by Hermione Lee
One of the last Red Cloud letters to Mariel, written soon before Willa Cather left for Pittsburgh, is ruefully headed ‘Siberia’; and all her holiday correspondence to the Geres is scattered with references to life in bitter exile. She takes a condescending tone now about local pastimes: a rough-and-ready New Year’s Eve dance with planks for seats and ham sandwiches passed round in potato baskets and men grabbing her by the elbow; a week looking after the accident-prone little brothers; a ‘literary’ evening up at ‘Catherton’, the Virginian colony headed by her Uncle George and Aunt Franc (a clever, ugly, educated woman who spent her life, Cather said, distributing cultural manna in the wilderness), where a young lady who couldn’t sing was urged on by her doting mama, and the farmers discussed Emerson, rather well. The feeling for the landscape is as strong as ever (she tried out on the patient Mariel a ‘writerly’ description of a storm seen with Roscoe from a fifty-foot windmill tower), but she badly wants to be away. With no immediate prospects except more Lincoln journalism, feeling that her family had high, and critical, expectations of her, she was terrified that she would never get out of the cornfields.42
The Cather family had their own problems, like most other Nebraskan country households in the mid ’90s. In 1890 an almost continuous ten-year drought began in the state. Crops failed, hundreds of families left, the heavily mortgaged farmers went broke; banks closed (including Silas Garber’s, as in A Lost Lady). ‘I have very little news to tell except dry, dust and no rain’, Mrs Cather wrote to relatives back in Virginia in May 1895. ‘Every one is so low spirited it looks as if the good Lord has forgotten us entirely. The poor country people do look so blue. Indeed what will become of us all if it does not rain soon.’43
In her 1923 essay on Nebraska, Cather sees these hard times as having ‘a salutary effect’: ‘The strongest stock survived, and within ten years those who had weathered the storm came into their reward.’ Cather had no party political allegiance, and was certainly not a radical. But her celebration of the hardworking farmers who took hold echoes the voice of agrarian Populism, the mid-West politics of the 1890s. William Jennings Bryan emerged as its leader as a young radical lawyer in conservative Lincoln in the 1880s. The rural depression gave him his cause: usually conservative immigrant farmers moved towards radicalism, and Bryan campaigned as a Democrat (taking the Populists with him) on the nationalization of railroads, telephones and telegraphs, on the ending of monopolies, and with an attack on the gold standard. In 1896, he was the unsuccesful Democratic candidate for President. Though he failed, his famous ‘cross of gold’ speech at the Democratic Convention, for free coinage of silver as a remedy for the depression, used a rhetoric on behalf of ‘the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere’ which would ring on, after his defeat, as the voice of opposition to urban, industrial America. Cather didn’t hear the Chicago speech, but she pretended she did in a stirring article on Bryan and his wife for a Pittsburgh magazine in 1900. She would use him again, equivocally, as a key figure in ‘Two Friends’, a late story about Nebraska in the 1890s. In the article she describes him as the embodiment of the Middle West:
all its newness and vigor, its magnitude and monotony, its richness and lack of variety, its inflammability and volubility, its strength and its crudeness, its high seriousness and self-confidence, its egotism and its nobility.44
Her mixed feelings about Bryan – like all her most inspiring figures, at once a hero and a failure – were also her feelings about the West. Her re-vision of Nebraska was to be a struggle between sentiment and revulsion. Her returns home would fill her each time with the old fear of never escaping, and a recognition that this was the place which would always ‘get’ her.
3
WORKING HER WAY OUT
I know what I want to do, and I’ll work my way out yet, if only you’ll give me time.
My Mortal Enemy, 1926
I know what I want – it stares one in the face, as big and round and bright as the full moon.
Henry James, letter to his mother, 1879
THE MOVE east was to a city with a hundred times the population of Lincoln, to the steel manufacturing centre of western Pennsylvania, where big business and Christianity made lucrative, respectable bedfellows. Lincoln’s conservative piety was mild in comparison with the sombre Presbyterianism of 1890s Pittsburgh, ‘dirty prosaic Pittsburgh that doesn’t care for anything but coal and iron mills and big houses on Fifth Avenue and Holy St Andrew Carnegie’.1 Cather was to spend ten years there as a journalist and a teacher, and the stories which used it as a setting (‘Paul’s Case’, 1905; ‘A Gold Slipper’, 1917; ‘Uncle Valentine’, 1925; ‘Double Birthday’, 1929) would all emphasize the ‘harsh Calvinism’ and the ‘merciless business greed’ of ‘the grim, raw, dark gray old city’. [UV, p.16] But the ‘iron kings’ whose wealth dominated the city—Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, George Westinghouse, H.J. Heinz, ‘St’ Andrew Carnegie – also gave Pittsburgh its cultural energy and distinction: the Carnegie Arts Institute and Opera House, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the theatres and newspapers.
Cather saw the paradoxes: she was caustic about the city’s striking class divisions, its stuffy hostility to the very artists it was paying for, its pompous unrelaxed approach to pleasure, its smug belief in purchasing power. She wrote sharp pieces on ‘St’ Andrew’s attempt to ‘manufacture himself’ a writer (‘Andrew Carnegie may control the iron market of the world, but he and all his millions can’t make a novelist’)2 and on the absurdity of his providing a French Renaissance library, with concert hall, for immigrants working twelve hour shifts in the Homestead mines.3 All her Pittsburgh stories are about the opposition between artistic aspirations and individualism, and the crushing, unimaginative orthodoxy of the bourgeois business world. Cather was no Upton Sinclair or Dos Passos, however; her move to the industrial city didn’t inspire a political writing. And like the boy in ‘Paul’s Case’, dreamily relishing the legends of the self-made magnates, she was drawn to the idea of tycoons. She met one called Magee,4 the political boss of the city and multimillionaire owner of the Street Car Company, in one of his newspaper offices, and was impressed by the shabbily dressed, nervy looking man’s attentiveness to all his supplicants. As always, it was energy she admired, whether it took the form of the iron foundries blazing away on the high hills by the city’s rivers, or the people pouring in year by year to see the American paintings in the Art Institute. Cather threw her own energy to meet it, racing the electric cars on her bicycle on her way to work, raring to go.
She had landed in the pious heart of the Puritan city. Charles Axtell, who had heard of her through contacts in Lincoln, and offered her the job on the Home Monthly, also gave her temporary room in his home. So Cather began her Pittsburgh career in a chilly, formal household, where she pretended to an interest in church work and Sunday schools, and joined in with the singing of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. She found the magazine as ‘namby-pamby’5 as the Axtells, all home and fireside stuff about babies and mince pies. The Lincoln papers had been cheerfully middle-brow; Cather’s first published essay on Carlyle in the Nebraska State Journal of 18916 rubbed shoulders with pieces on ‘A Glass-Eating Dog in Western Alabama’, ‘How an Indian Stands Cold’ and ‘Gossip for the Fair Ones: Fashion’s Favorites in Pastures Green’. The Home Monthly, modelled on the enormously popular Ladies’ Home Journal, was primmer (romances, floriculture, nursing, Christian endeavour) and pandered even more than most American magazines of the time to the sacred innocence of the ‘young person’. Like other turn-of-the-century writers, from Henry James to Frank Norris, Cather resented the tyranny of genteel censorship: ‘All we demand of a national literature is that it shall not injure our “sweet young girls” ’, she wrote in 1895,7 sounding just like Norris a couple of years later:
The great merit of the stories of the ‘magazinists’ – the one quality which endears them to the editors, is that they are what in editorial slang is called ‘safe’….They adorn the cente
r table. They do not ‘call a blush to the cheek of the young’….
It is the ‘young girl’ and the family center table that determine the standard of the American short story.8
Cather subverted the ‘center table’ standard mildly: her first story for the Home Monthly, ‘Tommy, the Unsentimental’, a Kiplingesque tale of a boyish Nebraskan girl who could play whist, mix cocktails and run her father’s business, is clearly written not just as an experiment in self-projection but as a reaction to the Axtell’s code of girlhood. Still, her tone for the magazine is much blander and more conventional than for the Lincoln papers (‘The habit of reading formed in childhood will follow the girls and boys all through this trying life, and will give them comfort and pleasure that nothing else can’).9 She was prepared to adapt for the sake of the job, and she was proud of the new responsibility, writing and putting out most of the first issue herself. Fortunately, she was still contributing regularly to the Lincoln papers, and in between theatre and book reviews she could say what she liked there about Pittsburgh culture. After the first year, when the Home Monthly closed, she went on to work as assistant telegraph editor for the Leader, Pennsylvania’s biggest evening paper, at $75 a month. All she needed for this, she said in a friendly letter to Louise Pound,10 was some general knowledge of foreign affairs and history, the ability to write headlines for twelve different suicides on the same day, and discretion enough to decide whether to fit a lady who had shot herself in Paris next to an Ohio convention. The excitement of this mechanical work soon wore off; by 1900 she was pulling out, increasingly wanting to find time for writing stories, and limited her journalism to freelance pieces for a periodical called the Library, which ran for 26 issues, until the money donated by its rich founder ran out – by which time Cather had turned to teaching.
But in those four years she turned out an extraordinary amount of work: the number of her bylines (Helen Delay,11 John Esten, Charles Douglass, George Overing, Clara Wood Shipman, Gilberta S. Whittle, W. Bert Foster, Henry Nicklemann) shows how much. These pseudonyms were common practice in American journalism (Samuel Clemens had lots of comic alternatives before he settled on Mark Twain): they allowed her to fill up the Home Monthly with her contributions, and to get away with hack work she didn’t value. But she had always liked re-naming herself: Willa Love Cather after the doctor who delivered her, Willa Seibert Cather after her Confederate uncle. (‘Willa’ itself was a family shortening from ‘Wilella’.) The dressing up as William Cather Jr was developed now into a professional disguise – some of the Leader pieces were just signed ‘Sibert’ – which could allow a chap like ‘Henry Nicklemann’ (‘I was just off the range; I knew a little Greek and something about cattle and a good horse when I saw one, and beyond horses and cattle I considered nothing of vital importance except good stories and the people who wrote them’)12 to sing the praises of an actress or to hero-worship Stephen Crane, without embarrassment.
Cather’s appetite for work and experience moved her on fast from the Axtells’ Sunday School parochialism. For all her disparaging remarks about the feminine culture of literary societies, her introduction to the Pittsburgh women’s club circuit was a great success: she stood up and recited her old essay on Carlyle and was mobbed by admiring ladies, who thereafter never stopped calling on her. She got to know people at the Carnegie Library, and spent a lot of time reading French literature with a cultured German-American family, the Seibels. And she very soon became involved with Pittsburgh’s marvellously active musical and theatrical life, meeting the musicians through Ethel Litchfield, an ex-professional pianist, and the actors through the Stock Company’s leading lady, Lizzie Hudson Collier, who had been in Lincoln and was kind and sociable to the young journalist.
Cather was enjoying herself in a new social field, with her Lincoln gaucheries behind her; her letters boast excitedly of picnics and boat rides and excursions ‘and things’. But she bitterly resented being teased by Mariel for her ‘Bohemianism’. She was there to work, and to surprise her Lincoln critics, and her family, by her dedication and success. The word ‘bohemian’, to which she kept returning, was a red rag: she felt all the dangers (as ‘Paul’s Case’ would eloquently show) of being attracted to the world of art for the wrong reasons, of hanging about stage doors without the price of a ticket or the commitment of a craft. ‘Bohemian’ artiness, taken up simply as an antidote to the philistine American materialism she saw all around her in Pittsburgh, would be a useless attitude, and she had grown out of attitudinizing – would come very much to dislike it, in fact. ‘Bohemia is pre-eminently the kingdom of failure’ she wrote in 1896.13 Her whole programme, in these hard-working years as a journalist, was to build a solid, technical, pragmatic base for her romantic worship of the creed of Art – a creed she would follow, if she had to, she said to Mariel, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh.14 Paul’s escapist adoration of the artist’s world has something of Cather in it. But Paul has no skills and no dedication, and destroys himself; Cather yoked her fantasies to routine work.
All the same, Paul’s naive wonderment at the glamour of stage life was part of Cather’s attraction to the performing arts. She wrote enthusiastically in 1896 about Henry James’s theatrical novel, The Tragic Muse, for its brilliant evocation of ‘the real spirit of the stage…the enthusiasm, the devotion, the exaltation and the sordid, the frivolous and the vulgar which are so strangely and inextricably blended in that life of the greenroom’.15 Like James, she found that life enormously alluring: one of her best theatre pieces enviously describes two exhausted, grubby stars, Ada Rehan and her manager Augustus Daly, eating soup and talking shop obliviously in a New York restaurant: ‘There were two people who lived all their real life in a theatre. The world outside was only a sort of big hotel to them.’16 She was particularly fascinated by the complicated relationship between technical prowess and the force of personality. Fine performances seduced her; she loved to be moved, and to be aware at the same time of how the effect was being produced. The transformation of a hard-working professional actress or singer, with all her idiosyncrasies and tricks of the trade, into the impersonal figure of the great performer, would always engross her. As, in different ways, James used the theatre and Whitman the opera, Cather would infuse her passion for performers and performance not only into her subject-matter but into her fictional methods, creating dramatic, scenic narratives with figures framed, vigorously in action, as on a stage. In the Pittsburgh years, the preferences that would shape the writing – for simplicity, heroism, restraint – were being worked out through the reviewing of drama and music. music.
Her veneration for personality comes through particularly strongly in her music criticism, where she had strong feelings but no technical expertise; George Seibel remembered that ‘she was not interested in the music for itself, but for the personalities connected with it’.17 But it was the transformation of personality which excited her (as it would in The Song of the Lark). Her heroes – usually female – were the artists who seemed able, through power, intensity and concentration, to transcend their egotisms: the dramatic Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreno, an Amazon or a ‘Valkyr come back to earth’, playing with ‘seriousness, consecration, triumph’ as though she had buried everything in life that could come between her and the keyboard;18 or the great French soprano Emma Calvé, able to switch in a moment from the exotic and coquettish to ‘the artist controlled, carried beyond herself, serene as the polar star’.19 Her interpretations of music were similarly emotional and programmatic (Julius Tyndale in Lincoln had accused her of ‘too great a tendency to interpret musical compositions into literal pictures’).20 She liked to be stirred by Brahms, Wagner (especially Lohengrin and Tannhäuser), Verdi (especially Falstaff), Chopin, Massenet, Dvořák: here, for example, she appropriates the ‘New World’ Symphony to her own landscape of feeling:
[In] the second movement, the largo…before you stretch the empty, hungry plains of the Middle West. Limitless prairies, full of the peasantry of
all the nations of Europe; Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Huns, Bohemians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Russians and Poles, and it seems as though from each of those far scattered lights that at night mark the dwellings of these people on the plains, there comes the song of a homesick heart.21
She wanted music to be ‘of the people’,22 to express its primitive, popular origins: ‘It first came to us many a century ago…as a religious chant and a love song’, and it should still speak to those ‘two cardinal needs of humanity’.23 Her ideal was the music of her Pittsburgh hero, Ethelbert Nevin.
Nevin – a household name then, though not now – was a young composer of American songs and piano pieces, an infant prodigy who had grown up near Pittsburgh and lived in Italy. Cather knew his songs, met him in ’98 when he came back to his childhood home at Vineacre, and half fell in love with him. His music – little evocative folksongs like ‘On the Allegheny’ or ‘O, That We Two Were Maying!’ – evoked a native scene with just the kind of affecting naturalness she liked, and she used all her most valuable words for it: ‘idealism’, ‘sentiment’, ‘tenderness’, ‘simplicity’. Personally, he was young-looking, frail, charming, girlish (though married with two children), at odds with the gritty, moneymaking Pittsburgh environment he had grown up in. He bought Cather violets, and dedicated a song to her. Even before his death at thirty-eight, her writing about him had the tone of pastoral elegy: she imagined him as a shepherd piping in the Vale of Tempe or as Virgil’s musical Menalcas, and read in his face, as in his music, ‘the poetic melancholy of the immortally young’. A good thing for her, perhaps, that he did die young, so that this idealized Lycidas could safely be used as the model for all her isolated, tragically short-lived aesthetes.