EARLIER this 12 months, in preparation for the a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of her birth on 7 December 1873, a sculpture of Willa Cather was unveiled and dedicated within the National Statuary Hall, Washington, DC. The base of the plinth is inscribed with a quotation from one in all her acclaimed novels, O Pioneers!: “The history of each country begins in the center of a person or woman.”
Above Cather’s name, in much larger letters, will be seen the solitary and imposing word, NEBRASKA. It was this vast territory on the Great Plains of America, and the courage and violence of frontier life, recorded and mythologised by Cather in her unique stories, that won her the Pulitzer prize in 1922. In 1931, her face appeared on the front cover of Time magazine, confirming her place as a brilliant star within the American literary firmament.
In the spring of 1883, when Cather was nine, she made essentially the most significant journey of her life. Her family left the relative calm of Virginian society to flee the post-war South, and moved to Nebraska to hitch grandparents and partake of cleaner air. With hundreds of international settlers — Germans, French, Norwegians, Czechs, and Russians — and despite the threats of droughts, blizzards, and plagues of grasshoppers, they’d been lured by the prospect of recent beginnings and low cost farming land.
On arrival, Cather believed that she had come to the sting of the world. For months, she cried incessantly, and nervous that she might die in a cornfield, forgotten and alone. By the primary autumn, nonetheless, this strange vista, ostensibly bereft of beauty, had claimed her heart and imagination. Even with the passage of time, and despite long absences, she knew that it might all the time be so.
GROWING up in a town called Red Cloud, and inwardly somewhat confused and insecure, Cather occasionally dressed as a boy, cut her hair short, and referred to herself as “William Cather Jr”. In the quietness of her attic room, she read Tolstoy, Stevenson, and Bunyan under the bedclothes. Energetic, and something of an ambitious free spirit, she consorted with the “Bohemians“ who were constructing the railroad, delivered mail on a pony, helped out at an area pharmacy, and entertained dreams of becoming a health care provider or surgeon.
All the while, she was immersing herself within the lives of the immigrants as they battled heroically, and sometimes tragically, to adapt to the unyielding landscape and scarce resources. She marked their hopes and destinies and, years later, would make a compelling mosaic of their tales.
Before then, there was the matter of her education and profession: first, five college years, through which her earlier inclination towards science gave strategy to classics and literature, and a firm grounding in journalism; then, a move to Pittsburgh, to be a journalist and humanities reviewer, followed by an additional stint as a schoolteacher, when she wrote poetry and short stories in between lessons.
In New York, now in her thirties, she became the managing editor of a successful magazine. The prestige was not enough to satisfy the author in her. For several years, she gave herself tirelessly to the demands of this latest work, nevertheless it was not her best self.
AS SHE approached 40, Cather’s Nebraskan past — the land itself, and its prairie dwellers, “none of whom had any appearance of permanence” — assumed a latest significance in her life. She became a novelist: a chronicler of great journeys, stoical endurance, and a landscape of severe and sometimes surreal wonder. She began to set down the saving graces of domestic life, representing them as if seen for the primary time: pots and pans, “little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums within the deep sills . . . and a nice smell of gingerbread baking”.
In O Pioneers!, Cather conjures a world far faraway from sentimental rural nostalgia. She deals with the desires and fractures of human relationships that may never wholly satisfy, and the mortal questions touching life, birth, death, and drama, because the earth moves through its seasons. Darkness and promise permeate her vision, as she charts the rising and setting of the sun, and the temporary span allotted to the rugged figures reconfiguring the frontier with their backs and hands. In time, they are going to return to the earth, but not before they’ve witnessed moments of sudden transfigurations: “blond cornfields of red gold” and “the entire prairie just like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed”.
In My Antonia, young Jim Burden (the tutor of the heroine of the novel) sits in a garden where little red bugs with polished backs move around him. Nothing happens, and yet he’s entirely glad under the sky, “an element of something entire, whether it’s sun and air, or goodness and knowledge . . . dissolved into something complete and great”.
CATHER died, aged 74, on 24 April 1947, and was buried in New Hampshire. The private life that she had all the time desired, through which her Nebraska childhood had come to represent her best years, became more transparent with the primary publication of her private letters in 2013. They reveal a warm, caring, and humorous disposition, at odds with a public demeanour that would appear aloof, judgemental, and somewhat detached. To one correspondent, she writes: “Such a ravishing world, and such a brief life through which to see it”; to a different, she ends with: “May all of the gold I ever dreamed of be yours.”
Cather sought to live a Christian life. From childhood, church attendance remained vital to her. Raised a Baptist, she was confirmed within the Protestant Episcopal Church on the age of 49, and later became drawn to Roman Catholicism. Her belief is said resolutely in a personal letter: “There isn’t any God but one God, and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I’ll follow it to the tip.”
At the close of her life, rendered frail through illness and grief, Cather still retained possession of “the dear, incommunicable past”, with its beauty, darkness, and promise, and ineffable moments of calm. As we kindle the flame of Advent, and look to the One of whom the prophets spoke, her life and writings seem strangely apposite.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, author, and theologian.
