youth spent closely observing sunflowers and sandbars. Other memories were in many ways public. As I have suggested elsewhere, Cather, as she composed fiction about Nebraska, was always recomposing an archive of ‘memories’ preserved in the newspapers of her youth in Red Cloud.¹⁷ Other crucial parts of what I would call this matrix memory are the stories Cather gleaned from older settlers, including members of her own family, particularly Cather’s Aunt Franc and Uncle George, who had gone West in 1873.¹⁸

Knowing this, Cather scholars regularly turn to A Reader’s Companion to the Fiction of Willa Cather compiled by John March and edited by Marilyn Arnold. The volume (which runs to well over eight hundred pages) provides detailed information about real people, real places, texts, music, animals, plants, and so on that Cather either refers to directly or transforms in her fiction. A little time spent with this wonderful reference tool will help any reader appreciate Cather’s explanation to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: ‘Life began for me . . . when I ceased to admire and began to remember.’¹⁹

Eventually, while working on O Pioneers!, Cather discovered a powerful affirmation of her instinctual emphasis on memory in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, first published in French in 1907 and translated into English in 1911. According to Bergson, we are all artisans, moving through our daily lives moment by moment, creating ourselves continually.²⁰ Our creating is an organic process, the philosopher explained, that looks a lot like emergence: our personality shoots, grows, and ripens without ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before. We may go further: it is not only something new, but something unforeseeable.²¹ The past, according to Bergson, informs all this unforeseeable growth: all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it.²² Cather was clearly inspired. As Tom Quirk explains, Cather found in Bergson’s philosophy a way to use her own best talents in the service of an art that was significantly more subtle and confident than that of her apprentice years.²³

Cather certainly owed something to Bergson, but she owed even more to her near obsession with imaginative trial and error, a disposition rooted in her DNA but also in the American West. Indeed, I believe that Cather’s youth in Webster County informed her imagination in countless ways we have yet to appreciate. For instance, I think we can say that the author inherited a distinctly territorial imagination, a living poiesis rooted in the colorful vicissitudes of the recent territorial past that had enveloped Cather from the moment she set foot in the region.²⁴ Although it is still valuable to follow Susan J. Rosowski and think of Cather’s foreground beginning with the Homestead Act of 1862,²⁵ I think we gain insight by tracing the author’s early influences back to 1854 and the birth of the territory with the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

More than anything else, the territorial imagination encouraged people to think big, take chances, and imagine the world and themselves—otherwise. Growing up in a country town on the Great Plains in the 1880s, Cather inherited this bold disposition. At first glance, the writers of the so-called local color movement—such as Rose Terry Cooke, Bret Harte, E. W. Howe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—seem to have much in common with our author, but the territorial inheritance made Cather unique. Where the local colorists stuck to conventional literary forms, Cather liked to envision things otherwise.

A less disciplined author might have dithered with such a recipe, but early on in her career the woman on the wheel declared her devotion to what she called the mighty craft: In the kingdom of art there is no God, but one God, and his service is so exacting that there are few men born of woman who are strong enough to take the vows.²⁶ If art originated in the abstract realms of memory and imagination, it was made in the studio and the workshop, where experimental techniques and conventions could be refined through exacting service. As Bernice Slote and M. Catherine Downs have argued so convincingly, the nineteenth-century newspaper office was Cather’s first workshop.²⁷ After writing and editing for Red Cloud newspapers in high school, Cather went on to refine her craft in Lincoln and Pittsburgh. I found, she once explained, that newspaper writing did a great deal of good for me in working off the purple flurry of my early writing (WCP, 12). Of course, it should be pointed out that while Cather was working off bad habits, she was also assimilating newspapering techniques that came to permeate her evolving imagination. Nevertheless, as the years went by, she became convinced that journalism was undermining her literary craft. When I think of Willa Cather’s emergence, I think of the author working through challenges formed out of memory, imagination, and craft on a long road from her arrival on the Great Plains in 1883 to the publication of O Pioneers! in 1913.

It goes without saying that I am hardly the first, or even the hundredth, person to study Cather’s relationship to Nebraska and her place in the American West. Serious scholarly interest in the relationship began with The World of Willa Cather, Mildred Bennett’s detailed study of Cather’s Nebraska, first published in 1951.²⁸ A new era of literary criticism rooted in the American West was signaled in 1989 by Robert Thacker’s The Great Prairie Fact, which remains the definitive study of literary imagination and the prairie, with Cather very much at its center. More recently, Rosowski and Janis Stout have announced approaches to gender and imagination in the West that will continue to inspire new interpretations of Cather’s work.²⁹ Indeed, over the years, many other gifted scholars have contributed to the evolving conversation and their voices appear throughout this book.

That said, a knowledgeable reader could be forgiven for feeling that Willa Cather’s relationship with the West, like the land itself, was largely settled some time ago. In fact, Cather’s West has always been, to borrow a term from historian Elliott West, contested—by its inhabitants, historians, Cather’s readers, and (of course) by the author herself.³⁰ It would, I believe, be a serious mistake to suppose that Cather ever solved her roots, any more than she resolved her ambivalence over her sexuality and identity.³¹ As Ann Romines has pointed out, much remains to be said about the way Cather’s Virginian origins matter to her life and career.³² Meanwhile, anyone familiar with Cather’s attachment to the Southwest will read the chapters that follow and realize that I have only begun to engage the author’s relationship with that particular part of the American West. Needless to say, Cather’s geographical imagination will always inspire fresh commentary and new paradigms.

Any explanation of this radical energy probably begins by acknowledging that the West may be the greatest paradox of all in Cather’s writings. Adapting the author’s language from her famous essay The Novel Démeublé,³³ I would put it this way. In Cather’s poetry and fiction, the West is the thing constantly named that suggests more than it names. For Cather, the West is an inexplicable excess implying a verbal mood and an emotional aura that no writer before Cather had imagined possible on the Great Plains.

The author acknowledged some of this complexity when talking about her work. As everyone knows, she wrote in a famous little essay, "Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background; its very name throws the delicately atuned [sic] critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment."³⁴ The year was 1931, and Cather was in a magisterial mood, ready to shape the story of her emergence once and for all. The acclaimed author of O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, The Song of the Lark, and A Lost Lady could acknowledge what everyone knows and know more. She could even bend literary history to her will. Her first novel? Alexander’s Bridge (1912), of course. But she decreed that there were two. O Pioneers! (1913) was the real beginning because it had to do with a kind of country I loved (WCW, 93). Cather’s own public manifesto is clear: her artistic emergence was rooted in Nebraska. If only the author’s relationship with the region were so simple. . . .

Although critics often refer to Cather’s Midwestern home, the author was adamant that Nebraska was located in the West.³⁵ As a child in Virginia, she would have heard her father tell of the bears and wolves he saw while tramping about the West before he was married.³⁶ In Nebraska, newspapers of the time encouraged her vision by promoting live western towns in the state.³⁷ In her early cycling story Tommy, the Unsentimental (1896), Cather claims her region as the heroine surveys the eligible bachelors in a town modeled on Red Cloud: She knew plenty of active young business men and sturdy ranchers, the narrator confides, such as one meets about live western towns (CSF, 474). In Cather’s version of history, she had lived on a ranch and came from one of these towns.³⁸ Writing to Ellen Gere on July 27, 1896, about this time in her life, she describes spending happy moments with James Axtell’s boy Philly: Because I come from the West he expected me to tell him Indian stories, and I fulfill my role in a way that would convulse you could you hear me (SLWC, 37). In the famous interview of 1913 published in the Philadelphia Record, she explains, When I was eight years old, my father moved from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to that Western country (WCP, 9). In 1925, the novelist reported, Next to writing I love to prowl around the Western country, seeing little towns and how people live in them. To me the real West begins with the Missouri [River] (WCP, 76).

Cather had good reasons to think about Nebraska in this way.³⁹ Her reference to the Missouri River is precise. It was the body of water that marked old and new for the Kansas-Nebraska Territory in 1854. Pioneers headed for the Great Plains, for Utah and California, thought of the Missouri as their embarkation point. West of this boundary, rainfall diminished in dramatic fashion.⁴⁰ Grass dominated the region, running from tallgrass prairie through an ecotone of mixed-grass prairie to shortgrass prairie and then mountains. This was the land of bison, cowboys, forts, trading posts, wind, and sky. Identifying with this territorial realm of adventure and possibility, Cather liked to remind her readers that she came from the real West.⁴¹

In claiming this genuine region, the author was participating in the ongoing competition for the authentic in Western writing that stretched all the way back to the expedition into present-day Kansas led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1541. Although the idea can still cause an academic ruckus, most serious readers will acknowledge that the real West, like the true West, is a fiction, part of a larger rhetorical project that has always invoked notions of truth and authenticity based on firsthand experience.⁴² Cather clearly understood this rhetoric and took care to capitalize on it while maintaining her own sophisticated sense of irony. As William R. Handley observes, In that ironic gap between representation and experience, or between romance and realism, Cather’s art achieves at once a sense of historical authenticity and aesthetic duplicity.⁴³

It was a prescient stance for a writer who would one day claim a spot in the canon of American literature. As Rosowski has pointed out, From the beginning of discussions about American literature, writers identified its ‘Americanness’ with the West.⁴⁴ Cather recognized early on that her emergence as an American author depended on this vision of the West. And, thanks to Nina Baym’s impressive study Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927, we know that Cather has taken her place among some 343 women who published books about the region during this period.⁴⁵ In his laudatory review of O Pioneers!, Gardner W. Wood announced her triumph: There have been plenty of realistic studies of the West, but this book . . . is the West in action.⁴⁶

Readers familiar with Frederick Jackson Turner may be thinking of his Frontier Thesis at this point. At Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Turner announced, The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.⁴⁷ To the casual observer, Cather and Turner probably seemed like sympathetic contemporaries. Turner celebrated westward expansion for creating a composite nationality for the American people.⁴⁸ Namby-pamby European niceties had been cast aside to engender a homogenous Western character imbued with resourcefulness and masculinity.

By contrast, when Cather wrote about the real West, she thought of plurality, of women and immigrants freed, here and there, from certain oppressive conventions, mingling distinct European traits and practices in vibrant spheres of collaboration.⁴⁹ Outlining this vision, Rosowski describes an author intent on freeing herself from masculine codes.⁵⁰ Building on Rosowski’s argument, Stout argues that Cather not only contested established traditions of representing the West but actually helped to found an alternative western tradition, a tradition of women’s own aimed at gender liberation.⁵¹

I think we gain a sharper picture of how Cather’s experimentation led to this alternative West by locating it within the territorial imagination. In the chapters that follow, I want to mark the places where feisty, yet venerable impulses from territorial days inspired and informed Cather’s gambits, which were always pushing back at the masculine visions of male writers such as Brett Harte, Hamlin Garland, William Allen White, and Owen Wister. When the latter author announced the arrival of the modern Western in 1902 with The Virginian, Cather immediately recognized a coherent and powerful recasting of territorial impulses and materials. In the fiction that followed, the author was always competing for control of these elements. As John Swift remarks, Cather recognized that she herself might also be a sort of cowboy writer.⁵² Having charted this alternative vision, Rosowski is surely right to argue that Cather’s My Ántonia triumphs by establishing its independence from the Western.⁵³

Over the years, Cather did her best to manage her relationship with the West, both publicly and privately. Early in her career, she offered myth. In what may be the first portrait of the emerging celebrity, Jeanette Barbour recounts the youth of a successful woman editor in the March 28, 1897, edition of the Pittsburg Press:

She went west with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, a small ranch town. When she was a girl of fifteen her father foreclosed a mortgage on the only newspaper in the town, and as he was not a newspaper man, he left the paper in charge of his daughter until he could get someone else to conduct it. (WCP, 2)

In this well-crafted story, the junior Horace Greeley simply goes west and inherits a newspaper. When The Troll Garden appeared in 1905, the reviewer in The Bookman explained that in Nebraska Cather lived for a while a healthful, quite unliterary life, spending most of her time in the open on horseback (WCP, 5). A gentle unliterary creature of the grasslands, Cather needed no roof to shield her from the elements.

This myth took its final form in the story Cather told Latrobe Carroll in a 1921 interview: On the Nebraska prairie some years ago, a little girl rode about on her pony, among settlements of Scandinavians and Bohemians, listening to their conversation, fascinated by their personalities. She was Willa Sibert Cather, who, as a woman, was to give in her novels the story of their struggle with the soil (WCP, 19). In Carroll’s retelling, Cather’s relationship with the West was spare and fateful, the road to success inevitable.

Cather knew otherwise. She knew that her relationship with the real West was complicated, and she knew she would never try to explain all of the complexities to her reading public, many of whom would never comprehend the prairie world she wrote about. So, over the course of her career, she developed a number of conventional ways of talking about her origins to people who did not appreciate the Great Plains. Her often-quoted interview from 1913 in the Philadelphia Record stands as a perfect example. How, the interviewer inquires, did you come to write about that flat part of the prairie west, Miss Cather, which not many people find interesting? Cather responded by mapping the world of O Pioneers!, which had just appeared. She explained that although she did not see the country at the very beginning of settlement, it was still wild enough and bleak enough when we got there. My grandfather’s homestead was about eighteen miles from Red Cloud—a little town on the Burlington, named after the old Indian chief (WCP, 9). Cather was clearly implying that a wild prairie is fascinating, even if it seems flat to someone who does not know it. More important, she was insisting that the Nebraska of her fiction was more than prairie. It was also Red Cloud, the prairie town that served to orient her recollections. In other words, Cather’s Nebraska was both territory (an old Anglo-Norman word for the land surrounding a town or manor) and town (an older word for land enclosed for habitation). When she mapped and remapped Nebraska in her fiction, Red Cloud was always the compass