by Hermione Lee
In one reading, O Pioneers! is a history book, an absorbing documentation of the mid-West immigrant pioneers between about 1880 and 1910, from the first determination never to ‘lose the land’, through the terrible years of the depression, to the mixed blessings of prosperity and Americanization. Sometimes Cather allows herself to moralize on ‘progress’, as when Marie’s ear-pieces – bits of straw from a broom, worn until her ears are ready for gold rings – are described as happy features of ‘those germless days’, [OP, p.216] or Emil reflects that ‘Lou and Oscar would be better off if they were poor’. [OP, p.238] But mostly she lets the rich, attentive presentation of detail speak for itself. All the variegated forms these cultures make to sustain and identify themselves, in the face of the great undifferentiated land, are sympathetically marked, from the hunting scene old Mrs Lee cross-stitches on her apron, to the devoted practice Raoul Marcel puts in on the ‘Gloria’ while he is polishing the mirrors in his father’s saloon. At the same time, like Alexandra, the narrator keeps moving out and away, giving a sense of worlds elsewhere: the plains of Lombardy, compared to the Divide; a French landscape conjured up in Marie’s fortune-telling for the young exiled French priest; ‘the old Mexican capital’ in the days of Porfirio Diaz, evoked in Emil’s letters home. These are pointers to later novels, signs that the narrator will need more than her Nebraskan material, and wants her novel to be read as something larger than a local history.
Yet for all its tone of assured, impersonal control, the interchange between the historical and the legendary creates difficulties for Cather, very acutely felt at the end of the novel. Alexandra reclaims the book – the last section has her name – and tries to anneal the tragedy through gestures of forgiveness. So she is moved out of her pastoral context for the first time, and we see her, ‘ill at ease’, registering in a Lincoln hotel, carrying her handbag down to supper, walking round the campus, brushing her hair by ‘the electric light’, taking the elevator. It has an extraordinary effect, as though she has suddenly been put into another kind of novel. And when she gets to the State Penitentiary for her desolating conversation with Shabata, she begins to meet characters from that novel: a genial warder, a convict-clerk with a high collar, fine white hands, ‘his sharp shoulders shaken every few seconds by the loose cough which he tried to smother’. [OP, p.291] Historically, this is the realistic end for the pastoral novel, which ought to, or could, move into a dislocated, Kafkaesque urban scene. In this landscape, Alexandra loses all her magic powers – she can do nothing for Shabata. Cather shows, as usual very economically, that she can see this as a possibility, but chooses to deny it: she lets Alexandra go home and re-find Carl. And she also invokes another possible conclusion, that of the ‘new start’, the next pioneering departure: Carl and Alexandra will go away, marry, travel. But their wedding seems more like a burial, and their journey will end up as a returning.
And ‘returning’ is Cather’s final solution to the dilemma of concluding her pastoral without relinquishing a celebratory note, and without admitting that there might have to be a closure: no more pioneering, no more pastoral. Alexandra, crouched over Emil’s grave in the rain and dark like a propitiatory spirit, comforts herself by thinking of death as a returning: ‘ “If they feel anything at all, it’s the old things, before they were born, that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does when they are little.” ’ [OP, p.281] And her own childhood feeling, in bed when she was little, of being carried by strong arms, returns now as a vision of Death, a classical figure, ‘mightiest of all lovers’, for whom like a Stoic hero she now feels prepared. So, feeling and memory, the two qualities that give energy to Cather’s narratives, are turned at the end into aspects of death. The text itself, in the reminiscing reunion between Carl and Alexandra, becomes a kind of return, going over its own story like the dead in their graves: ‘ “You remember what you once said” ’ (Alexandra reiterates or ‘returns’ to Carl) ‘ “about the graveyard, and the old story writing itself over? Only it is we who write it, with the best we have.” ’ [OP, p.307]
The concept of death (like writing) as a form of ‘returning’, refuses the concept of mere stoppage. So the novel closes with an opening out:
They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening star. Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth! [OP, p.309]
Specific marks are smoothed away and generalized, and what Panofsky calls Virgil’s ‘vespertinal’ tone (found at the end of great pastorals such as the Eclogues or Milton’s Lycidas) is beautifully imitated. All the same, it is a strange and evasive ending. ‘Youth’, after all, has had its shining eyes brutally closed in this novel, and it seems an ambivalent apotheosis for Alexandra to be metamorphosed, not into a white butterfly like Emil or Marie, but into a kind of spiritual manure. Cather charms us into acceptance with her marvellous simple-seeming lyricism. But she has given an air of strength to something fragile and contradictory: a woman’s writing made impersonal, a pioneering story made into an elegy. These tensions are very serenely handled in O Pioneers!. My Ántonia is a more exciting and complicated pastoral because this time they are less smoothly resolved.
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But Cather did not pass directly from one great pastoral novel to another. O Pioneers! was enthusiastically received by friends and reviewers. But it would be some time before Cather returned to its pastoral mode. Though O Pioneers! and My Ántonia belong so closely together, they are divided by five years. That space is filled by a very different kind of book, in which everything Cather had been accumulating in the forty years of her life – her history, her apprenticeship, her idea of the artist, her feeling of having arrived – was acted out. The Song of the Lark is a commentary on her own achievement, and could not have been written ‘if she were not already sure of her own creative abilities’.10 Though it stands between the two great early novels, drawing its confidence from one and pouring its discoveries into the next, it feels quite unlike them. The Song of the Lark is the kind of thick, heavy, straggling, detailed narrative she would only allow herself once again, in One of Ours (which also had a subject that required special treatment). It is the fullest expression of one side of her aesthetic sympathies, always in negotiation between the barbarian and the civilized. As with O Pioneers!, the novel’s shape and feeling fits its heroine. This is the book of a heroic female artist, a great Wagnerian singer from the American West who, unlike all Cather’s other artists, is born to victory, not defeat. It is much less ambivalent and melancholy, therefore, than most of her celebrations, and meets the need for a large voice, deep breaths, and big gestures.
Cather came to feel, I think rightly, that these were not her best methods. It was always her way to start with too much material and then to cut down, and when she first published The Song of the Lark she shortened it from a mighty 200,000 words to 163,000 (and lost a whole section about Thea’s musical education in Germany).11 Even so, she agreed retrospectively with her English publisher Heinemann, who turned it down because ‘the full-blooded method, which told everything about everybody, was not natural to me’.12 She criticized herself in the preface to a 1932 reissue for not having ‘disregarded conventional design and stopped where my first conception [of Thea’s ‘awakening and struggle’] stopped, telling the latter part of the story by suggestion merely’.13 For the Autograph Edition of her books in 1937, she cut it by about a tenth, particularly the last part describing Thea’s triumphs. Even so, the 1937 version still feels large and lax. A.S. Byatt is right to say that the hard labour by which Thea prepares for her career needs the ‘amplitude and detail’14 that Cather came to dislike. But there is too much self-pity early on over the family’s hostility to their exceptional child and, later, too much wallowing in what ‘Paul’s Case’ calls ‘world-shine’: fur coats and New York dinners and knowing chat about opera stars.
So there were sound technical reasons for Cather’s feeling that she had diverged onto the wrong road with The Song of the Lark, and picked up the right one again with My Ántonia.15 All the same, her later queasiness about a novel with which at the time she felt passionately involved (‘Thea pulled at me’, she wrote to Elsie in 1915, ‘until I was hers more than she was mine’)16 was more than a technical matter. The Song of the Lark is by far her most personal and revealing novel; it is a splendid source book for biographers, because so many of the details of Thea’s early life are Cather’s. She would never be so explicit again about her struggle to become an artist, and with her increasing dislike of exposure, she may have regretted its heartfelt directness.
Thea Kronborg is a singer, not a writer. The Song of the Lark is an autobiography, but it is also a dramatization of Cather’s credo. The novel’s most interesting operation is the transposing it does between two keys, for two different instruments: the writerly and the dramatic, the personal and the objective. There are some revealing technical remarks on this in Cather’s letters to Dorothy Canfield. After publication, she told her that the whole book was in indirect discourse, and that she had begun by having two sets of quotation marks, single and double, all the way through.17 The book had two manners, she said, the intimate (for Thea’s secret growth) and the remote (for her public profession). Many years later, when she was thinking back on the novel, she told Dorothy that most people wrote in the third person as if it were the first – that is, too intimately.18 Thea is Cather’s ‘second self’. [SL, p.273] But to tell her own story, Cather had to find an ‘objective correlative’ which would enable her to be remote as well as intimate.
She had already thought of writing a novel about a singer when she met the great Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Cather’s passion for opera had survived her Lincoln days, and once settled in Bank Street she and Edith went to the Metropolitan as much as they could; Edith’s retrospective letters are full of opera-going memories. The meeting with Fremstad was professional. Cather had been asked to write a piece for the December 1913 edition of McClure’s on three American woman singers. When she went to interview Fremstad the singer was too exhausted and hoarse to talk. But that same night at the Met, to Cather’s amazement, she came on as a replacement for the soprano in Tales of Hoffmann, and sang magnificently. On a later occasion she saw Fremstad just after she had given a tremendous performance as the evil Kundry in Parsifal, completely used up, her eyes like empty glass.19 She would use these startling disjunctions for Thea, and they are keys to Cather’s fascination with the transformation processes which Fremstad revealed to her.
Of course she had written often about performance before, but now she was given a powerful close-up view of it, in a singer whose main gift was to project herself into the idea in the music: ‘With Madame Fremstad’, Cather wrote in her piece, ‘one feels that…the idea is so intensely experienced that it becomes the emotion.’ Personally, Fremstad attracted her because of her familiarity. She had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, in a poor, religious family of Swedish immigrants, and had to battle her way out of a hard childhood in a ‘new crude country where there was neither artistic stimulus or discriminating taste’.20 She seemed to Cather exactly like the pioneer women on the Divide,21 Alexandra Bergson transformed into Brünnhilde. Her own relationship with Fremstad replicated that transformation: she wanted to turn herself into the singer, in order to find out how the singer could turn herself into, say, Isolde.
Familiarity with this Nordic superwoman fell into the category of Cather’s troll friendships (and thereby set the tone for the novel): it was more like being swept up by Sam McClure than visiting the shrine of Sarah Orne Jewett. Rough, bossy, temperamental, Fremstad was also enthusiastic and honest. When Cather was ill (early in 1914 she had to go to hospital for an unpleasant infected scratch on her neck, which involved having her head shaved, and made her feel disgusted and miserable),22 Fremstad burst in, a bracing mother-nurse figure bearing gifts and rousing her from despondency.23 She invited Cather up to her ‘camp’ in Maine; a terrifyingly savage prospect.24 But as the audience for her heroine’s inexhaustible energies – chopping wood, swimming, tramping, gardening, cooking – Cather found it a grand show of human vigour and grace.25 Those two words, mixing the virile and the feminine, sum up the language she uses for this woman-hero. Fremstad had a Teutonic, boisterous, even comic energy which Cather did not have, and which comes out in the letters to Elsie about Fremstad, and in Thea’s jovial, ‘rough-house’ quality. Above all, Fremstad is a performance – a grand show, a bright show – with Cather as audience.
The ‘piece-picture’ of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow which the young Thea admires in the Moonstone home of her friends the Kohlers, the musical German tailor and his wife, [SL, p.35], is an image for the way Cather pieces her own childhood together with Fremstad’s. Thea’s parents, for instance – the fine, plain, calm, disciplined mother, and the unsympathetic Norwegian methodist minister, happy to make money out of his daughter’s piano lessons – are more Fremstad’s than Cather’s. Thea’s painful progress from Moonstone to Chicago, and her drudgery as an accompanist, is the story of the singer’s early years. But all the feelings are Cather’s. Thea has Willa’s childhood double life, divided between her attic room, a secret space for reading and thinking, and the annihilating, boisterous tyranny of family life. She feels Cather’s fierce adolescent hostility to the pious Philistinism of her ‘natural enemies’ in the small town. Thea’s humiliation at the Sunday School Christmas concert, when her difficult piano solo bores the audience, and her talents are eclipsed by the popular charms of Lily Fisher, the Baptists’ blonde ‘angel-child’, singing ‘Rock of Ages’, is done with the personal ferocity of a long-held grudge. ‘She would rather be hated than be stupid, any day’. [SL, p.81] And Cather draws strongly on her own memories for Thea’s friendships with all the people in the town who have something more to offer than ‘common’ Moonstone values, like the Kohlers with their garden, where Mrs Kohler ‘had tried to reproduce a bit of her own village in the Rhine valley’; [SL, p.28] or the Mexican ‘Spanish Johnny’ with his bouts of uncontrollable wanderlust.
Thea also has Cather’s passionate attachment to the landscape of the West. Red Cloud, as Moonstone, is cunningly transposed from Nebraska to Colorado, so that Thea can be put in a brilliant, dramatic desert setting and compared to ‘the yellow prickly-pear blossoms that open there in the desert’, thorny and sturdy. [SL, p.122] The Southwestern setting, derived from her recent travels, allows into Thea’s story heroic figures of the railroad, exotic Mexican scenes, and, above all, a spectacular, glorious rush of desert colours, lovingly and repeatedly described. But though Cather gives her heroine a more dramatic childhood landscape than her own, they have the same feeling for the pioneering West. In a stirring early scene, Thea and Mrs Kronborg are taken by Thea’s devoted railroad man, Ray Kennedy, to the ‘Turquoise Hills’, sand dunes ten miles out of town, where he tells them ‘tales of adventure, of the Grand Canyon and Death Valley’, and Thea thinks of an earlier trip with her father to Laramie, Wyoming. (Mother and father thus equally oversee her vision of pioneer history.) There an old rancher takes them to a high plain still marked by ‘the wagon-trails of the Forty-niners and the Mormons’:
There was not one trail, as Thea had expected; there were a score; deep furrows, cut in the earth by heavy wagon-wheels, and now grown over with dry, whitish grass. The furrows ran side by side; when one trail had been worn too deep, the next party had abandoned it and made a new trail to the right or left. They were, indeed, only old wagon ruts, running east and west, and grown over with grass. But as Thea ran about among the white stones, her skirts blowing this way and that, the wind brought to her eyes tears that might have come, anyway….The wind never slept on this plain, the old man said. Every little while eagles flew over. [SL, pp.68–9]
The old man tells the tale (that Cather loved so much) of the first telegraph messag
e across the Missouri – ‘Westward the course of Empire takes its way’ – and Thea is given Cather’s sentiments for the heroic pioneer past (‘the spirit of human courage seemed to live up there with the eagles’). They have the same desire: to make a mark in high places, superimposed on, but drawing strength from, the trails of male endeavour and endurance.
Cather speaks of herself through all of Thea’s early life. Her knowledge that she is ‘different’, which comes over her like the visits of a friendly spirit; [SL, p.100] her ferocious desire to ‘get something big’ out of life; her terror, when she comes back after her first stint in Chicago, of never getting away from the desert again; her despair, out in the world, at being a cultural savage with everything to learn, are all intensely personal. And her life in Chicago is full of revealing analogies with Cather’s years as a journalist and teacher. Like Cather in Pittsburgh, Thea starts off in a pious environment, singing in the choir of a Swedish Reform Church to earn her keep, and lodging with devout German ladies. Her difficult, strenuous piano lessons with the sympathetic Hungarian musician Harsanyi, where she struggles for professional excellence against the grain of her natural gifts, allows Cather to re-work her own feelings of frustration and distortion. Like Cather, Thea is rescued – Harsanyi discovers her voice and sends her to the brilliant, cynical Madison Bowers for lessons – but, as for Cather at McClure’s, that promising new direction is submerged by the drudgery of playing as accompanist for Bowers’s lady singers. This section, scornfully called ‘Stupid Faces’, is fraught with unresolved painful feelings. Thea is liberated at last into a clear sense of her vocation through her journey to the Southwest and her discovery of the ‘ancient peoples” cliff-dwellings. There she learns from the Indian relics, as Cather did, that all art is ‘an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself’. [SL, p.378] By analogy, Thea is Cather’s ‘mould’: she pours herself into her.