Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter the Willa Cather Society 326 N
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Copyright © 1993 by the Willa Cather Pioneer ISSN 0197-663X Memorial and Educational Foundation Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter The Willa Cather Society 326 N. Webster Street VOLUME XXXVl, No. 4 Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970 Winter, 1992-93 Bibliographical Issue Telephone (402) 746-2653 Theme for Red Cloud’s annual Street Car Days was 0 Pioneers!. The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and the Willa Cather Historical Center worked jointly on a float recreating "The White Mulberry Tree" scene. The clothing collection donated to the WCPM by Helen and Harry Obitz furnished costumes for the 0 Pioneers! parade. Works on Cather: Willa Cather Cather Events Summer 1991- and the in Summer 1992: Intimacy of Art, Red Cloud and A Bibliographical Or: In Beyond Essay Defense of Privacy1 For the sixth year, WILLA Virgil Albertini CATHER’S BIRTHDAY was cele- Susan J. Rosowski brated in Red Cloud. On December ~orthwest Missouri State University of Nebraska- University 6 the children were entertained at Lincoln the Cather House. They went An abundance of wdting about During a discussion at an straight to the attic, to the children’s Willa Cather continues, although international seminar held in Red haven, and read excerpts from the critical output of this past year Cloud and attended by professional "The Best Years." The children dipped below the sixty articles and scholar-critics and laypersons, three could look around and see what five books of 1989-1990 and the critics expounded at some length was being described to them by sixty-five articles and eight books of about the symbolism of the snake- Cather herself. Also, on December 1990-1991. (Here, I need to rectify in-the-garden episode in My ,~n- 6, the Cather Historical Center a comment I made about Mary tonia, one detailing its phallic impli- hosted its third Victorian Christmas Ryder’s Willa Cather and Classical cation, another its Edenic imagery, Tea at the Cather House. The par- (Continued on Page 53) (Continued on Next Page) (Continued on Page 58) 47 WILLA CATHER AND legendary sense of privacy is an essential ingredient in THE INTIMACY OF ART, (Continued) that art. and the third its comment upon a patriarchal society. Finally one of the laypersons spoke up: "But remem- During her apprentice period while a student at ber, there really are snakes in Nebraska." I sometimes the University of Nebraska (1890-1895) and an editor recall the snakes in the garden when I consider the in Pittsburgh and New York (1896-1912), Willa Cather explosion of academic interest in Cather these past wrote short stories, poetry, and m especially -- fifteen years. Critics have discovered that Willa Ca- reviews. In these reviews she directly addressed what ther’s lucid, apparently simple fiction is a fertile field for it means to be an artist, an elevated calling that leads the most sophisticated and intellectual of theories. She to a grim life. Cather characteristically employed is, it turns out, fine grist for the academic mill, which is metaphors of withdrawal and distance to write of the turning out an avalanche of writing about her m now artist’s "forsaking" the world and lifting "himself up into averaging over sixty articles and several books a year. the clear firmament of creation where the world is not." "But remember," I imagine a voice saying to us all, "He should be among men but not one of them, in the "Cather has always had readers lots of them." world but not of it," she declared (1894; KA 407). She Indeed, this recent upsurge has its ironies, placing described writing as a confrontation with intractable Cather firmly in an academy of which she wanted no subjects and a struggle with her medium, for "ink and part, privileging her status in a canon by arguing that paper are so rigidly exacting" that writing means being she broke with it, and producing criticism that her exposed and made vulnerable: "One may lie to one’s reader would often find incomprehensible. As Sharon self, lie to the world, lie to God, even, but to one’s pen O’Brien has written in understatement, "since Cather one cannot lie." In writing, "every artificial aid fails you. valued the nonacademic over the professional reader All that you have been taught leaves you, all that you (no matter how sympathetic), she might not be entirely have stolen lies discovered. You are then a translator, pleased by this development" (123, "The Case Against without a lexicon, without notes, and you are to trans- WC"). late --God" (1895; KA 409). Through these comments I am, for the moment, interested not in her critics runs the idea of being unprotected, insecure, defense- but in Cather’s readers, the ones she wrote for and the less, separated from the warmth and comfort of ones who have remained faithful through (and perhaps ordinary living. "For the business of an artist’s life is oblivious to) her vicissitudes of critical and canonical ¯.. ceaseless and unremitting labor .... the poet’s fortune. Why do so many people feel so close to work has so little to do with his life and often his life Cather’s books (readers don’t tend to feel close to has so little poetry in it" (1896; KA 413). Cather hardly Cather as an independent person, but to her through mentions readers in these early essays, where she her writing) that, as if recalling first meeting a spouse was giving her allegiance to God in the Kingdom of or beloved friend, they recall in detail when they first Art. From an aesthetic high road, she passed down read one of them? Yet it is a question that critics seem judgments, and these judgments were often harshly slightly embarrassed about, and the usual answers negative. She became known as "the meat ax critic," seem evasive and condescending m that Cather wrote her attitude toward art following that of competitive with nostalgia about a stable past, that she affirmed individuation identified with male relationships. the importance of family and place, and that she In her stories, also, Cather sacrificed life to art. described the roots we yearn for. So the question I Most obviously -- and to my mind interestingly be- began with is a simple one: how might we understand cause of the creative stance she was later to adopt -- the exceptionally close, personal relationship that she used prototypes in ways that would surely cause Cather’s readers forge with her books? them pain. As Mark Madigan has discussed, recently Considering this question has been a pleasure be- discovered letters have revealed that Cather based her cause it has led me to expected places -- to look yet story "The Profile" upon an unflattering portrait of an again at the change in Cather’s writing between 1912 acquaintance in the recognizable details of a birthmark, and 1913, between her skillful but conventional first dress, and manner; and she published the story novel, Alexander’s Bridge, and her second first novel despite warnings from their mutual friend, D~rothy (there were two, she later said), O Pioneers!. It has led Canfield, that doing so would cause pain and even me to reconsider the autobiographical impulse that danger to its model. She used not only the manner- runs through Cather’s writing, and to realize that isms but even the name of Flavia Canfield for another, though we have identified persons and places Cather similarly unflattering character -- that of the shallow wrote about and though we have used the fiction to collector of artists in "Flavia and Her Artists." In more psychoanalyze her, we have largely ignored the impor- subtle ways, too, Cather sacrificed life to art. In later tance of the autobiographical impulse to her art. It has years she spoke of having been "afraid that people, led me also to ask about the importance of privacy to just as they were, were not quite good enough," so Cather. These questions have led to broader ones feeling she had ".to trim them up, to ’prettify’ them." about gender and creativity, and to my argument here Thus when writing her story "Peter" (an early version m that Cather wrote an art of intimacy, and that her of ,~,ntonia’s father, who feels such loneliness in 48 Nebraska that he commits suicide), she made him a someone not altogether congenial;to whom you had violinist who had played for Bernhardt, though her to be talking all the time" (Willa Cather on Writing, 92- model was "just a fiddler -- and not even a very good 3). Conceiving of creativity as talking with -- or writing fiddler" (1931; Bohlke, 123-24). to -- a friend was, as O’Brien has argued, the liberat- That was all to change with O Pioneers!, the book ing strategy Cather needed3, and she repeated it the that is vintage Cather. With it Cather was speaking in rest of her life. Cather dedicated her next book, The her own voice -- that is clear; what has puzzled Song of the Lark, to Isabelle McClung; over two readers is how she did so. It is not simply that she decades later she said that McClung was the person turned from inherited materials to native ones, for for whom she had written all her books (Woodress though she had set her 1912 novel, Alexander’s 479). This was, then, the turn seen with O Pioneers!, Bridge, in Boston and London, she had written earlier at which time Cather embarked upon a life-long forging stories about Nebraska and its people. But she was of intimacy, revealing herself personally in her art even dissatisfied with those stories: "most of them were while withdrawing from public view in her life.