The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely-accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings. To that end, we are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content. The Archive is a product of a collaboration between the Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, with additional support from the The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
For a Cather devotee like me, it’s like a candy store. I went to its “Writings” tab and started downloading everything I found there. This volume -- The Journalism of Willa Cather, Volume 1 -- is a collection of those downloaded materials: as many of the items found at https://cather.unl.edu/writings/journalism that would fit into a 3-ring binder. Almost all of it is Cather’s early writing for the Nebraska State Journal as a kind of theater and social critic, starting with her November 5, 1893 "One Way of Putting It" column:
The church was crowded; hundreds of men and women were sitting in front of the minister who stood under the twisted brass chandeliers and spoke of the brotherhood of man. He looked over the well dressed, well educated audience and his interest quickened under the pleasant knowledge that he was being appreciated. His white face flushed and his thin lips trembled with enthusiasm, enthusiasm over the beauty of the women in the audience, the grandeur of the voluntary by Haydn that died from the great moaning pipes of the organ, and over his own eloquence and conscious power. He grew earnest over man’s eternal brotherhood, he spread his hands in eloquent gestures. As he quoted an extract from Browning he took a white hot house rose from the cut glass rose bowl beside him and shook the water gently from its leaves. He laid the fleshy white petals against his nostrils with evident satisfaction, then dropped it again into the water. Rich, melodious words dropped from his tongue, and his voice had in it a sympathetic quiver born of excitement and the grandeur of his subject. At last he closed with five of the grandest lines that Shakespeare ever wrote and sat down among the palms and drew toward him a silver pitcher of ice water, and the thunder of the pipe organ took up the strain and went on preaching of the brotherhood of man.
That’s the very first paragraph, and in it you can see a writer beginning to flex her muscles, trying to capture a scene. And, with the next juxtaposed section, to make a point:
In a bare, barn-like room with a low ceiling and grated windows sit 300 convicts in stripes. Before them stands the little white-haired chaplain speaking in a trembling voice, telling them of the brotherhood of man. They smile indulgently at him, they have their own ideas about fraternalism. He thanks God for the blessing of life, and they wonder if life is a thing to be thankful for. There is a tremor in the old man’s voice as he speaks to them. He is very artful in his discourse; he tells them something to set them laughing first, and dreary, lifeless laughter it is that echoes through the empty cell rooms and dies away in the iron corridor. Then he tells them he is going to leave them, he who has worked among them for ten years. His lips tremble a little but he says bravely:
“You are getting so much better, boys, that they are going to get you a taller chaplain than I, one who can reach further and do more good.”
Even the darkest faces look lovingly at him, and some of the younger men wipe their eyes with their hands. The old chaplain is not as strong for the ordeal as he thought himself, he murmured a few broken words of benediction, and the men marched out with that swinging gait which is peculiar to this brotherhood of crime who are surely God’s younger, less favored sons, not the heirs of promise.
The brotherhood of man -- something evidently better discussed in polite company.
As I went through these vignettes, I marked those that seemed to touch me in some way, to impart something more than just the flexing descriptions of scene and character.
From December 17, 1893:
It is not a very great while till Christmas now. One begins to feel the restlessness and secrecy in the air, and to smell the cedar and see the holly gleaming in the windows. Almost every one I meet has a bundle and is hurrying home to hide it. The toy shops are filled with people buying things for the children they love. It seems to me that I too must be buying and hiding away something for a child I used to love and I wonder what it shall be. It has been a long time since I have seen her, and I do not even know if they keep Christmas in her country, but I must send her something because I am lonely and think of her, and I wish in some way to get near again to the only love I have ever known which was never darkened by pain or misunderstanding. I must get something and hide it away where no one can see. No matter what it is, she will like it, for she is not like other children. They will grow old and forget and cease to love, but her childhood is eternal. Perhaps it will be only a few flowers, and on Christmas eve, when other people are filling the stockings while the children sleep, I will slip out to you, who are asleep too, and I will put the flowers in the snow over your grave, little one, and perhaps their fragrance will creep down to you somehow, and you will dream of other flowers that I gave you in other days down in our own country where we were both happy, Perhaps, too, since they say the stars shine brighter on Christmas night, perhaps through the frozen earth that shuts you from me, the light of those we used to know and name will reach you, and you will remember, and know that I do not forget.
Wow. Not sure if Cather is writing about a personal loss there, or if she is aping one in order to recognize and honor it as it must have been for others in her community, but wow, it really shows you how well she could write about the empty spaces that are eventually all that remain between people.
And, from January 28, 1894:
If it took Ruskin six months to interpret Turner’s “Garden of the Hesperides,” surely a person who is totally ignorant of the technical laws of art may be allowed several weeks to struggle with the Lansing drop curtain. I have been suffering acutely from that curtain for two long years, and sometimes I have longed for artistic knowledge, that I might understand and appreciate it better, but recently an artist told me that I was enviable because of my ignorance, that art could not help one with that curtain, for the more one knew of other pictures the less they knew of that. I begin to believe his statement, for I have found art books as powerless to help me with the anatomy as classical lexicons are to throw light upon that abominable Latin. “Somnium Fons Vitales.” I wonder how many people have been able to translate it? Lincoln is full of colleges and ought to contain a good deal of classical learning, but the lore of this generation has not got as far as “Vitales.” Most freshmen try to construe that Latin. The world looks very bright to a freshman and he has the fond complacency to try anything from discovering a new element to translating the Iliad in blank verse. He goes to the theater saturated with Horace and he gazes on that mystic sentence and tries to read it. When he fails he is chagrined. He swears that when he is a senior he will translate those words. But when he is a senior he does not look at it any more. By that time he has learned the lesson of his own littleness and his own helplessness. He knows then that genius is something more than eternal patience after all, and that even were he the proverbial patience on a monument he would never write a Hamlet nor discover a new plant nor construe the Latin of the Lansing drop curtain. He does out into the world to live his life and leaves the task to mightier men than he.
What a wonderful example of Cather’s unique voice -- sarcastic and educated.
And there are even peeks at one of Cather’s great themes -- the price that artists must pay in order to create great art. This, from February 11, 1894:
The Gerry Society have been at it again. This time they have stopped Essie Graham, the street waif in “Under the City Lamps,” from acting. The girl is thirteen years old and is fond of acting and in good health, and the manager of “City Lamps” fails to see any reason or reasonableness in the society’s action. It is a pity that the kindhearted Gerry folks do not extend their noble efforts and forbid authors to write and musicians to play before they are fifteen years old. If the society had its way there would be no actors at all in a generation or two. The greatest part of an actress’ education must be completed before she is fifteen. The society claim that it is cruel for a child to be put to the strain of acting every night when she ought to be at home and in bed. Of course it is cruel, most art is cruel, and very few artists have time to sleep much in this world, though we trust they rest very peacefully in the next. It is very kind of the world to try to lighten the burden of genius, but it can’t be done. Genius means relentless labor and passionate excitement from the hour one is born until the hour one dies. It means that a man must live the passions and sorrows of a hundred lives. Great actresses cannot be brought up upon what Kipling calls the “sheltered life-system.” They must have abundant knowledge of good and evil even if they become not at all as gods.
And, from March 25, 1894, a description of how the artistic stakes are raised even higher by the critics who unfortunately define the only landscape on which art can be offered to the masses:
The curse of every school and phase of modern art is the guild of drawing room critics; critics who sneer at the great and powerful, and adore the clever and the dainty. They refuse to read any thing more stimulating than Howells’ parlor farces, and to hear any play more moving than “the Rivals.” This race of critics has declared Ruskin and Wagner and Turner and Modjeska blase and have taken unto themselves new gods in the very airy and fragile shapes of Whistler and Jerome K. Jerome and De Koven and Julia Marlowe. They take the books that look well on their tables; the music that is not too loud for their parlors; the pictures that hang well on their walls; the actresses who most gracefully adorn their receptions, and say, “This is art, and these are artists; everything else is overdrawn, coarse, stagey, unnatural.” It is no new phase of criticism for people with a poverty of emotion and imagination to say that everything more pronounced is overdrawn and unnatural. Whatever they cannot feel they claim is beyond the range of human feeling, and whatever they have not experienced they claim is beyond the limit of human experience. These critics have had a wonderful effect upon the authors and playwrights of the Nineteenth century. A playwright cannot write without presenting emotions any more than a painter can paint without laying colors. The world in which playwrights are born has no emotions; it furnishes its parlors in dull grays and cold blues and has society and guests to match. Following the creed of realism, the playwright can no longer create knights and ladies, but tells of things that are. Artists of every nation have escaped from the chilling atmosphere of their own world, and have gone to the so-called crust of society for types which at least have the all redeeming virtue of sincerity. The greatest play that has been written to amuse society is “Camille;” the greatest book that has been written to instruct it is “Anna Kerenina.” One would think Mephistopheles’ sides would ache with merriment over the satire of it.
I’m not so sure about Mephistopheles’ sides, but my heart both aches and swells with these glimpses into an artist’s mind and sensibility in the very process of their formation.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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