This Day in Literary History (Death Comes for Willa Cather)

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 20^th 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.”