Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  27. See Slote, pp.97–103. For Cather on Modjeska, see WP, pp.37–8, 194–5, 459–61.

  28. ‘Ach, meine Liebe selber/Zerfloß wie eitel Hauch!/ Du alte, einsame Träne, Zerfließe jetzunder auch!’ Heine, Selected Verse, translated by Peter Branscombe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p.46.

  29. Woodress II, p.257 tells us that Cather bought Fremstad a little orange tree for Christmas 1913. Myra buys Modjeska a holly tree.

  30. Pittsburgh Leader, July 8 1899, WP, p.698.

  31. Letters as in note 21.

  32. Rosowski, p.153.

  33. Fryer, p.303.

  11. TAKING POSSESSION

  1. Cather is vague on the details of how Tom’s invention can power an engine, but he must, presumably, have discovered a gas that would transform with exceptional rapidity into liquid and back, requiring a lighter engine and a new kind of bulkhead to contain the intense pressure it created. In the corrected edition of 1942, all the references to the ‘bulkheaded vacuum’ or ‘vacuum’ were changed to ‘Outland engine’, ‘engine’, or ‘patent’, suggesting some unease over these technicalities.

  2. See Doris Grumbach, ‘A Study of the Small Room in The Professor’s House’, Women’s Studies, 1984, vol. II, pp.334–5.

  3. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Sept 21 1915, Morgan.

  4. ‘Willa Cather’s 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: the Genesis of The Professor’s House’, Susan Rosowski and Bernice Slote, Prairie Schooner, Winter 1984, vol. 54, no. 4, p.84. All writers on the cliff-dwellings (c. 1100 AD) call them ‘prehistoric’.

  5. Gilbert Wenger, The Story of the Mesa Verde (Mesa Verde Museum Association, 1980) p.68 and Frank McNitt, Richard Wetherill: Anasazi (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957, 1966), p.34.

  6. Woodress II, p.264; Lewis, p.97.

  7. Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Sept 21 1915, Morgan.

  8. Denver Times, August 25 1915.

  9. Georgia O’Keeffe would fulfil these conditions; see Phyllis Rose, ‘Modernism: the Case of Willa Cather’ in Modernism Reconsidered, p.140.

  10. ‘Willa Cather’s 1916 Mesa Verde Essay’, op. cit.

  11. Ibid., p.86; c.f. G. Nordenskjold, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, 1893 (trans. D. Lloyd Morgan, New Mexico: Rio Grande Press, 1979).

  12. Woodress II, p.284.

  13. Lewis, p.133; Woodress II, p.353. In PH, Cather synthesizes several cliff-dwellings into one.

  14. ‘Willa Cather’s 1916 Mesa Verde Essay’, p.84.

  15. WCOW, p.31.

  16. See Ch. 4, p.84; Ch. 15, p.345.

  17. Caroline Commanville, Selected Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert with an Intimate Study of the Author (New York & London: M. Walter Dunne, 1904), p.41.

  18. See Ch. 2, p.18.

  19. Fryer (pp.304–6) describes him as a Cartesian separatist of mind and body.

  20. In an interview with the New York World, May 21 1923 (in Bohlke), Cather objects to novelists ‘carrying too far’ the process of chopping up character ‘on the Freudian psycho-analytical plan’. But Rosowski points out (pp. 141–2) that ‘Cather was not hostile to psychology per se’, and that in 1925 she had been reading Joseph Collins’s book The Doctor Looks at Literature: Psychological Studies of Life and Letters (New York and London: Allen & Unwin, 1923). Collins analysed ‘psychology’ in the fiction of Joyce, Dostoievsky, Lawrence, Proust, Dorothy Richardson, Mansfield and others (including what he called ‘Two Lesser Literary Ladies of London’, Stella Benson and Virginia Woolf). He is hostile to ‘Freudianism’ for its denial of a higher spiritual life of the mind and for its dangerous theories of the unconscious. Cather followed his general attitude towards psychology as a useful but inexact tool for understanding people, and his theory that ‘mental complexes’ are produced by the attempt of ‘the primitive mental machinery to adapt to more intricate and varied processes than those with which it was originally intended to cope’. (She must have been pleased that he cited ‘Paul’s Case’ as an ‘admirable’ example of the novelist as ‘practical psychologist’.) (Collins, pp.19–20.)

  21. Rosowski (pp. 134–5) compares Robert Frost’s ‘nature’ writing.

  22. Grumbach, op. cit., p.339.

  23. A. S. Byatt neatly points out the link with Tom’s gas. Introduction, PH (Virago, 1981).

  24. Henry James, Preface to The Spoils of Poynton, in The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner’s, 1934, 1962), p.120.

  25. First by Brown, p.241.

  26. Byatt pursues this theme in her Introduction, and notes that the Berengaria, the ship on which St Peter’s family come home from Europe, was the name of Coeur de Lion’s wife. It was also the name of the transatlantic liner on which Cather herself travelled from Europe in 1923. (Woodress II, p.339.)

  27. David Laird, ‘Willa Cather and the Deceptions of Art’, Interface, ed. Daniel Royot (University of Montpellier, 1985), p.57, emphasizes Cather’s use of this medieval exemplum.

  28. WP, p.724. Dreyfus was reconvicted in 1899, and his name was partially cleared in 1906.

  29. Brown takes St Peter’s quotation of Longfellow’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘Grave’ (‘For thee a house was built/Ere thou wast born;/For thee a mould was made/ Ere thou of woman camest’) to show that the novel is about a ‘profound unconscious preparation for death, for the last house of the professor’ (pp.244–5).

  30. Rose, op. cit., p.128.

  31. Philip Rahv, ‘Palefaces and Redskins’, Image and Idea (1949, revised 1957, in American Critical Essays: 20th Century, ed. Harold Beaver, Oxford: OUP, 1959).

  32. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 7.

  33. See Rosowski, pp.133 ff, for an excellent analysis of this passage.

  34. Rose, op. cit., p.128.

  35. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, Studies in Classic American Literature (1924, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p.83.

  36. Woodress II, pp.354, 364. For Lawrence in Taos, see Harry Moore, The Priest of Love (London: Heinemann, 1974); Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Knopf, 1932); James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey (Case Western Reserve University, 1970).

  37. Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1958), vol. II, p.414.

  38. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Pan in America’, Phoenix (London: Heinemann, 1936, 1961), p.27.

  39. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1951), p.247.

  40. Eudora Welty, op. cit., p.58.

  12. THE GOLDEN LEGEND

  1. On Death Comes for the Archbishop’, November 23 1927, WCOW, p.5.

  2. Woodress II, pp.362–5; Harry Moore, The Priest of Love, (London: Heinemann, 1974), p.354.

  3. WCOW, p.4. See Ch. 5, p.188.

  4. Letter to E. K. Brown, Oct 7 1946, Newberry.

  5. Woodress II, p.390.

  6. Interview, The Cleveland Press, 20 Nov 1925. In Bohlke.

  7. WCOW, p.11; Letter to Elizabeth Vermorcken, Sept 27 1927, Morgan.

  8. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), p.359; Woodress II, p.395.

  9. Woodress II, p.395.

  10. Letter to Elizabeth Vermorcken, Sept 27 1927, Morgan.

  11. When she gave the mss. to Knopf she was confident enough to ask, for the first time, for an increase of one per cent in her fifteen per cent royalties. A month after publication it had sold 30,000; by 1942, 178,000. In 1946 she told Brown that she knew it was ‘of course’ her best book. (Knopf, The Art of Willa Cather, p.210; Letter to Miss Masterson, March 15 1943, RC; Letter to Brown, Oct 7 1946, Newberry.)

  12. Letter to Brown, Oct 7 1946, Newberry.

  13. Letter to Mr Graff, July 19 1925, RC, see Ch. 9, p.186.

  14. WCOW, p.9.

  15. See Woodress II, pp.402, 303–4; E. & L. Bloom, ‘On the Composition of a Novel’, Willa Cather’s Gift of Sympathy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), pp.197–236, and Lewis, pp.140–46, on the other sources for Death Comes for the Archbishop.

  16. Q
uotations in this paragraph from Rev. W. J. Howlett, Life of the Rt. Rev. Joseph Machebeuf (Pueblo, Colorado, 1908), pp.154, 166, 169, 265.

  17. ‘Valiant-for-Truth’ in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 2, is the fighting pilgrim who, like Father Vaillant, opposes his family in order to set out on his pilgrimage. He sings Bunyan’s famous hymn ‘To be a pilgrim’, and it is for him that ‘the trumpets sounded on the other side’. In an introduction to Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress (Knopf, 1924), she referred to Bunyan’s ‘satisfying’ scenes ‘where little is said but much is felt and communicated.’ (WCOW, p.79).

  18. For the changes in character between Lamy and Latour see Woodress II, p.401, Joan Younger Dickinson, ‘Willa Cather and the Priest’, Impact: Albuquerque Journal Magazine, August 7 1984, pp.10–13; for Lamy see Paul Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fé (New York: Noonday Press, 1975).

  19. Howlett, p.257.

  20. Howlett, p.217.

  21. Letter to Norman Foerster, May 23 1933, UNeb.

  22. Clinton Keeler, ‘Narrative without Accent; Willa Cather and Puvis de Chavannes’, American Quarterly 17, 1965, pp.119–26.

  23. Mary-Ann and David Stouk, ‘Hagiographical Style in Death Comes for the Archbishop’, University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4, Summer 1972, p.295.

  24. Rose, op. cit., p.143; Rosowski, p.171.

  25. ‘St Nicholas’, The Gilte Legende, ed. Richard Hamer (Heidelberg, 1978), pp.59, 62; ‘St Dunstan’, The Golden Legend, ed. M. Gürlach (Braunschweig, 1972), p.53.

  26. Rebecca West, ‘The Classic Artist’, The Strange Necessity, 1928 (Virago, 1987), p.229.

  27. WCOW, p.10.

  28. Joseph Conrad, Preface, ‘The Nigger of the “Narcissus” ’, 1899. (Cather had read the story; she mentions it in a letter to Norman Foerster, Jan 14 1931, Morgan.)

  29. ‘Typology’, the theological interpretation of natural ‘types’ (e.g. roses, thorns) as allegories, or of stories as prophecies (e.g. Old Testament David stories as prophecies of Jesus) was a characteristic way of thinking of the American Puritans, and had a powerful influence on authors whom Cather admired, such as Emerson and Hawthorne.

  30. Rebecca West, op. cit., pp.218–9.

  31. Rosowski, p.169; Stouks, op. cit., p.299.

  32. Byatt makes a perceptive comparison with William Carlos Williams’ concern with ‘the specific, the local, the name’ in his contemporaneous version of American history, In the American Grain. Introduction, Death Comes for the Archbishop (Virago, 1981).

  33. Just as Cather makes Lamy more tolerant of the natives than he was, so she makes Martínez more primitive. Horgan (op. cit., p.129) shows that he was a clever man who introduced the first printing press into New Mexico.

  34. D. H. Lawrence, ‘New Mexico’, 1931, Phoenix, p.145, makes a similar attempt to understand the Indians.

  35. Rose (op. cit., p.142) interestingly suggests that Cather’s primitivist, anti-realist ‘impatience with individuated character’ is reflected in the Indians’ dropping of the definite article.

  36. Rebecca West (op. cit., p.224) says that the difference between Cather and D. H. Lawrence is that Lawrence would have been through the hole in the wall after the snake.

  37. O’Brien (p.202) rightly sees the sequence in the cave as disturbingly anomalous.

  38. Quotations in this paragraph from Marina Warner, Alone of all her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1976 (London: Pan, 1985), pp.312, 159, 235.

  39. Warner, ibid., p.390, note 4.

  13. TWILIGHT AND MIRACLES

  1. Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, July 25 [1929], RC. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Sept 30 1930, Vermont.

  2. See Ch. 2, p.26.

  3. See Ch. 4, p.71.

  4. Lewis, pp.156–7. Quoted O’Brien, p.241. There is a fierce passage in ‘The Best Years’, a late story, about the ‘misery’ of old people in California. (OB, pp.135–6.)

  5. See O’Brien, especially pp.210–15, 237–9, 241–2.

  6. Sergeant, p.240. Quoted Fryer, p.336.

  7. WP, p.335.

  8. Lewis, pp.153–4.

  9. Woodress II, p.426, points out that the French domestic atmosphere of SR owed a good deal to Cather’s French cook, Josephine Bourda.

  10. Louise Bogan, ‘American Classic’, New Yorker, August 8 1931.

  11. Lewis, p.155.

  12. See Hawthorne’s Introductions and Prefaces to The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun.

  13. Letter to Elizabeth Vermorcken, Aug 14 1931, UVA.

  14. Lewis, p.156.

  15. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, June 15/16, 1931, Vermont.

  16. WCOW, p.15.

  17. A. S. Byatt explains ‘anacoluthon’ eloquently in her Introduction to SR (Virago, 1984), p.xi.

  18. See Byatt, ibid., p.xii.

  19. Francis Parkman, Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, 1877 (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1922), p.74.

  20. See Byatt, p.x.

  21. Parkman, op. cit., p.416.

  22. Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1885), pp.332–3.

  23. For another striking fictional use of the Jesuit Relations, see Brian Moore’s novel Black Robe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985).

  24. Woodress II, p.231.

  25. Letter to Mr Wilcox, August 10 1931, Morgan.

  26. See Parkman, Frontenac, pp.340–42; W. J. Eccles, Canada under Louis XIV, 1663–1701 (McLelland & Stewart, OUP, 1964), pp.230–37.

  27. Cornelius Jaenen, The Role of the Church in New France (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976) p.77.

  28. Ibid., p.104.

  29. Brown, pp.285–6; Eccles, op. cit., p.139.

  30. Jaenen, op. cit., p.57.

  31. Ibid., p.112.

  32. Eccles, op. cit., p.68.

  33. Brown (p.381) compares SR with My Ántonia.

  34. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, June 22 1933, Vermont.

  35. Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, June 15/16 1931, Vermont; Woodress II, p.432.

  36. See Fryer, p.335.

  37. Rosowski (pp. 184–7) concentrates on Cécile’s resemblance to the Virgin Mary.

  38. See Fryer, pp.330–42.

  39. Woodress II (p.430) compares it with Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral.

  14. OBSCURE DESTINIES

  1. ‘Obscure’ is probably not meant to be a reminder of Jude the Obscure, as Cather very much disliked the novel (KA, pp.359–66).

  2. NOF, p.26.

  3. See Ch. 5, p.95, note 23.

  4. ‘Neighbour Rosicky’ has been more anthologized than any of Cather’s stories except ‘Paul’s Case’ and ‘The Sculptor’s Funeral’. (Crane, p.248.)

  5. Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, Jan 27 1934, RC.

  6. Letter to Mrs Mellen, [n.d.], UVA.

  7. When I visited Red Cloud I noticed that all the men wore large, showy signet rings with their work-clothes.

  8. Rosowski (p.193) says that it is as if ‘from the grave Rosicky describes his continuing contentment’. Oddly, she doesn’t note the strong resemblance of this passage to Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’, though she thinks that the poem lent something to The Professor’s House (Rosowski, p.134). There is, too, a presumably coincidental resemblance to the last paragraph of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, where the snow falls all over Ireland with the same effect of mortality recognized and accepted.

  9. See NOF, p.112, on Mann’s ‘tempo’ in Joseph and his Brothers.

  10. Though she did set a few harsh stories in New York, ‘a city full of exiles,/Short marriages and early deaths and heartbreaks’ (from ‘A Silver Cup’, April Twilights).

  11. Marilyn Arnold, Willa Cather’s Short Fiction (Ohio University Press, 1984), p.141.

  12. This is a re-writing of a scene in ‘The Joy of Nelly Deane’ (1911) in which three old women dote on the baby of a young mother, Nelly, who died in childbirth. Nelly will reappear in the guise of Lucy
Gayheart; this story, which has a narrator who goes away from the small mid-Western town for many years and then returns to hear the news of Nelly’s death, was evidently much in Cather’s mind at this time.

  13. Bennett, p.233, Woodress II, p.63.

  14. See Ch.2.

  15. Crane, p.248, gives no reprintings of OMH.

  16. See Ch. 2, p.23. OMH has affinities with Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’.

  17. St Matthew, 5:3.

  18. Louise Bogan, ‘American Classic’, New Yorker, August 8, 1931, In James Schroeter, Willa Cather and her Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp.131–2.

  19. Truman Capote, Interview with Gloria Steinem, McCall’s, November 1967, p.151. In Woodress II, pp.494–5.

  20. Yehudi Menuhin, An Unfinished Journey (London: Macdonald & Jane’s, 1976), p.129.

  21. Sergeant, p.210.

  22. Letters to Carrie Miner Sherwood, Dec 14 1933, and from Annie Pavelka to Willa Cather, Nov 8 1937, RC.

  23. Letters to Carrie Miner Sherwood, April 29 1945, RC, and to Mrs Lizzie Huffman, June 13 1943, RC.

  24. Knopf did not publish complete sets; Scribner’s had proposed to Knopf that they do a complete limited edition, but Houghton Mifflin would not release their rights to Cather’s first four novels. Hence, Houghton Mifflin issued the edition, which began appearing in 1937, in 12 volumes, with Sapphira and the Slave Girl added in 1940. Cather did not make major changes for the edition. Alfred Knopf, ‘Miss Cather’, in The Art of Willa Cather, ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), p.215; Woodress II, p.468.

  25. Letter to Helen Sprague, Mar 20 1932, RC.

  26. Letter to Stephen Tennant, Jan 6 [1937], Hugo Vickers.

  27. Letter to Bernard de Voto, Mar 19 1937, Stanford.

  28. Granville Hicks, ‘The Case Against Willa Cather’, 1933, and Lionel Trilling, ‘Willa Cather’, in After the Genteel Tradition, 1937. Both in Schroeter, op. cit., pp.159 ff.

  29. Letter to Zoë Akins, Oct 28 1937, Huntington, Woodress II, p.474.

  30. In letters to Stephen Tennant, Oct 20 1941, June 23 1937, Feb 16 1945, Hugo Vickers.

  31. Sergeant, pp. 143, 167, 198, 201, 209. See Ch. 9, p.185. Cather lamented Virginia Woolf’s death in a letter to Stephen Tennant of April 15 1941.