Arts and Letters

Willa Cather, born in Virginia in 1875, was taken as a child to Nebraska to live on a ranch. There was no school in the neighborhood and she grew up largely out of doors in the corn-fields, on roads that were tracks in the buffalo-grass. Most of the settlers roundabout were Danes, Norwegians, Bohemians, and Germans dwelling in sod-houses and dugouts on this windy table-land, and she often spent her mornings with the pioneer women who were making their bread and who were glad to tell their family stories. She was witnessing the "little beginnings of human society in the West," which later became the theme of a number of her novels, beginnings that were heroic often, as she recalled and described them in My Antonia, for instance, and O Pioneers! She had known characters like old Rosicky and Alexandra Bergson, who had "not many roots, but one tap-root that goes down deep"; and she dwelt by choice on these strong types who were, as she put it, "rich mines of life, like the founders of early races."

When she began to write at the State University in Lincoln, Nebraska, she found herself crudely telling the stories of these settlers. She first took as her model Henry James, whom she followed in certain other stories about painters, sculptors, and singers who are misunderstood, but she soon perceived that James's world and the method he used in dealing with it were remote indeed from the world of her imagination. Although she suggested later that she had learned much from Flaubert, she found a more intimate mentor closer at hand when, in 1908, in Boston, she met Sarah Orne Jewett and saw her Nebraska in the light of Miss Jewett's Maine. She had taken the back-trail, first to Pittsburgh, then to New York, where she was managing editor of McClure's Magazine—at the height of the muckraking school, so foreign to her own—and she found in Boston a traditional note that appealed to something as deep in her as her love of youth or the prairie or the pioneer West. Perhaps the last of the Western writers to be drawn to Boston as Howells was drawn, she described it lovingly in Alexander's Bridge, the first and far from perfect novel that was later followed by several others concerned with the past in the oldest American settings. She was to be attracted strongly to French Quebec and Santa Fé, the remains of the most venerable civilizations in the western world, even the caves of the cliff-dwellers in Arizona, which appeared again and again in her novels and stories. She delighted in these cities of stone, asleep, set in great caverns in the face of the cliff, which had, as she said, a kind of composition, still as sculpture as they were, all hung together, and she liked to think of the Spanish relics, the medals, the sword-hilts and stirrups that Coronado's men perhaps had left on the plains. She loved what she called the "reassuring" solidity and depth of old adobe walls and granite dwellings, of whatever in the French and Spanish towns suggested the calm, the repose that marked the style even of her western stories.

Along with her sensuous imagination, her feeling for color, tastes, odors, and sounds, the flavor of fresh lettuce and good wine, the tones of bells, this note of composure characterized Willa Cather, all but uniquely at a time when the brilliantly rapid report was the mark of most of our novelists, especially of the West. She found in Boston this composure, and she certainly found it in Miss Jewett's stories, which, for the rest, were so "lightly yet so tightly built," she said, that to read one was like watching the movement of a yacht. Miss Jewett spoke of "the thing that teases the mind over and over for years" as properly belonging to literature, and Willa Cather added: "The shapes and scenes that have 'teased' the mind… make a much higher order of writing… than the most vigorous transfer of immediate impressions." It was her own special quality, in a day of reporting, to "recollect in tranquility" whatever had impressed her; and did not Miss Jewett's Almira Todd, the heroine of The Country of the Pointed Firs, serve partially at least as a model for her women of the plains? One thinks of old Mrs. Harris who was "tied to the chariot of young life" and had to go wherever she was needed and of Alexandra and Antonia, so "tireless in serving generous emotions," who stood for the "unalterable realities at the bottom of things." Willa Cather compared these to the lonely ledges and far-away islands to which even the sea-birds return, the anchors, the ideas, the memories that give us courage. As for her debt to Sarah Orne Jewett, it was mainly aesthetic, however, and a consequence of their similar taste for the "unfurnished" novel, for the method of presenting scenes by suggestion rather than enumeration, for the poetry rather than the prose of the descriptive art. She felt that to reproduce on paper an actual city, a house, a street, was perhaps a stupendous ambition but unworthy of an artist, and, having no faith in the "value of literalness," she would have sacrificed gladly the force that has often accompanied the realism of the novel. Of all her contemporaries in this country, she was the remotest from Theodore Dreiser, as she was closely allied to another Chicagoan, Henry B. Fuller, a novelist who shared her distaste for the sprawling and the formless. They were of one opinion regarding the virtue of brevity, and Willa Cather must have liked what Fuller said of the use of words: as in the case of the echo, one word should be spoken so that twenty are evoked in reply.

Willa Cather's conception of her art was all of a piece with her vision of life, her delight in ideality and beauty, gaiety and grace. She shared her Paul's "shuddering repulsion" from the "colourless mass of everyday existence," aware as she was of the seamier side of her little prairie towns, of which many other writers made so much. She was too full of the exhilaration, the excitement of youth and discovery to dwell on the gauntness of her houses or the cracks in the mirrors, constantly on the alert as she was, in her studies of the Western scene, for every trace of distinction, vitality, talent. Like her young singer in Chicago, she "seemed to be carried along on a rushing river and was constantly saluting beautiful things on the shore… They were there, flashing on the right or the left"; and, meager as the scene appeared in the minds of other writers, it was never so for Willa Cather. She had her Tom Outland's zest of the explorer when he discovered the Blue Mesa. She suggested Thea Kronberg who collected on her walks the crystals and the prickly pear blossoms that opened on the plains, and no writer has begun to convey such a sense of their human resources as the author of Lucy Gayheart and The Song of the Lark. She peopled them with Swedish farm-girls who become great opera-singers, old wandering German musicians, Hungarian violinists who have grown up in Western mining-towns and warm-blooded Mexicans with much to give an artist, who have learned to "dive below insults or soar above them." With her magical gift of evocation, she gave us other atmospheres, the Quebec of Laval and Frontenac, the Virginia of her childhood, but the light dry air of the great grass plains with its aromatic odor of the sage-brush—“on the bright edges of the world"—was most her own. Sometimes her note was elegiac, oftener idyllic, while her style, so luminous, buoyant, and fresh, recalled the hot sun on the sage and the clover, the wind, and the snowy peaks flashing against the sky.