Today is acclaimed American novelist Willa Cather’s 150th birthday. The National Willa Cather Center is celebrating with a series of special events to mark the occasion.
Willa Cather (1873–1947) was born in Virginia, moved with her family to Nebraska in 1883, and eventually settled in Red Cloud. After graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1895, Cather returned to Red Cloud briefly before moving east to work on Home Monthly and eventually McClure’s. She is well known for her portrayals of frontier life on the American plains.
Below, UNP author Tracy Daugherty meditates on Willa Cather’s relevance as we celebrate 150 years of her life and writing.
The Timelessness of Willa Cather
Tracy Daugherty is distinguished emeritus professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University. In addition to biographies of Joan Didion and Joseph Heller, he has published several novels, including High Skies, Axeman’s Jazz, The Boy Orator, Desire Provoked, and What Falls Away. He is the author of 148 Charles Street which explores the fascinating story of Willa Cather’s friendship with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
One semester in the 1980s, when postmodern fiction was all the rage, I took a college course on the work of Willa Cather. I had never read Cather. My fellow students stuffed their backpacks with volumes of literary criticism. They spoke of the indeterminacy of language and the Death of the Author. They told me that Cather was stodgy and outdated, stately and boring. They said that the contemporary anti-novel had rendered narrative as Cather’s generation knew it irrelevant. I began to regret enrolling in the course.
The teacher started the class by asking us to research Cather’s life. Talk about indeterminacy! At that time, five major biographies of Cather had appeared, from E. K. Brown’s 1953 critical biography to Sharon O’Brien’s 1987 plunge into Cather’s psychological make-up. By reading each book’s index, one could trace the evolution of Cather studies. Brown made vague reference to Cather’s “dual nature”: James Woodward primly proposed to examine Cather’s “attitude toward marriage and love”; Phyllis C. Robinson discussed Cather’s susceptibility to high-spirited beauty under the heading of “love affairs”; and O’Brien boldly announced the topic of “sexuality.” These books did not appear to be written about the same woman. Whatever I did or did not learn about Cather, it was clear that the portraits of her in each of these narratives had more to do with the biographers’ interests than with Cather herself.
When I turned to Cather’s novels, I saw that she understood, better than her biographers, the difficulties of encapsulating a life on the page. “Who marries who is a small matter, after all,” her heroine Thea Kronberg says in The Song of the Lark, all but dismissing biography and its counterpart in fiction, characterization. Cather believed that “the novel, for a long while, has been overfurnished” with niggling matters such as who marries who. She urged her fellow writers to strip their stories of “emotions, great and little.” “Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life . . . [T]hey can never be wholly satisfactory,” she said. Rather, she wished to concentrate her fiction on the play of shadows and light on an adobe wall, or on the interplay of foreground and background as in Dutch paintings of interiors with windows opening out onto the sea. Flickering shadows, changing perspectives: hints of timelessness behind the fleeting details of human lives.
Postmodernism had nothing on Willa Cather. It was apparent to me that her notions of narrative structure and of the purposes of fiction were as radical as anything in American literature, and her sentences were more elegant than any other writer’s. We were all trying to catch up with her.
Her novel My Mortal Enemy (1925) is divided into two parts, tracing the life of a character named Nellie Birdseye. We see Nellie first as a young woman then meet her again ten years later when her circumstances have drastically changed. But how they changed, and why, is left unspoken in the gap between the two parts of the novel. Cather dispenses with development, movement, story, the bones of narrative. Instead, she supplies us with dueling perspectives, a stark collage, forcing us to reexamine how we look at a life and evaluate its worth. In novel after novel Cather challenged her readers this way.
At one point in My Mortal Enemy, Nellie recalls attending a long-ago New Years’ Eve party. Most of the people at the party “are dead now,” Nellie says, “but it was a fine group that stood around the table to drink the new year in.” They all wore make-up and colorful masks. It is this glittering surface that Nellie remembers, with the faces of the dead underneath it: another layering of perspectives, as if two time-frames had been superimposed on each other. The future and the past. Cather diverts our attention from the overfurnished room where the party took place, the fleeting emotions and relationships shaping that night. Instead, she focuses our minds on the eternal, a vaster, more lasting vision than the small matters by which we normally define our personal biographies.
That semester, while my fellow students read their anti-novels and their postmodern grab-bags, I learned to cherish Willa Cather’s timeless perspective, her radical flaunting of narrative techniques, and her flawless sentences. She taught me that nothing is ever irrelevant or outdated. By peering into the shadows to see what we’ve left behind, we discover what lies before us yet. By studying the gaps in our stories, we discover new angles from which to view the whole. Willa Cather remains a peerless guide to grasping the tragic necessities of human life.
For more ways to celebrate Willa Cather, find an upcoming event hosted by the National Willa Cather Center to attend in Nebraska, or dive into one of her timeless books.
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