Willa Cather did some of her best writing in an attic study. It’s an ironic contrast to the expansive settings of her novels (frequently the Great Plains), and the roaming curiosity of her mind. A slender new biography illuminates the life of this literary giant.
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Willa Cather (1873-1947) serves as a refreshing counterexample to the incessant drama that has characterized the lives of more than a few iconic American writers. From Ernest Hemingway and William S. Burrows, to Sylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald, it can seem as if laying words on a page necessitates a turn to addiction, toxic relationships, and inner turbulence. Norman Mailer—the curmudgeonly hotheaded novelist who married half a dozen times, stabbed one of his wives, and struggled with alcohol and drugs—might take the cake for messiest of them all.
And then there’s Miss Cather.
Her life of seventy three years featured no barroom brawls, no stays in an asylum, no domestic violence, no trouble with the law, no substance abuse, no scandalous headlines. In the context of famous creatives, that’s quite the rare stat sheet. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Cather’s life ever being made into a Hollywood biopic, as has been done with the likes of the cantankerous, womanizing, and alcohol-guzzling Hemingway.
Yet Willa Cather—who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and wrote such exquisitely crafted novels as Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Ántonia—merits anyone’s attention who enjoys reading about the lives of creative individuals.
Benjamin Taylor, author of Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, has long been under Cather’s spell. “This book arises from a debt of love,” he writes in the introduction. Readers won’t doubt this for a second.
Taylor’s book offers a wealth of thoughtful analyses on nearly every sphere of Cather’s life: the inspiration she gained from the American landscape; her pivotal upbringing in the midwest; her career as a journalist before turning to fiction; her close relationships with the two loves of her life, both women.
The sharp, intellectual mind that Cather displayed throughout her life and work was fostered in a surprising place—Red Cloud, Nebraska. Her family had moved there from the rolling hills of Virginia when Cather was nine. In this new midwestern home, populated with immigrants from all over Europe, “[Cather] became a citizen of the world.” Diverse language, cultures, and backgrounds were constant in this formative period of her life. Not only that, the precocious Cather interacted with many adults, further cultivating her mind. “From childhood,” writes Taylor, “Taylor was drawn to mature people distinguished by independent judgment, intellectual breath, and personal originality.”
When Cather entered the University of Nebraska, she was intent on studying medicine. That all changed when a professor, impressed by her writing, sent an article of hers to a magazine. It was published. As Cather remarked later in life, seeing her name in print “had a kind of hypnotic effect.” Throughout college, Cather was active in the school’s magazine as well as other literary endeavors of her own. She graduated in 1895.
Given her intellect and gift for writing, it is somewhat surprising to learn in Chasing Bright Medusas that it would be another two decades before Cather. In those intervening years, Cather moved to Pittsburgh, teaching high school and writing for Home Journal. Subsequently, she took a job with McClure’s Magazine, in New York.
It was while Cather was living in Pittsburgh that she met, and became extremely close to, a young woman named Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a judge. Cather became close to the McClung family, and indeed she eventually moved in with them. The bond that Cather felt towards McClung was deep; the latter was Cather’s “great love,” writes Taylor. Among other adventures, the two traveled overseas, including to France, a place that particularly ignited Cather’s mind and spirit.
Cather’s passionate feelings towards McClung were not to be. McClung wound up marrying Jan Hambourg, a violinist. To a friend, Cather described the marriage as a “devastating loss.” Cather would eventually have a long term domestic partner in a second love of hers, Edith Lewis. But the change in dynamics between McClung and Cather was a lingering blow to the latter.
Regarding Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, a story about a bridge-builder who’s torn between competing desires, Taylor writes: “One cannot help suspecting Cather was here expressing the divided state of her own personal life, split as it was between two, Isabelle and Edith.” He admits, however, that this is mere speculation, and “cannot be demonstrated.”
It was the novel after Alexander’s Bridge, which Cather called her “second first novel” (owing to her dissatisfaction with the quality of the first), that she began to steadily morph into the literary talent that she’s known for today. In her so-called “Prairie Trilogy,” written in the 1910s, that steadily became the. Upon the publication of the third book, My Ántonia, a prominent critic lauded the novel as “one of the best that any American has ever done.”
Success brought more and more eyeballs to her work, and the novel for which she received the Pulitzer Prize, One of Ours (1922), promoted strong opinions—both good and bad. The novel centers around a young Nebraska native, restless for a different life, who joins the military upon America’s entrance into World War I. Cather had a difficult time giving much attention to the positive reviews; “the opinions that meant most to Cather,” writes Taylor,” were distinctly negative.”
With increasing success also came a rise in fame. Cather, however, was never attracted to the limelight. Giving interviews, responding to press inquiries… Cather had little mood for any of it. (Humorously, she had a go-to response if she wanted to wriggle out of an undesirable correspondence. I’m leaving for Mexico City, she should say. As Taylor notes, it was “a place she never in her life visited.”
As Taylor also notes, however, there were exceptions to this. Indeed, one of those instances makes for a brief but poignant passage in the closing pages of the book.. Towards the end Cather’s life, when the physical ability to write was an extremely burdensome task, she diligently replied to the many letters from servicemen who had found affinity with One of Ours. “She felt an obligation to the men at arms she heard from almost daily,” says Taylor.
In this short but skillfully written biography, readers gain a strong familiarity with the complex—though not reckless nor wild nor pompous—life of Willa Cather. Benjamin Taylor’s erudition on the subject is nicely balanced with his conversational tone. It’s a wonderful book to highlight the 150th anniversary of this great American writer.
Spectatio 