The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Grace S. Richmond

The Indifference of Juliet, 1905.
With Juliet in England, 1907.
Round the Corner in Gay Street, 1908.
Red Pepper Burns, 1910.
Strawberry Acres, 1911.
Mrs. Red Pepper, 1913.
The Second Violin, 1906.
A Court of Inquiry, 1909.
On Christmas Day in the Morning, 1908.
On Christmas Day in the Evening, 1910.
The Twenty-fourth of June, 1914.
Under the Country Sky.
Under the Christmas Stars.
The Brown Study.
Red Pepper’s Patients, 1917.
The Whistling Mother, 1917.
The Enlisting Wife, 1918.
Brotherly House.
Red and Black, 1919.
Foursquare, 1922.

The first six books are published by A. L. Burt Company, New York; the rest by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.

CHAPTER XXI
WILLA SIBERT CATHER

SOME novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show steady growth and a very few show steady and rapid growth. Of these last is Willa Sibert Cather.

She has written four novels. You pick up Alexander’s Bridge and read with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It is—excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon another book by the same author and start to read.

Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather better than a filled one). O Pioneers! is in its way an epic of the Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough believer in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though intensely satisfied with O Pioneers! you never for a moment expect more of her—perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would be in any way reasonable.

A year or so passes. You get hold of a new novel by her, as much thicker than O Pioneers! as O Pioneers! was thicker than Alexander’s Bridge. It is called The Song of the Lark. You eye it speculatively. You start to read it confidently but not breathlessly. And ere you are halfway through you know that she has excelled herself again.

The Song of the Lark is a much bigger thing than her second novel in every respect except one—it has not the same peculiar quality of seeming to sum up in a single life the whole history of a part of America in the period of that life. But wait—think a moment. Does not this chronicle of Thea Kronberg, the singer, sum up in a single life the whole emotional history of thousands of lives? Why, yes; you had not thought of it but that is so! Thea Kronberg the girl, struggling ahead toward some goal as yet unsuspected; Thea Kronberg the woman, fighting with all her force to gain a goal perceived but hopelessly distant; Thea Kronberg the great singer, fighting and triumphing for the sake of the fight—what is this but the record of every superb artist who has ever lived?

From the wonder of those second and third books, each so much bigger than the one before, we turn somewhat bewilderedly to the probable wonder of the woman who could—and did—write them. But here no wonder lies. At least, you may read the external record of Willa Sibert Cather’s life and find nothing that fully, or even adequately, explains her growth as a novelist. If there were only a hint! But read through this bit of autobiography and see if you can find any.

“Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of Charles Fectigue Cather and Virginia Sibert Boak. Though the Siberts were originally Alsatians, and the Cathers came from County Tyrone, Ireland, both families had lived in Virginia for several generations. When Willa Cather was 9 years old her father left Virginia and settled on a ranch in Nebraska, in a very thinly populated part of the State where the acreage of cultivated land was negligible beside the tremendous stretch of raw prairie. There were very few American families in that district; all the near neighbors were Scandinavians, and ten or twelve miles away there was an entire township settled by Bohemians.

“For a child accustomed to the quiet and the established order behind the Blue Ridge, this change was very stimulating. There was no school near at hand, and Miss Cather lived out of doors, winter and summer. She had a pony and rode about the Norwegian and Bohemian settlements, talking to the old men and women and trying to understand them. The first two years on the ranch were probably more important to her as a writer than any that came afterward.

“After some preparation in the high school at Red Cloud, Nebraska, Miss Cather entered the State University of Nebraska, graduated at 19, and immediately went to Pittsburgh and got a position on the Pittsburgh Leader. She was telegraph editor and dramatic critic on this paper for several years and then gave it up to take the place of the head of the English department in the Allegheny High School.

“While she was teaching in the Allegheny High School she published her first book of verse, April Twilights, and her first book of short stories, The Troll Garden. The latter book attracted a good deal of attention, and six months after it was published, in the winter of 1906, Miss Cather went to New York to accept a position on the staff of McClure’s Magazine. From 1908 until the autumn of 1912 Miss Cather was managing editor of McClure’s Magazine, and during these four years did no writing at all. In the fall of 1912 she took a house in Cherry Valley, New York, and wrote a short novel, Alexander’s Bridge, and a novelette, The Bohemian Girl, both of which appeared serially in McClure’s Magazine. In the spring of 1913 Miss Cather went for a long stay in Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating to some of the many hardly-accessible Cliff Dweller remains and the remote mesa cities of the Pueblo Indians.

“Miss Cather has an apartment at 5 Bank street in New York, where she lives in winter. In the summer she goes abroad or returns to the West. This summer [1915] she refused a tempting offer to write a series of articles on the war situation in Europe to explore the twenty-odd miles of Cliff Dweller remains that are hidden away in the southwest corner of Colorado, near Mancos and Durango.”

Very nice, but it tells you nothing that you need to know if you are to frame a hypothesis to account for Miss Cather’s astonishingly rapid progress as a novelist. The material for O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark, or a good deal of it, was patently gathered in her impressionable girlhood. The fine chapters of The Song of the Lark which relate Thea Kronberg’s stay in the Cliff Dweller region with Fred Ottenburg are outwardly explained by Miss Cather’s personal interest in these ruins. What is not made in the least clear is the secret of her own success. Let us look into some of the things she has said and see if we can find a clew to it there.

“I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her baking or buttermaking. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than they said—as if I had actually got inside another person’s skin. If one begins that early it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again—no other adventure ever carries one quite so far.”

Do you detect something? Do you perceive (1) a set of impressions acquired at the most plastic age and with a sharpness of configuration never to be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellectual and emotional feeling—of heart and mind—which carried the girl beyond the spoken word; and also (3) an imaginative faculty which could go on living a thing after merely hearing about it and living it through to the unnarrated, possibly unexperienced, conclusion? Do you get a hint of any or all of these things? Of course you do!

Going further we learn that when Miss Cather began to write she tried to put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood into her short stories. “The results,” we are informed, “never satisfied her.” She discussed this dissatisfaction afterward.

“It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart,” she argued. “From a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort and disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I decided that I wouldn’t write any more about the country and the people for whom I had a personal feeling.

“Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them and about where my work fell short. She said: ‘Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way; you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants; write the truth and let them take it or leave it.’

“It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett’s own work. I dedicated O Pioneers! to her because I had talked over some of the characters with her, and in this book I tried to tell the story of the people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word of mouth.”

Ah! This is downright enlightening. Miss Cather does not specifically say that she had to depart from actual persons when she came to do her good work, but that is the inference we draw. She does not entirely lay bare the real reason; and for the benefit of those who may be puzzled over it let us supplement what she says.

There is a pitch of emotion at which the artist cannot work; he can only see, feel, learn, store up; the rendering of what he has felt and seen comes afterward. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity. He might just as well have extended the definition to include all forms of art. When you or I come to sit down and put on paper actual persons whom we knew and loved (or hated) we cannot do it if the feeling is still very strong, any more than we can write about them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake and our emotional and mental disturbance is so great that we cannot collect our thoughts, or, if we contrive to collect them partially, we cannot put them down on paper. Tears blur the vision. We have to wait, then, until a little time has passed and we are calmer; until we can recall in a warm, remembering glow, the feeling of that time, recall it just sufficiently for our artist’s purpose. We sail through it then, but are not awash.

Very often this intensity of feeling about actual persons so persists as to make it impracticable to write honestly about them at all. And so the artist is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying forth of other persons and characters, typical enough, real enough, true enough, but not the flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. About these creations of his own he can write and write well. And this, we are surmising, is the experience that Miss Cather underwent as so many others have undergone it before her.

In her case the difference was that she had an imagination to come to her rescue. So few have! Or rather, so few have an adequate imaginative faculty, one that will bear them forward, one that will sustain their created people, that will meet every demand made upon its resources early and late, that will not flag, that will not weary, that will not die in the middle of the creative task.

We have built up our hypothesis. Now let us see if we can support it.

“According to Miss Cather, all the material for her writing had been collected before she was 20 years old. ‘I have had nothing really new since that time,’ she said. ‘Every story I have written since then has been a recollection of some childhood experience, of something that touched me while a youngster. You must know a subject as a child, before you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it, in a story, the true feeling. After you grow up impressions don’t come so easily. And it is for the purpose of recalling the old feelings I had in my youth that I come West every summer. The West has for me that something which excites me, and gives me what I want and need to write a story.’”

Surely this is all the confirmation we need. She goes West to get the warm, remembering glow that is necessary for her artist’s purpose.

Let us consider her four books.

Alexander’s Bridge might have been written by Edith Wharton. It has only one fault, a certain cloudiness characteristic of finely-written stories in which the mentality of one or two of the characters is of the essence of the whole thing. It needs for its full appreciation Miss Cather’s own explication of its purpose. She says:

“The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself only in his work, everything goes well; but he runs the risk of encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli

“The same qualities which made for his success involve him in a personal relationship [with an actress, a youthful love] which poisons his peace of mind and dissipates his working power. His behavior changes, but his ideals do not.

“He was the kind of a man who had to think well of himself. His relation to his wife was not a usual one; when he hurt her, he hurt his self-respect and lost his sense of power. His bridge fell because he himself had been torn in two ways and had lost his singleness of purpose which makes a man effective. He had failed to give it the last ounce of himself, the ounce that puts through every great undertaking.”

There! That last paragraph’s better! It makes quite clear the inner action of the novel. And the only fault with the novel, we repeat, is that this inner action should be clear right there! It should not be necessary for any one of ordinary intelligence to have to read Miss Cather’s explanation of what really takes place inside Bartley Alexander.

O Pioneers! is utterly different. Some one has said that reading a novel by Miss Cather gives you no assurance at all as to what her next novel will be like. That seems to be true. It is the stamp, we may add, of a very original gift—talent—genius; the degree of her endowment is not precisely determinable even yet. In O Pioneers! it is a woman who dominates the whole story, tall, strong, sensible, not so much kind-hearted as human-hearted, which means a great comprehension with sympathy to serve it. We see the girl Alexandra and her two brothers left by a dying father with the charge to hold to the land, the untamed soil of the prairie. The father has made his daughter the head of the family because she has intelligence and her brothers have not. They work well, but they do not use their heads in their work. The girl justifies her father’s faith in her and by her intelligent anticipation makes her brothers prosperous and herself rich. There is a third brother, distinctly younger than the others, whom she has under her especial care and upon whom she lavishes the maternal affection that is in her. The terrible tragedy which involves him would have blasted irretrievably a woman less strong, less intelligent than Alexandra. She survives it as she would survive anything that life could do to her.

The quality of the story is dual. There is the fidelity to character which marks the true novelist, the resolute putting through of what these people, in contact with each other, will certainly bring about. That calls for courage! How severe the temptation to shirk an inevitable but bitter event! It is so easy to persuade yourself that this and that will not mean disaster, that such and such chemicals when joined need not explode, that oil and water will mix this once, that two and two may for the moment make five! Why must there be a blighting catastrophe? Why cannot a happy ending be a truthful ending? The answer is that sometimes it can, but when it can’t you mustn’t make it so. Miss Cather’s O Pioneers! doesn’t try to.

The second aspect of this novel we have already named. It is cyclic, that is, it sums up an era. Such a quality always gives a book a historical value; where it is wedded to high fictional art, as here, the satisfaction of the reader is complete.

The Song of the Lark gains over O Pioneers! in the first place by its sheer bulk. O Pioneers! was a series of scenes in a single but changing setting; to cover so much ground, in point of time, the author had to strip her action of all that was not indispensable. But as The Song of the Lark is entirely centered about the development of a single person there is a chance to enrich the narrative with no end of detail; more, it is necessary to do so. For here we are trying to come at the innermost secret of Thea Kronberg, we are trying to find out what—what—it was in her that made her great. To get at that we must have exhaustively every item which can be made to contribute the least mite of information. We must have everything about her from her girlhood to her success on the New York stage, we must have all the persons who came in contact with her and who had their effect on her, or upon whom she had her effect, for it was generally that way about! We must have her as she appeared to each and every one of the few really privileged to know her. What they saw and said, the conclusions they drew, are the material from which we have to dig out the secret. And Miss Cather gives us all we need. She is replete with the facts and she puts them in their entirety before us. The result is a biography, no less; but a biography unencumbered with letters and irrelevant conversations and unimportant views and the unendurable conscientiousness of the faithfully recording friend.

My Antonia is a book to be put alongside O Pioneers! It is less epical but of more historical value for its minute and colorful depiction of life on the Nebraska prairies and in the Nebraska towns about 1885. The book is really a chronicle of people and their surroundings, a mosaic of character sketches and scenes and short stories brought within a single ken. The material ranges from tragedy, horror and repellent occurrences to pathos, humor and farce. It is perfectly handled, however; the reader is never offended and is variously touched and amused—and always the book is engrossing. Such a book is worth a dozen formal historical records. And the figure of Antonia Cuzak is a biographical triumph. Reminiscence here surpasses fiction.

There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been said already. If this chapter has been too venturesome in its inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it.