Newsletter & Review

Willa Cather NEWSLETTER & REVIEW VOLUME 54, NO. 1 SUMMER 2010 “Spirit of Place” Cather at Bowdoin, 1925 Shadows on the Rock: ’Toinette and les filles du roi Scenes from the 2010 Spring Conference Preserving Our Past, Pioneering Our Future Willa Cather NEWSLETTER & REVIEW VOLUME 54, NO. 1 SUMMER 2010 4 12 14 16 27 4 The Genius Revisited: 22 Remembrances: Willa Cather and Chuck Mignon and Linda Ross Spirit of Place Guy Reynolds and Robert Thacker Joseph C. Murphy 12 Scenes from the 55th Annual 24 Preserving Our Past, Willa Cather Spring Conference Pioneering Our Future “Miss Cather Talks on Technique” John Murphy Delivers Santa Fe 14 Fredric “Fritz” Klees 25 400th Anniversary Lecture on Cather 16 Les filles du roi 27 Family Bequest Continues and Female Destinations Cather Legacy in Shadows on the Rock Jacqueline H. Harris Prairie photographs by Barb Kudrna WILLA CATHER NEWSLETTER & REVIEW / SUMMER 2010 2 Willa Cather Letter from the President NEWSLETTER & REVIEW Jay Yost The fun at the Cather Foundation just keeps comin’. promoting the life, times, settings and After hosting in rapid succession a very successful Prairie work of Willa Cather. Writers’ Workshop (our third), an amazingly wonderful Specifically, these added funds will Spring Conference celebrating “Food, Drink and Willa be used to expand the work we are doing Cather’s Writing” (our 55th), and a thoroughly appreciated with the Foundation’s Cather Archives Elderhostel/Road Scholar week in Red Cloud (also our in Red Cloud, and to redouble our third), the Foundation’s Board and the staff decided we just efforts to get school kids in the region can’t sit on our laurels. and throughout Nebraska reading Cather and then coming So our new endeavor to move the Foundation forward is to her hometown to see those stories brought to life. There our aptly named campaign: The Willa Cather Foundation: is no greater work we can do than to act as a steward to the 12 Preserving our Past, Pioneering our Future. As noted objects entrusted to us, while also ensuring a new generation below and described on page 24, we are gathering several of readers has the opportunity to love Cather’s words and challenge grants from Foundation supporters which will works as we do. need to be matched by the end of this year. The goal is to So on we go, upward and onward, with the help of your raise our annual giving base by at least $60,000 to enable support. And with that, let me introduce the talented and us to get even more serious about fulfilling our mission of lovely Judy Keller. 27 May We Get Personal? Judy Keller It is not often I have the honor to share the President’s She reassured me that changing place, page. I especially appreciate the opportunity to let the Cather being among strangers, being “out Foundation’s friends and scholars know how much I look West,” having mixed feelings, were all forward to working with you to enhance the Foundation’s good things and that I would adjust. important work. Her wise counsel helped me select my As your development consultant, I ask you to read on first job: building a community radio page 24 about the special challenge at the heart of a new station from scratch on the central High campaign: The Willa Cather Foundation: Preserving our Plains. She certainly encouraged me to Past, Pioneering our Future. It is an opportunity that keep reading about strong characters, smart women and the can’t be missed. American rural experience. She proved to me that a good When I was in eighth grade my mother gave me a worn book is better than indifferent company and there’s nothing copy of My Ántonia. We had recently abandoned the East wrong with staying home on a Saturday night. Coast for a small town in Colorado, much to the chagrin of Recently I gave my eighth-grade daughter a copy of My fancy relatives and colleagues. Ántonia. Cather’s legacy is a wonderful gift both to receive As a teenager, I was sure my mother was wrong about and to share. most things, and her moving West was clearly one of those I thank the Foundation for keeping Cather’s gifts alive things. Young and without friends in a new, small town, I and I look forward to sharing them widely in the coming Prairie photographs by Barb Kudrna discovered the world of Willa Cather at the local library. months. WILLA CATHER NEWSLETTER & REVIEW / SUMMER 2010 www.willacather.org 3 The Genius Revisited: Willa Cather and Spirit of Place Joseph C. Murphy Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei lexandra’s epiphanic return to the Divide from a with authorial genius, reframes some major interpretive tour of the river country in O Pioneers! (1913) problems in O Pioneers! and situates Cather’s isA widely considered the novel’s decisive passage, not Southwestern novels as avatars of the genius’s progress only for the heroine’s relationship to the prairie, but for in that region, where a community of modernists Cather’s as well. As “[h]er eyes [drink] in the breadth pursued “spirit of place” in relation to American Indian of” the land, “rich and strong and glorious,” Alexandra cultures. The development of genius loci in literary forges a reciprocal bond with place paralleling Cather’s history and in Cather’s oeuvre sharply illuminates her first novelistic embrace of Nebraska: “Then the Genius understanding of place, history, and literature itself. of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes The flexible genius concept that emerged in ancient across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a Roman culture has ramified throughout the Western tra- human will before. The history of every country begins dition. The Romans believed each person has an exter- in the heart of a man or a woman” (64). Critics have not nal soul, or genius, a second self that accompanies him fully contextualized the topos unifying these fictional through life. (To be precise, each person is guarded by and metafictional strains: the ancient Roman concept two genii—one good, one evil.) Genii were attached to of genius loci, certainly familiar to the Latinist Cather, certain places as well—the genius of a river or village, whereby a tutelary spirit presides over a particular for example—and peaceful dwelling required an alli- landscape.1 The genius loci device, which evolved ance between one’s personal genii and the genius loci. through the Western tradition toward an association The Romans also associated each paterfamilias, in his WILLA CATHER NEWSLETTER & REVIEW / SUMMER 2010 4 reproductive power, with a genius connected to the uni- role[,] . poetry renews itself by its contact with what versal Genius of generation. From early on, then, genius may seem to be archaic forces” (335). For Cather, first could be personal or supra-personal, local or universal alienated by Nebraska’s bleakness and later its materi- (Lewis 169-70). Each successive age has managed to alism, the Genius of the Divide was a bid for literary conjure the genii it needed. The Christian Middle Ages renewal—for literary genius—not an allegorical prop favored Genius as universal generative force (170). The but a typological structure, a key to her fictional design. Renaissance entertained, at turns, the universal spirit, Throughout her work Cather articulates, in modernist private spirits, and genii attached to local topography forms, the dialectical relationships among cultures, his- (Starnes). Beginning in the eighteenth century genius tories, and geographies that constitute the spirits of her loci was increasingly associated with picturesque aes- landscapes. thetics. Alexander Pope admonished landscape design- From early on Cather understood genius loci as a ers to “Consult the Genius of the Place in all” (“Epistle principle of cultural fusion reflecting the progress of to Burlington” 57), and the British Romantics persis- civilization from East to West. In “Behind the Singer tently courted the device, eyeing a marriage between Tower” (1912), a skyscraper mixing “Jewish,” “Per- the genius of poetry, typically imported from the East, sian,” and Buddhist effects “watch[es] over the city and and the spirit of the English landscape. In The Prelude the harbor like a presiding Genius. come out of Asia Wordsworth swears off genii as personified allegorical quietly in the night, no one knew just when or how” figures and seeks an enlightened consensus between the (16). To the theology student Norman Girrard in “The common English countryside and his poetic genius as Conversion of Sum Loo” (1900), the odors of a San such (Hartman 328-30). As John Dixon Hunt has ar- Francisco Chinese import store evoke “whole Orient gued, the “imaginative liaison between genius loci and landscapes, as though the ghosts of old-world cities had an artistic genius encountering it” is “as much the actu- been sealed up in the boxes, like the djin in the Ara- al subject [of romantic poetry] as the original landscape bian bottle” (4)—this last simile reflecting a common itself”; “a landscape is given voice at the same time as confusion in Western literature between the Roman ge- we learn how it possesses meaning” (238-39). nius and the proverbial Arab trickster. In “Paul’s Case” Hunt sees the Romantics’ engagement with genius (1905) Cather fuses personal genius, local genius, and culminating in the work of John Ruskin, Cather’s early Arab genie in her description of Paul’s flight of fancy intellectual hero, whose chapter “On Turnerian Topog- at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall, where “the first sigh of raphy” in Modern Painters defines “spirit of place” as the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit the artist’s imaginative encapsulation of historical and within him, something that struggled there like the Ge- cultural experience into highly compressed landscape nius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman” (75).

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