Dissolved into something complete and great

I have gushed previously about Willa Cather on this blog here. I am about to do so again.

My dual personality gave me the newly published Selected Letters of Willa Cather for my birthday last month. Cather had left adamant instructions to her executors that her private correspondence not be published or quoted. “The editors of the new collection, Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, acknowledge in the introduction that this publication flies in the face of Cather’s instructions, as set forth by a will that partially expired in 2011. Still, they believe that publication of her letters will prove invaluable for her legacy, arguing that ‘these lively, illuminating letters will do nothing to damage her reputation.'” (Melville House)

Oh well, I have been enthusiastically reading them. (Personally I think she was very depressed at the end of her life, and that is why she put those particular orders into effect.) I already knew from her fiction, that she was wonderfully talented and deep, but from her letters we get a real sense of Willa as a person. We see what gets her excited and the things that annoy her. We see her feelings hurt by mean-spirited reviewers and her confidence boosted by the encouraging words of worthy people.

“Weeks ago I got such a heart-warming letter from a former president of the Missouri Pacific, Edwin Winter, who as a young man helped to carry the U.P. across Nebraska, and who built the bridge over Dale Creek canyon–the first bridge, which was of timber! He asked if he could come to see me, and on Friday he came. Such a man! all that one’s proudest of in one’s country. He picked the book [My Antonia] up in his club and sat right down and wrote me the most beautiful of letters. I would rather have the admiration of one man like that than sell a thousand books…”

–from a letter to her brother Roscoe Cather, 1919

She loved her family and friends. She never married, and despite what some people who look at everything through the “queer lens” imagine, I think she would have liked to. But she was a passionate artist first and foremost. Had she married and had children, we might not have the wonderful books which are her legacy.

I also read Death Comes for the Archbishop, which she considered to be her best work. It is awesome. It tells the story of two well-meaning and devout French priests who encounter an entrenched Spanish-Mexican clergy whom they are sent to supplant after the United States acquired New Mexico in the Mexican-American War. She is very respectful of the Catholic Church (more so probably than a Catholic would be), and I am happy to say, she is a big fan of our old family friend Kit Carson, who plays a minor role in the novel.

“This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-press could not follow him. Out of the hardships of his boyhood–from fourteen to twenty picking up a bare living as cook or mule-driver for wagon trains, often in the service of brutal and desperate characters–he had preserved a clean sense of honour and a compassionate heart.”

Through the 1910s and 1920s, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in  1922 for her novel One of Ours. By the 1930s, however, critics began to dismiss her as a “romantic, nostalgic writer who could not cope with the present.” Critics such as Granville Hicks accused Cather of failing to confront “contemporary life as it is.” The same thing happened to Thornton Wilder, you may recall,  and many other writers who are still read today (whereas Granville Hicks is long forgotten). It is good to see Willa Cather appreciated again. I agree with Wallace Stevens who wrote toward the end of her life: “We have nothing better than she is. She takes so much pains to conceal her sophistication that it is easy to miss her quality.” I am so grateful to have finally discovered her!

On a personal note, I was interested to read that one of her favorite nieces graduated from Smith College. I was gratified to learn that the college bestowed an honorary degree on Willa, the year her niece graduated.

Someday I would like to visit her grave in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

WILLA CATHER
December 7, 1873-April 24, 1947
THE TRUTH AND CHARITY OF HER GREAT
SPIRIT WILL LIVE ON IN THE WORK
WHICH IS HER ENDURING GIFT TO HER
COUNTRY AND ALL ITS PEOPLE.
“…that is happiness; to be dissolved
into something complete and great.”
From My Antonia