Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  I cannot help saying what I think about your writing and its being hindered by such incessant, important, responsible work as you have in your hands now. I do think that it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should – when one’s first working power has spent itself nothing ever brings it back just the same, and I do wish in my heart that the force of this very year could have gone into three or four stories….If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. This you will be anxiously saying to yourself! but I am wondering how to get at the right conditions.31

  And she goes on to give those words of advice which meant so much to Cather: go from the ‘parish’ to the ‘world’, find a quiet centre of life: ‘We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves’. The letter (which Edith Lewis said ‘became a permanent inhabitant of her thoughts’) provoked a long, despondent, revealing reply from Cather 32 about her present state of mind. The work at McClure’s, she said, made her feel like a trapeze artist who had to keep catching the right bar or fall into the net; she was using up so much energy on the magazine’s concerns – what McClure called ‘men and measures’ – that she was too exhausted to write in the evenings. The images she used for her editorial work were all of entrapment and undernourishment: she couldn’t breathe, she felt as if she were living in a tepid bath, she was getting as much food as she would from artithmetic, she was turning into a card catalogue. Though she was loyal to Sam McClure, he was beginning to have a stultifying effect on her. He wanted her to write nothing but clear-cut journalism, like Ida Tarbell, and was now telling her that she was a good magazine executive but would never be a very good writer. And perhaps he was right: she knew that her writing had not improved since The Troll Garden, and that it should have done, but she didn’t know how to make it better. Every time she started a story she felt like a newborn baby, naked, shivering, with everything still to learn. Perhaps she shouldn’t set out to do the one thing at which she felt inept? But meanwhile she was worn out. She might be called an ‘executive’, but inside, she was more like a hunted animal. The psychologists had a new word for it, she believed: split personality.

  In Alexander’s Bridge, the novel she would begin two years later, the hero’s public success as a builder of bridges creates just this sort of constraint and frustration: ‘ “You work like the devil and think you’re getting on, and suddenly you discover that you’ve only been getting yourself tied up. A million details drink you dry,” ’ he says. The narrator reiterates, with feeling: ‘It was like being buried alive….There was still something unconquered in him, something besides the strong work-horse that his profession had made of him’. [AB, p.33] It is an early and revealing example of an impassioned autobiographical statement transposed into a male voice. But though Cather characteristically masculinizes her dilemma in the figure of her tormented bridge-builder (a man with a double life whose bridge cracks under the strain and ‘buries him alive’), and though she had built herself an independent and unconventional life for a woman, her professional predicament was very much a female one. William Godwin, in 1798, made an excellent analysis of the danger to any writer of being trapped by hack work:

  It perhaps deserves to be remarked that this sort of miscellaneous literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and contract, than to enlarge and invigorate, the genius. The writer is accustomed to see his performances answer the mere mercantile purpose of the day, and confounded with those of persons to whom he is secretly conscious of a superiority….He is touched with the torpedo of mediocrity.33

  The point is general, but the passage refers to Mary Wollstonecraft, one of many outstanding literary women who spent years working their way out – through translation, journalism, reviewing, editing, or anonymous ‘ghosting’ – before they came into their own. Wollstonecraft’s translations in the years before she published the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, George Eliot’s anonymous unpaid editorial labours for Chapman’s Westminster Review, Virginia Woolf’s long years of anonymous reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement while trying to write her first novel, are only the most famous examples of women writers’ slow starts. What prevented them? Lack of time, lack of independence, lack of confidence, lack of money: or a combination of them all.

  Certainly Cather worried about the last: the family’s hard times in the 1890s and the tough Pittsburgh days had left their mark. She saved her income carefully, still sending some home, and was nervous of leaving a safe job at the age of thirty-nine. Her lack of confidence shows up, as O’Brien points out,34 in one peculiar detail: she accepted McClure’s suggestion at about this time that she advance her date of birth by a few years for Who’s Who; a deception which, thanks to Edith Lewis’s complicity, would persist on her tombstone (it reads 1876) and which suggests considerable anxiety about her progress.

  By 1912 she was nearly there. She began Alexander’s Bridge in the summer of 1910, and in 1911 she finished it and wrote a long Nebraskan story, ‘The Bohemian Girl’, to be followed by two sketches, ‘Alexandra’ and ‘The White Mulberry Tree’, which would turn into O Pioneers! Both Alexander’s Bridge and ‘The Bohemian Girl’ were published in 1912, and the appearance of her first novel (which was received kindly, as ‘promising’), quickly followed by a long, exciting, liberating journey to the Southwest, finally sprang the trap. Even then the impetus came as much from circumstances as from within: McClure’s erratic financial ventures had finally got out of hand; he had to sign over his empire to his son-in-law, and in 1913 (by which time his staff had seen it coming, and left) he was pushed out. As a parting gesture of loyalty, to help him financially, Cather agreed (even after the success of O Pioneers! in 1913) to ‘ghost’ his autobiography (anonymously and without payment), concentrating not on his fall, but on the man’s energetic, enterprising rise from Western poverty to international success. It was a story Cather naturally found sympathetic, and some of its dynamic energy leaks into the novel she started immediately afterwards, The Song of the Lark. But that was her last piece of subservient hack work.

  Once these ‘miscellaneous literary employments’ can be seen as apprenticeship, and not as a life’s work, their value is apparent. Like George Eliot in her thirties, Cather had been finding out for the past twenty years how to write, and what she thought: ‘seeking constantly and urgently for explanations of her own desires…and for keys which [would] unlock the mysteries.’35 Jewett saw that, too: ‘You have been growing I feel sure in the very days when you felt most hindered, and this will be counted to you.’36 Editing factual pieces taught her, as well as her contributors, to ‘crush feelings into the background’, and to subdue the lavish rhetoric of her theatre-reviewing days. Ghosting McClure’s autobiography trained her to appropriate the colours of a man’s voice and personality: making herself speak his plain abrupt language, she said (at once revealingly and disingenuously) in a letter of 1919,37 was the inspiration for Jim’s narration in My Ántonia. She rescued herself from the numbing effects of the ‘torpedo of mediocrity’ just in time. All the same, she would not have become the writer she was, without those years of training; and she knew it.

  —

  Looking back, Cather was always dismissive38 about her first novel: only a year after its publication she was talking about its moral flimsiness, and she would come to see it as a mistaken attempt to imitate James and Wharton. The Boston and London settings were the material she felt at the time an American novelist ought to use. It’s true that Alexander’s Bridge is awkward and immature, and that, as with many of the early stories, her imitation of civilized East Coast writers went against the grain. But it is more revealing of strong personal feeling than she would ever acknowledge.

  The story is framed (in a contrast she would use again between one of life’s observers and a man of action) by the point of view of an old professor of philo
sophy, wise Aristotle to a heroic Alexander. Bartley Alexander, the professor’s pupil when he was growing up in the West, has gone East, made an empire for himself as a bridge-builder, married a distinguished civilized woman (met when he was on his first assignment in Canada), and settled down in Boston. At the height of his success, he meets again an Irish actress called Hilda Burgoyne, now a great hit in London in a play called ‘Bog Lights’, whom he had been in love with in his days as ‘the youth who had worked his way across the ocean on a cattleship and gone to study in Paris without a dollar in his pocket’.[AB, p.33] Their affair resumes, and Bartley, already frustrated by administrative burdens, is tugged transatlantically between the two women, guilt-struck but unable to resolve the strain. Then, the ‘engineered’ crisis: the bridge he has been designing shows signs of a fatal flaw; he goes up to Canada – scene of his first triumph – to inspect it, and it snaps in two when he is on it. He is drowned with a letter of confession to his wife in his pocket, rendered forever illegible. The two women’s lives are left without meaning, and the old professor sums up: ‘He belonged to the people who make the play, and most of us are only onlookers at the best.’[AB, p.111]

  The first title was Alexander’s Masquerade,39 and the novel, like a great deal of her work, is about performance: Bartley is an elevated figure on a heroic stage, and he is also a dissimulator, a bad actor trapped in conflicting roles. (He also owes a good deal to Ibsen’s Master Builder, for whom youth and troll-like power are embodied in ‘Hilda’ Wangel.)40 Hilda’s enchanting performance in her Irish play (a wonderfully silly concoction, complete with potheen smugglers, cabins, fairy rings, primrose wreaths and a donkey) provides a fairy-tale illusion to satisfy Bartley’s romantic escapism. And the whole theatrical conception allows Cather to project Bartley’s fatally strained split self into the dramatic breaking of the bridge.

  It’s a crude device, but it is Cather’s first extensive treatment of her deep and lifelong obsession with doubling. The obsession belongs not just to her interior life, but to a powerful tradition in American writing. The split self, symbolically projected, goes from Hawthorne’s guilty Reverend Dimmesdale, nursing his hidden scarlet letter, and Poe’s doomed, fissured House of Usher, to James’s failed hero Roderick Hudson, caught between art and love and crashing appositely to his death off a Swiss mountain, or the revenant encountering his terrifying doppelgänger – the man he might have been – in ‘The Jolly Corner’. William Carlos Williams and D.H. Lawrence, writing about American literature in the 1920s, discerned a fatal, morbid split throughout it, and put it down to the Puritan repression of the ‘terrific energy’ of aboriginal instincts: a history of making walls instead of ‘bursting into flower’.41

  There is something of that morbid ‘fissure’ in Bartley’s feeling that ‘a second man has been grafted into him’. [AB, p.84] His split self is, as we’ve seen, partly Cather’s: he is the Westerner gone East, creative energies trapped by desk work, the pioneer feeling his age. Fictionalizing this personal sense of strain, she calls on the archetypal opposites which have always fascinated her, the rugged Carlylean hero and the delicate artist, the pagan and the Christian, the barbaric and the civilized. Like a god in exile, Bartley is a tamed natural force whose primitive energy strains against its confines. His wife Winifred (beautiful and dignified in the Isabelle McClung mode) stands for the civilizing constrictions: their central scene together takes place in their home, elegantly decorated with wreaths and azaleas for Christmas. She nourishes his finer feelings, but not his energy. Hilda, by contrast, is identified with Bartley’s pioneering youth, with romance, freedom, sexual fulfilment, and love of life. The power of the book, though, is not in the relationships, but in the sinister qualities of Bartley’s ‘second man’, ominously described as ‘restive’, ‘strong’, ‘sullen and powerful’, like an underground troll, or the waters that will bury him.

  In a strange lyrical passage near the end, Bartley crosses his first bridge by train, on the way to his last, and remembers how he used to walk it by moonlight, when he was first in love:

  And always there was the sound of the rushing water underneath, the sound which, more than anything else, meant death; the wearing away of things under the impact of physical forces which men could direct but never circumvent or diminish. Then, in the exaltation of love, more than ever it seemed to him to mean death, the only other thing as strong as love. Under the moon, under the cold, splendid stars, there were only those two things awake and sleepless; death and love, the rushing river and his burning heart. [AB, p.95]

  I think Cather is momentarily echoing Whitman – one of her admired ‘barbarian’ writers – in his poem about the making of a writer. In ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’, the antiphonal voices of the bird and the sea both speak to the emerging poet. The bird sings of night, the moon, the water, lost love, all blurred together; the sea, as if in answer to the listener’s questions

  Whisper’d to me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak

  Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word Death:

  And again Death – even Death, Death, Death

  and the poet, walking in the moonlight on the grey beach, has to ‘fuse’ these two songs of Death and Love. Death, of course, is much more Bartley’s desired lover than any Hilda or Winifred, and the strength of this first novel is in its impulse towards what destroys and obliterates. This time the flawed hero is sucked under; but in the future, the battle between the actor and the dark indifferent ‘physical forces’ would be renewed. As yet she hadn’t found the right landscape for the struggle, but Bartley has a glimpse of it out of his train window, when he sees a group of boys sitting around a little fire on the edge of a marsh, and it reminds him of ‘a campfire on a sandbar in a Western river’. [AB, p.94] In her next story, ‘The Bohemian Girl’, the lovers are not destroyed, they escape, as Cather was about to escape into the freedom of writing. The paradox of her life and work is that the place they escape from is the place she had to get back to for her true subject.

  5

  A WIDE, UNTRIED DOMAIN

  Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia;

  Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts,

  That matter of Troy, and Achilles’ wrath, and Eneas’,

  Odysseus’ wanderings;

  Place ‘Removed’ and ‘To Let’ on the rocks of your snowy

  Parnassus…

  For know a better, fresher, busier sphere – a wide, untried

  domain awaits, demands you.

  Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Exposition’, 1871

  IN THE SPRING of 1912 Cather took one of the most important journeys of her life, her first visit to the Southwest. She went to visit her brother Douglass, working on the railroad in Winslow, a small town in Arizona, and travelled with him on horseback into the wild country around, to the Grand Canyon, and down into New Mexico, before going back to Red Cloud for the summer. At first she resisted the ‘untried domain’. In one of the first of her vivid, affectionate letters to Elsie Sergeant about the trip, she wrote that she still has her fears of the bigness of the West; when she gets back to it she feels, as she did in her childhood, that it will put her to sleep. She will die there, never get out. She can’t let herself ‘go with the current’.1 And at first Winslow seemed ugly and dusty; Douglass’s cockney cook was always drunk, and his brakeman, Mr Tooker, was a terrible bore, the kind of self-educated Westerner who read his bound copy of Emerson all the time, never used words of one syllable (when the wind blows it ‘retards’ his freight train), and said things like ‘You have me buffaloed’.2

  But very soon she gave herself up to this dramatic, vivifying journey. The landscape of the Southwest, ‘big and bright and consuming’,3 inspired her. She felt it should be the setting for ‘a new tragedy or a new religion’, perhaps a new Crusade. Out in the hills, even Mr Tooker improved,4 shed his ‘magazine’ culture (it sounds like Leonard Bast describing the dawn in Howards End) and became a decent sort.
Her postcards to Elsie give a glimpse of what she was seeing: a seventeenth-century Spanish mission church at Acoma; adobe huts; Hopi Indian pueblos discovered by Coronado’s army in 1540; and an Indian village on the Rio Grande, thirteen miles south of Albuquerque, with a mission church where the priest, Cather noted, had a wonderful garden with parrots and snow-white doves. These sights – the Spanish mission churches with their gardens, the native Indian villages, the glamorous high-coloured landscape, and above all the ancient cliff-dwellings of the vanished Indian tribes, relics of an extraordinary and beautiful civilization, which she saw at Walnut Canyon, Arizona, would haunt her for ever. This was far older history than that of the mid-Western pioneers (though it provided a more ancient version of the interweaving of cultures which so interested her at home), one that had fascinated her since childhood. Seeing it, at last, had a very powerful effect on her.

  The emotions of the journey were centred on their native guide to New Mexico, the romantic Julio.5 Unlike Tooker’s, Julio’s speech was not a waste product of modern American culture, but a ‘new language’, restrained, unliterary, direct. He told her an old Aztec story of love and death (which she inserted into ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’) with ‘sharply cut figures’ in it; he took her to a Mexican dance, and sang her a Spanish serenade in the desert, against a background of stars and the dead Indian city on the mesa. But he could not understand her interest in the Cliff-dwellers. The dead should be left alone; ‘We are the living’.