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.”