WILLA SIBERT CATHER
Some novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their
best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show
steady growth and a very few show steady and rapid growth. Of these last
is Willa Sibert Cather.
She has written four novels. You pick up _Alexander’s Bridge_ and read
with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It
is--excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all
through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you
are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is
nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell
to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon
another book by the same author and start to read.
Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as
your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather
better than a filled one). _O Pioneers!_ is in its way an epic of the
Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping
panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and
the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough
believer in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though
intensely satisfied with _O Pioneers!_ you never for a moment expect
more of her--perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would
be in any way reasonable.
A year or so passes. You get hold of a new novel by her, as much thicker
than _O Pioneers!_ as _O Pioneers!_ was thicker than _Alexander’s
Bridge_. It is called _The Song of the Lark_. You eye it speculatively.
You start to read it confidently but not breathlessly. And ere you are
halfway through you know that she has excelled herself again.
_The Song of the Lark_ is a much bigger thing than her second novel in
every respect except one--it has not the same peculiar quality of
seeming to sum up in a single life the whole history of a part of
America in the period of that life. But wait--think a moment. Does not
this chronicle of Thea Kronberg, the singer, sum up in a single life the
whole emotional history of thousands of lives? Why, yes; you had not
thought of it but that is so! Thea Kronberg the girl, struggling ahead
toward some goal as yet unsuspected; Thea Kronberg the woman, fighting
with all her force to gain a goal perceived but hopelessly distant; Thea
Kronberg the great singer, fighting and triumphing for the sake of the
fight--what is this but the record of every superb artist who has ever
lived?
From the wonder of those second and third books, each so much bigger
than the one before, we turn somewhat bewilderedly to the probable
wonder of the woman who could--and did--write them. But here no wonder
lies. At least, you may read the external record of Willa Sibert
Cather’s life and find nothing that fully, or even adequately, explains
her growth as a novelist. If there were only a hint! But read through
this bit of autobiography and see if you can find any.
“Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of
Charles Fectigue Cather and Virginia Sibert Boak. Though the Siberts
were originally Alsatians, and the Cathers came from County Tyrone,
Ireland, both families had lived in Virginia for several generations.
When Willa Cather was 9 years old her father left Virginia and settled
on a ranch in Nebraska, in a very thinly populated part of the State
where the acreage of cultivated land was negligible beside the
tremendous stretch of raw prairie. There were very few American families
in that district; all the near neighbors were Scandinavians, and ten or
twelve miles away there was an entire township settled by Bohemians.
“For a child accustomed to the quiet and the established order behind
the Blue Ridge, this change was very stimulating. There was no school
near at hand, and Miss Cather lived out of doors, winter and summer. She
had a pony and rode about the Norwegian and Bohemian settlements,
talking to the old men and women and trying to understand them. The
first two years on the ranch were probably more important to her as a
writer than any that came afterward.
“After some preparation in the high school at Red Cloud, Nebraska, Miss
Cather entered the State University of Nebraska, graduated at 19, and
immediately went to Pittsburgh and got a position on the Pittsburgh
_Leader_. She was telegraph editor and dramatic critic on this paper for
several years and then gave it up to take the place of the head of the
English department in the Allegheny High School.
“While she was teaching in the Allegheny High School she published her
first book of verse, _April Twilights_, and her first book of short
stories, _The Troll Garden_. The latter book attracted a good deal of
attention, and six months after it was published, in the winter of 1906,
Miss Cather went to New York to accept a position on the staff of
_McClure’s Magazine_. From 1908 until the autumn of 1912 Miss Cather was
managing editor of _McClure’s Magazine_, and during these four years did
no writing at all. In the fall of 1912 she took a house in Cherry
Valley, New York, and wrote a short novel, _Alexander’s Bridge_, and a
novelette, _The Bohemian Girl_, both of which appeared serially in
_McClure’s Magazine_. In the spring of 1913 Miss Cather went for a long
stay in Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating to some of the many
hardly-accessible Cliff Dweller remains and the remote mesa cities of
the Pueblo Indians.
“Miss Cather has an apartment at 5 Bank street in New York, where she
lives in winter. In the summer she goes abroad or returns to the West.
This summer [1915] she refused a tempting offer to write a series of
articles on the war situation in Europe to explore the twenty-odd miles
of Cliff Dweller remains that are hidden away in the southwest corner of
Colorado, near Mancos and Durango.”
Very nice, but it tells you nothing that you need to know if you are to
frame a hypothesis to account for Miss Cather’s astonishingly rapid
progress as a novelist. The material for _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of
the Lark_, or a good deal of it, was patently gathered in her
impressionable girlhood. The fine chapters of _The Song of the Lark_
which relate Thea Kronberg’s stay in the Cliff Dweller region with Fred
Ottenburg are outwardly explained by Miss Cather’s personal interest in
these ruins. What is not made in the least clear is the secret of her
own success. Let us look into some of the things she has said and see if
we can find a clew to it there.
“I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used
to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her
baking or buttermaking. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable
state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than
they said--as if I had actually got inside another person’s skin. If one
begins that early it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again--no
other adventure ever carries one quite so far.”
Do you detect something? Do you perceive (1) a set of impressions
acquired at the most plastic age and with a sharpness of configuration
never to be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellectual and
emotional feeling--of heart and mind--which carried the girl _beyond_
the spoken word; and also (3) an imaginative faculty which could go on
living a thing after merely hearing about it and living it through to
the unnarrated, possibly unexperienced, conclusion? Do you get a hint of
any or all of these things? Of course you do!
Going further we learn that when Miss Cather began to write she tried to
put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood into
her short stories. “The results,” we are informed, “never satisfied
her.” She discussed this dissatisfaction afterward.
“It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart,”
she argued. “From a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort and
disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I
decided that I wouldn’t write any more about the country and the people
for whom I had a personal feeling.
“Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all
of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them
and about where my work fell short. She said: ‘Write it as it is, don’t
try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way;
you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new,
don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story
that this or that magazine wants; write the truth and let them take it
or leave it.’
“It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the
thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett’s own work. I
dedicated _O Pioneers!_ to her because I had talked over some of the
characters with her, and in this book I tried to tell the story of the
people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word
of mouth.”
Ah! This is downright enlightening. Miss Cather does not specifically
say that she had to depart from actual persons when she came to do her
good work, but that is the inference we draw. She does not entirely lay
bare the real reason; and for the benefit of those who may be puzzled
over it let us supplement what she says.
There is a pitch of emotion at which the artist cannot work; he can only
see, feel, learn, store up; the rendering of what he has felt and seen
comes afterward. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in
tranquillity. He might just as well have extended the definition to
include all forms of art. When you or I come to sit down and put on
paper actual persons whom we knew and loved (or hated) we cannot do it
if the feeling is still very strong, any more than we can write about
them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake and our emotional and
mental disturbance is so great that we cannot collect our thoughts, or,
if we contrive to collect them partially, we cannot put them down on
paper. Tears blur the vision. We have to wait, then, until a little time
has passed and we are calmer; until we can _recall_ in a warm,
remembering glow, the feeling of that time, recall it just sufficiently
for our artist’s purpose. We sail through it then, but are not awash.
Very often this intensity of feeling about actual persons so persists as
to make it impracticable to write honestly about them at all. And so the
artist is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying forth of other
persons and characters, typical enough, real enough, true enough, but
not the flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. About these creations
of his own he can write and write well. And this, we are surmising, is
the experience that Miss Cather underwent as so many others have
undergone it before her.
In her case the difference was that she had an imagination to come to
her rescue. So few have! Or rather, so few have an adequate imaginative
faculty, one that will bear them forward, one that will sustain their
created people, that will meet every demand made upon its resources
early and late, that will not flag, that will not weary, that will not
die in the middle of the creative task.
We have built up our hypothesis. Now let us see if we can support it.
“According to Miss Cather, all the material for her writing had been
collected before she was 20 years old. ‘I have had nothing really new
since that time,’ she said. ‘Every story I have written since then has
been a recollection of some childhood experience, of something that
touched me while a youngster. You must know a subject as a child, before
you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it, in a story, the
true feeling. After you grow up impressions don’t come so easily. And it
is for the purpose of recalling the old feelings I had in my youth that
I come West every summer. The West has for me that something which
excites me, and gives me what I want and need to write a story.’”
Surely this is all the confirmation we need. She goes West to get the
warm, remembering glow that is necessary for her artist’s purpose.
Let us consider her four books.
_Alexander’s Bridge_ might have been written by Edith Wharton. It has
only one fault, a certain cloudiness characteristic of finely-written
stories in which the mentality of one or two of the characters is of the
essence of the whole thing. It needs for its full appreciation Miss
Cather’s own explication of its purpose. She says:
“The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a
pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and
work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and
much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the
social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a
participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself
only in his work, everything goes well; but he runs the risk of
encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli [a pity
that in the effort to explain it should be necessary to resort to this
jargon!].
“The same qualities which made for his success involve him in a personal
relationship [with an actress, a youthful love] which poisons his peace
of mind and dissipates his working power. His behavior changes, but his
ideals do not.
“He was the kind of a man who had to think well of himself. His relation
to his wife was not a usual one; when he hurt her, he hurt his
self-respect and lost his sense of power. His bridge fell because he
himself had been torn in two ways and had lost his singleness of purpose
which makes a man effective. He had failed to give it the last ounce of
himself, the ounce that puts through every great undertaking.”
There! That last paragraph’s better! It makes quite clear the inner
action of the novel. And the only fault with the novel, we repeat, is
that this inner action should be clear right there! It should not be
necessary for any one of ordinary intelligence to have to read Miss
Cather’s explanation of what really takes place inside Bartley
Alexander.
_O Pioneers!_ is utterly different. Some one has said that reading a
novel by Miss Cather gives you no assurance at all as to what her next
novel will be like. That seems to be true. It is the stamp, we may add,
of a very original gift--talent--genius; the degree of her endowment is
not precisely determinable even yet. In _O Pioneers!_ it is a woman who
dominates the whole story, tall, strong, sensible, not so much
kind-hearted as human-hearted, which means a great comprehension with
sympathy to serve it. We see the girl Alexandra and her two brothers
left by a dying father with the charge to hold to the land, the untamed
soil of the prairie. The father has made his daughter the head of the
family because she has intelligence and her brothers have not. They work
well, but they do not use their heads in their work. The girl justifies
her father’s faith in her and by her intelligent anticipation makes her
brothers prosperous and herself rich. There is a third brother,
distinctly younger than the others, whom she has under her especial care
and upon whom she lavishes the maternal affection that is in her. The
terrible tragedy which involves him would have blasted irretrievably a
woman less strong, less intelligent than Alexandra. She survives it as
she would survive anything that life could do to her.
The quality of the story is dual. There is the fidelity to character
which marks the true novelist, the resolute putting through of what
these people, in contact with each other, will certainly bring about.
That calls for courage! How severe the temptation to shirk an inevitable
but bitter event! It is so easy to persuade yourself that this and that
will not mean disaster, that such and such chemicals when joined need
not explode, that oil and water will mix this once, that two and two may
for the moment make five! Why must there be a blighting catastrophe? Why
cannot a happy ending be a truthful ending? The answer is that sometimes
it can, but when it can’t you mustn’t make it so. Miss Cather’s _O
Pioneers!_ doesn’t try to.
The second aspect of this novel we have already named. It is cyclic,
that is, it sums up an era. Such a quality always gives a book a
historical value; where it is wedded to high fictional art, as here, the
satisfaction of the reader is complete.
_The Song of the Lark_ gains over _O Pioneers!_ in the first place by
its sheer bulk. _O Pioneers!_ was a series of scenes in a single but
changing setting; to cover so much ground, in point of time, the author
had to strip her action of all that was not indispensable. But as _The
Song of the Lark_ is entirely centered about the development of a single
person there is a chance to enrich the narrative with no end of detail;
more, it is necessary to do so. For here we are trying to come at the
innermost secret of Thea Kronberg, we are trying to find out
what--_what_--it was in her that made her great. To get at that we must
have exhaustively every item which can be made to contribute the least
mite of information. We must have everything about her from her
girlhood to her success on the New York stage, we must have all the
persons who came in contact with her and who had their effect on her, or
upon whom she had her effect, for it was generally that way about! We
must have her as she appeared to each and every one of the few really
privileged to know her. What they saw and said, the conclusions they
drew, are the material from which we have to dig out the secret. And
Miss Cather gives us all we need. She is replete with the facts and she
puts them in their entirety before us. The result is a biography, no
less; but a biography unencumbered with letters and irrelevant
conversations and unimportant views and the unendurable
conscientiousness of the faithfully recording friend.
_My Antonia_ is a book to be put alongside _O Pioneers!_ It is less
epical but of more historical value for its minute and colorful
depiction of life on the Nebraska prairies and in the Nebraska towns
about 1885. The book is really a chronicle of people and their
surroundings, a mosaic of character sketches and scenes and short
stories brought within a single ken. The material ranges from tragedy,
horror and repellent occurrences to pathos, humor and farce. It is
perfectly handled, however; the reader is never offended and is
variously touched and amused--and always the book is engrossing. Such a
book is worth a dozen formal historical records. And the figure of
Antonia Cuzak is a biographical triumph. Reminiscence here surpasses
fiction.
There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been
said already. If this chapter has been too venturesome in its
inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O
reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree
but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will
be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have
said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will
have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds
measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same
estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters
supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it.
BOOKS BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER
_April Twilights_, 1903. R. G. Badger, Boston.
_The Troll Garden_, 1905. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.
_Alexander’s Bridge_, 1912.
_O Pioneers!_ 1913.
_The Song of the Lark_, 1915.
_My Antonia_, 1918.
_Youth and the Bright Medusa_, 1920.
_One of Ours_, 1922.
_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, but Youth and the Bright
Medusa and One of Ours are published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York._