Benjamin Taylor’s brief biography of Willa Cather serves as a useful companion piece to Cather’s novels and letters. Taylor offers insights into Cather’s development as a writer, the themes that brought her into her full power, and her carefully guarded relationships with Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis. Conscientious about labeling his hypotheses as unprovable, he considers Cather’s private emotional life with respectful percipience, honoring a woman who is protective of her own home life while writing so beautifully about intimate moments in her characters’ lives — Thea Kronborg in her bath, Antonia giving birth alone to her first baby.
I did wonder at Taylor’s choice of title. Cather’s book, Youth and the Bright Medusa, is mentioned as gathering “all the best stories about young people and the perils of art.” And Cather uses the phrase in a letter about the development of her mature authorial voice: “It is strange to come at last to write with calm enjoyment and a certain ease, after such storm and struggle and shrieking forever off the key. I am able to keep the pitch now, usually, and that is the thing I’m really thankful for. But Lord—what a lot of life one uses up chasing ‘bright Medusas,’ doesn’t one?”
It's that chase — the quest for art—that propelled Cather out of Red Cloud, Nebraska. She describes this pursuit in a letter to a young admirer: “Rebecca West calls it ‘the strange necessity.’ If one has that desire, no circumstances can keep him from the treasure house of the world. All the great literature and the great music and the great art are his. As much of these things, I mean, as his desire can reach. And after all, we deserve only what we can reach—though the process of reaching it may be slow.”
Yet the quest is only part of the alchemical equation that produced Cather's most enduring novels. Tranquility is the other necessity, that “calm enjoyment and a certain ease” that foster Cather's deepest expression.
In her early years as a journalist, in the midst of the hustle of working for McClure's magazine, Cather longs for such repose. She wrote Sarah Orne Jewett, "I have often thought of trying to get three or four months of freedom a year...I would write a little—'and save the soul besides.' It's so foolish to live (which is always trouble enough) and not to save your soul. It's so foolish to lose your real pleasures for the supposed pleasures of the chase."
Jewett supported Cather's claim to quiet and freedom. She wrote, "I do think that it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should — when one’s first working power has spent itself nothing ever brings it back just the same, and I do wish in my heart that the force of this very year could have gone into three or four stories... your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life..."
Jewett was right. It was in the lull that Cather's mature vision and voice emerge. As she writes, “Strange: how long and pleasantly one can reach after a design, and how quietly and simply it comes to one at last. I shall always remember the late afternoon when I was sitting in a very gravelly, uncomfortable spot up by the Martyr’s Cross, east of Santa Fe, watching the Sangre de Cristo Mountains color with the sunset. I suddenly, without any questioning, said to myself: ‘The real story of the early Southwest is the story of the missionary priests.”
It's in quietude, whether sitting in gravelly mountains or cloistered in a small attic room ("I can always work best in a low room under the roof," Cather wrote her brother Roscoe) that Cather's memories shape themselves into stories. And it's this quietude that gets into the bones of her stories to give them their enduring power. As Cather writes in her essay, The Novel Démeublé, "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, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed."
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