Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Homes where the intelligent aspiring child (Thea, Claude, Vickie) has to resist family pressures are frequently and feelingly contrasted with big, intelligent, musical households, dominated by an understanding hostess/mother/manager figure, where the children are well and widely educated, but given their own space: the energetic Harling household in My Ántonia, Aunt Charlotte’s musical bringing-up of her four daughters and two adoptive nieces in ‘Uncle Valentine’, the busy, civilized Erlichs in One of Ours, all constantly reading and talking, with ‘none of the poisonous reticence’ of Claude’s home. From her childhood, Cather was enormously attracted to such families for their Europeanized, unprovincial culture. Her own family was a rich storehouse of native history, and its powerful personalities influenced her whole life. But it did not give Cather the window on the outside world for which, from early youth, she had such furious desires.

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  What was the Cather family like? We can summon up a genealogy, a landscape, and a strong atmosphere. Willa Cather’s first childhood memories were of her paternal grandparents’ big farm, Willow Shade, in Frederick County, Virginia. The Shenandoah Valley near the Blue Ridge mountains and the border with West Virginia, though not very rich farming country, was a sympathetic, picturesque landscape of willows and dogwood and azaleas, sheepfolds and streams and winding, wooded hill roads. Her ancestors were colonial settlers from Ireland who had built up what Cather called (in an anonymous biographical sketch written for Knopf)18 an ‘old conservative society’. The land passed down from father to son – a secure patrilineal inheritance19 – and ‘generations of Cathers already filled the graveyards in the valley’.20 Just a few years before her birth, the area had been hotly contested in the Civil War, and the Cathers, like many back-country Virginians, where there was not a strong slave-holding tradition, were bitterly divided between the Union and the Rebels. But the society, as Cather described it, was ‘ordered and secure’, hierarchical: ‘People in good families were born good, and the poor mountain people were not expected to amount to much.’ The history of these divisions and hierarchies would be the subject of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and I will come back to them, as she does, at the end of her life.

  There were some strong fathers in the Cather family. Great-grandfather James Cather, born in 1795, was an intelligent farmer and magistrate, a Presbyterian and a Rebel sympathizer, with a house on Flint Ridge, Frederick County, where people liked to go for good talk. His son William (1823–1887), Cather’s grandfather, who built Willow Shade, is described by her biographers as ‘a taciturn, strong-willed patriarch’, with the ‘face of a zealot’ and the air of an ‘Old Testament prophet’. (Jim Burden, meeting his grandfather in My Ántonia, ‘felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him’ [MA, pp.11–12].) William’s eldest son George inherited the paternal firmness: it was he, and then his father and mother, who pioneered the Cather family move to Nebraska in the 1870s. But like many sons of strong patriarchs, Willa’s father Charles, the second son, a law student turned sheep-farmer, was a much milder character, an easygoing, gentle, Virginian gentleman, with his ‘boyish, eager-to-please manner, his fair complexion and blue eyes and young face’ [OD, p.112] as she describes his likeness in ‘Old Mrs Harris’. (The name she gives him there, Hillary Templeton, perfectly expresses his weakness and charm.) He was just a sweet Southern boy, she says of him wistfully and fondly, giving him back his youthfulness in a letter written soon after his death.21

  But in this extended family, with its ramifications of neighbouring in-laws, its close connections between the generations and its proliferations of young Cathers (between 1873 and 1892 Willa Cather’s parents had seven children, their brother George and his wife five), the outstanding, influential characters were women.

  Great-aunt Sidney Gore, William’s sister, a devout evangelical and a powerfully competent woman, was in her early fifties when Willa Cather was a child. She had single-handedly turned her husband’s farm, after his death, into a big health resort called Valley Home, which she managed, and where during the war she looked after the wounded of both sides. She was also a postmistress and teacher, and an eloquent diarist and letter-writer. The village where she lived was renamed after her when she died.

  Grandmother Caroline Cather, William’s wife, was a tough, efficient farming housewife and pioneer (the grandmother in My Ántonia is ‘quickfooted and energetic in all her movements…a strong woman, of unusual endurance’ [MA, p.10]). She upped and left for Nebraska with her husband in her mid fifties, and her letters to her daughter (who died young) are full of resilient advice against life’s trials. But Caroline herself was getting advice from her old mother-in-law back on Flint Ridge, here (in 1875) sending a wonderfully wry message to Caroline and William via their daughter-in-law, George’s wife: this ironical old lady, though not a prominent figure in the Cather story, eloquently suggests the powerful assurance of the Cather matriarchs, and the firm family lines stretching between Virginia and Nebraska:

  I suppose they think that they are such large children that they can take the liberty of running abroad as far as they please and staying away as long as they please; but never mind there is some very good hickory switches still growing on Flint Ridge and we will try to have some of them in soak for them by the time they get back to Virginia. Why I never learnt William to hunt squirrels and now he aspires to be a buffalo hunter; but it is often the case when children get from under the eye of their parents that they run a little wild!22

  It was Willa Cather’s maternal grandmother, though, whose house she was born in, and who moved with the family to Nebraska and lived with them until her death in 1893, who was of most importance to her. She is very touchingly ‘drawn’, late in Cather’s writing, as Rachel Blake in Sapphira and the Slave Girl and as ‘Old Mrs Harris’. And Cather’s early volume of poems began with a sentimental dialect poem (naively indebted to Robert Burns, whom Cather adored at the time) called ‘Grandmither, think not I forget’. Rachel Seibert, who grew up in Virginia, was married at fourteen and went to live with her husband in Washington. After he died she returned to Back Creek Valley with five children. She was known locally for her nursing skills, and she taught Willa Cather to write and to read – from the Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Peter Parley’s Universal History. In Red Cloud she was cook, housekeeper, and something of a drudge, for the big Cather family. ‘Old Mrs Harris’ dwells on her self-denial, stoicism, and kindness to her grandchildren.

  Willa Cather’s mother is noticeably absent from her daughter’s pleasant early memories, which are of helping to herd sheep with her father, or listening to the talk of the family’s many visitors and guests, or going up to Timber Ridge to hear local stories from gossipy old Mrs Anderson (whose daughter Marjorie went with the Cathers to Nebraska as houseservant, and was fondly memorialized in the novels). But in spite of all the strong, alternative ‘mothering’ figures in Cather’s childhood, her real mother, as O’Brien is at pains to establish in her biography, was Cather’s main challenge, and would be one of her main subjects. She had to separate herself from her, to come to terms with her, and to recognize their likeness.

  Virginia Cather was a well-bred, imperious, handsome Southern belle, fussy about dress and social graces in the old genteel tradition, strong-willed (she reconciled the Civil War division in the family) and dominating over her indulgent husband and numerous children, whom she is said to have disciplined with a raw-hide whip.23 But, like many Southern ladies turned housewives, she was subject to prolonged bouts of depression and illness. (Similar cases are fictionalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and in the character of Mrs Birdsong in Ellen Glasgow’s The Sheltered Life.) This may have made her a difficult mother, resented by her children. But Cather seems to have come to terms with her, imaginatively. In her late work, alarming mature women like Myra Henshawe and Sapphira, who bitterly resent their loss of beauty and authority through illness, are very we
ll understood. And in ‘Old Mrs Harris’ Cather poignantly imagines her mother’s frustration and homesickness in Nebraska.

  Cather owed a great deal to the women who brought her up: her own ruthless drive towards independence, her ambitiousness, her resilience and adventurousness, her competence in organizing the shape of her life, her great capacity for work, her impatience with the illnesses she suffered in later years. And those strong nurturing female figures with, at the centre, the difficult mother whose approval was hard to gain must in part have shaped Cather’s lifelong emotional dependency on, and affectionate comradeship with women. Above all, her childhood gave her a sense of possibilities for women. As she was witness to the negotiation, for all her ‘mothers’, between fulfilling conventional female roles and asserting great powers, it was no wonder that her youthful admiration – and identification – went to exceptional women playing larger-than-life roles on an elevated stage, women as heroes rather than women as mothers.

  O, yes; of course it’s unwomanly to do anything well, and it’s shockingly unwomanly to be great. But it would be a dull old world if a few women were not unwomanly to that degree. And while these strong women, these Brünnhildes, go out and fight with fate, and with art that is so much more relentless than fate, their amiable sisters sit back behind a fortification of cradles and tea-towels and carp at them!24

  In all her writing there was to be a see-saw between the epic and the quotidian, the heroic and the domestic, the ‘unwomanly’ and the ‘womanly’, which derived from her earliest relationships.

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  ‘The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.’ [MA, p.5] So thinks the orphaned Jim Burden, making his first train journey from Virginia to a country ‘where there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries are made’ [MA, p.7]. Dramatic early dislocations often make a writer – Conrad’s from Poland to the sea, Kipling’s from India to Southsea, Elizabeth Bowen’s from Ireland to Kent. In the spring of 1883, when Willa Cather was nine, she made the most important formative journey of her life. The Cather family – Charles and Virginia, four children and a niece, grandmother Boak and Margie Anderson – followed the older brother and the grandparents to Webster County, recently settled territory halfway across Nebraska and just north of the Kansas line. Charles, typically, was bowing to his grandfather’s pressure. But there were more positive reasons for the move. Like many other Virginian farmers, they went in search of better air (tuberculosis was rife in their part of Virginia and the Cathers were susceptible to it), richer and flatter farmland, and escape from the post-War South. To the nine-year-old migrant, it seemed a pioneering into nowhere:

  We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfather’s homestead one day in April. I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side of the wagon box to steady myself – the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything – it was a kind of erasure of personality.

  I would not know how much a child’s life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been jerked away from all these and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron.25

  No marks, no boundaries, no signposts, hardly any wooden houses – mostly sod houses made from the earth or dug-outs buried in the flanks of the hills or ‘draws’ – red grass running everywhere, faint cart tracks, larks singing, and endless undulating prairie: out of this frighteningly formless ‘material’, like the settlers digging in and making their marks, Cather would make the shape of her writing.

  When the first telegraph wire was brought across the Missouri river at Brownville (Cather recounts, in The Song of the Lark, and again in her 1923 essay on Nebraska), ‘the first message flashed across the river into Nebraska was not a market report, but a line of poetry: “Westward the course of empire takes its way”. The old West was like that’.26 This chauvinist romanticizing of expansionism will strike us dubiously now: the unstoppable ‘course’ of any ‘empire’ seems less of a self-evident good to us, probably, than it did to Bishop Berkeley, whose line of poetry that is. As Edwin Fussell says of Whitman’s late pioneering poetry, this sort of language could easily become ‘the merest sentimentality or empty rhetoric’.27 But, in fact, the settling of the ‘old West’ was an amazing process. When the Territory of Nebraska was created in 1854, a census recorded 2,732 inhabitants – squatters, soldiers, hunters, teamsters. (The Indians, presumably, were not counted.) Then, with the silver-mining boom in Colorado, the ‘freighters’ came through, taking supplies six hundred miles from the Missouri to the camps at Denver, long trails of oxen and wagon crossing the north-south buffalo tracks. After the Homestead Act of 1862, which meant that settlers could claim up to 160 acres as their own if they farmed the land they had ‘staked’ for five years, thousands of Americans and immigrants poured into the state. Through the ’70s and ’80s, the uncounted Indians of the Great Plains fought desperate battles for their territories (one of the Sioux chieftains was called ‘Red Cloud’); there were blizzards and droughts and plagues of grasshoppers; farmers tangled with cowboys and ranchers over landclaims.

  Willa Cather’s family arrived in comparative luxury. They didn’t spend their first night, as her Aunt Franc did a few years earlier, in a tent which burnt down in a sudden prairie fire. They were not going to live in a cave in the ground, and they had not had to cross Nebraska on foot, like some of the first immigrant pioneers, or in a ‘prairie schooner’, as the covered horse-drawn wagons were called. The railways had made all the difference. The Union Pacific lines had been opening up this great flat central plain, between the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, since the 1860s, and by 1879 the Burlington branch, following the line of the Republican River valley, had reached Red Cloud. The great transcontinental trains and the men who planned and laid their tracks inspired Willa Cather from the first. ‘All our great West has been developed from such dreams,’ muses the old railroad man in A Lost Lady. ‘We dreamed the railroads across the mountains.’ [ALL, p.51] From early poems and stories to nostalgic late works like Lucy Gayheart and ‘The Best Years’, the ‘night express’ was remembered as one of the excitements of childhood:

  On Saturdays the children were allowed to go down to the depot to see Seventeen come in. It was a fine sight on winter nights. Sometimes the great locomotive used to sweep in armoured in ice and snow, breathing fire like a dragon, its great red eye shooting a blinding beam along the white roadbed and shining wet rails. When it stopped, it panted like a great beast. After it was watered by the big hose from the overhead tank, it seemed to draw long deep breaths, ready to charge afresh over the great Western land. [OB, pp.109–10]

  Trains hardly ever stop at Red Cloud nowadays, and the population is down to 1,300 and falling. But in the 1880s, when it had about 2,500 inhabitants, Red Cloud was a busy stop-off for the Burlington, and a shopping centre for the outlying farmers. It had a school, an opera house, and a tall ugly red building (now the Cather Museum), the Farmers’ and Merchants’ bank, built by Silas Garber, the State Governor who founded the town in 1870.

  For the first eighteen months, Charles Cather tried to farm. By 1884, he and Virginia had four children – Willa, Roscoe (born in 1877), Douglass (born in 1880), and Jessica (born in 1881) – and the family lived on the grandfather’s homestead, up on the ‘Divide’, the high prairie land between the Republican and the Little Blue River. Cather would idealize this landscape, but in reality it seemed, at first, extremely bleak. Her early Nebraskan experiences, she says in a letter of 1905, were of ‘discovering ugliness’.28 Anything remotely resembling a landmark – a small muddy creek, a few poplars – would be hailed with cries of wild enthusiasm by her and her brothers. But as she rode around this unpromising scenery on her pony, she discovered what was,
to her, a completely new cultural world.

  The Germans had come first to Nebraska, fleeing the revolutions of 1848. Then the Czechs, or Bohemians – more of them than to any other American state – from feudal villages where they had no experience at all of isolated farming. From the ’60s, the Scandinavians began to come in, hearing of cheap farming land from countrymen in Wisconsin and Minnesota. There were also French communities, and, by the end of the century, a large number of Russo-Germans in Lincoln. In her 1923 article on Nebraska, Cather regretted the Americanization of these distinct ethnic groups:

  The county in which I grew up, in the south-central part of the State, was typical. On Sunday we could drive to a Norwegian church and listen to a sermon in that language, or to a Danish or a Swedish church. We could go to the French Catholic settlement in the next county and hear a sermon in French, or into the Bohemian township and hear one in Czech, or we could go to church with the German Lutherans.

  In 1910, she estimates, the proportion of foreign to native stock was nine to three. A local Czech historian, Rose Rosicky, described these people’s lives in the Omaha World Herald for October 27, 1929:

  The first home was a dugout. These dugouts preceded the sod houses. They were built about four feet in the ground by excavating that much, and were very common. Sometimes they were built in the side of a bank. For the roof, rafters were laid, a few boards or poles placed over them and the whole covered with sod. If the homesteader came by wagon, the interior furnishing usually consisted of what he had brought in that vehicle….Sometimes even a bed was lacking….Featherbeds, those prized possessions of immigrant housewives, did valiant service….There was a scarcity of shelter, food, wells, fuel – in fact everything was scarce except the great outdoors.