Like many other writers (such as her contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter), Willa Cather was throughout her professional life an inveterate interpreter and reinterpreter of her own writings and career. She constructed herself as an aesthete and a bohemian, then rejected the label of bohemian, then built up her image as an active, capable newsperson and journalist, then (following the model of the man she called her “chief,” S. S. McClure) constructed herself as an editor and an impresario of high-quality commercial writing, then depicted her weariness as an artist distracted from her art by the demands of commercial journalism. And so on, throughout her life. She was always looking at herself in a mental mirror and was always conscious of being looked at and sized up by others. And she tried to control the varying ways in which both she herself and others directed their gaze.

To a great extent, Cather seems to have tried to minimize the complexity that lurks under the seemingly transparent surface of her writings and to maximize their romantic, as opposed to realistic, tendencies. She insisted that she did not wish to write fiction that raised the reader's awareness of social problems or argued out positions on issues, but to write what might be called pure literature, literature valuable purely for its artistic merits. In part, this was a reaction against the popularity of many sensationalist and romantic women writers and an effort to avoid being categorized with them as a popular but lightweight and unsophisticated “scribbler” (a term used in the nineteenth century by Nathaniel Hawthorne in an angry outburst against the women writers whose books were more commercially successful than his own). As a successful literary businesswoman, she knew she had to define a niche for herself, and she chose an elevated one.

When critics in the 1930s charged Cather with being escapist—that is, with not taking notice of the severe economic and social problems all around her—she insisted that she was doing what true artists have always done, because true art is by definition escapist. Some recent scholars, including myself, have believed that she was in fact very involved in social issues, sometimes consciously so, but more often unconsciously reflecting the public issues and cultural trends of the times she lived in. For example, the debate over immigration that culminated in the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 is very present in her writing, though in indirect or disguised ways.

Cather positioned herself among her contemporaries (who were also her rivals) partly by her comments but more often by her silences. In private letters she claimed not to have a high regard for Edith Wharton, who was probably regarded by most literary critics and serious readers as the greatest of the women writers of the time, and stated her displeasure when people occasionally dared to compare them. In public she took no notice of Wharton. She did not like the hard-hitting war fiction of John Dos Passos, though that may have been partly because her own book that touches on World War I, One of Ours, was unfavorably compared to his Three Soldiers and to the standard of war writing that was modeled on it. She coveted the good opinion of Sinclair Lewis but had little to say about what she thought of his novels, except (again, in private letters) that her mother was distressed by his hostile portrayal of the Midwest in Main Street. She liked Dorothy Canfield Fisher (a writer who is now little known but at the time had a sizable readership and was a member of the selection committee of the influential Book-of-the-Month Club) but more than once took Dorothy gently to task for being too prone to spell things out and to go on at length with nonessentials, obscuring the structural design of her novels. By so doing, of course, she positioned herself not only as one well qualified to judge but as a writer who adhered to a more demanding artistic standard requiring discipline, compression, and a keen sense of form.

More often Cather preferred to position herself in the company of selected predecessors, rather than contemporaries. By singling out in her early newspaper columns the writers of the past whom she most admired and then echoing them in her fiction, she guided her readers to compare her with them, rather than with those whose books were currently selling. Almost always these were writers whose names were not household words and writers whose works were admired in academic, high-art circles. Writers of heavily romantic love-story fiction and tear-jerkers she regarded as the fare of the lower classes, and was careful to distance herself from them and their readers. She meant to be seen as a writer of capital-L Literature—even while she also made it clear to her publishers that she expected them to sell her books. In numerous letters to her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet, she provided instructions on how she thought her books should best be advertised. Mainly this meant supplying to Houghton Mifflin the snippets from reviewers' comments that she thought would generate the most excitement, but on one occasion she suggested a contest among female college students to stimulate interest in The Song of the Lark.

For most writers, the primary source of such self-examination and self-construction is letters. (In the future that may not be true, as telephones and now e-mail more and more replace written personal communication.) But for Cather it is very difficult to have access to that important source of information, because only a very few of her letters—no more than a handful—have been published. What's worse, her unpublished letters are neither collected into one primary archive, so that scholars could confidently know where to find them, nor are they quotable even when found.

It is often said that before Cather died she made an effort to retrieve and destroy, or have her friends destroy, her letters. Many scholars have believed that she was largely successful in that effort. And certainly there are gaps. Very few of her letters to her family are known to have survived; if they did, they are still in the hands of relatives who have not released them for general use in research. Her letters to Isabelle McClung Hambourg, which would almost certainly be very valuable for understanding not only Cather's sexual orientation (which has been much discussed and debated) but other aspects of her emotional, intellectual, and social life in her early years as an independent professional woman, did not survive. Only one letter to Edith Lewis, her companion for some thirty-five years, is known.

Cather's will contains a clause specifying that none of her writings that were not published during her lifetime could be published, in whole or in part, after her death. That clause was quickly violated in the case of three posthumously published stories which Edith Lewis knew to have been in polished condition and intended for publication. Otherwise, it has been enforced by her executors. The standard procedure for a scholar wanting to quote from unpublished material written by a person who has been deceased for seventy years or less (the present term of copyright protection for unpublished material) is to request permission both from the library where the material is found and from the writer's executor. But Cather's executor (at present, a nephew) steadfastly refuses permission, citing the prohibition clearly stated in the will. What this means in practical terms is that if the person making the request then proceeded to publish the letter or an excerpt (quotation) from it after being denied, he or she as well as the publisher could be sued in court. More basically, it would be a violation of professional ethics.

Researchers can and do visit the various libraries where letters written by Cather are known to be kept. The knowledge of these locations has grown up gradually over the years, as many scholars and critics have written on Cather and cited such resources. Scholars who make such research visits can and do benefit in their understanding of Cather by reading the letters. It is then perfectly allowable to publish a paraphrase of what is in a letter or to comment on it. But great care must be taken to avoid writing a paraphrase that is so close to the original that it becomes, in effect, an unacknowledged quotation—again, a violation of accepted ethical norms in research.

Despite this ban on reprinting or quoting from her letters, there are available, published sources of Cather's comments on the art of fiction-writing, and occasionally on her own fiction. These include, as the above listing of her works indicates, a few essays and open letters that she published as a mature writer. In addition, there are several known interviews and published speeches, which have been gathered into a convenient volume (Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters, ed. L. Brent Bohlke). Her early journalism often comments on books, literature, and the arts in ways that illuminate her own practices.

CATHER SPEAKS ON HER OWN LIFE

“When I was eight years old,* my father moved from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to that Western country. My grandfather and grandmother had moved to Nebraska eight years before we left Virginia; they were among the real pioneers.

“But it was still wild enough and bleak enough when we got there. My grandfather's homestead was about eighteen miles from Red Cloud—a little town on the Burlington, named after the old Indian chief who used to come hunting in that country …

“I shall never forget my introduction to it. We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfather's homestead one day in April [after arriving from Virginia via the Burlington Railroad]. I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side of the wagon box to steady myself—the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality.

“I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been jerked away from all these and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron … my one purpose in life just then was not to cry …

“For the first week or two on the homestead I had that kind of contraction of the stomach which comes from homesickness. I didn't like canned things anyhow, and I made an agreement with myself that I would not eat much until I got back to Virginia and could get some fresh mutton. I think the first thing that interested me after I got to the homestead was a heavy hickory cane with a steel tip which my grandmother always carried with her when she went to the garden to kill rattlesnakes. She had killed a good many snakes with it, and that seemed to argue that life might not be so flat as it looked there.

“We had very few American neighbors—they were mostly Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians. I liked them from the first and they made up for what I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women, they understood my homesickness and were kind to me.”

Interview, Philadelphia Record, August 10, 1913; Bohlke, 9-10. *Actually, she was nine.

Of her childhood move from Virginia to Nebraska: “I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn, that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life. … I always come back to Nebraska.”

Interview, Omaha Bee, October 29, 1921; Bohlke 32

“I shall never live abroad permanently. I do not want to. But for a number of reasons it is easier to work in Paris than in New York. There are fewer interruptions and the comforts of life, such as good food and service, are obtained with less effort.”

Lincoln State Journal, November 2, 1921; Bohlke, 41

“The leading popular misconceptions about Miss Cather are (a) that she was born in the West and (b) that she is a Catholic. ‘I'm an Episcopalian and a good one, I hope!’”

Stephen Vincent Benet and Rosemary Benet, New York Herald Tribune Books, December 15, 1940; Bohlke, 135

ADVICE ON WRITING

“… the main thing always was to be honest. … I think a writer ought to get into his copy as he really is, in his everyday clothes. His readers are thrown with him in a personal relation, just as if they were traveling with him; and if he is not sincere, there is no possibility of any sort of comradeship.”

Interview, Philadelphia Record, August 10, 1913; Bohlke, 8

“It is always hard to write about the things that are near to your heart, from a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort them and disguise them.”

Interview, Philadelphia Record, August 10, 1913; Bohlke, 11

“The business of writing is a personal problem and must be worked out in an individual way. … No beginner knows what he has to go through with or he would never begin.”

Interview, Lincoln Daily Star, October 24, 1915; Bohlke, 12

“One trouble with young writers is that they imitate too much.”

Interview, Lincoln Daily Star, October 24, 1915; Bohlke, 14

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”

“On the Art of Fiction,” The Borzoi 1920; On Writing, 102

“For me, the morning is the best time to write. During the other hours of the day I attend to my housekeeping, take walks in Central Park, go to concerts, and see something of my friends. I try to keep myself fit, fresh: one has to be in as good form to write as to sing. When not working, I shut work from my mind.”

Interview, Bookman, May 3, 1921; Bohlke, 23-24

“‘… the years from 8 to 15 are the formative period of a writer's life, when he [sic] unconsciously gathers basic material. He may acquire a great many interesting and vivid impressions in his mature years, … but his thematic material, he acquires under 15 years of age. Other writers will tell you this.’”

Interview, Omaha Bee, October 29, 1921; Bohlke, 31-32

“My first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was very like what painters call a studio picture. It was the result of meeting some interesting people in London. …

“I found [writing O Pioneers!] a much more absorbing occupation than writing Alexander's Bridge; a different process altogether. Here there was no arranging or ‘inventing’; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong. This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine morning when you felt like riding. The other was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time.”

“My First Novel [There Were Two],” The Colophon, 1931; On Writing, 91-93

“The ideas for all my novels have come from things that happened around Red Cloud when I was a child. I was all over the country then, on foot, on horseback and in our farm wagons. My nose went poking into nearly everything. It happened that my mind was constructed for the particular purpose of absorbing impressions and retaining them. I always intended to write, and there were certain persons I studied. I seldom had much idea of the plot or the other characters, but I used my eyes and my ears.”

Lincoln Sunday Star, November 6, 1921; Bohlke, 44

“The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification. …

“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named. …

“How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window.”

“The Novel Démeublé,” Not under Forty, 1936; On Writing, 40-42

ON ART

“When all is said, it is personality that counts in art as in everything else, a personality that reaches out of art into life, commanding alike the wise and the foolish.”

The Library, March 24, 1900; The World and the Parish, 755-56

“Whether art itself can be propagated by infusion or no, has not been proven; but in some measure taste can be.”

Lincoln Courier, August 10, 1901; The World and the Parish, 843

“Whether it is a pianist, or a singer, or a writer, art ought to simplify—that seems to me to be the whole process. Millet did hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated, but when he came to paint ‘The Sower,’ the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. It was probably the hundred sketches that went before that made the picture what it finally became—a process of simplifying all the time—of sacrificing many things that were in themselves interesting and pleasing, and all the time getting closer to the one thing—It.”

Interview, Philadelphia Record, August 10, 1913; Bohlke, 8

“Art must have freedom.”

Speech in Omaha, Lincoln Evening State Journal, October 31, 1921; Bohlke, 148

“When in big cities or other lands, I have sometimes found types and conditions which particularly interested me, and then after returning to Nebraska, discovered the same types right at home, only I had not recognized their special value until seen thru another environment.”

Lincoln State Journal, November 2, 1921; Bohlke, 40

“The thing worth while is always unplanned. Any art that is a result of preconcerted plans is a dead baby.”

Rose C. Feld, New York Times Book Review, December 21, 1924; Bohlke 72

“The arts can not stand still; if they mark time, they die. There must be experimenting.”

Interview by Harold Small, San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 1931; Bohlke, 110

“You were asking me what I thought about a new term in criticism: the Art of ‘Escape.’ Isn't the phrase tautological? What has art ever been but escape? To be sure, this definition is for the moment used in a derogatory sense, implying an evasion of duty, something like the behavious of a poltroon. When the world is in a bad way, we are told, it is the business of the composer and the poet to devote himself to propaganda and fan the flames of indignation.

“But the world has a habit of being in a bad way from time to time, and art has never contributed anything to help matters—except escape.”

Letter to The Commonweal, April 1936; On Writing, 18-19

ON SOCIETY

“Superstition has ever been the curse of the church, and until she can acknowledge that since her principles are true, no scientific truth can contradict them, she will never realize her full strength. There is another book of God than that of the scriptural revelation, a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery. …

“It is the most sacred right of man to investigate; we paid dearly for it in Eden; we have been shedding our heart's blood for it ever since. It is ours; we have bought it with a price.

“Scientific investigation is the hope of our age.”

High school commencement address, Red Cloud Chief, June 13, 1890; Bohlke, 142

“Woman may be man's inferior but she makes him pay for it.”

Lincoln Courier, September 28, 1895; The World and the Parish, 127

“The struggle for power is essentially the same whether it is fought with railroad shares or the flint hatchets of the stone man.”

Lincoln Courier, August 24, 1901; The World and the Parish, 858

“As for the choice between a woman's home and her career, is there any reason why she cannot have both?”

Lincoln Sunday Star, November 6, 1921; Bohlke, 48

“Bad Governments come and go without altering the direction of a people's progress. The sanity of people always brings things right.”

New York World, May 21, 1923; Bohlke, 59

ON NOVELS—HER OWN AND THOSE OF OTHERS

“It is a solemn and terrible thing to write a novel. I wish there was a tax levied on every novel published. We would have fewer ones and better.

“I have not much faith in women in fiction. They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable. They are so limited to one string and they lie so about that. They are so few, the ones who really did anything worth while; there were the great Georges, George Eliot and George Sand, and they were anything but women, and there was Miss Brontë who kept her sentimentality under control, and there was Jane Austen who certainly had more common sense than any of them and was in some respects the greatest of them all. Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.”

Lincoln Courier, November 23, 1895; The World and the Parish, 276-77

“It is quite as important that a child should read as that it should go to school. The habit of reading formed in childhood will follow the girls and boys all through this trying life, and will give them comfort and pleasure that nothing else can. It is our duty to our children to supply them with good books. …

“If I were asked what two books were the most essential to a child's library and most important in his education, I should name two very old-fashioned ones that their fathers and mothers read and loved before them: Pilgrim's Progress and The Swiss Family Robinson. Any child who has not read these has missed a part of his or her childhood.”

“Books Old and New,” Home Monthly, January 1897; The World and the Parish, 336

“I know that Daniel Deronda [1876] is considered George Eliot's best novel, and that Middlemarch [1872] ranks next in the judgment of the critics. The critics may say what they please—that is their privilege, but a book is precious to me for what it means to me, not for what it means to cleverer persons than I. And of all George Eliot's masterpieces give me that one in which she touched the hearts of the people, The Mill on the Floss [1860].”

“Old Books and New,” Home Monthly, November 1897; The World and the Parish, 362

“A Creole Bovary is this little novel [The Awakening] of Miss [Kate] Chopin's. Not that the heroine is a Creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a Flaubert—save the mark!—but the theme is similar to that which occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a second Madame Bovary should be written … and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but light, flexible, subtle, and capable of producing telling effects directly and simply. The story she has to tell in the present instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. Edna Pontellier, a Kentucky girl, who, like Emma Bovary, had been in love with innumerable dream heroes before she was out of short skirts, married. …

“Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary are studies in the same feminine type; one a finished and complete portrayal, the other a hasty sketch, but the theme is essentially the same. Both women belong to a class, not large, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr. G. Bernard Shaw would say that they are the victims of the over-idealization of love. … These people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. … And next time I hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent style of hers to a better cause.”

Pittsburgh Leader, July 8, 1899; The World and the Parish, 697-99

“Ordinarily the most unattractive feature about western stories is their monotonous cheerlessness, a feature so indigenous to the atmosphere of a prairie country that perhaps only people that have lived there can understand its inevitableness.”

Lincoln Courier, November 4, 1899; The World and the Parish, 728

“[Alexander's Bridge] does not give any more information about bridge building than it does about whist. In fact it doesn't give information about anything. Do I believe in the industrial novel that does give information? Certainly, but that is one kind of a story; this is another.”

New York Sun, May 25, 1912; Bohlke, 6

“I have never drawn but one portrait of an actual person. That was the mother of the neighbor family, in My Ántonia. … All my other characters are drawn from life, but they are all composites of three or four persons.”

Lincoln Sunday Star, November 6, 1921; Bohlke, 45

On One of Ours: “I have cut out all picture making because that boy does not see pictures.”

Eva Mahoney, Omaha World-Herald, November 27, 1921; Bohlke, 39

“The new American novel is better than the old-fashioned conventional one, with its plot always the same, its accent always on the same incidents. With its unvarying, carefully dosed ingredients, the old-fashioned American novel was like a chemist's prescription. I certainly prefer the modern novelist, even if he does become a little ridiculous when he carries too far the process of chopping up his character on the Freudian psycho-analytical plan.”

New York World, May 21, 1923; Bohlke, 58

“My Ántonia … is just the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern. I just used it the way I thought absolutely true. A Lost Lady was a woman I loved very much in my childhood. Now the problem was to get her, not like a standardized heroine in fiction, but as she really was, and not to care about anything else in the story except that one character. And there is nothing but that portrait. Everything else is subordinate.

“I didn't try to make a character study, but just a portrait like a thin miniature painted on ivory. A character study of Mrs. Forrester would have been very, very different. … Neither is ‘Niel’ a character study. In fact, he isn't a character at all; he is just a peephole into that world. I am amused when people tell me he is a lovely character, when in reality he is only a point of view.”

Interview by Flora Merrill, New York World, April 19, 1925; Bohlke, 77

“Plot—that is heard much of among critics and is discussed by the book-makers on such subjects. They say ‘the plot shows poverty of invention.’ Great literature has no plot.”

Lecture at Bowdoin College, reported by Arthur G. Staples, An Institute of Modern Literature, 1926; Bohlke, 163

On Death Comes for the Archbishop: “My book was a conjunction of the general and the particular, like most works of the imagination. I had all my life wanted to do something in the style of legend, which is absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment. Since I first saw the [Pierre] Puvis de Chavannes frescoes of the life of Saint Geneviève in my student days, I have wished that I could try something a little like that in prose; something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition. … The essence of such writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it—but to touch and pass on. …

“Writing this book (the title, by the way, which has caused a good deal of comment, was simply taken from Holbein's Dance of Death) was like a happy vacation from life, a return to childhood, to early memories.”

Letter to the editor of The Commonweal, November 1927; On Writing, 9

On Death Comes for the Archbishop: “I am amused that so many of the reviews of this book begin with the statement: ‘This book is hard to classify.’ Then why bother? Many more assert vehemently that it is not a novel. Myself, I prefer to call it a narrative.”

Letter to the editor of The Commonweal, November 1927; On Writing, 12

On Shadows on the Rock: “To me the rock of Quebec is not only a stronghold on which many strange figures have for a little time cast a shadow in the sun; it is the curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite. There another age persists. There, among the country people and the nuns, I caught something new to me; a kind of feeling about life and human fate that I could not accept, wholly, but which I could not but admire. It is hard to state that feeling in language; it was more like an old song, incomplete but uncorrupted, than like a legend.”

Letter to Wilbur Cross, The Saturday Review of Literature, October 17, 1931; On Writing, 15-16

“I do not believe in courses in contemporary literature. … As regards contemporary literature, the work of living authors, I think young people should be allowed to discover for themselves what they like. For young people, half the pleasure of reading new books is in finding them out for themselves.”

Letter to the News Letter of the CEA (College English Association), December 1939; Bohlke, 190-91

On The Professor's House: “In my book I tried to make Professor St. Peter's house rather overcrowded and stuffy with new things; American proprieties, clothes, furs, petty ambitions, quivering jealousies—until one got rather stifled. Then I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa, and the fine disregard of trivialities which was in Tom Outland's face and in his behaviour.”

Letter to the News Letter of the CEA (College English Association), October 1940; On Writing, 31-32