Writing Willa Cather

Melissa J. Homestead | The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis | Oxford University Press | 2021 | 389 Pages

Daryl W. Palmer | Becoming Willa Cather: Creation and Career | University of Nevada Press | 2019 | 244 Pages

Since the publication of O Pioneers! more than a century ago, the name Willa Cather has been synonymous for many with Nebraska and the Midwest as a region. Undoubtedly, for a great majority of her admiring readers, she occupies the foremost place among Midwestern writers. Cather, one of the most highly praised and best loved writers of her generation, is virtually inseparable from the Midwestern identity that she actively cultivated—this, even though Cather was not a “native” Midwesterner (she was born in Virginia and moved with her family to Nebraska at age nine), lived on the urban East Coast for virtually all of her adult life, and hardly confined herself to writing solely about the characteristic places and peoples of the Midwest.  To note this is to observe that Cather hardly fits neatly into the category of the “regional” writer as it has been defined by its influential champions from Hamlin Garland to Tom Lutz since the height of its vogue in the late nineteenth century.

The myriad ways in which Willa Cather embraced, exceeded, and, at times, resisted the role of the regional writer of the Midwest have continuously engaged the interest of scholars devoted to deepening our understanding of the writer and her work.  Although Cather’s writerly reputation has never been in jeopardy—the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial, a foundation dedicated to promoting her legacy, was organized in 1955, less than a decade after her death—enthusiasm for her work has recently reached a high peak. The National Willa Cather Center, an arts and cultural center located in the author’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, opened in 2017, and boasts a public museum, archive, research center, classroom, bookstore, art gallery, and performing arts center. Literary tourists pilgrimaging to Red Cloud can visit Willa Cather’s childhood home, take “Country Tours” of the notable local color that appears in her writings, shop in a Cather-centered book and gift store, and wander in the tallgrass of the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie.

Scholars and enthusiasts alike have been able to access The Willa Cather Archive since the late 1990s. This extraordinarily ambitious, highly usable, collaboratively produced digital resource housed at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, (Cather’s alma mater) offers public access to biographical and scholarly materials as well as rare, Cather-authored texts such as her early, uncollected magazine and newspaper writing. Over the past few years, a number of Cather’s major novels have entered public domain and are also now available on the site in searchable, carefully annotated digital transcriptions. These include the Pulitzer Prize-winner One of Ours (2018), A Lost Lady (2019), The Professor’s House (2021); My Mortal Enemy and Death Comes for the Archbishop will be digitally republished on the site in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Perhaps even more exciting to scholars has been the site’s annotated, digital publication of the author’s letters. The originals of these letters are scattered in public and private collections around the world and only very recently were released from legal restrictions to their quotation or publication. The Willa Cather Archive began publishing the letters in 2018 and continues to do so as more are discovered; as of this writing more than 3300 letters—heretofore rarely viewed and largely unknown—are documented and summarized or transcribed and annotated on the site. 

Rigorous research on Willa Cather’s life and work has kept pace with the recent uptick in public interest. The two books under review here, Melissa J. Homestead’s The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis and Daryl W. Palmer’s Becoming Willa Cather: Creation and Career, join a number of other in-depth, book-length studies of the author that have appeared since 2017. .

To this embarrassment of Catherly riches, Homestead and Palmer offer their own extensive biographical and historical research with original critical examinations of Cather’s writing. Homestead and Palmer build upon the recent archival and scholarly boom and draw from still relatively inaccessible and obscure sources to establish and develop a fuller context for discussion of Cather’s authorial career.  While these books extend and intervene in ongoing academic conversations, both Homestead and Palmer write in an engaging manner accessible to a broad reading audience. 

The Only Wonderful Things constitutes a comprehensive and rigorous study of the author and her career, from her birth through the years after her death. Moreover, it marks a major—if long-in-coming—intervention in Cather studies and beyond.  In the wake of the anti-gay repression of the fifties (the decade in which Cather Studies was formally established), critical assessments of the author’s career have largely ignored, suppressed, and denied the evidence that Cather lived her fabulous life as a lesbian, a lover of at least a few women (and no known men), and the life partner of 39 years of her fellow Nebraskan, the writer, editor, and adwoman Edith Lewis.  In this dual biography, Homestead presents the Willa Cather that we know today—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, the modern stylist, the savvy fashioner of her own world—as a “creative collaboration” of the writer and her best girl.  Lewis has heretofore been relegated within Cather Studies as a mostly ghostly “secretary” whose long-term, intimate relationship with Willa Cather has been subordinated in public memory and scholarly studies to a minor “lackey” whose self-abasing servitude of her master literally placed her at the great author’s feet—even after death. In this important study, however, Lewis comes forward alongside her partner Willa Cather in this carefully researched narrative of their lives together.

Edith Lewis met Willa Cather in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the home of a mutual friend in 1903.  Both were recent college graduates (Cather of the state university, and Lewis of the elite New England women’s school, Smith College), young, ambitious careerwomen, and published authors. Their frontier upbringing in Nebraska gave them familiar points of reference. As Homestead makes clear, however, the life they lived together found its present and future in the urban, modern world.  In Homestead’s account, the Midwest of Nebraska is an important, shared background, but the couple put down their own roots in bohemian Greenwich Village and bustling Manhattan.  Together, they lay claim to an expanded New England and—for a dramatic change—New Mexico, where they vacationed in the teens and twenties.

The couple’s shared life is remarkable not only because half of the pair is one of the most important and beloved of all American writers, but because they lived their life together during the post-Boston marriage, modern era as “heterosexuality” was defined and described as “normal”; every other kind of sexual and romantic expression was demonized, pathologized, and criminalized across spiritual, physiological, social, professional, and legal realms. The effects of this profound shift in American culture during the early twentieth century (Lewis and Cather moved in together in 1906 and lived together until Cather’s death in 1947) are legible enough in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to their relationship that has been taken by even her most enthusiastic readers and critics.  

The Only Wonderful Things directly confronts and corrects this obscurantism. The title is taken directly from the only currently known letter between them, and, as Homestead shows, refers to the deep and passionate intimacy that the women shared. Drawing on more than a decade of research involving family correspondence, legal documents, medical records, and an array of other sources, Homestead directly names and celebrates Lewis and Cather’s lesbian life as a sustained, collaborative creation, one that spanned the period before and through Cather’s decision to quit her high-pressure and time-consuming work as the editor of McClure’s Magazine in order to dedicate herself to the art of fiction.  Homestead convincingly shows that their partnership was neither one-sided nor furtive (claims sometimes made to diminish or dismiss the significance and intensity of the relationship) but openly acknowledged in social and professional contexts, by family, friends, colleagues, and others.  Moreover, Cather’s romantic, social, and professional collaboration with Lewis was, Homestead argues, the crucial factor in Cather’s realization, application, and evolution of her distinctive voice and persona as an author.

Those captivated by Willa Cather’s distinctive literary style may be aware that the “mature” style of her novels—allusive yet precise, plain yet richly evocative—represents a gradual shift from the more ornate and sometimes overdone writing of her early stories and poems. In her second chapter, Homestead proposes that it was Lewis’s editorial hand—one that seems to have touched much of what Cather published—that shaped and refined these works, resulting in Cather’s later, more spare, modern style.  Lewis’s intimate understanding of Cather’s writerly intentions and her own long experience as a successful magazine and advertising copyeditor undoubtedly made her an ideal reader and collaborator. Working as a literary detective, Homestead traces many handwritten edits to Cather and Lewis on multiple typescripts of the widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Professor’s House. Lewis’s contributions were substantial.  Like Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor’s House was inspired by the women’s travels together in the Southwest. In these novels and others, Homestead shows that Lewis and Cather’s creative collaboration extended from the literary texts’ imaginative origins to their final edits.

For many readers, the most significant revelations that Homestead’s careful research brings forward are those that are primarily biographical and personal in nature. The Only Wonderful Things considers the meaning of gift exchanges between the two women (mostly books), casual snapshots from travels, testimonies and anecdotes by friends and acquaintances, documentation of the vacation home that they built together on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, and the sole known letter between Cather and Lewis. This single letter paradoxically marks the closeness of the relationship: they lived together and typically traveled together, making it likely that their epistolary correspondence was actually minimal; at the same time its uniqueness almost belies the substance of a relationship in which written expression had a privileged, central place.  It is a precious and touching record of the passionate partnership between the women, one that simultaneously indicates the deep intimacy they shared and its quotidian nature. Reading it, we enter a full relationship, mid-conversation. We sense the many years between them that lay behind it as well as the certain presumption that they will have many more beautiful ones together. Homestead’s sensitive handling of this single letter in chapter six reveals why she was just the right researcher to bring it into the ken of the world: she treats it with great care, patience, and insight. 

Homestead’s thesis is utterly convincing: it names the very thing that has been shied away from since the fifties, as Cather’s authorial reputation was being written into American literary history. The Only Wonderful Things is not only a major new biography of the author, it provides us with an especially intimate, decades-long portrait of a lesbian partnership in the early twentieth century. Surprisingly, extensive documentation of this sort is relatively rare for this period, and Homestead’s view of it also permits us a glimpse at other established and acknowledged lesbian and gay communities in the urban and rural places in which the couple lived and traveled. The book also offers us the opportunity to reflect on the making of a modern American literary canon during the midcentury: a period of particularly repressive, anti-gay and misogynist backlash.  Homestead’s writing is careful, touching, and impassioned, even as the research is thorough and impeccably done. 

Daryl W. Palmer’s Becoming Willa Cather enters well-plied scholarly waters by investigating Cather’s relationship to her adopted homeland of the rural, Midwestern plains and a greater “Nebraska,” which to her mind was unbounded by state lines and included northern Kansas and other parts of the prairie region.  In this book, Palmer largely reinforces the well-established view that Cather’s Nebraska years (1883-1896) were not merely foundational but defining. This is a fairly uncontroversial claim, given that her late childhood through late adolescence was spent in and around Red Cloud, Nebraska.  Palmer’s book is particularly devoted to unearthing what he identifies as her “territorial imagination,” a somewhat loosely defined concept that he believes prompted Cather toward a “recognition, resistance, and innovation” of key “Western” themes in her writing.  For Palmer, the “territorial mindset” distinguishes Cather’s works from others along the same lines from the early twentieth century.

Palmer’s fairly intuitive assessment of Cather’s relationship to Nebraska and the West does not ultimately point toward a significant revision of what we already think we know about the author, but his research is nonetheless compelling. Palmer’s examination of Red Cloud’s town life through its competing newspapers is fascinating and well-executed.  Palmer’s thorough investigations show that a number of the colorful characters and memorable incidents that appear in Cather’s frontier fiction were based on known townspersons and events.  His discussion of Red Cloud’s “boy life” and “hired girls” illuminate very different, important short stories such as “The Enchanted Bluff” and “Tommy, the Unsentimental” as well as the later novel My Ántonia. His discussion of that novel draws from his own original research, and it emerges in this study as a culminating text of what Palmer might call her “territorial” technique.

While connecting the fiction to the real-world prototypes from which Cather drew has occupied scholars since the publication of The World of Willa Cather, Mildred Bennet’s 1951 biography of the writer, Becoming Willa Cather sustains its analysis beyond remarking on factual or fictional correspondences and pushes toward an explanation of Cather’s style. This approach is especially persuasive when Palmer demonstrates that the surprising formal juxtapositions in Cather’s work—which some scholars might attribute to (international) modernist innovations and inspirations—seem to be drawn from the miscellaneous columns of her hometown newspapers, the Red Cloud Chief and the Argus, which set side-by-side territorial politics, local business news, police blotters, social reportage, advice, scandal, opinion, advertising, and more. Emphasizing Cather’s newspaper journalism and editorial work in Red Cloud and Lincoln (which preceded similar work she later did for national magazines), Palmer makes the case that her facility with these territorial forms established an indigenous method toward modern, even modernist, writing.

Becoming Willa Cather is also particularly generative when Palmer traces Cather’s frequent revisions of her own work. As he shows, Cather routinely reworked her juvenilia and inserted it, sometimes in only slightly revised forms, into her longer works. If other scholars, working with individual texts, have taken note of this idiosyncratic working method, Palmer’s monograph documents just how extensive (that is, VERY extensive) Cather’s revisionary practice was. Palmer is a conscientious researcher; in his book, even minor contributions to the scholarly compendium are carefully documented and summarized.  This makes for a thorough display of his mastery of the field.

Palmer’s discussions end somewhat abruptly in 1918, with the publication of the last of the so-called “prairie” novels. Palmer devotes a scant few pages to Cather’s (many) later works, which in fact comprise the high point of her literary career; this is a bit disappointing, as any assessment of Cather’s foundational influences and working methodologies unquestionably must include the novels of the 1920s. It is with the publication of these later novels that Cather confirmed her spot in the American literary canon and in the hearts and minds of the average reader. Ultimately, Palmer tends to romanticize the “Western” outlook and sensibility that he attributes to Cather and emphatically puts forward as her defining characteristic.  For some readers, Palmer’s exuberant celebration will be gratifying, but some may wish that he had produced more rigorous, extended critical analyses of Cather’s incorporation of her real-world contexts throughout her imaginative oeuvre.

These two well-researched, meritorious books not only shed new light on aspects of a great author’s life, they punctuate the growing interest in Willa Cather’s world. As both a scholar and a fan of Willa Cather’s novels, I was impressed with the way that these enjoyable books illuminated her writing for me.  Truly, they reveal the extent to which those “things not named” (as Cather famously, cryptically referred to the “backgrounds” of her work) informed her art.