University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Fall 1982 An Exploration Of Cather's Early Writing Bernice Slote University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Slote, Bernice, "An Exploration Of Cather's Early Writing" (1982). Great Plains Quarterly. 1636. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1636 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. AN EXPLORATION OF CATHER'S EARLY WRITING BERNICE SLOTE Willa Cather has been fairly well studied as a thought, the design grander, the problems novelist of the Nebraska pioneer, a writer more complex. whose books have a lyric nostalgia for other Perhaps we are better equipped to address times that were nicer than ours. This maybe those problems now. More than a half century an oversimplification. One might say, for exam­ has passed since she did her major work, but ple, that she wrote about Nebraska no more the gap that sometimes comes between the than she wrote about Rome; that it was not artist's creation and the reader's understanding man's retreat that concerned her so much as may be a time for the tuning of the ear. Critical man's extension into other planes, other powers; terms and concepts now at hand seem curiously that she may belong not with Sinclair Lewis appropriate: alienation and the search for and Edith Wharton but with Marcel Proust, identity, archetype and myth, antinovel and James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. I suggest antihero; theories of simultaneous time, of these possibilities after several years of fortu­ double selves, masks, and images. Cather would nate exploration into the first twenty years of understand some of these concepts, as she Cather's writing career-the twenty years before would understand Andre Malraux and the her first novels, Alexander's Bridge (1912) search for the Grail, because she knew Homer, and 0 Pioneers! (1913). I say "fortunate" Virgil, and Ovid; Heine, Lucretius, and Ruskin; because it has been like opening the curtains Keats's Endymion, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, wider on a stage, revealing other windows and and a good many generations of the always­ a new landscape. The room is larger than we changing gods. When Cather began her career as a novelist she was forty, with one career of some distinc­ An emeritus professor of English at the Uni­ tion as a journalist and editor already behind versity of Nebraska-Lincoln, Bernice Slote is her. Her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl the author of The Kingdom of Art (1966) and (1940), was published when she was in her late many other contributions to Cather scholar­ sixties. The public novels, stories, and essays ship, including critical editions of April Twi­ that appeared during this second career are lights (1968) and Alexander's Bridge (1977). nearly matched in volume by the body of 210 AN EXPLORATION OF CATHER'S EARLY WRITING 211 writing-much of it in a journalistic under­ some conclusions and identify new directions ground-that was published during the twenty based on her early writing. This wo~k, which years of her first career: newspaper columns, proved to be more extensive than I had thought articles, reviews, and stories. This is not too possible, consists of weekly columns published different from the careers of other writers who in Lincoln newspapers from 1894 to 1896, began as journalists except in two respects. including a number of essays in which she ex­ First, little of her early writing has been read, panded her ideas of art and artists. Taken to­ even by Cather scholars; and second, all of the gether, they reveal a remarkable measure of early writing relates to the major work after continuity with her later, better-known work.! 1912 in an unusual way. The two careers were The extent of Cather's writing is one thing, not separate; rather, the writing (both good and but its continuity is more significant. The fust bad) shows extraordinary continuity, with newspaper pieces have implications for the links, repetitions, recurrences, developments, interpretation of her major work, both in tone and personal relationships-almost, in a Prous­ and in content. For one thing, she was a tian sense, one book, with the writer more at romantic and a primitive. She wrote, often with the center than she ever intended or wanted sweeping, insistent rhythms, in a passionate to be. voice about elemental things. Often she suited Much of Cather's early material has been style to subject. She seemed to think allegori­ unavailable or unknown-buried in old news­ cally, write figuratively. And she knew a great papers and magazines, published unsigned or deal more than I thought she did: there is under pseudonyms, and sometimes virtually hardly a paragraph without some blending of erased by the writer herself (for it was her quotations, a figure of speech, or an allusion choice to isolate the novels from the writing to the Bible, Shakespeare, classical writers, that led up to them). Cather's work has not French writers, classical and Norse mythology, been accurately read, I believe, in part because oriental themes, new books, old books, theater so much of it has been unknown. Reading out gossip, or theories of history and of fate. Critics of context is always difficult, but in a writer in the 1920s and 1930s sometimes thought that whose total work has special unity and inter­ Cather's books should have had more realistic relationships, it is likely to be misleading as social criticism of Main Street and Babbittry. well. We must admit also that we have handi­ But she had written that book before 1896 capped ourselves by fashionable judgments; in her newspaper columns-a running attack on by critical assumptions made, held, and never philistia and especially its stupidity and pre­ reexamined; by our own ignorance of the nine­ tensions and values. Honorable ignorance was teenth-century milieu in which Cather devel­ allowed, but not pedantry or analytics about oped (who now reads Alphonse Daudet, art. Some themes are not surprising, ·only that Alexandre Dumas,. Pierre Loti, or George they were in her hand that early: art and Sand?); and by the neglect of clues and allu­ religion are the same, she said, and she had a sions within the work that in T. S. Eliot's The habit of religious-chivalric reference (Our Lady Waste Land (to give only one example) would of Art, Our Lady of Beauty); the idea that have drawn forth tomes of analysis. Cather's Dumas needed only four walls and a passion own clarity and precision may also have con­ appears in her mature statement of her theory cealed as well as revealed, but one need not of art in "The Novel Demeuble," but she have expected notes from the novelist. With fust used this reference in her newspaper a severe artistic integrity, she chose to suggest, columns as early as 1896.2 but never to explain. When the newspaper comments stop after A definitive appraisal of Willa Cather's 1900, it is harder to find her direct voice. But accomplishment probably will not be possible it is natural to wonder what happened to the for years to come. Yet it is possible to offer free-wheeling Willa, reckless and sharp and 212 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1982 dominant, full of old passions and incantations Other accounts of singers and actresses from of joy and beauty; whether the first part of the the early days are deeply infused into The Song story did indeed fit the last. So I read every­ of the Lark and into the concept of Thea Kron­ thing-columns, fiction, essays-from beginning borg herself, and Cather's statements before to end, in order. I could see then the growth 1896 on the nature of art are transmuted into and variation of theme and style and the final the fiction. Stories, too, move into other absorption into the body of her fiction. In the works: the wild Aztec moon of "The En­ first stories, elements of the newspaper columns chanted Bluff" (1909) blends into the mesa were in plain sight (themes, references, habits world of The Professor's House (1925);4 both of speech, and even variations of whole passages story and book have foreshortened endings in taken from the earlier work). Increasingly the which dreams and distance come down to the comment and allusions were woven into the cold light of the usual day. The Professor's substance of her style. She used quotations, House, it is especially interesting to note, has or parts of them; myths, or fragments of myth absorbed most of the elements of Alexander's recombined; old themes in modern dress­ Bridge (1912). eventually so smoothly refocused that one Reading the total work is also a corrective. might read the story (or the novel) and never Before 1896 there are allusions to Henry James think beyond the primary conscious level, but never the outright devotion the young Willa though the allusions were there to be recog­ Cather gave to the French Romantics, Dumas nized. Continuity and development were un­ or Daudet; or to Stevenson or Tolstoy. She did mistakable, and knowing the origins of themes write of James, but ambivalently, admiring his made recurrences more dramatic and signifi­ sentences and phrases: "You are never startled, cant.