“The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers…I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
For weeks now I have been meaning to write something about Willa Cather, but I have been so busy that I have not been able to think about it. I have read The Song of the Lark and My Antonia in quick succession, followed by O Pioneers! They are all three deep goldmines of insight and wonderful writing. I (literally) wept the tears a writer sheds when she reads something better than she can ever write.
Portrait of Willa Cather by Edward Steichen
She was born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873 in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather, whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher. The Cathers moved to Nebraska in 1883, joining Charles’ parents, when Willa was nine years old. Her father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months; then he moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time. Clearly Cather’s time in this frontier state was a deeply formative experience for her.
For now I will just give you a few quotes to give you some idea of the power of her writing and of her strong feelings about things. Reading three books in a row, I have a pretty good idea what was important to her: art, home, the land, childhood, hard work, authenticity. She repeats themes, and characters have similarities that indicate clearly where old Willa was coming from. I have to say, I am with her all the way.
As she says of one character: “Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.”
Here she writes about the young main character in The Song of the Lark:
“The clamor about her drowned out the voice within herself. In the end of the wing, separated from the other upstairs sleeping rooms by a long, cold, unfinished lumber room, her mind worked better. She thought things out more clearly. Pleasant plans and ideas occurred to her which had never come before. She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends. She left them there in the morning, when she finished dressing in the cold, and at night, when she came up with her lantern and shut the door after a busy day, she found them awaiting her.”
Many years later, the girl, now a famous opera singer, tries to explain her art in a long, brilliant section. Here’s just a snippet:
“They saved me: the old things, things like the Kohlers’ garden. They were in everything I do…the light, the color, the feeling. Most of all the feeling. It comes in when I’m working on a part, like the smell of a garden coming in at the window. I try all the new things, and then go back to the old. Perhaps my feelings were stronger then. A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude. I am more or less of an artist now, but then I was nothing else…”
Here in My Antonia the narrator describes houses in the town:
“They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip.”
And here in O Pioneers! a person expresses something important to a friend:
“It’s by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you’ve helped me. I expect that is the only way a person ever really can help another. I think you are about the only one that ever helped me.”
Have I convinced you yet? Go now and order this book!
nationalgeographic.com
