Willa Cather Read online

  The Moonstone cast of friends also functions as an audience for the girl not fit for ordinary life. She is already their star and, in varying degrees, they cheer her on in “indecorous” ambition. Both Ray Kennedy and Dr. Archie will become her patrons. In a contemplative moment in the section “The Ancient People,” Thea realizes that “One’s life was at the mercy of blind chance.” Such chance is the occasion for much incident; it leads the story by the nose. Ray, who adored Thea’s attack on the world, dies leaving her the money to study in Chicago; her piano teacher, almost by accident, discovers the real prize of her voice; “Only by the merest chance had she ever got to Panther Canyon,” the family ranch of Fred Ottenberg, her somewhat brotherly suitor. It would seem that the rise and fall of her fortunes might accord with the determinism of the era evident in the works of Theodore Dreiser and William Dean Howells. Thea’s Chicago trials are, indeed, Dreiserian, but Cather gives her heroine another line: “She had better take it in her own hands. . . .” as we presume Cather did in forging her own career.

  The closest Thea comes to having a flesh and blood lover is Fred Ottenberg, who is entirely appropriate for a romance—rich, cultured, sympathetic to her career—and also entirely inappropriate, the victim of yet another of Cather’s wretched marriages. He comes to think of himself, not unkindly, as an “instrument” in her life. But Thea does not use people. She literally repays Dr. Archie, who footed the bill for her study in Germany. What her instruments get in return for their belief in her talent is Kronborg, the great singer in performance. The “Kronborg” section is often considered formal, distant. Well, of course, she has given herself to the larger audience. Her oldest friend, the doctor who has also moved on in his life, attends her triumph in Lohengrin: “This woman he had never known; she had somehow devoured his little friend, as the wolf ate up Red Ridinghood. Beautiful, radiant, tender as she was, she chilled his old affection; that sort of feeling was no longer appropriate.” In his view, the successful woman has destroyed the vulnerable child. She no longer needs his paternal attention.

  In The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather breaks into the flow of the story much as she does with Alexanra Bergson’s dream imagery, as though to halt the episodic, to cut deeper. In 1912, Cather first went to Arizona and New Mexico with her brother. The Southwest is her other place, not the world which she knew, but the vast and mysterious landscape beyond prairie town acculturation and book learning. This land, which she would use in many of her later novels, was the primal place where getting on in the world was erased by natural grandeur, where the small human figure might find perspective on herself. “The Ancient People” is set at the moment of Thea’s possible failure. She is twenty, her promising voice flawed in the middle range. Fred Ottenberg, her prince manqué, sends her to Arizona, where the revelations of Panther Canyon connect Thea to prehistory, to “the long chain of human endeavour,” which she sees in the ancient adobe villages and in the shards of beautiful pottery made by the Indian women. Cather will go back to this theme in her most mature work, giving her sympathetic characters the insight to place their struggles in the vastness of history. It is a view that both elevates and diminishes; Thea understands this, that you must unpack the baggage you come with, ad place your goods in the storehouse of man’s achievements and failures.

  Thea’s bathing scene in the canyon is joyous, indulgent, the opposite of Alexandra’s purgation. “She had got to a place where she was out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort.” She makes connections that are not available to Alexandra. The novelist had made the discovery that she awards to Thea Kronborg: “She was singing very little now, but a song would go through her head all morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation than like an idea, or an act of remembering.” Cather understood that the conflict between the cerebral and the earthy cold only be settled in her art. Sensuality was assigned to her inscribed page.

  My Ántonia (1918) is the best known, the most honored of the early novels. It is less furnished with incident than the Song of the Lark. Cather returned to her strong suit of interwoven tales, which had served her well in O Pioneers! The device of the introduction in which we learn that Jim Burden has written down “what I remember about Ántonia” was not set in its final form until a reissue of the novel in 1926. Clearly, the idea that the novel would be presented as a written text was troubling, but the character as author was a move that Cather wanted to pull off. Jim Burden must be fully drawn, not merely a mask for the writer. Much commentary on My Ántonia worries the point that the distinction between the novice writer (a male narrator) and the accomplished novelist (Willa Cather) is often blurred. Like Sancho Panza, I do not believe everything the master tells me about the “I” of her novel. When, in the course of finding fault with the writer, did we lose track of the imagination? Cather’s interest in the narrative voice lay in transformation, the skill by which the writer can become who she wants when she wants: she is the teller of the tale. If her open form is understood, all the Jim/Willa-as-narrator conundrums may be swept away as problems purely academic. (I do believe that she worked out of a tradition that went back to the earlier forms of storytelling that had sustained her: the tales found in Homer, in Ovid, in Cervantes, and in all those old books that she loved—The Golden Legends, The Lives of the Saints.)

  In the first section of My Ántonia, Jim Burden’s writing what he can remember is a boy’s adventure story though he titles it “The Shimerdas.” He is transplanted, like Cather, from Virginia to Nebraska as a child. On the train he’s reading a “Life of Jesse James.” The Bohemian family, Ántonia’s family, gets off at the same stop. He has only a glimpse of them before the excitement of the West takes over in truly boyish stories that might be out of the serial Westerns of the day: sketches, vignettes of heroic deeds in the wilderness. Cather, a master at digressions, breaks this youthful mood with the story of Pavel and Peter, a cruel Russian tale that introduces the theme of reckless youth, the guilt of the outcast. Jim will be mildly reckless as a college boy, Ántonia foolishly destructive when she falls in love, but they will find their place within society. Each time I read this magical work, I wonder at Cather’s daring in rejecting linear narrative. Pavel and Peter’s tale of the wedding party destroyed by ravaging wolves is told as a confession to Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia’s gentle father, who does not persevere in the Nebraska winter. His suicide is the saddest story in the many stories that Jim Burden recalls as his boyish excitement gives way to deeper consideration. Jim is a gatherer of stories in the manner of the old storytellers who so influenced Cather. It is instructive for the reader and for any writer to chart the teller of each tale within My Ántonia, to observe Cather’s switch from private memory to the collective views of the community in Black Hawk, whether it be the harsh censure of the Catholic church on Shimerda’s suicide or the final acceptance of Ántonia as an enduring force of life.

  Then, too, in the manner of popular magazines that ran illustrated stories, Jim Burden is given to the pictorial. “Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade—that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one’s first primer.” Exactly, and his written memories are sharply seen, but I do not read them as fully instructive because Jim, no matter how successful his legal career, how unsuccessful his marriage, cannot move beyond the “precious, the incommunicable past.” That is his small tragedy. His triumph is in seeing how fully Ántonia lives in the present.

  Ántonia is not the only woman pictured in Jim’s memory. In “The Hired Girls,” he places her with the many immigrant girls who worked in middle-class homes and boarding houses. The hard masculine work of the farm that was so natural to Ántonia is replaced by the domestic chores during her years as “the help” for the Harlings, a pleasant, well-to-do family. As she comes into womanly beauty, she I less my Ántonia, less the
possession of her boyhood chum, her story thrown into the hopper with stories of other girls—the Swedes, the Germans—and of Lena Lingard whose name gives title to the next section. “Lena Lingard,” what an odd naming of the passage in which we follow Jim Burden to the University, track his progress, most particularly, in the classics. But, then, his great distraction is Lena. Cather fell in love in her college days, though, unlike Jim, was not drawn away from her studies. The “I” of Jim’s story is richer than an autobiographical disclosure: Lena Lingard, one of the hired girls, is deliciously female, but she wants neither marriage nor children, while Ántonia, after a false start in which she bears an illegitimate child, is the mother of a happy brood, settled in a marriage that is an accommodation but happy after all. Lena’s flirtation with Jim is less a seduction of the body than of the spirit. He idles his days away in presexual play with this enchantress, before his wise professor, aptly named Cleric, brings him to task—and to Harvard—so that he might get on with the business of his education. “Lena,” he comes to understand, “gave her heart away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her business and had got on in the world.” Cather strikes this note again, as she did when finding her way home in O Pioneers! to “the country she loved,” “the old friends.”

  “Lena Lingard,” that entry in Jim Burden’s writing down of his memories is a light-hearted restatement of Cather’s mind/body problem. Jim cannot make sense of his studies while immersed in dreamy sensuality. He is only nineteen. Even in recall he doesn’t get to the understanding that comes to Thea Kronborg, that the physical may nurture the cerebral: Forget what you know in order to know it best. When he encounters Lena in her mature beauty, he is reading Virgil’s Georgics, that perfect pastoral model “where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow,” but he remembers her as a waiflike child, “a picture, and underneath it the mournful line: ‘Optima dies . . . prima fugit.’ The best days . . . the first to depart.”

  Jim Burden’s claims on his Ántonia when he finally returns to Black Hawk are extravagant. He has made her up, made her the central character in his story and presumably in his life. “The idea of you is a part of my mind,” he tells this aging pioneer woman, “you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You are really a part of me.” Idea, mind, are the operative words, the words that Cather chose to set Jim Burden’s emotional limits. She also chose to undermine the mournful nature of his recall in the joyous present of the last section. Burden’s summing up, like Nick Caraway’s at the end of Gatsby is grand, elegiac. Though I marvel at the rhetoric in which he couples himself with Ántonia—citing their “Destiny,” “those early accidents of fortune which predetermine for us all that we can ever be,” he is all eloquence, beholden to schooled language, while the pioneer woman reverts to her native Bohemian to speak of the fruitful pleasures of the day, pleasures she has forged beyond the early accidents of fortune.

  In the epilogue of The Song of the Lark, Tillie, the unfortunate maiden aunt who so wanted to be an actress, is pasting pictures of the magnificent Kronborg in her scrapbook. It is a Chekovian moment. Willa Cather in her prairie novels, like Chekov in the great plays, wrote of those who stay and those who go away, a theme so simple, so given to inclusion of many lives. Cather came to dislike the modern, dime-store POP as much as a post-World War I aura of wasteland, of the loss of faith. She would be out of sorts at my suggestion that beginning with these early novels she bravely leapt ahead to the postmodern, to the rewriting of primal tales, to a nesting of stories within stories—like Ovid, Virgil, Cervantes, Calvino. Yes, Willa Cather broke the frame, poked her tomboy head through the canvas. In her great early work, My Ántonia, she quotes, by way of her front man Jim Burden, yet another line from the Georgics: “Primus ego in patrium mecum . . . deducant Musas”: “I shall be the first to bring the Muse into my country.” In the song of her prairie novels, Cather did just that.

  —Maureen Howard

  O Pioneers!

  “Those fields, colored by various grain!”

  MICKIEWICZ

  To the memory of

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  in whose beautiful and delicate work

  there is the perfection

  that endures

  PRAIRIE SPRING

  Evening and the flat land

  Rich and sombre and always silent;

  The miles of fresh-plowed soil,

  Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;

  The growing wheat, the growing weeds,

  The toiling horses, the tired men;

  The long empty roads,

  Sullen fires of sunset, fading,

  The eternal, unresponsive sky.

  Against all this, Youth,

  Flaming like wild roses,

  Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,

  Flashing like a star out of the twilight;

  Youth with its insupportable sweetness,

  Its fierce necessity,

  Its sharp desire,

  Singing and singing,

  Out of the lips of silence,

  Out of the earthy dusk.

  Contents

  PART I

  The Wild Land

  PART II

  Neighboring Fields

  PART III

  Winter Memories

  PART IV

  The White Mulberry Tree

  PART V

  Alexandra

  Part I

  The Wild Land

  I

  One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o’clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.

  On the sidewalk in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede boy, crying bitterly. He was about five years old. His black cloth coat was much too big for him and made him look like a little old man. His shrunken brown flannel dress had been washed many times and left a long stretch of stocking between the hem of his skirt and the tops of his clumsy, copper-toed shoes. His cap was pulled down over his ears; his nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and red with cold. He cried quietly, and the few people who hurried by did not notice him. He was afraid to stop any one, afraid to go into the store and ask for help, so he sat wringing his long sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole beside him, whimpering, “My kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!” At the top of the pole crouched a shivering gray kitten, mewing faintly and clinging desperately to the wood with her claws. The boy had been left at the store while his sister went to the doctor’s office, and in her absence a dog had chased
his kitten up the pole. The little creature had never been so high before, and she was too frightened to move. Her master was sunk in despair. He was a little country boy, and this village was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts. He always felt shy and awkward here, and wanted to hide behind things for fear some one might laugh at him. Just now, he was too unhappy to care who laughed. At last he seemed to see a ray of hope: his sister was coming, and he got up and ran toward her in his heavy shoes.

  His sister was a tall, strong girl, and she walked rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next. She wore a man’s long ulster (not as if it were an affliction, but as if it were very comfortable and belonged to her; carried it like a young soldier), and a round plush cap, tied down with a thick veil. She had a serious, thoughtful face, and her clear, deep blue eyes were fixed intently on the distance, without seeming to see anything, as if she were in trouble. She did not notice the little boy until he pulled her by the coat. Then she stopped short and stooped down to wipe his wet face.