by Jane Rule
Willa Cather can be just as sympathetic with a woman who is frailly feminine, like Mrs. Forrester in A Lost Lady, a woman who is entirely dependent on her husband’s strength, integrity, and social position to give her a protective atmosphere in which to charm everyone. When he loses his money and becomes ill, she turns where she can for support and approval, even to Ivy Peters, a crude young lawyer who despises and envies all she stands for. Though Niel Herbert, the narrator, is shocked and disillusioned by her affairs, he stays protective and half in love with Mrs. Forrester through her decline. Instead of judging her harshly, he comes instead to admire her husband more, to see in him not only the traditional masculine virtues of strength and integrity but also the insight and compassion reflected in his attitude toward his wife.
Though many male writers have been concerned with the role and nature of the artist, Willa Cather is nearly alone among female writers in her preoccupation with this theme. Most of the stories in Youth and the Bright Medusa deal with artists, and two of her novels, Lucy Gayheart and The Song of the Lark, are studies of women artists, a pianist and a singer.
Lucy Gayheart, though set apart by her talent and vitality from childhood, “the parlor cat”24 as compared to her older sister’s “kitchen cat,” is constitutionally dependent, afraid to acknowledge her gift even to herself, and lacking in ambition. Her relationship with Harry Gordon, the most eligible young man in the small town where she grows up, is a real alternative to a musical career. “Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry’s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost.”25 When she goes to Chicago to study, she is not driven by her own needs but by her infatuation with a singer, Clement Sebastian, for whom she is to play. “She had never been nervous when Auerbach [her teacher] asked her to play for his friends; he had told her this was because she was not ambitious—and that was her greatest fault. But this time it was different. If she didn’t please Sebastian, she would probably never meet him again. If she did please him—But that possibility frightened her more than the other.”26 The relationship that develops between them is not sexual. “He sometimes thought of her as rather boyish, because she was so square. It was more like a chivalrous loyalty than a young passion.”27 Sebastian is probably a decorous portrait of a homosexual since, except for Lucy, his most important relationships have been with an adopted boy who had to be sent away because Sebastian’s wife became jealous, a male friend of his youth, and his male accompanist. When Harry comes to Chicago to press Lucy to marry him, she untruthfully confesses that Sebastian is her lover as the only way to explain her real passion, which is the music she shares with him. When Sebastian and his accompanist are killed in a boating accident, Lucy has a breakdown and returns home, needing to make some contact with Harry, even though she knows that he has married. “If he should put his hand on her, or look directly into her eyes and flash the old signal, she believed it would waken something and start the machinery going to carry her along.”28 There is no one, now that Sebastian is dead, to encourage her. Her Chicago teacher has said to her, “In the musical profession there are many disappointments. A nice house and a garden in a little town with money enough not to worry, a family—that’s the best life. …Even for women of great talent and great ambition—I don’t know. Some have good success, but I don’t envy them.”29 Mrs. Ramsey, the town’s wise woman who is concerned about Lucy, gives her these clichés: “I don’t like to see young people with talent take it too seriously. Life is short; gather roses while you may.” “Nothing really matters but living—accomplishments are the ornaments of life, they come second.”30 Against these views is set one frail evening, during which Lucy hears a soprano in a traveling show. “She felt she must run away tonight, by any train, back to a world that strove after excellence.”31 Lucy is killed before her resolve can be tested, but it seems clear that she did not have the toughness and independence of spirit necessary for any artist, particularly a woman, to survive and perfect her gift.
Thea Kronburg, in The Song of the Lark, is a different breed of woman, one who recognizes her gift and holds it to herself against any damage. She is not only not frightened of it but knows that it is both center and goal. In the small community where she lives, she associates with those few people who will help nurture her as an artist: Dr. Archie, who recognizes early that she is an unusual child, lends her books, takes her on his rounds, talks seriously with her; Mr. Wunsch, her alcoholic music teacher who is considered too disreputable by most people in the town to be suitable as a music teacher for their children; Spanish Johnny, a Mexican with fine natural musicianship and a passion for his art. Thea’s mother does what she can to give her gifted daughter space to grow, and Ray Kennedy, a sentimental railway man, who dreams of marrying her when she is old enough, is more usefully killed in an accident, his life insurance money left to Thea so that she can go to Chicago to continue her studies. She works her teachers as hard as she works herself, studying first piano and then voice. Without social grace, with only the strength and vitality of her gift, she is in a pure way ruthless.
Exhausted from study and trying to earn a living, she goes home for a rest, but, as she later reflects on a better kind of holiday in Arizona, “There was certainly no kindly Providence that directed one’s life; and one’s parents did not in the least care what became of one, so long as one did not misbehave and endanger their comfort. One’s life was at the mercy of blind chance. She had better take it in her own hands and lose everything than meekly draw the plough under the rod of parental guidance. She had seen it when she was at home last summer—the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward serious effort. Even to her father it seemed indecorous. Whenever she spoke seriously, he looked apologetic. Yet she had clung fast to whatever was left of Moonstone in her mind. No more of that! The Cliff-Dwellers had lengthened her past. She had older and higher obligations.”32
Willa Cather is as willful with the plot as Thea is with her life. She provides Thea with Fred Ottenburg, a rich young businessman and music lover who has the intelligence and sensitivity to understand her, who wants nothing more of his own life than to serve her and help her in her career. But Willa Cather also provides him with a wife so that he can’t clutter up Thea’s emotional life as she begins her rigorous training for opera. Dr. Archie provides the money for her to go to Germany, from which she does not return even for her mother’s illness and death because her career is at a crucial point. In a triumphant return to New York, she appears to the people who have loved and helped her to be totally absorbed in her singing without anything left for them. “I have no private life,”33 she explains. In an epilogue, she finally marries Fred Ottenburg, but her life has been one in which both she and other people have had to make great personal sacrifices. The triumph of her art exacts a price higher than most are willing to pay. When one of her teachers is asked for the secret of her success, he answers simply, “Passion,” the fault Willa Cather from girlhood is most willing to forgive.
Willa Cather knew she had put much of herself as well as her friend, Olive Fremstad, into the portrait of Thea Kronburg. Olive Fremstad said, when she had read the book, she could not tell where she left off and Willa Cather began. Though Willa Cather gave a great deal of personal time to her family and attended her mother’s last illness, she understood how much of herself must be reserved for her work. There is no condemnation of Thea Kronburg by those who care for her. They come to understand her position, and the loss of a personal life is not presented as a great grief against the fierce joy of a fulfilled and fulfilling voice. The book is dedicated to Isabelle McClung.
The character in which critics most identify Willa Cather is not Thea Kronburg but St. Peter, the main character in The Professor’s House. “He is what Willa Cather herself has always been or hoped to be—a pioneer in mind, a Catholic by instinct, French by inclination, a Spiritual aristocrat with democratic manners.”34 Not only are
his tastes and accomplishments similar to those of Willa Cather, but the crisis he is going through seems one which might parallel Willa Cather’s loss of her old writing room at the McClung’s and of Isabelle.
No novel by a writer of real gifts should be read as veiled autobiography. All successful fiction is transformed and transcended biography. Willa Cather often acknowledged one or several models, as well as identification with aspects of many of her characters, and she knew that the best material for fiction is what is in the writer’s natural domain. “A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within range and character of his deepest sympathies.”35 “It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject matter, by using his ‘imagination’ upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham which, like a badly built house, looks poor and shabby after a few years.”36 The Professor’s House is an authentic building, obviously drawing on the deep sources of Willa Cather’s experience and perception. It is not, however, an inexact translation of her personal life.
St. Peter is a successful, middle-aged scholar with a wife and two married daughters. Prize money from publications has made it possible for him to build a new house, and one of his sons-in-law has made a lot of money commercializing another man’s discovery. When St. Peter refuses to move his study out of the old house and excuses himself from a trip to France his son-in-law has planned for the family, St. Peter gives himself the opportunity to examine the effect material success has had on all of them. His daughters, who have been very close, are now envious and suspicious of each other. His wife is entirely enamored of her successful son-in-law, and St. Peter finds himself indifferent to them all. His chief attachment is to young Tom Outland, killed in the war, whose story is told in a separate section of the book. In Tom are all the values of youth with its passion and integrity, the very things everyone has now lost. St. Peter’s brooding and his increasing dread of his family’s return make him careless of his own safety, and he is nearly killed by a faulty stove in his old study. Augusta, the stolid Catholic seamstress, finds him in time. He seems resigned to being alive. “Theoretically he knew that life is possible, maybe even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”37 For a man who really loved his wife, his children, his work, “surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love.”38 One of the most telling observations in the book is “the complexion of a man’s life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together,”39 those two perhaps very different, intimately connected parts of the human personality. St. Peter’s obviously were wearing mortally thin.
Willa Cather suffered crises of her own, some of them perhaps related to the conflict between her original self and the self modified by her own sexual nature. She certainly knew the profound discomforts as well as the pleasures of success. And she shared with St. Peter the horror of what is lost in the worship of material progress. But it was Willa Cather’s vitality and passion which created The Professor’s House, and she was to go on from there to write her greatest book, Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Willa Cather wrote two books about French Catholics in the new world, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, and Catholicism is Myra’s refuge in My Mortal Enemy, hinted at also for St. Peter when he is rescued by Augusta. Willa Cather was not a Catholic. When she finally was confirmed, she joined the Episcopal Church with her parents, the closest alternative which still allowed the Protestant privacy of individual conscience. Her sympathy with the Catholic Church and her knowledge of it made many of her Catholic readers assume she was one of them, an error which gave her great pleasure.
Though Willa Cather did not write a book about love between women, Death Comes for the Archbishop is, among many other things, the study of a relationship between two men, Bishop Latour and Father Valliant, vowed to celibacy as French Catholic missionaries in the Southwest. Their attachment to each other from the time they are boys together studying for the priesthood in France to Father Valliant’s death after years of hard service is quietly developed throughout the book. Father Valliant, a remarkably homely and frail-bodied man, is overtly emotional, friendly, enduring, a man of action. Bishop Latour is an intellectual, handsome and refined in his tastes, naturally an introvert. The two men, during their years as missionaries in the same territory, rarely have the opportunity to be together. If Father Valliant lies ill somewhere in an Indian encampment, Bishop Latour rides out with medicine, grateful to bring his friend home for some period of rest. Occasionally Latour sends for Valliant on no more than a slight pretext simply to have his company, but Valliant is always restless to be at work; at the same time he is sympathetic, for he understands that, while he makes friends easily everywhere, Latour does not. Here is a relationship in which the erotic plays no part, in which work always takes precedence over affectionate need. Though it is neither sentimentalized nor idealized, it is offered as another of the ways human beings relate to each other and to their work.
Willa Cather was a contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, knew him and enjoyed his company. They shared an enthusiasm for the Southwest. Her only critical comment about his work indicates that she resented his literalness about mental reactions and physical sensations as dehumanizing, as reducing to “animal pulp.”40 She read Gertrude Stein and could not take her seriously. Willa Cather’s literary mentor was Henry James, and, though she learned early not to imitate him, to find her own subject matter, her own style, her own creed of art as simplification, she shared his ability to create an enormous range of characters in accurate, limiting, and illuminating environments. Her sexual tastes, like his, extended rather than limited her sensibilities, whatever social and private burden they may sometimes have been to her. Her only “dangerous idiosyncrasy” is her great gift of perception and craft, which has always made those who are fearful of the truth uncomfortable before it.
Vita Sackville-West 1892–1962
THE DESIRE TO BE a man, shared by Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, and Willa Cather, is probably no more common among lesbians than among other women, for it begins early in childhood not as a sexual taste but as a rebellion against the physical, emotional, and social restrictions imposed on little girls. Most have resigned themselves, some even embraced those limitations in adolescence, particularly those who are sexually astute enough to realize that they do not have to improve and advance themselves but only their husbands and children to maintain a position of value in the world. To be excused from the self would probably be as much a temptation to some men if they were given the legitimate option. For people who are by nature independent and gifted, that abdication is extremely painful if not impossible.
Of all the women considered in this study, Vita Sackville-West had the greatest reason to wish that she had been born male. She was the only child of Lionel Sackville-West and Victoria Sackville-West. Lionel would inherit Knole, the largest house in England still in private hands, from his uncle because all five of his uncle’s children were illegitimate. Victoria was one of his uncle’s illegitimate daughters, and, when she and Lionel married, they lived at Knole. Vita was born there and lived there until at twenty-one she was married to Harold Nicolson in the Knole chapel, confessing that the only great rival for Harold was Knole itself, for in marrying him she gave up her life at Knole, and, even though she was the only child of the family, she would not inherit the estate because she was female.
A solitary child, she found her greatest ally in her grandfather (who was also her great-uncle), as unsociable as she was, aloof and rude to the numbers of people entertained at Knole. The relationship between her parents deteriorated early, but they tolerated each other’s affairs for some years. Lionel even encouraged Victoria in her relationship with Sir John Murray Scott
, an extremely wealthy man, who also lived at Knole for some years and left most of his money to Victoria when he died so that she and her husband could continue to enjoy living on the lavish scale his money for years had provided. His money also made them resigned to Vita’s marriage, for, though they liked Harold Nicolson, he was without resources except for his career in the diplomatic service, and Vita could have married other men who would have provided her with great estates and titles. Obviously wealth and position in themselves did not interest Vita as substitutes for the loved place she must inevitably lose.
When her grandfather died, even her father was not secure in his inheritance, for one of the illegitimate sons contested Lionel Sackville-West’s right to Knole in a law suit that revived the family scandal. When that case was settled in Lionel Sackville-West’s favor, another suit was brought by Sir John Murray Scott’s family contesting his will, in which the scandal of Victoria’s long relationship with him brought even more notoriety to the family. Some time after Vita’s marriage, Victoria finally left her husband and Knole. Vita and Harold had taken a cottage just two miles from Knole and moved only when the land around them was bought by a farmer who was going to raise chickens. When they left the area, they went to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, a “battered relic of an Elizabethan house in which not a single room was habitable,”1 which they gradually restored. Though it was not imposing and grand, it was old and beautiful, and there in the tower Vita Sackville-West had her study, where she wrote short stories, novels, and biographies, an occupation that had absorbed her since childhood, at which she was successful enough to provide a comfortable income even during a period when Harold was uncertainly shifting professions and Victoria was being recalcitrant about providing the allowance which had been legally made over to Vita at her marriage.