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No Stone Unturned: Popular Versus Professional Evaluations of Willa Cather

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

David Stineback
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Extract

In The Song of the Lark (Willa Cather's third novel, published in 1915), Thea Kronberg goes to one of her father's regular prayer meetings in Moonstone, Colorado, and hears an old woman who “never missed a Wednesday night [and] came all the way up from the depot settlement.” Cather describes the woman this way:

She always wore a black crocheted “fascinator” over her thin white hair, and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always prayed “for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to Eternity.” She used to speak, too, of “the engines that race with death”; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made one think of the deep black cañons, the slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that colour of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 7 , October 1982 , pp. 167 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

NOTES

1. The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), pp. 162, 165.Google Scholar

2. “On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” in Tennant, Stephen, ed., Willa Cather on Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

3. Hicks's comment appears in “The Case Against Willa Cather,” English Journal, 11 1933, p. 708Google Scholar, and Zabel, 's in Craft and Character in Modern Fiction (New York: Viking Press, 1959), pp. 273, 274Google Scholar. See also Trilling, Lionel, “Willa Cather,” in Cowley, Malcolm, ed., After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers Since 1910 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), pp. 52–63Google Scholar; Rahv, Philip, “The Slump in American Writing,” American Mercury, 02 1940, pp. 185–91Google Scholar; and Geismar, Maxwell, The Last of the Provincials (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947)Google Scholar. Footman, Robert, “The Genius of Willa Cather,” American Literature, 05 1938, pp. 123–41Google Scholar, is an early embodiment of all three “critical approaches” I'm describing and a good example of “damning with faint praise.” The two essays by Willa Cather that most infuriated the political critics were “The Novel Démeublé,” The New Republic, 04 12, 1922, Part II, pp. 5–6Google Scholar, and “Escapism,” Commonweal, 04 17, 1936, pp. 674–79Google Scholar, both of which are in Willa Cather on Writing.

4. Italics added. Kazin, 's statement is in On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), p. 251Google Scholar. A good introduction to the heavy critical emphasis on sociological themes in Cather's work is provided by Schroeter, James, ed., Willa Cather and Her Critics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, which contains healthy selections from, among others: Mencken, H. L.'s Smart Set reviews; Carl Van Doren's Contemporary American Novelists: 1900–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1922)Google Scholar; Brown, E. K.'s Yale Review article, “Homage to Willa Cather,” Autumn, 1946, pp. 77–92Google Scholar, the ideas of which were expanded in Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953)Google Scholar; Randall, John's The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960)Google Scholar, and Edward, and Bloom, Lillian's Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962)Google Scholar. Schroeter himself contributes one of the more vicious scholarly analyses of Cather: “Willa Cather and The Professor's House,” an investigation of Cather's supposed anti-Semitism reprinted from the Yale Review, Summer 1965, pp. 494–512.Google Scholar

5. Edel's work on Cather includes a chapter on The Professor's House in Literary Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957)Google Scholar and Willa Cather: The Paradox of Success (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1960)Google Scholar, an especially patronizing pamphlet that is reprinted in Schroeter. See Woodress, James, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (New York: Pegasus, 1970)Google Scholar for evidence, even in a “safe” treatment of Cather, of the aggressive influence of Edel; Gelfant, 's statement is from “The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Antonia,” American Literature, 03 1971, pp. 60–82Google Scholar, a fascinating but improbable application of Freud to Cather. Another recent psychological study of My Antonia is Stuckey, William J., “My Antonia: A Rose for Miss Cather,” Studies in the Novel, Fall 1972, pp. 473–83Google Scholar.

Here, by way of contrast, let me mention a few academic studies of Cather from a general point of view that could serve as reliable introductions to the characteristics of her imagination. Whipple, T. K.'s “Willa Cather,” in Spokesmen: Modern Writers and American Life (New York: Appleton, 1928), pp. 139–60Google Scholar, provides the best intuitive understanding of Cather's art, though of course it has nothing to say about her last three novels, published after 1928. Van Ghent, Dorothy's Willa Cather (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964)Google Scholar is a brief, sensitive treatment of all of Cather's fiction. And Stouck, David's Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975)Google Scholar, despite its fondness for rigid categorization, has the virtue of being the first book to take Cather on her own terms, as a very conscientious craftsman.

6. “A Chance Meeting,” in Not Under Forty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), p. 40.Google Scholar

7. I limited my research to daily or weekly publications that had reviewed more than two of Cather's sixteen works of fiction: Commonweal (7 reviews), The Dial (3), The Independent (7), The Nation (13), The New Republic (11), The Outlook (7), The Saturday Review of Literature (9), and the Boston Transcript (10), Christian Science Monitor (4), New York Herald Tribune (11), New York Times (20), and Springfield Republican (5). Only the New York Evening Post (7 reviews) was not consulted. Two extensive bibliographies were of great help: Hutchinson, Phyllis Martin, “The Writings of Willa Cather: A List of Works by and About Her,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 06–08 1956, pp. 267–88, 338–56, 378–400Google Scholar, and Slote, Bernice, “Willa Cather,” in Bryer, Jackson, ed., Sixteen Modern American Authors (rev. ed.; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), pp. 29–73.Google Scholar