Willa Cather (1873-1947)
At last I find occasion for a “trigger
warning”. Though I aim at “general
interest” in this blog, I must indulge myself from time in a rather “academic”
post. Such a time has come, so if this
is not your sort of thing I suggest you follow Chaucer’s advice and simply turn
to another page. What is
“literature”? The question is more
difficult than it might appear. Among
the dictionary definitions is “printed material,” any printed material. The best literature on septic tanks
recommends plastic baffles. More
commonly the word implies a positive aesthetic judgment. Literature means writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas
of permanent universal interest. For
me, a work of literature is traditional—meaning
that it is aware of earlier written works with which it engages in a spirit of
respect or competitive contestation without recognition of which a reader must
necessarily have but a limited view of the work. Thus practically all of Roman literature
imitated earlier Greek “models”. Dante
in his Commedia is “imitating”
Virgil, who at the literal level is the pilgrim’s guide for most of the
poem. And Dante obviously “influences”
the many writers of Renaissance epic.
This past week I have read for the
first time a number of the early stories of Willa Cather. By any just reckoning Cather is one of our
greatest twentieth-century writers. I
was particularly impressed by her story “‘A Death in the Desert,’” published in
1903. To this story I shall in a moment
return, but I must first note that I find a decisive shift in her writing after
the first World War, especially in the great novels My Ántonia (1918) and Death
Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
These are novels still clearly linked to a classical tradition, and by
the time of her death in 1947 she had fallen somewhat into eclipse. It is one of the ironies of the perversity of
current academic fashion that her critical reputation was reanimated by an
unwarranted attention to her lesbianism.
The obviously more important wellsprings of her art, which I have rarely
seen mentioned, were classicism (she was a Latin teacher) and Christianity (she
was a fully engaged practitioner and active member of the Episcopal Church in
its frontier outpost of Red Cloud, Nebraska.)
But when it comes to English departments, one must these days be content
with what scraps are on offer.
Perhaps the most important
character in “’A Death in the Desert’” is a famous and deeply self-absorbed
American composer named Adriance Hilgarde, who makes no direct appearance in
it. Adriance, who has had a great
success in Europe and is on the verge of a crowning triumph in Paris, has a
much more ordinary brother, Everett, who so annoyingly resembles Adriance in
physical appearance that Everett is constantly being mistaken for him. There is a third major character, Katharine
Gaylord, an aging singer, a very old associate of the Hilgarde brothers. Katharine is dying of tuberculosis in a ranch
house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where (following the standard medical advice of
that age) she has retreated in the vain hope of regaining her health. As the story begins, Everett, one of those
nice guys who always finishes last, travels from the East by train to the wilds
of the West to comfort the doomed woman.
Her dying is protracted, and the two share many intimate
conversations. She recounts her hopeless
and unrequited love for the Olympian composer.
“It was not the first time that [Everett’s] duty had been to comfort, as
best he could, one of the broken things his brother’s imperious speed had cast
aside and forgotten.” Everett in turn, rendered
incautious by the pathos of the moment, confesses his own long-standing passion
for Katharine—a revelation that startles, indeed shocks her. Then she does die, and Everett, as he is
departing Cheyenne is mistaken for his brother by a visiting German singer with
whom he crosses paths in the train station.
Now that is about as Henry James as you can get without being Henry
James. Indeed, a valid criticism of the
early Cather is its excessive “Jamesianism”.
But James is not the only great writer with whom Cather engages.
She puts the title of the story in
quotation marks because it is an actual quotation. It is the title of a (once) well-known poem
by Robert Browning. Browning is among
our hardest and most philosophical poets.
That is probably why he is so little read today. Few of his dramatic monologues are simple,
and this one is no exception. But his death in the desert is that of Saint
John the Evangelist, the last living literary eye-witness of the ministry of
Jesus Christ. What will become of
Christian faith when the last personal witness of the Christ-life is gone? Among the complex issues the poem raises are
questions of truth, the authority of written texts, and grounds for belief. I believe that for Browning, one of the
prominent issues he had in mind was the nature of Scriptural authority, a
subject that had among intellectuals been pretty well revolutionized—to the
dismay of many conventional Christian believers--by the so-called “Higher
Criticism” of the nineteenth century.
Cather’s story is not a theological treatise, but it explores the
relationship of art (in this instance, music) and truth in a manner in which
James and John strangely cooperate. I
suspect that no one ever reads a serious writer “completely,” but it is always
worth the try. And, certainly, there is
as much danger of over-reading a subtle work than of under-reading it.
A major theme in Henry James is the
spiritual freshness of the new American character in the context of the
ambiguous sophistication of the old European societies. So far has the world moved on since 1881
(publication of Portrait of a Lady),
say, that the idea of the comparative spiritual wholesomeness of Americaness may seem
mind-boggling. But it is was major theme
of our early national literature, elaborating the ancient subject of the moral
superiority of simple, rural life to the dangerous sophistication of urban
cosmopolitanism. But the drab, dreary,
and often sinister side of supposedly heroic pioneer life, and the small- town
legacy of that life, likewise became an important American topic. You see it famously in Sherwood Anderson,
much admired by Cather. Sinclair Lewis
won the Nobel Prize on the strength of it.
It is pretty much the essence of southern Gothic in parts of Faulkner,
Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. It
is not infrequent in Cather herself, and conspicuously in The Troll Garden, the early collection of short stories that
included “’A Death in the Desert’”.
Willa Cather was not merely a great
writer, but a conscious creator of literature
as I defined it at the beginning of this short essay. The title of “’A Death in the Desert’” is, I
suspect, a lapidary ornament. The masons
who built the great medieval cathedrals sometimes placed beautiful stone
ornamentation in parts of the building invisible to those who worshiped in
it. The idea, I think, was that God
could and did see it. It was a kind of
redundant luxury, a work of pious artistic supererogation. No reader needs
to see the meaning of Browning to her sad story—presuming it really is there--but if you do see it, it is likely to increase the already opulent pleasure of
the reading experience.
