Note to self: Collecting original copies of the magazines in which Cather’s stories appear could be my next literary affectation. What a delightful quest that would be!
Well, I haven’t started collecting any antique magazines, but I did find a website where I could download all of Cather’s stories, each a facsimile of how it appeared in its original publication. This I have done, and now I have a red three-ring binder full of “new” Willa Cather stories to read.
But this post is about Gerber’s book, which is what I would call a literary biography of Cather -- covering her life from birth to death, and emphasizing the development of her creative spirit and the literary substance of her creative output. Since Cather is one of my favorite authors, it was an absolute joy to read. Here are some of the gems it contained.
The Passing Show
While Cather was attending the University of Nebraska she became the theater critic for the Nebraska State Journal, writing a weekly column called The Passing Show, focused on the actors and plays that came through Lincoln, and exploring art and what it means to be an artist at the same time. What fascinated me about this early time in Cather’s life was how much the theme of much of her own literary career was fashioned and formed in these musings and criticisms.
The possibility of flawless artistry was beginning to engross Cather’s mind, and she commented of Mansfield’s performances that one was left with little to say when faced by real art. Of a perfect work, only another artist might describe the how or why. Such “asides” began early in Cather’s reviews, and in them can be seen the young artist testing her own wings; reaching for an ideal, determined to soar; and setting for herself the highest standards.
Another note to self: Collecting original copies of Cather’s weekly column in the Nebraska State Journal could be my next literary affectation. What a delightful quest that would be!
But there’s more.
A year of arduous play reviewing convinced Willa Cather that the actor’s was the hardest of all lives led for art, his product needing to be created anew for each performance, something comparable to a painter’s being required to finish a new canvas every evening. The evanescence of the performing arts both inspired and appalled her. Each perfect creation bloomed for its brief hour and then vanished “as music dies in a broken lute”; when the actor dies, his greatness perishes. More reassuring was the career of a writer. He might labor and die, but he had the hope of posthumous influence. As her graduation day approached, Willa Cather chose not an actor but a writer to be the topic for her address before the university literary societies.
And which writer did she choose?
Significantly she chose a prose master, the author of “the first perfect short stories in the English language,” Edgar Allan Poe. In retrospect, her decision has the air of inevitability, she herself being drawn to a life dedicated to the literary art. In Poe she saw the life of art at its most demanding, yet its most unadulterated. Friendless, often hungry, plagued by creditors, crippled by alcoholism, and doomed to observe the wreckage of those he most loved, Poe never allowed the flag of his art to be sullied. That he was a liar and an egoist mattered little to Willa Cather, for the man was nothing; his work everything: “There is so little perfection.” By 1895 all that mattered was that somehow, against all odds, Poe had kept the ideal of perfect work. “I have wondered so often how he did it,” Cather said in her speech. “How we kept his purpose always clean and his taste always perfect.”
Remind you of anyone? On the liar and egoist side, Poe sounds a lot like Charles Strickland, the defiant and doomed protagonist of Maugham’s beautiful and terrible The Moon and Sixpence (another special favorite of mine). His work everything. But on the idealistic side, Poe sounds like none other than Cather herself.
Whether she realized it or not, Willa Cather already had her answer embedded in her eulogy to Poe -- his single-mindedness evidenced in his refusal to become discouraged, deflected, or sidetracked. But in 1895, still at the first step of her journey, she could not yet state this answer as a certainty. She needed to live the life of art herself in order to confirm what she had said about Poe.
This is the artist that Gerber introduces us to in this literary biography. Art above all. The theme that would drive Cather is set very early in her life.
Art Above All
Throughout the biography Gerber will return to this theme again and again. It is Cather’s guidestar, and it makes an appearance at nearly every important step of her life’s journey.
In Cather’s decision not to marry:
Her writing of that period -- even her transitory reviews -- speaks much of art and its stringent demands upon the individual who cares passionately; and her decision to be a writer merely strengthened with time. Marriage and a career in her thinking were incompatible. The dire consequences of acting as if they were otherwise are portrayed throughout her fiction, in which marriages for artists exist but are neither satisfying nor successful.
In her short friendship with the aging writer Sarah Orne Jewett:
The Cather-Jewett friendship lasted only a brief sixteen months, for the older writer, ill when they met, died the following year. After Cather’s assignment in Boston had been completed, the two corresponded regularly; and in one of her notes Miss Jewett include the second sentence that became axiomatic to Cather: “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.” This statement defined to Cather the creative process on its highest level; if it did not alter her course in life, it surely buttressed notions she had already approached intuitively. There were youthful materials -- scenes, characters, anecdotes, themes -- that since her university days she had been attempting to record rightly. Her efforts to date seemed shamefully experimental, amateurish, and awkward; but with a volition of their own, these same memories persisted in urging themselves as subjects: life on the Nebraska Divide, the struggle of the gifted individual to achieve.
Jewett’s words also speak powerfully to me. “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.” Think of every great novel you’ve ever read (or tried to write). This simple sentence should help you distill it to its essence.
And also from Jewett:
Before her death Miss Jewett wrote about the hazards involved in balancing a personal writing career with a full-time job in editing. “I think it is impossible,” she concluded. In competition against the magazine’s incessant demands on time and energy, the artist was bound to lose. “Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office,” she warned, “must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world.” Cather cherished this letter; for in stating baldly what she already sensed about herself, it made her painfully aware that her publishing day was comparable only with the exhausting gyrations of a trapeze act.
And even in Cather’s own words:
Great thoughts are not uncommon things, they are the property of the multitude. Great emotions even are not so rare, they belong to youth and strength the world over. Art is not thought or emotion, but expression, expression, always expression. To keep an idea living, intact, tinged with all its original feeling, its original mood, preserving in it all the ecstasy which attended its birth, to keep it so all the way from the brain to the hand and transfer it on paper a living thing with color, odor, sound, life all in it, that is what art means, that is the greatest of all the gifts of the gods. And that is the voyage perilous, and between those two ports more has been lost than all the yawning caverns of the sea have ever swallowed.
It is serious work, art, and the voyage of the artist is a perilous one. Cather believed that. So do I. But more than that, Cather lived it, lived it in everything that she did.
Youth and the Bright Medusa
My own musings about the meaning of this title of one of Cather’s few published collections of short stories came in on the same angle -- the voyage of the artist being a perilous, but dazzling and potentially rewarding one. Here’s Gerber’s description of the same subject:
A strange title, but Cather titles have special meanings, sometimes hinted at in epigraphs; or they are perhaps elucidated elsewhere by the author herself. But she made no comment about the title of this new book, perhaps because she thought it self-explanatory -- and to an extent it is. The monster Medusa, one of three Gorgons, her head a wreath of serpents, petrified all who dared look upon her with naked eye. To attempt her subjugation lay beyond human power, and most of the countless youths who hunted her to her lair perished. Only the brilliant, redoubtable Perseus was successful, and he approached Medusa obliquely, guided by her reflection in his shield. With her severed head he was enabled to perform great deeds.
On this ancient myth Cather constructs her legends of man’s hunt for glory. The analogy with Medusa is imperfect, yet workable, for from Medusa’s bleeding torso sprang the horse Pegasus, whose hooves kicked open the fountain of art atop Mount Helicon. Youth and art, the struggle of the one to master the other -- she saw this pattern in the legend. Medusa stood, therefore, for life’s bright challenge -- bright but without mercy -- that only the fearless, the able, the resolute might dare approach. The promise that most would fail is no dissuasion because the Medusa of art glittered with same magnetic appeal as the Medusa of legend. Her attraction is hypnotic and, in the end, ironic. Speaking of the “magical song of youth, so engrossing and so treacherous,” or of “the bright face of danger,” Cather herself leads others to an identification of the bright Medusa as “art itself, with its fascinating and sometimes fatal attraction for youth.”
Looks like I nailed it. Art: a monster worth defeating?
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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