WILLA CATHER'S STORY

...For after Shadows on the Rock, in 1931, she never wrote anything comparable to her earlier work, although she published two more novels (Lucy Gayheart and Sapphira and the Slave Girl), and did not die until 1947...

...Miss Cather wrote a lovely, spare, distinguished prose, and her descriptions were often minor lyrics...

...It is from the personal point of view that Mrs...

...Her credo that "art must simplify" may have been arrived at because she took so much from real life, and therefore had to pare away the excessive exuberances and complications that human beings seem to introduce into their affairs...

...and that aside from the fact that the principal character was an apothecary who served under Count Frontenac in Quebec, "People around Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where Willa worked on Shadows on the Rock, recognize in the book some of their French-New England neighbors...

...Cornell Universitv Press...

...226 pp...

...Bennett's book is interesting...

...It is undoubtedly true that her childhood was the happiest time of her life, but I have wondered sometimes if perhaps in another career she might not have been able to grow and expand...

...Bennett's book...

...Bennett's The World of Willa Cather* has suddenly made me wonder whether Willa Cather was actually a novelist at all, or whether perhaps she was merely an inspired reporter...

...193 pp...

...the former from The Life of Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf by William *THE WORLD OF WILLA CATHER, by Mildred R. Bennett...

...Joseph Howlett, the latter from the diary of an apothecary who had served under Count Frontenac in Quebec...

...Bennett, who lives in Red Cloud, Nebraska, Willa Cather's home town, has tracked down, with a wealth of detail and documentation, the originals of most of Miss Cather's characters, and even the stories and incidents of their lives, where they came from, and sometimes actually their names—all of which appear, almost verbatim, in Miss Cather's books...

...It is badly organized, and it is maddening in a sense because she almost never gives the sources of her many quotations...

...She was from the beginning almost frantically determined to succeed—and apparently success meant being well-known in one's chosen field...

...Bennett has accumulated shows unmistakably how much she depended on actual people and situations for her stories...

...which are written with style and distinction and, in parts, with great beauty...

...except a student who had suddenly to take an exam on Willa Cather without having read any of her work...

...2.75...

...She said that "one's strongest emotions and one's most vivid mental pictures are acquired before one is fifteen," and certainly the descriptions of those early days in Nebraska have a bloom and a glow and a shining, fresh quality that makes them incomparable...

...I think that Alfred Kazin, in a few pages in On Native Ground, gives a more perceptive and more critically sensitive estimate of her work...

...With her passionate determination to succeed she would probably have triumphed in whatever career she chose, and perhaps in some other field she might have reaped greater personal satisfaction and fulfillment...

...Even in the later novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, Miss Cather wrote from specific historical sources...

...Daiches' book* would not, I think, be very interesting to anyone *WILLA CATHER: A Critical Introduction, by David Daiches...

...That was the mother of the neighbour family in My Antonia...

...These stories sound a little dated now, but there is no mistaking her passionate sincerity...

...And the evidence that Mrs...

...I am not one for footnotes in a popular book, but I do like to have some idea of where the material comes from, and sometimes the date is of real significance too...

...which contain real characters who seem to live for us as they did in actual life...

...she seceded...

...But only a few pages later Mrs...

...But there is a very little real evaluation...

...but it is cerebral, disciplined work, and often lacks in warmth and imagination and insight...

...The original of My Antonia is still living, and her life is almost exactly that which is described in the book...

...Finally, so strong did her feeling become that, as Alfred Kazin says, "Others were lost in the new materialism, satirized or bewailed it...

...The novels are summarized, excerpts are given, the short stories, essays, and even the little known poetry is commented on and quoted from...

...Not that she did not have a talent for writing, for she clearly did...

...her husband is Neighbour Rosicky in the story of that name...

...But it is most particularly Red Cloud, its streets and buildings and rooms and people and incidents, that appears in almost photographic likeness in all except these two books...

...This theme—the children who are ashamed or their Old World parents, the growing callousness and insensitivity of small town life—appears over and over in her work...

...She changed her name from Willa Love Cather to Willa Sibert Cather in honor of an uncle killed at 19 in the Civil War, and promised in a poem called The Namesake "that she alone would achieve enough fame for 'two who bore the name.' She did indeed achieve fame and recognition, but it seems a pity that the way she chose should have turned into a narrower and narrower path, instead of one that would lead her into wider fields and let her grow and develop with it...

...She had a great feeling for herself as an artist, and many of her early short stories, as well as the novel The Song of the Lark, are fierce justifications of the necessary selfishness of the artist and of his struggle in a world that almost never understands his values...

...In fact, one could almost catalogue the characters in the novels and their real life counterparts in Mrs...

...For Mrs...

...Miss Cather said many times, in her books and in letters and conversations with friends, that everything real and important that happened to her happened during her childhood...

...It seems to me that the true artist increases in stature—in understanding and sympathy—with maturity...

...Her life would make a fascinating study for a biographer with a good psychological background, for she apparently had a real "father fixation," and also she spent several years dressing and looking as much like a boy as possible...

...3.50...

...II There is no doubt, however, that the pictures of pioneer society in the early books, and of the transplanted Catholic society in New Mexico and Quebec in the later ones, are vividly and beautifully done...

...But Willa Cather, as she grew older and left her golden childhood farther behind, became almost petulant and querulous in a world she could not and did not want to understand...

...It seems a little fractious to ask for anything more...

...This tremendous emotional response to her childhood life is, of course, responsible for her later attitude, found in all her books, that the old ways were the best ways, and that the rising commercial and industrial civilization that took the place of the pioneer society was to be' viewed with alarm and suspicion, since its values were cheap and shoddy and standardized...

...And, after all, I suppose it doesn't matter whether Willa Cather was primarily a novelist or a reporter, for at least she has left us several books which are quite unlike anything else in American literature...

...Bennett, who seems not quite to have realized what her careful documentation was doing, remarks that in Death Comes for the Archbishop, "Miss Cather's book portrays both the Archbishop and his Vicar so faithfully that it is almost biography instead of fiction...

...Bennett quotes her as saying, "A Lost Lady was a woman I loved very much in my childhood...

...in spite of the subtitle, A Critical Introduction...

...She really did not like people very much, and although she knew well the ones she had grown up with, she was not able to project herself into their lives except to a very limited extent...

...This essentially emotional response may help explain why her work faded away into pallid reflections of earlier attitudes and into outright sentimentality at the end...

...Miss Cather said once, "I have never drawn but one portrait of an actual person...

...Dodd, Mead 6 Co...

...I didn't try to make a character study, but just a portrait like a thin miniature painted on ivory...