As I pick my way over the rubble of half-finished books and broken intentions at the end of this year, my thoughts are turning to plans for 2025. A big one is to read more of three of my favorite authors: Colette, Rilke and Willa Cather. I get the impression that Cather is far less well known in the UK than in her native America, and frankly she deserves to be known everywhere. She’s an outrageously good writer. I was reminded just how good in a recent reread of A Lost Lady, the first novel by her that I ever read.
A Lost Lady is essentially a portrait novel, recounting the story of Mrs Marian Forrester, the young, vibrant wife of an elderly railroad pioneer. ‘There could be no negative encounter, however slight, with Mrs Forrester’, the narrative tells us. ‘If she merely bowed to you, merely looked at you, it constituted a personal relation. Something about her took hold of one in a flash; one became acutely conscious of her, of her fragility and grace, of her mouth which could say so much without words; of her eyes, lively, laughing, intimate, nearly always a little mocking.’ Marian Forrester is a rich creation, described sometimes as the American Madame Bovary, though I think this is a far more nuanced and ambiguous account of a woman’s downfall than the one Flaubert wrote. Marian is a delicate mix of triumphant femininity and its darker, needy, underside. Her downfall is more plausible and sympathetic than Emma Bovary’s, as she becomes entangled at first in her desires for freedom and self-expression, and then compelled by the sheer imperative to survive. Cather’s perspective is ambitious, too. It’s a short novel, but the whole end of the great pioneer era becomes conflated with Marian’s decline, as America falls under the sway of capitalism. All this is swiftly and deftly achieved in Cather’s magnificent prose.
The marriage to Mr Forrester might, in less accomplished hands, become an empty caricature, with the much older husband always seeming beyond the reach of his delightful young wife. But Mr Forrester is also a beautifully drawn character, and we understand their mutual attraction: ‘When he laid his fleshy, thick-fingered hand upon a frantic horse, an hysterical woman, an Irish workman out for blood, he brought them peace; something they could not resist. That had been the secret of his management of men. His sanity asked nothing, claimed nothing; it was so simple that it brought a hush over distracted creatures.’ But for me, the genius of Cather is to deliver this portrait of a marriage from the perspective of Niel Herbert, a young boy at the start of the novel, a middle-aged man by its end. He worships Mrs Forrester with a young boy’s idealism, but his own trite conservatism and his tightly-grasped ideals mean that he can neither understand nor help her when she falls on troubled times. Cather manages quite brilliantly to sustain sympathy for Mrs Forrester, and it is Niel we judge, for his uptightness and his ineffectual and misplaced attempts to save her from herself.
I have to say I have become quite fascinated by Willa Cather herself, one of those extraordinary writers who shot to fame in her own lifetime for doing something different and unusual. I just love this picture of her, taken in 1927 by Edward Steichen.
She was in the middle of writing Death Comes to the Archbishop when it was taken, and on a creative roll, having written in steady succession, Song of the Lark, My Antonia, A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House. In my introduction to A Lost Lady, A. S. Byatt suggests that what interests her most in writing is energy: ‘She has a great novelist’s capacity to show human beings almost as forms of energy: children and adolescents unable to imagine death: the transient sexual ferocity of youth: the unusual power of those who are survivors: the decay of power in all, even in those passionate creatures she most admires.’ And passion was paramount for Cather; she had written in one of those old-fashioned autograph book memes that it was the fault she could best tolerate in others, whilst she was most disdainful of ‘Lack of “nerve”’. Can’t you see that from this photo of her here? She looks rooted in the ground, a powerful and steadfast oak tree of a woman, bearing her creative fruit with casual good nature and charm. Her authority, her good will, her sparkling intelligence, all I think are plainly visible in her face and her stance. She knew exactly who she was, right then, and her life and her vision were unfolding, unapologetically, as she wished.
One of her biographers, Rachel Cohen, felt that Cather had received vital writerly advice just at the moment she needed it. A very young Cather had become friendly with Sarah Orne Jewett shortly before she died and a strong bond of affectionate respect grew between the women. But Jewett felt that Cather was writing for the wrong audience, and so she sent her a letter, telling her ‘In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality – you can write about life, but never write life itself…To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world.’ This letter had a significant impact on Cather, and she took up all of her suggestions. ‘She grew into a writer of unshakeable discipline and conviction,’ Cohen writes, ‘she wrote of Nebraska and her Virginia childhood; she became, as the years went on, increasingly solitary; she was known for her wide outlook upon the world; and as she wrote more and more of history, worked with just those subjects in which Jewett would most have delighted.’ That’s what interests me about Cather: she was never a lost lady, but one who found herself and her perspective and held onto it with steady grace.
