The Art of Willa Cather

...Willa Cather did not make that mistake again...

...She worked slowly over many years, learning from Sarah Orne Jewett, from intelligent adoration of Henry James, and also from writing many thousands of words as an editor and special writer for S. S. McClure...

...Miss Lewis' is a simple book, the record of a friendship, but it is even less than Brown's a personal book...

...Because Willa Cather was an artist who had worked diligently to achieve perfection in her art, she was determined that her art should speak for itself, without the inept intercession of modern biographer or official critical interpreter...

...As she matured she learned a kind of concentration which focused bright light on the core of her fable and sent out such shimmering waves of suggestion as no one, except perhaps Virginia Woolf, had managed before...

...She discovered that she could not do what Henry James could do...

...she later knew and loved the Southwest, and she knew French Quebec...

...WILLA CATHER was an artist who achieved control of her craft through daring to take great pains...

...In some respects she was the reverse of Henry James...

...Her talent was evident almost from the beginning, as her collegiate sketches indicate and as her early story, Paul's Case, amply demonstrates...

...They are books which, so far as the rest of us are concerned, are necessary...

...Nevertheless, it was a novel which no one else could have written...

...Her account also seemed worthy of publication...

...It was not long before Miss Cather's death that E. K. Brown, in an article in the University of Toronto Quarterly, seemed to sense and express exactly what Miss Cather was about...

...This, of course, was quixotic and could not really be enforced, for critics, being critics, must write...

...Her work must stand of itself, cherished or dismissed because of what it was, not because of what someone said of it, or of her...

...After her failure through too much formalism in Alexander's Bridge, she sprawled happy recollections of Nebraska almost formlessly through O Pioneers...

...It was her answer to Henry James or anyone else who would draw her into his orbit...

...In her next novel, she made a fable of her own problem, the artist's problem in The Song of the Lark, in which she showed that hard work and intelligence, conscious control and formalism were necessary, but that they were not finally enough...

...It was a thoughtful novel, hedged about by all the things she had learned from people like Henry James...

...She was not Henry James, and it seems a little silly to suggest she should have been...

...My An~ tonia, which followed it, was a big novel, bursting with life, integrated, but without the concentration at which she was later to aim...

...It is about a boy growing up, as Mark Twain's Huck had grown, as Hemingway's Nick Adams was to grow...

...But what Brown has to say in his final chapter, "A Cadence, a Quality of Voice . . . ," is one of the finest interpretations yet written of her art...

...She joins Miss Jewett, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore as one of our most sensitive minor artists...

...Perhaps he is too complete...

...It is about the worsening of American life as one generation succeeds another and bid ideals, old traditions, old niceties are lost...

...If she is not a Henry James, a James Joyce, an Andre Gide, or a William Faulkner, we are, I think, the happier for it...

...It was well made by an expert craftsman...

...it is about a woman spoiled...

...And she was concerned also with the sacrifice, the renunciation, the hard-fibered will which are necessary for the accomplishment of anything excellent, whether by artist, priest, professor, or simple farm woman...

...She liked the article and entered into correspondence with him...

...it had theme and symbol, but it lacked the essential which was life...

...And I suspect it is only a very minor heresy to submit that Henry James could not possibly have done what Willa Cather learned to do...

...197 pp...

...A few years later her literary executors asked Brown to write what surely amounts to an "official" biography: Miss Cather had indicated that she trusted him...

...In this one tale she suggested what Theodore Dreiser spelled out ponderously in half a dozen novels, and this power of suggestion was among her greatest gifts, but it was not enough...

...There should be no biography—at this many of us groaned...

...As he gathered materials, Brown had extensive correspondence with Edith Lewis, a very old friend of Miss Cather, who wrote him at length of her recollections of the novelist...

...She was not concerned with the impact of Old World cultures on Americans who traveled or lived abroad, but with what happened to people of the Old World who came to live in America...

...it had balance...

...But it was in A Lost Lady, five years later, that she came fully into her own, in a novel stripped of everything which was not necessary to the legend she there created...

...She distrusted our time, as Faulkner and Eliot and Hemingway, and you and I also, each in his degree distrusts it...

...So, the two books which now appear are special books—privileged books, we might call them...

...As you read it, you will quarrel with him sometimes, as I have quarreled, but you will leave it with a sense that you have been in the presence of two great and sensitive people...

...She was concerned with what happened to the strength and the culture of Europe, the traditions which Englishmen, Scandinavians, Frenchmen, or Central Europeans brought to the New World and which lived on quietly there or, more often, finally fell victim to a brash new environment...

...Where Henry James demands intelligent concentration from his readers, she demands an imaginative response, no less intelligent, no less controlled by the deft manipulations of the artist...

...When he died suddenly, the work was completed by his friend Leon Edel, the distinguished critic and biographer of Henry James...

...He started it and almost completed it...

...More will be said of Willa Cather, even better books than Brown's may be written, but they would not be possible without Brown's book...

...II Then in 1925 came The Proles' sor's House which, like The Song of the Lark ten years earlier, is a personal book, almost as much about Willa Cather as about anything else, and more interesting, I think, to the student of Miss Cather than to the student of fiction...

...We are most grateful to The Professor's House because it leads toward the writing of the two novels for which, with A Lost Lady and perhaps My Antonia, Miss Cather will probably be longest remembered...

...Nothing need be said here of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, except that in them Miss Cather perfected what she called the "novel de-meuble' and established herself with Mrs...

...Some of the things he has to say about novels I judge less important, like One of Ours, My Mortal Enemy, or Lucy Gay-heart, seem to me not very important as criticism because Brown fails to discriminate, as Miss Cather usually did, between what is excellent and what is simply well intentioned...

...it is about coarse men who, long before Faulkner invented the Snopses, coarsened whatever came to their hand...

...Woolf and E. M. Forster as one of the few sensitive artists who in our century have created new forms for fiction...

...After one unfortunate experience with Hollywood, she decided that her work should never be presented, in moving picture, radio, or even read into records for the blind, in any way except through the words she had written and the intonations which her words made explicit...

...She was well into her thirties and had been writing for more than a dozen years before her first novel appeared...

...He was the right man, certainly, to present Willa Cather complete...

...She knew America—Virginia where she was born, Nebraska where she grew up, Pittsburgh, New York, and Boston...

...It failed to satisfy her...