April 24, 1947—Thirteen years after making the cover
of Time Magazine, Willa Cather died, age 73, of a
cerebral hemorrhage in her New York home, with her critical reputation at low
ebb. But her longtime readers hadn’t abandoned her, and nearly three decades
later the critics began to respect her again.
It’s more than a bit tempting to compare Cather with
another great female writer of the early 20th century, Edith Wharton. Well, I’ve always found
it hard to resist temptation, so let’s have a go at it, shall we?
*Both lived approximately three-quarters of a
century.
*Both, as beginning authors, were heavily influenced
by Henry James.
* Both hit their literary stride in their early 40s,
enjoying a run of brisk sales, then fell out of favor because of
their perceived conservatism and male critics' predominant gender bias.
* Both benefited from feminist scholarship and from
revelations about their private lives (Wharton’s extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton,
Cather’s lesbianism) that suddenly transformed them into racy
and fascinating women.
* Both were awarded Pulitzer Prizes in years in
which Sinclair Lewis was the favorite (Wharton’s The Age of Innocence bested Lewis’s Main Street in 1920, and Cather’s One of Ours beat out Lewis’s Babbitt
two years later). At the time, it was charged, the Pulitzer voters had opted
for something safe and genteel over biting satires of American life. Nearly a
century later, it’s Wharton and Cather, not Lewis, who’s more likely to show up
on high school and college reading lists.
A quote by Cather herself could be cited as a reason
why her material garners more attention than ever while Lewis’s reputation has
taken a hit: “If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the
same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism,” Cather wrote in an essay
called “The Novel Démeublé” in the
April 12, 1922 issue of The New Republic.
“Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of
the present it must select the eternal material of art.”
While it is true that Lewis still has his adherents
(notably, Tom Wolfe, in the 1989 Harper’s
essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”), Cather’s advocacy of the timeless
nature of fiction has largely carried the day. Only the situation, I think,
might be a bit more complicated than that.
Lewis rose to fame in the Twenties on the strength
of novels that benefited from what might be termed reporting: following people
around who would become subjects of his fiction, then capturing their speech
patterns and those of others in their environment. Cather’s fiction dealt far
more often with the past than Lewis did, but she learned many of her writing
skills in a journalistic setting: at the muckraking magazine McClure’s, where she rose to become
managing editor. And this could be a particularly hothouse example of
journalism, at that: Her companion, Edith Lewis, likened it to “working in a
high wind” with proprietor S.S. McClure as the “storm center.”
Before I close this post out, I should mention one
other way in which Cather and Wharton resemble each other: their powerful
evocation of atmosphere, almost textbook examples of how to create setting. In a prior post, I offered just such an
example from Wharton’s physically and morally wintry Berkshire setting from Ethan Frome. Though Cather is associated
most with the Nebraska settings of O
Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark
and My Antonia, her extraordinary
ability to evoke place can also be seen in Death Comes for the Archbishop. The following is just one of many amazing descriptions
of the Southwest through which her Roman Catholic cleric passes, in a beautiful but haunting landscape that somehow mirrors the emptiness of souls:
“Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride
to Acoma as his introduction to the mesa country. One thing which struck him at
once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection,
which lay motionless above it, or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud
formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes
they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour, sometimes they were dome-shaped, or
fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an
Oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set
down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which
were a part of them, as the spoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the
wave.”
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