Happy Birthday, Willa Cather

150 today!

Though she was one of America’s finest novelists in and of the twentieth-century, Willa Cather (1873-1947) has rarely received the recognition she so justly deserves through the academic literary establishment or through popular memory. As an anti-Progressive and someone who believed in the sanctity of free will and personality as well as of place, Cather has, at best, been remembered as an eccentric but talented regionalist.

Truly, though, like T.S. Eliot in poetry, she was a genius when it came to challenging modernity by using modernity’s own tools. Still, she cautioned time and again, one should keep one’s art as art, not as a tool of politics, or of ideology, or of social systems. Instead, art as art would allow for the deepest expressions of human follies, desires, and victories.

In terms of personalities, Cather wrote about Swedish, Norse, Bohemian, French, and Russian immigrants to the American frontier of the Great Plains, each bringing with them their own religious and cultural assumptions, some for better and some for worse. She wrote about extraordinary persons who—through a sort of ethnic individualism—challenged those around them, often succeeding when least expected to. She also wrote of opera singers, historians, populists, Catholic bishops, American Indians, Quebec colonialists, southwestern folklore, ante- diluvian entities, and railroad magnates. In Shadows on the Rock, her heroine is an eleven-year old girl in Canada, eagerly awaiting the spring of 1698. In My Antonia, her heroine is a devout Catholic woman, part saint and part pagan earth mother. In O Pioneers!, her heroine is a Swedish individualist who forces nature to bow to her. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, her hero is an aristocratic and liberally-educated French clergyman, hoping to civilize barbaric outlands through the power of grace. In The Professor’s House, her reluctant hero is historian at the end of his career, wondering if anything he did—in or out of the class- room—actually mattered in this world of sorrows.

For Cather, as should be obvious from the above examples, the setting—the land, always the land—matters profoundly and fundamentally. In O Pioneers!, when the reader is first introduced to the town of Hanover (Red Cloud), Nebraska, he sees just how tenuous civilization is.

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling- houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by them- selves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them.

For Cather, the land mattered utterly—it was, after all, that which God had given man in the beginning of all things and with the purpose of cultivating for the sake of life and more life, and life piled upon life.

But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

Yet, through the divine imperative and through free will, women and men had the duty of working with the land, taking the created goods and, through the virtue of temper- ance, using them for the good. The person must love and understand the land, Cather thought. And, indeed, her heroine in O Pioneers!, Alexandra does just this.

When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have been lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of ever country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

In all of Cather’s novels—but especially those set on the American and Canadian frontiers—she loves to play with the interplay of land and free will, setting and personality.

The two things, she believed, were necessarily connected. Thus, free will works best within God’s creation, and God’s creation flourishes most when free will had dedicated itself to His glory.

Amazingly enough, Cather was not Roman Catholic, despite the settings and themes of her novels. She was raised a Baptist, but she converted, later in life, to Anglo- Catholicism. In some senses, this means that her love of the Catholic Church is even more astounding and meaningful. As the great Ralph McInerny once wrote, Cather was the most Catholic/non Catholic writer of the twentieth century. Amen.