Queen of the frontier

Willa Cather was an intensely private person. She hated interviews; her will strictly forbade quotation from her letters, a ban finally lifted six decades after her death. Fame, which came late, disconcerted her. One of Ours (1922), her epic about a Nebraska boy who fights in the First World War, won her a Pulitzer prize in 1923, but exposed her to painful criticism, both literary and political. Benjamin Taylor’s slim Life, the first since her letters were published in 2013, is timed to coincide with the centenary of that prize and the 150th anniversary of her birth.

It’s hard to imagine what Cather would have made of this year’s flurry of commemorations, or the bronze statue of her unveiled in the US Capitol, or her canonization by Nebraska’s Cather industry. Her combination of political conservatism and gender nonconformity (her great love was for a woman, Isabelle McClung, and she lived for four decades in a “Boston marriage” with Edith Lewis) has made her fertile ground for the last half-century’s culture wars. But the world inside her pages, brimming with close observation, alive to change and turbulence, ambivalent and searching, welcomes multiple readings and resists efforts to enlist her.

In the early Nebraska novel for which she is perhaps best known, Cather wrote both herself and the Midwestern landscape into being. Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia (1918), is given the author’s own memories of moving west from Virginia at the age of nine: “There was nothing but land: not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made”. The prairie is still unfixed, in motion, “as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping …”. The naming and taming of this world by the newly arrived Swedes, Norwegians, Bohemians, Germans and Americans proceed hand in hand. Those ghostly buffalo are a rare reminder in her work of the Pawnee people the settlers have displaced.

In direct sentences full of colour and sound and scent, the novel’s opening chapters conjure up a child’s paradise where “the road ran about like a wild thing” and the growing corn makes a “faint crackling” at night. The autumn cottonwoods look “like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales”, and there’s even a dragon – a giant rattler – for Jim to despatch before the admiring eyes of his new friend, Ántonia, whose Bohemian family has also just arrived. As his grandparents help the struggling Shimerdas, Jim teaches Ántonia English, while she teaches him to live. But life in the dugouts and sod houses is no prairie idyll. The fairy tale finally shatters with Mr Shimerda’s suicide, the aftermath of which begins to drive Jim and Ántonia apart.

The rift that opens between them runs, in different shapes, through much of Cather’s work. Most often it’s the tension between the ballast of a grounded life and a longing to explore. It’s generally Cather’s men who go adventuring. Her most idealized women put down deep roots at home, like the almost too wise, resilient Alexandra in O Pioneers! (1913), or Mrs Wheeler, the mother in One of Ours, whose selfless love for her son enables her to send him off to war. (Against them Cather sets her beautiful, flighty victims of desire: the tragic Marie in O Pioneers!, shot with her lover, Emil, under a mulberry tree; or Hilda, the Irish soubrette in her first, underrated novel, Alexander’s Bridge, 1912.) So Jim, in My Ántonia, goes off to college in Lincoln, then to Harvard, while Ántonia bears a child alone, abandoned by her first fiancé, and eventually settles down to raise a large and lively brood on a Nebraska farm.

Jim’s tender description of his visit to Ántonia after twenty years away, and his melancholy delight in her boisterous family, is one of Cather’s many versions of that classic American theme, the impossibility of return. The early part of Jim’s journey closely follows her own, from the prairie to Black Hawk (a version of Red Cloud, the small town to which Cather moved aged eleven), then to a university room decorated with the same classical prints as hers. Here and elsewhere in her workthe author’s literary cross-dressing is a successor to the literal cross-dressing she played with in her youth; as Hermione Lee points out in her essential biography, Willa Cather: A life saved up (1989), it allows her to take on the masculine literary tradition of the American frontier. It’s also her way of refracting, through the lens of her “double” gender, the tension between her deep nostalgia for her childhood roots – the well of her imagination – and her thirst for adventure, her own restlessness.

Benjamin Taylor sets out his approach early on in Chasing Bright Medusas: “I wish to frame the story as driven by Cather’s antagonism to the times in which she lived. She alone among the moderns wrote with unguarded admiration about the antique virtues: valor, loyalty, fulfilment of some high destiny”. His swift account turns Cather’s conservative side to the light, stressing her idealism and moral backbone, and paying rare attention to the Anglican faith that sustained her in later life. He writes from “a debt of love” and admires Cather enough to lay bare her flaws, quoting at length from her youthful “meat-ax” journalism, in which she damns Oscar Wilde (“Civilization shudders at his name”) and scorns women writers (excepting “the two great Georges”). He also confronts her (sometimes ambivalent) antisemitism, directly expressed in letters (“Isabelle has married a very brilliant and perfectly poisonous Jew”), though he is less alive to the unconscious racism of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), despite a nod to Toni Morrison’s account of it in Playing in the Dark (1992).

Taylor’s book is a useful and honest reminder of aspects of Cather that may be less attractive to (some of) us now. But the woman who emerges from his pages is more monolithic and less subtle than the writer I’ve come to know in my reading of her these last weeks. It’s true that she railed against aspects of “modernity”, and not only in her later years: the Nebraska novels are peppered with gripes about new-fangled machinery, ostentatious jewellery and the conformity of consumerism. From midlife on she felt the world she knew had vanished, to be replaced by something thin and tawdry. But Taylor’s chivalric list of “virtues” has a more grandiose tone than the values I jotted down as I read – kindness, humility, generosity – which are often embodied in the mothers, wives and servants who make up the warp of her world.

“Fulfilment of some high destiny” is especially problematic; deaf, I think, to Cather’s irony, expressed through the patchwork technique of her narratives rather than woven into her sentences. Many of her men come to see ambition as an equivocal blessing, most poignantly Godfrey St Peter in her great midlife novel, The Professor’s House (1925), which more than any other reads like a reflection on her own writing life. And while Taylor is careful to acknowledge the naivety of young Claude’s Great War idealism in One of Ours, he ignores Mrs Wheeler, the novel’s emotional anchor, who has the last word about her son in a heartbreaking coda: “He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be … [He was] one she knew, who could ill bear disillusion”.

As a critic Taylor is eloquent about passages he loves but also prone to hyperbole: “an exceptional story”, “another of her supreme achievements”, “one of Cather’s noblest creations”. He also tends to read her for opinions rather than for the weave of character, story and mood. “What makes her the greatest of antimodernists”, he writes, “is that ideals were what was most real to her.”

Setting aside the complex question of whether Cather was an antimodernist in practice as well as by profession, I would say that what was most real to her was the world of the senses, people and the land, and how they shape each other. At the heart of The Professor’s House is a first-person narrative by Tom Outland, the professor’s former student, about how he found a way into the heart of the Blue Mesa in Cather’s beloved southwest; his months spent exploring the ruins of the ancient cliff dwellings there; his bitter disappointment at the Smithsonian’s lack of interest and his partner’s deceit; and the peace that he eventually finds alone on the mesa’s top, “a close neighbour to the sun”. I agree with Benjamin Taylor that this may be the “mightiest” thing the author ever wrote. But to me it’s not an expression of “the essence of Cather’s far-reaching humanism: a reverence for the conquest of barbarous existence by beauty-making civilization”. It’s a far more mysterious tale about how landscape shapes our inner and outer lives; about the archaeology of memory and what remains unfathomable; about loss and the power of writing as both a tool for discovery and a ritual of return.

Maria Margaronis is a writer and radio documentary maker

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