Willa Cather:
Wimsatt, Margaret
A PICTURE UNDEREXPOSED WILLA CATHER James Woodress University of Nebraska, $35, 583 pp. Margaret Wimsalt The official biography of Willa Cather was largely written by Edward Killoran Brown of...
...All readers of and writers about Cather, including Professor Woodress, recognize this, but no one explains it...
...These ephemera were set down with a blunt and fluent pen...
...many facts enter twice...
...So it just might be safe by now to repeat Alfred Knopf's prediction...
...Readers with an interest in Cather will enjoy his accounts of her early journalism...
...This eluded her until the publication of My Antonia when she was forty-five years old...
...Many people have worked hard to establish the facts of her life, and to recover early pieces in obscure journals of the period under many pseudonyms...
...He dedicates this one to ' 'the community of Cather Scholars, past and present...
...Brown worked under difficulties...
...Nowadays there is a Cather cult centered in her childhood home, Red Cloud, Nebraska, and fostered by the excellent publications of her alma mater at Lincoln...
...The information has not diminished her...
...Or of a visit to the deserted town of Brownsville, abandoned when the perfidious Missouri River shifted its course...
...The coming together is the problem with Cather, the joining of technical skill to the broader vision...
...Cather was a private person, and left instructions that none of her writings outside the official canon might be cited directly, and that as many as possible of them, especially letters, should be destroyed...
...James Woodress, who teaches at the University of California at Davis, is in a good position to undertake so large a work, having published, in 1970, a slimmer and more strictly critical volume, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art...
...Writer's block it wasn't...
...nevertheless, his biography remains the most sympathetic, the friendliest, yet to appear...
...for years she wrote copiously but not very well...
...For instance, her account of a Chautauqua Festival in southwestern Nebraska's farming country...
...And the good tales can still be found to move and please us: O Pioneers!, A Lost Lady, perhaps Shadows on the Rock, or The Professor's House...
...Both Knopf and Edith Lewis, her friend and executor, did their best to carry out these instructions, but they overlooked hordes of juvenilia...
...When it appeared in 1953 the publisher, Alfred Knopf, wrote as jacket copy: "Here is all the biographical information anyone is likely ever to gather about Willa Cather...
...She certainly would have hated the exposure, but- perhaps she was wrong...
...His method is one popular with writers of literary biography: periodic, with the biographical facts given first, followed by discussions in each chapter of the writing that appeared (or was written) within the period...
...Here she found a falling-down gingerbread town, the final signal of despair indicated by the deserted saloon...
...A more serious question, however, has not been tackled by Woodress, nor, to my knowledge, by anyone else...
...Why did it take her so long to distill what she began soaking up very young...
...To be reminded of their existence helps to keep them in our minds, and for this refreshment, James Woodress deserves our thanks...
...Margaret Wimsalt The official biography of Willa Cather was largely written by Edward Killoran Brown of Toronto and Chicago, and finished after his death by Leon Edel...
...It is an excellent way to be comprehensive, though duplication is hard to avoid...
...That book, in large type, ran to about 350 pages...
...s our thanks...
...Perhaps this book is substantially canonical...
...It is a vast and busy fraternity, and Woodress has coherently consolidated years of paraphrasing, quotation being forbidden, from collections in libraries all over the country...
...Here as elsewhere Woodress acknowledges the basic digging in hard ground of such scholars as Beatrice Slote, James Shively, Mildred Bennett, and William Curtis, to which he has substantially added...
...she early developed and never lost the ability to turn a phrase...
...Cather at her best is very, very good, a fact honored by such fellow writers as Sinclair Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, and Eudora Welty, and by the many "common readers" who have kept her best books continuously in print...
...She was a good reporter, and published miles of copy, both in college and while waiting for the job that eventually materialized in Pittsburgh...
...It is for this reason that people speculate, and scholars dig out and publish the facts, not only of the composition of her work, but of her private life as well...
...Some of her earlier fiction shows talent...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 15
