On the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, 2011.
In this week's issue of The New Yorker I write about Willa Cather's home town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, and, more widely, about the present state of understanding of the great novelist's work. Anyone interested in exploring the more or less infinitely rich world of Cather can begin with the three superb Library of America volumes devoted to her: Early Novels and Stories, Later Novels, and Stories, Poems, and Other Writings. The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, published in 2013, has instantly become an essential volume. A large quantity of Cather's writing is available at the website of the Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, including her complete journalism up to the year 1894. In a longer draft of my piece, I quoted her journalistic début, from the Nebraska State Journal, in 1893. She was, awesomely, nineteen:
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.
I trust at least a few readers put down the paper that day and asked themselves, "Who the hell is this?" The assurance is what impresses. Cather is already writing from a lordly remove, yet with empathy and a detective's eye. The best line in the piece is "five of the grandest lines that Shakespeare ever wrote.” Her editor may well have asked: "Which lines are those?" But Cather knew that we didn’t need to know: for this pompous minister, Shakespeare is décor, and any lines will do.
Many people provided assistance as I worked on this article and on the Cather chapter of my forthcoming book Wagnerism. (In the book I will have a great deal more to say about Cather's musical masterpiece, The Song of the Lark.) Andrew Jewell, Guy Reynolds, Beth Burke, Melissa Homestead, and Kari Ronnig were excellent hosts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln last year, when I gave a talk entitled "The Schindelmeisser Factor," unveiling my minor discovery about Cather's childhood piano teacher. My friends Jay Yost and Wade Leak, unabashed Catherites, inspired me to revisit and write about Red Cloud; at the Cather Foundation, Ashley Olson, Lynette Krieger, Tracy Turner, Tom Gallagher, and Jarrod McCartney were all hugely helpful and generous with their time; and members of the extended Yost clain, including Suzy Yost Schulz and the Hansens (Matthew, Sally, Dennis), gave me a sense of Red Cloud life and history. I've also gained much from the Cather writing of John Murphy, Joseph Murphy, Janis Stout, Ann Romines, and my esteemed New Yorker colleague Joan Acocella, among many others. At the Cather Archive site you can read back issues of Cather Studies, a rich fund of contemporary scholarship.
At the end of the article, I mention my grandfather the geologist Clarence Samuel Ross. This is not the first time the late Dr. Ross has received notice in the pages of The New Yorker. He figures in John McPhee's masterly 1996 article "The Gravel Page," recounting the contributions made by American geologists in tracing the origins of Japanese balloon bombs during World War II. "A damned good man on rocks" was the verdict upon him. My parents, also mineralogists, were delighted to be quoted in an article by the great McPhee, who is universally revered in the geological profession. He will be appearing at the New Yorker Festival next week. I will be there, no doubt with many of my colleagues, taking notes.
